Hi,
I am a current owner of Poser 4 and are looking to go to Poser 5. Could any owners of Poser 5 advise if they are happy with it and would they buy again?
Thanks very much.
Richard Taylor

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It certainly has problems and I don't think I'd want to own it without also owning Poser 4. My workflow now is to set up as much of my scene as possible in P4 then take it to P5 for special texturing, hair growth, dynamic cloth and rendering. I'm very happy with the extra options it gives me and I haven't had the crash problems other people have had, but I do think CL could have done a much better job. On balance, yes I'd buy it again, but not with as much enthusiasm. To get a feel for how different your renders can look, take a look at my most recent gallery image. I couldn't have produced anything similar in P4.

I would buy it again. It has several new features that we didn't have in P4; I especially like the Cloth Room. The displacement mapping in the Material Room is great, too. I think it's available at Amazon for about $200, and there's a $50 mail-in rebate on it, so it would come to about $150.

Despite my many criticisms of elements of P5 not working properly it is still worth it at the current price for the material room alone. And if CL ever get round to fixing elements like dynamic hair collisions it will be a bargain at current prices. So my advice is get it while CL are still in business.

I'll add a 'yes' to that, as well. At the moment, you get the best performance from having both P4 and P5 installed (better even with PP, as then you can output to other high end packages through the plugins...and you need a valid P4.exe to export to Vue d'Esprit if you use that. You can't do any of the P5 dynamics or shaders yet, but E-on is working to get Vue to talk to P5). The current CL team is working on and SR-3, and considering how quiet they have been on it, either it is smoke, or they have the bit in their teeth and are killing as many of the bugs as they can before releasing.

I'm happy and I got it for $99.95!

It's sure as heck worth $99 and even $150. I paid full price-- $359 and I owud advise no one to do that. However, with a big processor, Win XP and a ton of memory, real and virtual you should have little problems with basic Poser 5, material room and FireFly. It is slow. If you have NO Patience, forget it. You cannot do what was so cool with Poser 4-- run a quick render to make sure everyting is okay. That was hard to let go of. But Firefly is great, even my non-poser friends who get subjected to my renders noticed the difference immediately. And now that I'm just beginning to get deeper into the material room, there's so much potential there. Note, I have not had problems with lighting freezing poser up, but others have. I use all kinds of lights but not the ones from Poserstyle as they had a known prob with P5. And you cannot cancel a render -- especially into a larger window. Sometimes you can in the display but I just eliminating canceling renders period. The only other problem I occassionally have is when Ihave loaded something new--sometimes Poser can't find the textures and freezes on loading them. I cancel out and reboot and it works fine. This has not happened in the last month, even though I've loaded a lot of stuff, so it may be getting used to the extra four runtimes I have linked. Keeping the Poser 5 Runtime as lean as possible-- I have only V3 and her morphs in it-- has improved my speed in working about 100%. It's also important to work with V3 in a lean condition-- that is use the Injection Pose Builder from Daz to eliminate all the extra morphs before you work with her. Emily

I was really excited about Poser 5. Now I rarely use it.

I've found that I can cancel a preview render by hitting the Esc key on the keyboard, instead of clicking on the Cancel button. I haven't tried it with rendering to a new window yet, so I don't know if it works there, but I think it should. Sue

I have both and I use Poser 5 exclusively. I love being able to create as many different libraries and folders as I need to be able to find my stuff (when I can remember what folder I put it in). I have used the cloth room to resize clothes a few times but not for much else--yet. I occasionally play in the hair and face rooms but haven't spent enough time to learn them very well yet. The firefly renderer may be slower but the quality is unbelievable. You still have the option to use the old renderer. By the way, I pre-purchased my Poser5 upgrade and, although I'm not happy it's so cheap now, I do not feel cheated about the price I did pay.

If it were less than 100 (UK pounds) then I'd buy it, warts and all. It was advertised on Amazon.com for $99 for a while, but then they changed it to $199. On Amazon.co.uk 1t was still about twelve million pounds. I exagerate a little bit, but the dollar-pound exchange rate for books, music and software is something that does tend to get me a bit annoyed. Maybe I'm just a mean old git, or perhaps it's time for my medication again. Maz

I use it exclusivly as well, I bought itsecond hand from an unsatified customer who it would n't work properly for, and I have never had a problem with it, I still have posr 4 installed but I oule use it for the 12 gigs of installations I have in it (I am too lazy to move them LOL I would buy it again, even brand new, I am very happy with it...in the 3 months or so I have used it it has only crashed on me twice and both were my fault, with poser 4 in the same time period it would have crashed 12 times at least.

Thanks everybody for the feedback. Have just purchased in electronic form from Curious Labs. Cheapest way to get it here in Australia (Current prices >$US600 eqivalent). Download was approx 84k/s so took a total of 2.5 hrs for both disks. Will be installing it after I take my wife out to lunch! Thank you. Richard

May I also suggest The Poser 5 Handbook, it is an invaluable resourse for all that is poser LOL... ...no don't it is just a joke , I am not serious, hte book while having some good chapters is essentially crap do not get it.