ok, i just got p5 shipped to me. should be here shortly. i would like to know what i can anticipate right out of the box. what's it going to be like to get it booted? are there any immidiate problems i'll need to know about right away? additionally, i wrote to cl and told them that i bought their product amid much negativity. i told them that i'd put some faith in them and that i hope the program would work well for an animation i'm trying to do. not that it would really matter too much, but it's always good to let them know how you feel, since they'll be getting your hard earned cash. thanks folks!

Since you're getting it shipped now, it should already be updated to SR 2.1. Check first before downloading and installing the updates. I heard some users had to reinstall because they tried updating what was already updated. 2.1 also got rid of the registration requirement, so you don't have to deal with that. Walk Designer is still broken. I haven't really used it, but heard it messes things up from time to time. One thing I haven't seen anybody mention is bump maps. Alot of times, when using a MAT pose, the bump isn't attached to the bump node. You'll have to attach it yourself. Make sure to also attach it to the gradient_bump instead of bump. You really have to work at it to get bumps looking right being connected to the bump node. Light sets-some lights sets P5 gets angry with. When you go to render (oh yeah-ALWAYS save before you render), it will get stuck on 'loading textures' and sit there for days if you let it. If that happens, kill P5, re-open your PZ3, save the light set back into the library, and use your newly saved light set. It'll be fine then. If you have Vicki 3, you're going to have to reinstall her to the base P5 runtime. She isn't going to work from a linked runtime. That's about all I can think of that's major. P5 really is good; people just bash it too much. It'll take some adjustment, but I think you'll like it. Good luck!

right on. thanks!

You can also use the bump map on a low level displacement node. When I say low I mean 0.1 to 0.001, the higher one works for some building props, the lower one is better for people. Emily

Oh, also, turn off Smooth polygons on individual props or you get the pillbury dough boy temple.LOL! I love Poser 5. Smooth polys works great on most hair though. Emily

wow... you love p5? you're one of the first people i've heard say that!

I don't post much but i've been using poser since poser3 first came out, I think 5 is great the dynamic hair and cloth room are great,for animating, but one other problem unless someone knows a fix is the collisions in the hair room don't work, I really hope they come out with a fix for that. If you try to use it, the hair does some really weird stuff,lol..........asmith

Yes, I love Poser 5. You can look in my gallery if you want, I loaded up Poser 5 as a Christmas present to myself-- I'd prebought it, but wasnt' gonna use it till it behaved. I havent' used anything else since. It's slow, but the renders are so good. The latest patch worked for me and, I'll admit there are areas I havent'used in P5-- haven't tried dynamic clothing yet. I'm waiting for hmann'slong dresses plus tutorial. But I use Vicki3 all the time in it, Vicki 2 and Mike are a lot faster to render, so that's a treat, background images come out better, shadows are actually usable now. I use other people's dynamic hair-- chiefly Rdna and I love it. I'm never gonna animate so you have to figure that in. But, I would never go back to the library chaos of Poser 4 and ProPack-- both of which were buggier for me, with my imited usage, than P5. Emily

I love Poser 5, also. I'll love it more if-and-when the remaining bugs, quirks, memory leaks, etc. are dealt with, but I'm having as much fun with it as I've had with Poser 4.

P5 lover here as well

wow, seems there's a lot more people who love it that it sounds like, reading the posts around here. is there an ongoing list of needed fixes around here? something you can add to when something comes up? neat. now i'm anxiously awaiting p5!

For the lights problem mentioned earlier I think the easiest solution is to use the "reset lights" python script available in free stuff. When using anything other than the "default" lights, I run this script, kill the lights and then add new ones. I run the script every time I change lights. Lights that would instantly lock up my machine previously now work fine. I've not had a "lights lock" since using it. I guess saving into the library would work as well, but then you still have to remember which ones are the ones you saved and which ones aren't, or remember to delete the ones that aren't! The script is fool proof. I've been a critic of P5 because of the degree of bugginess being displayed by a fully released product. You expect it in a beta, but not in a $300 software package. My other disappointment is that I can't use it with Vue.....and at the time I could not purchase a solo version of P4 instead. On the other hand, it does have a lot of potential and some of its features, once learned, can do some pretty neat things. It does take time to learn, however......so you must have patience.....and a powerful computer as it is also a bit of a resource hog, even with XP Pro! :)

There's a down side to Poser 5, I don't want to be a complete Pollyanna about this. It is slow, and there are ways to make that better-- don't use fully loaded V3, keep the poser runtime fairly lean, use the download runtime for additional purchases. And the biggest problem-- which may just be cowardice on my part is it is not so easy to do large scenes. I had moved to three and four person scenes with lots of props in Pro Pack and I'm back to one or two people in my scenes now. So it would be nice to have that fixed if it's at all possible. I was really getting into creating multiperson scenes and now I'm back to figuring out how to do this in stages again. Emily

uh oh. some of the scenes in my animation are going to have dozens of folks. mainly dead, but sometimes moving. just so long as they put out a p5--lw plugin sometime soon... and it sounds like a service pack 3 would help... i never have a problem making suggestions about products to the manufacterers... i have a feeling they'll be hearing from me an awful lot when i get p5 :)

Did you say "animation"?? I don't use the animation in P5, but I believe it's problematic....maybe some of the others have used the animation features? Don't expect to get much response from CL about P5 problems.....at least not quick responses. Their staff seems to have been dramatically cut back since the "shake up". They say they're working on fixes, but who knows when a new patch will be out. Be prepared to spend a lot of time here.....asking very specific bug questions of those who have used P5. As for plug-ins.....same as the patches.....who knows. They've been promising a workaround or plugin to allow Vue and P5 to work together for about 6 months. Who knows when it will come. Like I said....patience......lots of it.

i agree. patience is a virtue. if someone were to program an interim (or maybe not so interim) lw plugin for poser, how would it be scripted? what language? hmmm... and i have heard that poser animation is problematic in p5. i hope it's not as bad as it sounds. i bought p5 in good faith that the company would fix all the bugs. do cl reps ever venture out this way? they must read what we write sometimes... every good company has scouts. all i can think is, get together a list of needed fixes and requests for the future, have a petition signed, and present it to cl. i guess a lot of people would think that it wouldn't help at all. maybe. but it sure wouldn't hurt. honestly, p5 was a tough decision for me, even at 150 bucks. i don't think i've ever heard so many mixed reviews of a full product in my life.

I've only done some simple animation, but have not had a problem with it. Well I guess once, but that was before 2.1. And it wasn't really a poser issue. I ran out of memory by trying to make it very high rez. I may be able to render it now, but it's not really worth it anyway. And for the record, I love P5 as well

Emily is right - P5 really has eliminated the library (and morph) chaos that we were drowning in with P4. I've done a fair amount of P5 animation with no problems, using my Judy figure, which has hundreds of morphs. But I always render animation as a series of still images and assemble the movie as frames in a video editor, so I may have missed the problems others have had. If you have a number of non-moving figures you may want to render them against a background image, then import the render as the background. That can cut down significantly on the size of a multi-figure scene. HTH, Elisa/gryffnn

Learn the basics first. Do not go into the hair or cloth room till you understand the material and pose rooms. Don't use bump maps and transparent maps till you understand simple texture mapping. Remember to keep it simple at first, there is a steep learing curve.