I've been considering buying Poser 5 as it's on sale at Amazon. The problem is I've read so many reviews stating that there are many bugs in the system, ranging from the cloth and the hair room don't work, often crashes, slow rendering, etc. I've also read that Cur. labs have issued a fixing download; does that alleviate most of the probs.? I'd be grateful of any advice. Also, is Curious Labs on it's deathbead?

my biggest issue with Poser 5 is that it does not support the graphics acceleration on your video card - things could be significantly improved if it did. IMHO Poser 5 is better than 4, if you can look past it being slow and cumbersome, and a memory hog. that is usually what makes the hair and cloth room not "wok" they are slowed down due to the increased poly count and the system cannot handle it. what kind of system are you running? that might be a major factor in your decision

"work" not "wok" sorry

I think it's worth the price for the Material Room features and crosstalk fix alone. Others enjoy the improved Library management so much that they refuse to go back. Almost everyone seems to agree that Judy looks like an alien and needs work to bring out her inner beauty, but they said the same thing when Victoria was first released. The dynamic clothing is neat, especially for capes, skirts, and other flowing garments, although I haven't played with it much. The dynamic hair causes such a slowdown on my system that I've all but given up on it, and am sticking with transmapped hairstyles.

Yes, Poser 5 has bugs. Is it buggier than Poser 4? Possibly. The Walk Designer certainly seems less reliable. P5 has higher system requirements than P4 (especially when you're using the new features), and the memory leak is particularly nasty as a result. Hair collision is completely skewed.

Many of P5's features are also found in Pro Pack (additional file format support, the setup room, multi-pane document windows, JPEGs for bump maps, no more corrupted geometry RSRs, thumbnails in PNG format, Viewpoint and Shockwave Flash export, 2D motion blur, the content, etc.). Pro Pack's hosting plugins (for Lightwave, 3DS Max, and Cinema 4D XL) aren't available for Poser 5 yet, and this is causing considerable bitterness with some users. Vue d'Esprit users are also having problems loading P5 scene files, but that is more of a problem for E-On software than Curious Labs.

Service Release 3 should be available soon. You might want to delay your purchase a few weeks to see if it makes a difference. Rest assured, those of us who didn't abandon P5 in disgust earlier will report any problems and improvements with the new patch.

It's worth the sale price without a doubt as long as you have large processor and lots of memory. Don't try to run this on win 98 or ME. Over a Gig processor and a G memory should do it. I agree with everything Little Dragon said except that I have had less problems with Poser 5 than with Pro Pack-- less freezes for instance. There are some things to stay away from -- cancelling a render to a larger window, for instance. I hear there's a workaround but I don't want to chance it. It is slow,especially with V3 loaded and dynamic hair. V2 and Mike aren't anywhere near as slow. The hair room is a bloody mystery to me, very twitchy-- I use premade dynamic hair and it renders fine. I wouldnt give up the library management and the FireFly engine now. Like I said, well worth the price it is now, if your machine is powerful enough. Emily