I have P4 and have wondered too long if I should buy the P5 upgrade. I don't know how the new hair thing and the other new features are either, but my need is to have old age characters and children in high res. maps, so I wonder if buying Mill. Michael, Victoria and children is enough, and together with the hair app. from Bantam3D, is sufficient for my need.

Or are the figures in P5 good figures/characters alternatives for the latter mentioned?

I don't want to be stuck in past technology, knowing that things can be done less tedious with fresh tech. But to know from someone who can compare is alot better knowing than spending money in vain.

Anyone?

Hi there, I would say if it's just the characters that you want, go with Daz, especially with Michael 3 supposedly coming soon. If your choice is either the figures or P5, definitely go with the figures. In my opinion the default P5 figures still aren't anywhere near the quality of the Daz canon, and there aren't as many acessories/clothes for them, either. P5 is a real memory hog and I wouldn't want to consider running it on anything less than what I've got, which is 100gb hard drive, a 64mb GE-FORCE graphics card, a gig of RAM and a 2.4 processor. Even then, I find it can't render a complex scene with the new Firefly render engine. Especially with hair! P5 hair is great, but again it really hogs the processing. Also, there isn't a good tutorial for P5 hair in the manual, so for me it was trial and error trying to get it right. HTH,

I'd say go with Daz figures.. I have never used and will never use the figures you get with poser 4 & 5.... I have poser 5, but rarely use it, its kinda slow and problematic at times... I use Poser 4 with Pro Pack, and the Daz figures (mainly V3)... Have Fun!

I personaly would go with the Daz Figures and wait for the new Daz Studio release. I feel is the way to go and the future. Perhaps CL in the future will come around and build an application that meets the expectations the Poser community.

Agree with the Daz figures, but P5 is great too. It's dramatically faster better since the service releases are out, and the cloth room is terrific. Haven't played with the face room much, but that seems to have a lot of potential.

Definitely figures. I don't know that P5 has really made anything less tedious. Anyone who has it care to comment on the tedium factor? And of course, Daz Studio will be out sometime this year. We don't know all it'll have and a lot will be modular, but we do know a better rendering engine than P4 and an OpenGL preview that shows transparency.

skip the daz figures. don and judy are easy to morph in the face room and you will get alot more out of the face room than you would from the dials on v3. if you ever need an alternate figure mesh for whatever reason you have 100% total conversion with the face room and don and judy arent memory hogs. i dont use anything but don and judy and the only reason i can think of to use a daz figure would be because a client requests a different mesh. otherwise, it would be pointless and a waste of my money. to wit, most of those people who bought daz figures, post here... and most of those same people most likely bought v3 because: (a)they dont have p5. (b) everyone else was doing it and they bought into the idea that having v3 in your image give it more credability. (since you went outa your way to buy the mesh and morphs ((like there not available for free anyways)) and finally: (c) of the people who have p5 but buy into daz milfigures, they give up too easily. flame-on mil-retards!

TCSB, agree with you on Don and Judy. They're decent meshes, and use a lot less resources than the mil figures. The face room adds versatility (though I haven't played with it much.) The mil figures have more add-ons at this point, and the higher density mesh makes for smoother curves (especially V3.) One more note: If you have P4, either the propack or P5 will be a DRAMATIC upgrade because they both allow mutiple views. things are much easier when you can see (for example) from the front camera and one of the side cameras at the same time.

Sorry, I think the p5 figures are worthless if you really want to do any kind of serious animation or voice work with them. I just picked up both the Farrah here, which is very nice, and the hmann product for Judy which is also nice, but these characters (both Judy and Don) have a LONG way to go before they are even a 10th as useful as Mike and Vickie. I have P4 pro pack and P5, and usually am working in P4. I have yet to see anyone do any decent lipsinc with either Don or Judy, if anyone has please show me. Marque

My vote is for DAZ figures.

Get Mike 2 and Vicki 2. (Get the CDs cuz they come with the clothing packs and textures. Then get yourself a Poserworld subscription. You'll be gaining so much more by spending your money on that than a P5 upgrade.

I finally create a scary looking creature with don I use the morph putty tool to shape the face, material room shaders and fire fly render. I create the dynamic hair in the hair room using the collision detection.

I'd go for the DAZ figures, then go to Steffy Z's site and take a look at her textures, she has an old woman texture that's incredible. I think Cath Harders did an old man texture, but it may have been somebody else... Personaly I bought V3 because I bought V1 and V2, the same reason I bought P5, becuase I've got P4... P5 was a dissapointment, V3 wasn't, but then I'm a hobbyist, I have money to spend and I enjoy playing with new toys, I can imagine that if you're in business then you have other considerations. But know this, P5 is significantly different to P4, even if you don't use the rooms that much. It's like Pro Pack with extra bits. So if you only use P4 then you'll have to factor in the learning curve as part of the cost too. I'm not in business, P5 isn't "fun" to use, so I've all but stopped using it and gone back to P4, where V3 is far more fun to play with. YMMV. later jb

here is another one.

Right on, TCSP. P5 is great. Why people continue to go with Daz's crap is beyond me.

"flame-on mil-retards!" Um, just like to point out that the only person flaming so far is, well, you, TCSP. Everybody's got opinions. The fact that they differ from yours does not mean anyone has a mental handicap.

I see... Good arguments for both sides! I have give in some thoughts about the DAZ when it comes to setting parameters for home made clothes. I have tried to learn, but are still learning about confirming clothes. Some tutorials have taken parameters from other native Poser clothes to help out on finding right parameters for the conforming of P4 man/woman. How is it to find parameters help for conforming for the DAZ, vice verca P5? And how is to make old characters and children in P5?

Please again, anyone?

I think the biggest issue with Don and Judy is that many people were pissed (justifiably) at the performance of P5 when it first came out. That put a bad taste in everyone's mouths. With the srevice releases, P5 is now (IMHO) a cool product. I run it on a 850MHz machine with "only" half a gig of RAM, and have few problems. Don, Judy, Vicky (especially V3) and Mike are all great models if you take the time to learn their individual quirks. Heck, some people are still doing neat stuff with Possette. P5 and the Daz models are by no means mutually exclusive. If I had P4, I'd consider the upgrade to pro pack or P5 more valuable than the daz figures. Being able to use multiple camera angles alone is worth it to reduce the tedium. And, P5 is only $30 more than pro pack and includes a lot of neat features, plus Don and Judy. Later, I'd add the Daz figures and some high-end textures. (as was already pointed out, steffyzz makes some phenominal ones.)

I'm still using Poser 4 too (with Pro Pack), with the DAZ figures and I'm not even considering getting Poser 5 to be honest. I'm eagerly awaiting the new Daz Studio though as that's sure to compliment the figures nicely :-)

Does anyone have a rough idea what sort of P4/P5 ratio of users there are on here? Just curious as I would like to know how many P5 users I'm neglecting when developing my add-ons!

I have yet to see Don and Judy in anything really useful. I can monsterize Vickie, Mike, Steph and Vickie 3, and I can also animate them and use lipsinc with them. I can also create morphs for them faster than the face room works with Don and Judy. Please, someone show me something that is really good with them, something that makes them look like more than a glorified Posette and Dork, with decent lipsinc and smiles, and I will never say another unkind thing about them. 8^) Marque

Here comes the opinion of someone who had Problem child 5 crash again last night. :( Get the Daz figures or wait for DAZ Studio then decide. P5 hasn't delivered on its promises on my system and I'm running a decent system: 1.7Ghtz, 1GB RAM. Only P5 gives me significant trouble; every other program on my machine is well-behaved. There are a few things that make P5 nice - such as library nesting, but the freaking program is so slow it drives me nuts. I don't like waiting 10-15 seconds after a render has completed to get control of the program back. (I've had wait times of over a minute and I didn't have a lot of meshes in the scene.) P5's nodes get cluttered and P5 gets confused as to which textures to apply to figures after a while. Switching light sets can also crash P5. Thank goodness ockham created a python script to fix the issue! Until CL puts in a patch to fix the "Can't find texture" crashes and resolve texture confusion issues in general, I can't recommend P5. PPP is worthwhile for the .png thumbnails, .jpg bump maps, python scripts and the lack of geometry .rsr files which suck up hard drive space. It's also more stable and faster than P5. I've only seen one Judy character that looked good, and she's a commercial product with additional morphs - but boy did she look good! Judy and Don do not have a useful number of morphs, nor is there the ethnic variety found in V2, M2, and V3. (I will admit that Don is a big improvement over Dork, but Judy doesn't strike me as much more than a better UV Mapped Posette.) If you go the DAZ route, I'd go for either V2 and M2, or just V3, and get DW's texture converter so you can use a wider range of textures. As for making clothing, you need to know a decent amount about making clothes even with the P5 "dynamic cloth" function. I found the instructions on using it very confusion. There's a good number of tutorials out there for using magnets or morphing clothes in other programs to make them fit better. As well, there's far more free clothing for Vic and Mike out there than clothes for Judy and Don, so it will be easier to use them as a base for new/modified outfits. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it! ;-)

Poser 5 is a PITA. Way too many "new" features don't work or are so buggy they can't be used. Dyn Hair... Can not be used for anumation. Collision detection on hair does not work properly. Cloth room will "Just Quit" after a few frames. FireFly... "Fire Flaw" and "Stoned Sloth" come to mind. Walk Designer seriously messed up after SR3. It only loads the first few blends and frequently crashes. I'm not a real fan of V3, It is very complex, but at least it works as DAZ advertised.

• snekkis: "I don't want to be stuck in past technology, knowing that things can be done less tedious with fresh tech." Poser 5 is by no means "less tedious". As a matter of fact, you are going to spend more time learning. There is also the matter of looonger render time. I guess P5 is one of the prime example of "bleeding" edge technology.

Argh! not another "P5 is crap!", "No it isn't!" thread. P5 is probably the one issue that divides the community more than anything. Here's the deal- Either you have P5, it works fine, and you like it, or it doesn't and you hate it. Though there's a lot of useful features in P5, they do take time to learn, and you won't get the most out of it till you learn how to use them. As for Judy not looking good, this has been done before in other threads, but hell, why not- the pic at the top here's my latest render just testing out P5 skin nodes on Judy. No postwork.

I have P5 and all the DAZ stuff. I would say go daz. maybe one day P5 will work well enough to be useful. I have all the system spec they say I should have and have done all they ever asked and reported all the weirdness I saw. P5 as it stand right now, works, but will make a 1G proseccor wir 1G of memory with a 40G main HDD and and 80 G application HDD. and when P5 is run the system acts like a 486SX with 32 MB of memory. Don and judy are just eve4 male and female with more bones. I don't care for them to the point I deleted the OBJ and the crz from poser. thoght I have seen a few artists do some interesting things with judy, don is just a high res dork. I would say buy daz items and stay with P4

It is always a tough choice when people ask whether they should buy one thing over another, especially when both things are highly desirable. In this case it is even more difficult because as far as I am concerned, both things are not only desirable, but indespensable. Additionally, if a choice must be made for FINANCIAL reasons, there would be different recommendations than if the choice were to be made for AESTHETIC reasons. If the choice is financial, here are a few things to consider before making your decision. 1) The cost of P5 is currently about $99 to $149. The cost of the current set of Mil Figures (Mike2, Vic2, Mil kids and baby) is around $200 WITHOUT basic clothing or texture packs. The clothed and textured Mil family will end up costing about $350-400, and then you might want to add a few hairstyles for another $100. (see note about Bantam3D hair below). If you opt for the Mil family, you are still stuck with the P4 rendering engine which is OK but not in the same league as the p5 Firefly, Bryce or Vue. 2) Poser 5 comes with a complete set of family figures with textures, hair and basic clothing for all of them included with the price. The P5 Firefly renderer is capable of renders just as good as Bryce or Vue (but there is a learning curve with each of them before you will get the best results - NONE of them makes great renders without a lot of work on your part). 3) Flexibility: If you need figures that will enable you to easily create a large variety of personalities (very different faces and body-types) here is another plus for P5. The face room makes it a snap to create an endless variety of characters without needing an external modeling program. Michael and Vicky, unfortunately always look like Michael and Vicky unless you want to spend a lot of time (and more money) making morphs or buying some of the better pre-made ones. 4) Time: How important is your time? DAZ figures are great, but they take longer to set up and longer to render than P5 figures for a couple of reasons. They are larger meshes and they have more morph channels. Again, you can spend more money to buy pose and morph sets to do the work for you or you can do it yourself. One great advantage of the P5 figures is that they can use all of the existing P4 figure poses with excellent results, and as I said above, morphing is a snap in P5 with the face room and morph putty tools (specifically designed for the P5 figures, but don't work too well on the DAZ figures). 5) And about mesh size versus quality, there are TWO different approaches taken by CL (Poser 5) and DAZ (Vicky3). Poser 5 introduced SDS (sub division surfaces) to achieve the same result (higher potential mesh detail) that DAZ achieves with higher polygon count. But the high-polygon DAZ version3 figures are so large that they they will choke most systems if they have all the morphs installed, so DAZ introduced the morph INJection and REMove process to help keep the total figure weight (mesh plus morph channels) down at render time - bottom line: you will either spend more time injecting/removing morphs or waiting for your render (if your system can handle it). 6) State-of-the-art: Is it important for you to have the highest technology (longer life before obsolete)? If so, consider that the DAZ version 2 figures are on their way out. Their replacements (vicky3 and Mike3) bring new technology (INJection morphs), but their meshes themselves are old technology (brute force high polygon detail) - Do we really NEED 50,000 polygons to get realistic facial wrinkles?. On the other hand Poser 5 with SDS and displacement mapping is state-of-the-art, and potentially a superior alternative to high polygon meshes - faster renders, PLUS greater detail and smaller file sizes in the long run. Unfortunately, we are only learning now how to realize this potential with P5 so there is little yet to show of this capability... but it will come as people discover how to use SDS and displacement mapping together to create extremely high detail with lower polygon counts. If your choice is more about aesthetics, then there are good arguments (pro and con) stated above to help weigh your decision. But if your choice is financial, I think there is only one way to go. Poser 5 gives much more bang for the buck on an initial purchase, but you will want to keep saving up for those DAZ figures eventually.

By the way - here is a quickie render in P5 that shows how great it can potentially be on human skin. This is a cropped and scaled version which was originally 800x600 and took all of 90 seconds to render in Poser 5 on a 733Mhz machine. I think it is as good as anything I have yet seen from Bryce of Vue.

Ron- what settings did you use on the skin node? That looks practically photo-realistic!

Can you have both? For the price to upgrade to P5 that is a great deal on for an amazing 3d software. Hands down it is better than P4. The P5 figures are Good, not Great. Face Room works great on the P5 figures... But I still prefer MM Family... but be prepared to start spending more money for clothes....unless you do the Sword, Stringy Thingy, barebreast stuff.

ronstuff, thank you for the exhaustive conclusion. Based upon this and my preferences, I have made up my mind of what I will do. And thanks to you others for making the tread sort of a representative opinion sample.

Snekkis

nerd, can you please give exakt details about the crashes you experience in the Walk Designer? What do you mean by "only loads the first few blends"? Which ones are not loaded?

Still no lipsinc or animation that looks decent. C'mon Don and Judy fans you can do better than this...lol Marque

It load the first few blends... Yes, that's about it. The number of blends loaded seems to vary with system load and how long since a reboot. Every once in a while it will actually load all the blends. The blends that are not loaded (perhaps a better description would be loaded incorrectly) only contain their first frame. For example lets say it gets to "shuffle" before it messes up. Using any blend after that will generate a solid pose of the first frame. Blending this with a properly loaded blend produces a wild limp. Crashes: Takes 5 - 10 minutes to load then clicking anything causes it to just go blank. Can't be closed. Poser's task must be killed. Further most applied walks produce poses where the feet are translated about 3000 miles from the figure. (Yes they are the 3/24/2003 blends and I did delete "Don for walk designer.pwd") Every patch has made walk designer worse. This one finally completely killed it. Please just put it back the way it was in P5/Release at least it worked then. My laptop (P3/700, 384MB W2K) and Desktop (P4/1.8, 512MB W2K) both exhibit the same problems. The trouble is in the software, not the machine.

P.S. Some of these bugs were reported LONG before SR3 was released. The "only loads a few blends" problem existed in SR2.1 just not as severely.

Well, I'd say the problem is the software and the runtime(s). In case you have more than one runtime: When you say you deleted the pwd, before regenerating it, you also removed the non-P5 Walk Designer folders as I suggested, is that correct? Another question: can you post the contents of your Walk Designer poses directory? I wonder if there are any custom walks in addition to the ones we shipped. We won't just revert to an older version, because lots of users already expressed they like the new improvements. We rather want to find out why some others are experiencing problems, and want to solve them.

okay okay... mil-retards was too much... i see alot of valid points... and some not so... i guess it all just comes down to: 'what are you going to use poser for?' be it 4, pp or 5... i bought p5 because hiring actors was not an option and none of my friends can act. with p5 comes all the actors i could ever want. dynamic hair and cloth and full GUI for setting up and boning. im of the opinion that, if all you ever did was create/render and post here... then blow your money where you wana blow it. priority one for me was not to waste money on things i didnt 'need'. that said. i have every intention to creat my own clothing (shot/scene specific) for all my p5 characters so the fact that there is a lack of said articles doesnt stop me either, it only serves to teach me. leaving all who settle, in the dust.

uli k, can you tell me if Poser 5 SR3 does anything to a system's memory? Seems strange that it is the only program that dropped my system to a bluescreen and completely crashed it. Nothing else running, just p5. This happened once before with one of the earlier service releases. Won't be re-installing it again for a while, have to much work to do to waste time beta testing your releases. Marque

I've had that happen too. The only times have been doing complex simulations in the cloth room. Rare, but it has happened.

I've personally never experienced a blue screen with Poser 5 (Win2K, PIII 800, 512 MB RAM). Some people did, but since the anti-piracy protection got disabled, those reports vanished. Especially from Win2K users, I can't remember a single one (except for yours). I can't imagine what in P5 SR3 could cause a blue screen. You said earlier on that you had applied the Poser 4 memory updater to Poser 5, was that correct? If you'd install this updater, you'd "downdate" a critical low-level Poser component to a 2 years older version. That could potentially cause a blue-screen.

(Addressing the original question) I am probably wrong, having only gotten into this stuff in March, but I was under the impression that the newer DAZ items (Vic, Steph, etc) required something as "advanced" as P5 and that P4 (or equivalent) was just not up to the task. (We now return to the Blue Screen discussion) (,,,)><^..^><(,,,)

Nope. V2, V3 and M2 run under P4 so long as you have the .03 patch. It's the hardware that matters, not which version of Poser.

Cool. Now, if I can only get P5 to open, I can get back to work. The thing locked up on me and now will not get past the "credits" page - if that far. I have a list of things to try when I get home.

I will go with P5, if I am doing it as hobby, and want to have more control rather than great results. I may go with DAZ, if I am doing it as professional works, and want to have good results in less time but with some money. I found that, ironically, less people came to see my poser galleries, if I spent more time for the works.

No what I said was the last blue screen I got which crashed my system completely was with the previous update. Total re-install from scratch, next blue screen, with no update on the memory for the pro pack, just straight install on both got me a blue screen after I installed the SR3. One thing I wish I could figure out here...why is it if you say anything about Poser 5 that doesn't seem to be a compliment to the program or the company gets you a slew of comments about your system not being good enough or something YOU did wrong must have caused the problem? Just curious. Everytime anyone says anything that could be construed as bad they get slammed. When will people admit that there are some inherent problems with this program and there are actually things missing like ik in the hair room? Marque

Not to mention the "new" animals we were supposed to get...lol Marque

think you must know what you want too do. for playing with figures on a programm you know *i use poser4 german on first time realise in german *maby 5 or 6 years? and... i use it more than 2 h per day and i NEVER do all the things you can do with him. p5 is for me a better workprogramm as poser4 see the diffrent floddersystem and mutch more small things but i think there are some years for me to see all on this. DAZ make the best figurs comerziell and V3 is the greatest but...for me all the FREESTUFF for v2 p4 mike ect.. are the best for playing my owen dreams. evere new figure from DAZ need time and inspiration from users all over the world too make a only DAZ figur too a charakter that can live. you see it on vicky in her first time. know you can found many many morphs for her all the dirty morphs too and she is using good. hope that v3 go the same way. and..its your turn if you know what you want to do playing with all the good lovly figures and your fantasy or make better perfekt reders and charakters thats my owen thinking only and sorry for my bad english but i am an old gray german dreamer :o)

C) None of the above: Buy a newer version of your operating system: Win2000 or XP for the PC or OSX for the Mac. Using P5 or the newest DAZ figures is rather dumb, pointless, and waste of time if you're using a 5 year old operating system. Despite all the tweaks that people claim will work, you will start cursing at your computer for crashing, freezing, and taking so long to render. Next, spend the money and get as much RAM as you can afford. This will help things considerably!

Actually, many gamers still run 98 because it's not as resocurce intensive as XP. I run P5 on XP pro on a 2Ghz Pentium4 with 1Gb of Pc3300 DDR Ram. using Poser5 on that machine is like running P4 on my old PIII 700Mhz laptop. It's just slow, I've tried cutting services and everything else to the core, even mucked with the clock in an attempt to get the forground process to run faster. Didn't work. When it stopped being fun, I stopped using it, went back to Poser4, where I pootle and play as I see fit. I didn't buy this for a business so I don't have to make use of it. The way I look at it is this. It wasn't a waste, CL needed the money, for my money they gave me a product. The product doesn't work very well, but I'm not going to get angry about it because it serves no purpose. It is not going to work as advertised anytime soon. When it does, then I'll give it a second chance, provided I've not found something else to occupy me in the meantime. IMO, P5 is a flawed product, it's no fun to play with, so I don't, it works better on some machines than others, and some people are more forgiving. Poser4 locked on me the other day too, forst time is ages, if I'd have waited it might have come back, but I got bored of waiting. Your milage may vary. later jb

Actually, that is how I conlcuded. I have Win2000 and P41.8Mhz and half a Gig RAM, which I think would give resonable velocity. But the crashes mentioned here are disturbing to hear about. I also have a Mac with OSX, which has given me a meaningfull life after OSX, because I have never had crashes with it. But on the other hand my Mac hardware is to slow. Maybe it is possible to make the PC and Mac to live in a symbiosis. Model and compose on Mac, because it never crash, and render on PC, because it is faster.

/...We are the people,we are the world.../

Start singing everyone!

Peace, man! V

I'm the last one to answer this question because I've never even seen Poser 5 run (even though I own a copy). I was sort of waiting for them to fix the problems before I tried it out, still waiting, I guess. It is a pity because the program seems to have a lot of great features. It also seems many actually do use it with little or no problems, too, but there is the other side of that, too. Plus I'm sort of put off by all the reports of "slow", I used to use Bryce for a lot of my reneders but I don't bother any more, mostly because of the "slow", life is too short, I've got other things to do with my time than spend a day setting up a render. I not getting any younger either, I have to make good use of my remaining days. Plus as somebody who creates Poser content, I really have to work in the-lowest-common-denominator, which means Poser 4, which operates almost flawlessly, too. Vickie III, on the other hand is the greatest thing since sliced bread! ;-)

Ideally, use Poser 5 with the Daz figures. I agree with what others have said here about Don and Judy--they aren't awful, but they aren't the sort of thing that you can use right out of the box (by default they look like aliens, or claymation characters), and P5 doesn't give you many tools to deform their meshs outside the face room. Even the face room is disappointing--"morph putty" is really just adjusting morph target dials by clicking and dragging on the figure. It's an imprecise way to build characters, because it's nearly impossible to limit your deformations to a small area or specific adjustments. Click and drag on the brow ridge, and you also deform the chin and mouth. It's easier to simply adjust the morph target dials manually (which is all the morph putty is doing, anyway). The DAZ characters with the morph packs have a LOT more morphs, both for the face and for the body (aside from breast and gential morphs, you'll have to do all your body adjustments for Don and Judy with magnets). That said, I think Poser 5 SR3 is worth buying for the cloth room alone, which totally blows away anything you could ever do with conforming clothing. It has a moderate learning curve, but it's worth investing time in. Vickie 3 with dynamic P5 simulated clothing is about as good as it gets. If you can only get one or the other for now, I'd start with the DAZ characters, however.