I have been away from Renderosity for nearly 9 months because I was expecting a baby. After nearly a month at home I have new strenght and will resume my modeling and poser habit. I reloaded Poser 5 and installed the new SR-3, I also bought the new Mimic Pro 2.0 which I love. However after installing Poser 5 I realized why I hate it so much. It is slow as hell. The SR-3 took care of some of the bugs, but the walk designer still sucks which is a shame because I love animation. Poser 4 and Poser Pro Pack was way more stable. Poser 5 can't even work with Cinema 4dxl 7.2 unless I can find a workaround. So I come to the experts in this forum for advice. Since I plan on modeling clothes and furniture I am going to upgrade to Rhino 3.0 so is Poser with Pro Pack enough for the job without all the bells and whistles that Poser 5 had like materials, face room and the hair room. Or should I wait for Daz's new program which by the looks of it could mean Posers death. Secondly should I upgrade my system. I think it is fast enough considering I can handle Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Adobe Premiere without a hiccup and I can run my other programs without any problems. My current configuration is a PIII 1.2 GHZ and 386 MB RAM. I have several harddrives, defrag regularly, and use an ASUS Motherboard which is stable.I also run Windows 2000. What configurations is anyone out there using and can you recommend anything. Thanks in advance. Renaylor@renderosity.com

More memory. Lots more memory. I upgraded my system from 256 meg to a little over 700 meg of memory and noticed a great improvement. If you're running the NT version of Windows 2000, you should be OK. If you're running ME, you might want to consider an upgrade to an NT version of the operating system since they use memory better (either 2000 or XP). I wouldn't wait on getting the memory upgrade. All your programs will run better and faster. You also might want to check your font and display settings. I know it sounds a little strange, but when I changed my font defaults in Windows and reduced my resolution a bit, I saw another improvement. This may have been system specific for me though. Hope this helps.

I'm no expert with Poser, but... is it really that slow? I mean, it isn't going to win any races (what program like Poser will?), but it isn't THAT slow. I'm running a 1.53Ghz Athlon (around a 2Ghz P3). I'm not sure about the future of programs like Poser, and although I agree there are certain aspects that need a little fine-tuning, I struggle to understand why you think something like the walk designer sucks. Can elaborate for little ol' me? ;)

The walk designer in poser 4 would not take as long to load and was responsive and would not crash like p5's. The new service release took care of some of the problem but the annoying glitch in the buckling of the left leg with anything other than the poser based figure like Don and Judy is a PITA. It is a shame that Nerd had to go though so much trouble to fix the problem that should have been addressed from p4 Renaylor@renderosity.com

For some of us, P5 is remarkably slower in responding to mouse clicks, switching liubraries, etc. as compared to P4/PPP. Like pdxjims said, get more RAM. It makes a big difference. Get as much as you can. I have 1GB and I'm a happy camper. (I'd be happier with 2GB, but I'm a greedy, happy camper.) You don't need P5 for clothes modeling if you have PPP. The P5 material room nodes are nice (if ... ahem ... quirky) but it won't affect your ability to import and bone the clothing. You might want to look at getting P-Wizard by kattman. It has a utility that makes setting up joint parameters much easier. (steveshanks of Poserworld recommends it highly. I've used it a few times and it did work nicely for me, as well.) Cheers!

I have viewed some nice animation produced with P5, but have not tried animations. here is a link to a good , might ask this person, also little Dragon uses P5. As far as "bell and whisles" I like them, I use the material every time I use P5. I have P5 on 3 machines, the slowest being a P111 with 1 gig of ram. Both Pentium 4 runs circles around the P111.

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Poser 5 on a PIII/850MHz with 785 MB RAM, a Parhelia with 128 MB RAM, on a Sony 20" >>> even Bryce is a racehorse compaired to Poser5. And: reducing the the screen-resolution?? Maybe set the colours to 256?? You MUST be kidding!! Well, my good old box maybe not the fastest kid around - but it goes along very well with Vue, Bryce, Truespace, ZBrush, Painter, and some other apps. I think there should be some kind of shield against resource-killing software like that. Plain and simple: if it is done this way >> refund! But, it is - sadly - a fact nowadays, that the first thing you do after getting that new proggie (be it a game or a "serious" app), is start looking for patches, updates, bugfixes. Now - please transfer this situation to the moment that you bought your last car (fridge, TV, bike - whatever): you paid for your new car, you opened the door, jumped in ........ only to find that the stearing-wheel just went the left way?? NO, your newly bought "whatever" did just what it was supposed to do, fully functional in every way. For software.......... a 50% NOPE. I always felt I had to say that :)!! Precaution: I am using Poser from the time it was available on the PC, I am running it still, version 4 - Poser5 made it into my trash-can, and this ain't no kidding.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do have the P-Wizard and it does work great:-). I will try more memory though. Thanks. Renaylor@renderosity.com

With all the P5, P4 performance debate I thought I'd post this: P4 refused to render, P5 (SR3) with Firefly rendered in 7 minutes +-. Win98, 512mg, 2gig P4. It should have been the other way around.

Well, Zbrush is fast (unless you're mucking around with 2048 pictures and a while pile of layers, under which things get slow), and while Bryce runs quite smoothly under Direct3D, it bogs without. The same goes for Truespace. "The walk designer in poser 4 would not take as long to load and was responsive and would not crash like p5's." I've never had it crash, and although I've only played with the Poser 4 demo, the loadtimes on both were the same. Now don't get me wrong here- I'm not trying to defend Poser 5's bugs (and there are still some good ones to work out... and why they haven't yet is beyond me) but being a first time user of Poser (and using version 5, obviously) I haven't had much difficulty with it at all. It has its quirks, but then so did Poser 4 when I played with it. The way you guys talk, you'd think Poser 4 was some amazing god-like program without a problem. Are we talking about the same programs here? Is Poser 5 really 50% defunct (and I'm just really blind) or... you're over doing it a bit, maybe?

@r10k: Surely (for overdoing things), I did it at that point because I was talking of our new software in general. But: would a defunct of 25% make you a happier person? We pay 100%, right? Why, please, can't we get 100% functionality from "them"?? I have seen software since I got first my Commodore C64, been on the Amiga, and finally on Win-driven machines. We got more powerful machines by now, and likewise the software allows for much more to be creative - no reason to nag, after all?? Well: just remember your first Poser, Truespace, even Word :) >> those proggies were done careful - compaired to a lot of what we can expect "to day". And: this will never change - unless WE, the users find some kind of common voice! ranting part 2: over:)

You know, I could put up with the slow, if I didnt have to pose blind. If I have more than 1 or 2 figures in a scene-- depending on how high the resolution of the textures are-- I'm posing block figures. It's a misery. I'm fairly sure it's because I have a lot in Runtime. Some program with incentives to buy less and use less. Pentium 2.4 with 2G Ram. I'm stuck right now because my firewire drives didn't work out-- so until I can arrange the loan for my new computer-- I have no more slots in this one-- I can't do the organisation I want to do-- no, strike that, HAve to do, in order to run Poser 5. Divide up into many small runtimes and work out of one at a time. Since I tend to work spontaneously, this takes every bit of fun out of it and makes it a drudgery. If you are having no probs with Poser 5, I suggest you check the size of your Runtime-- however many you run-- If you are under 5Gs, that's the reason you are having no problems. Emily

I find shadowmap calculations to be excruciatingly slow with Firefly, to the point that I often use raytraced shadows instead in my Firefly animations. This slowdown doesn't occur when I use the P4 renderer in Poser 5. Other than that, it's workable, as long as I don't use much dynamic hair (another big slowdown). I cranked out an 180-frame animation at 640x480 with dynamic cloth in about an hour this morning.

queri - I VERY much doubt that the size of Runtime is of any relevance at all. Mine is about 90 000 (Yes, 90 thousand) files and 25 Gig or so and it has no significance for Poser5 (didn't for P4 either) except for one thing: When I click on the libraries, it takes a second sometimes before the popup window pops up. Not always, just sometimes. P4 2,53 GHz, 1 Gig RAM, Win2KPro :] Fish

Zerebrom- nice of hear of another Amiga user ;) I'm with you on principle. You have a good point, (that we have the right to have the software work) but Poser 5 is obviously a step into new teritories for Curious, and it is obvious they are trying to get things fixed. At the moment, it isn't a perfect piece of software, but it's pretty good, and (at least) has support. Programs today do seem to be a little rougher around the edges, but even you'd agree that programs like Poser are now doing things that are extremely complex, compared to what similar ones were doing 2+ years ago. Like it or not, we live in an age of increasingly detailed software, and patches. It's just the way of things. With Truespace- I'm using the free 3.2 version. And... WOW does that have some serious rounding errors going on. It might have been 'good' back then, but even after all of its patches, it is still problematic in the way it does things like its painting.

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I don't think any computer has got that it takes to deal with poser 5. I use a rather slow machine to do development my work on, 1.7AMD w/1.5gb ram. I wouldn't dream of trying to render with it and then I have two 3.0 P4 with 2GB of dual channel memory that I use for rendering. They're both water cooled (Thermaltake AquariusII) with 4 seventy-five watt Peltier chillers on the water holding tank. I have the Mother boards (ABIT IC7-MAX3) overclocked to the max and still there are some scenes that the rendering machines can't handle. What make it really sad is, half way through a 600 frame amimation rendering poser 5 will throw in the towel and lock up. And you just wasted 24 hours of computer time to get nothing. CL really needs to address the memory issue. So if you're thinking about upgrading your machine for Poser 5...don't. Wait until CL learns how to write a program that can mamage the system's memory correctly.