**Hi, I've just been wondering what people around here think about Poser 5. I'm using Poser 4 and haven't really thought about upgrading to 5 and I seem to hear alot of people complaining about it. In general is it a good or mostly bad program for posing things especially compared to 4?

Thank You
HAE Inc.**

It tends to be slow and requires a far stronger system than 4 but it provides a lot more features (hair and clothing). Coming from 3ds Max background, I appreciate that considering what these plugins cost in MAX.

If all you want the program to do "for posing things", stick with what you have. If you want more it works for some,some it does not. For the price $$$ of P5 it really is amazing.

you want an answer? I bought P5 and it was such a piece of crap that after installing it and trying to work with it I finally deleted it, reformatted my harddrives so that no residue would be left and threw the disk into a pile of trash I have and now I have no idea nor do I care to know where the damned thing is. What the hell it only cost a weeks wages.

For now,i prefer the version 5 ,more than the 4:more stability on my system,better rendering,better files managing,...only one complaint:when i am using injection morphs system like in Vic3,i have problems(system freeze,slower system,etc) and i prefer come back with version 4 for this kind of poses files.

I love it. It's awesome. Especially after I upgraded to 2.13 ghz computer. :p

Keep your Poser 4.if you want to be happy, if you want to bitch, complain, gripe, yell, fuss, piss green, write countless emails to Curious Labs, and then go to your local doctor to write you a script for valium cause your about to have a stress attack because of a program that promotes itself as better than before. then be my guest, buy Poser 5 and start a whole new set of problems.

well I haven't had any problems with Poser 5 ... I haven't used it a huge amount as I'm easing into it gradually like :) Its a sensible upgrade from Poser 4 for an advanced user. The key differences: dynamic cloth, dynamic hair (fiddly as heck), volumetric lighting, procedural materials, and an improved library management. The downsides? takes a strong system to use it, the new figures are eh and the Faceroom only works with them, the firefly renderer is sloooooow and the new material setup means that some older poser files need to be fiddled with before they render properly.

It's a crap shoot - it will either work quite well and give you lots of benefits or it will give you a stroke from frustration. The nested library system is wonderful but there's a bunch of known bugs that really drive me nuts and make me pine for P4, especially with the render speed.

I won't weigh in on it's merits and faults this time, since both sides are pretty well presented. However, I will mention that support for the product is pretty iffy, and there is no refund policy. You buy it and don't like it, you're screwed. I do most of my work in it. I also keep good old P4 on my machine, just in case. If you do get it, get a bigger machine with LOTS of memory. You'll love some things, hate others, and the only place you can complain is here. Do a forum search on P5, and check out what everyone has said since it's come out. The politics, the beta releases, CL's reorganization, the broken promises (where are the new animals, anyway?). Then check out the galleries and see the magnificent work some (emphisis on some) people have done with it. Good luck!

Being a Quality Assurance Engineer, and having read numorous posts over the months since P5's initial release, I can only say that Curious Labs QA team was less than through. It's also possible that the decision was made to release P5 with the defects and patch them later. Either way it has made for more than a few unhappy customers. I'd stick with P4 and get the Pro Pack if you don't have it already. Hopefully we'll see a 5.something release down the road that will have all the fixes and whatnot included and justify the "upgrade".

I think that SR-2.1 and SR-3 fixed many issues people had with the initial release. Just make sure you have enogh RAM, then you'll get a number of useful new features.

I love it really and I never had the problems others have mentioned. I like the ability to have multiple runtimes and to create subfolders, the FireFly lets me render bigger images than the default P4 renderer that is stuck with max 4039 pixel. The Firefly isn't really slow - compare it to the rendertime you would need in Bryce or Vue on a similiar image with reflections and whatnot and you see it's doing well. It's not as fast as the P4 renderer but it has much more features - real reflections, water etc.

For Posing - well, Poser 4 does that faster than Poser 5 so you'd be better off sticking to Poser 4 if it meets your general requirements elsewhere. Poser 5 only really come sinto its own doing things that Poser 4 can't do - things that often were left to post-processing for Poser 4. I love Poser 5, but I could never suggest it was as fast as Poser 4 for general work.

Let's see... after SR3, it takes over 30 minutes to load on my machine and it still crashes repeatedly when I try to render. Would I go back to P4? Not if you paid me!

"...release P5 with the defects and patch them later. Either way it has made for more than a few unhappy customers." Hmm, could it be that some former MS people were involved in P5 getting booted out the door before it was debugged all the way?

Not crap but needs a fast computer does alot more then poser has a learniong curve most poser 4 users bitchj about because they are too used to the old programs basics,And don't want to buy a new computer to peed the program up so it works well for them. My complaints are about the renderer I can say it5's better then 4 but I was expecting it to be able 3ds embedded texture info based on booliens, Look at this, Sarod's Voyager loaded into pser 5 I was sick when I saw it screw up on reading polygons that are booliend cut in other programs the models were built in, poser 4 could never read them,poser 5 reads some and not others.

Not crap but needs a fast computer, does alot more then poser4, has a learning curve most poser 4 users bitch about because they are too used to the old programs basics,And don't want to buy a new computer to speed the program up so it works well for them. My complaints are about the renderer I can say it's better then 4 but I was expecting it to be able READ 3ds embedded texture info based on booliens, Look at this, Sarod's Voyager loaded into pser 5, I was sick when I saw it screw up on reading polygons that are booliend cut in other programs the models were built in, poser 4 could never read them,poser 5 reads some and not others. AND RENDEROSITY EATS HALF THE WORDS I TYPE!

Plenty of free harddrive and gig of mem should get you to use P5 rather than PPP/P4. After getting over the learning curve of P5... I hardly ever resort to using PPP. Am using xppro, 200gig free harddisk (and boy when rendering with firefly - it eats it up), 1gig mem. If your machine is below 1.8 and 512meg mem and hardly any diskspace left - wouldn't bother getting p5. You can pose okay with less but rendering dies on the vine unless you use the P4 renderer.....

Poser 5 is the biggest crap I've ever seen in my life. Once you add a Matfile you can't change this in Poser 5. I'm using ProPack and never got this kinda problem. Poser 5 is the money not worth to spend on