I've been DYING for the OS X release of Poser 5! Anyone here used it yet? Do they finally take advantage of Quartz and OpenGL acceleration? Is it stable? I'm on 4.0.3 in OS 9, and no problems (never crashed) and I'm chomping at the bit on ver. 5! Gimmie the lowdown! Inquiring minds want to know...

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NO poser5 fpe MAC OSX is NOT a hardware accellerated program and has NO open GL sorry.

I'm guessing P5X doesn't support dual processors, either.

It seems to run ok on my 933 with a gig of ram. Only real prob I have is the texture paths seem to be screwd up from all my pc models i copied over. Even used mac converter but it cant find any of the tex on its own. Good thing is it opened my pc p5 scenes w/o any trouble, but couldnt find the textures once again, thats a pain.

Just got it; wonderfulness. My 5min+/frame renders went down to >1min/frame. I have a G4 876 OSX 10.2 w/8?? RAM. I have been able to bring it to its knees w/ lot's of hires objects. Closing the program and restarting between scenes seems to help so there might still be something being retained (like the txt files in P PRO.) The ability to retain my P4 libraries in their original location is a huge bonus for me. The methodology is ill explained and I had to resort to trickery (renaming) in order to get it to recognize all of the libraries.

I just got P5 for OSX. Unlike feldermaus, my experience has been that it is very slow! I'm running an iMac G4 800 MHz with 768 MB RAM. I tried rendering the humble stick man, at the size you see here (350x350). This is a very low-resolution figure, with no textures, no shadows, no antialiasing. I tried several times, and Firefly took it 1:06 on average, while the P4 renderer took 1:18! I used Poser 4 on a much slower machine and it seemed to render something simple like this MUCH faster... I dunno, 20 seconds or so? Maybe I am mis-remembering, but I was stunned at how slow it is. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? (No other big apps running...) Any advice appreciated!!

Well, I'm at about 20 hours of use and I've tried it on 2 systems - both G4/OS10.2.6/1G RAM, one a 733MHz, the other a 1.4G DP. I'm really pleased. The thing actually works pretty much as advertised! So here's a couple of thoughts: Stability: One crash so far, hitting the Delete key instead of the Return key to confirm a choice in a dialog (fumble fingers!) . I've had no conflicts running other apps, including Classic apps. I've loaded 4 15Mb UVMapped .OBJs and 4 Vicky 3s with the Hirez maps (no crosstalk!). I've also done a little something in each of the rooms (no animation though) , all without crashing but... Speed: P5X seems slower then P4 doing P4 things and the new stuff often puts a real strain on my 1.4G machine. On my 733 machine I found that the "big" DAZ figures (like V3 and the Mil Dragon) went from frustrating with P4 to maddening in P5. I'm not sure I'd want to run P5 on a 500MHz machine (but I'm not very patient person). No DP support. Bugs: The only major bug I've found is with redrawing P5 when another app covers it. Various parts fail to reappear when you return to P5. Doing anything that forces Poser to redraw itself (like changing rooms) brings everything back. A couple of minor problems with numeric entry and the Presets Panel often changes from the directory you're in to the default. But P5 fixed a couple of P4 Setup room bugs and now works with QT6. P4 Runtime and PC format: To get to my P4 stuff I just left P4 where it was and pointed P5 to it's runtime directory. P5 is now compatible with the Poser PC file formats. Old/New: Old Poser stuff works pretty much as it always has and the few changes are for the better (like the new Info dialog). Of the new stuff I like the Material Room best, it's pretty easy but can also be quite deep. But for a newbie to this like me, the other rooms sure seem too convoluted and littered with "gotchyas" to get good results. Fortunately, there's a number of very good tutorials done on the PC that work the same on the Mac. All and all, and so far, I'd give P5X a grade of B. Best; Dan

I like the expanding and collapsing parameters dial for morphs and transform.

But I don't like the materials interface screen, I would have preferred the old P4/PPP interface.

? (!)

The screen redraw problem is inherited from PC. Let's hope it's on the SR4 list.

Thanks for the reports, guys. Looks like I'll stick with regular Poser 4 for now. Until CL rebuilds Poser with Quartz, Altivec and OpenGL acceleration, I'm not budging. BTW, How much of a performance hit does the Pro-Pack put on Poser in Os 9?

What exactly would Quartz accelerate? The drop shadows under windows are drawn by Quartz already, I can turn them off with Shadowkiller.

maybe Quartz wont help but NO open GL full texture previews will keep alot of mac users with powerful graphic cards away :-( since poser5's outdated core will ignore those cards But this ability will be in DAZ studio and FREE!!

If you're interested, here is a statement from a Maxon developer why Altivec in the Cinema4D renderer gives hardly any speed improvements. Another statement from Maxon is here and here's a general article on Altivec and 3D rendering. The bottom line is that Altivec neither handles 64bit precision floating point numbers nor is it optimized for random memory access (which is essential for ray tracing). Altivec is great for streaming media, e.g. audio processing or video encoding (which Poser handles through Quicktime, and most Quicktime codec are Altivec enhanced). Same goes for the SIMD instructions on x86 like MMX, 3DNow! or ISSE.

As for the lack of OpenGL: I'm with you here, Poser really should be able to use that by now, or better, should be using it since Version 4.

But this ability will be in DAZ studio and FREE!! I'm going to rave about DAZ|Studio when it's out. Right now, it's time to rant about Poser 5. Just like I don't judge books by their cover, I won't judge DAZ|Studio by the announcement.

Overall I like Poser5, and I glad I bought it. It only cost me $99 to upgrade from PPP.

But, I am very dissappointed that Poser5 does not have a Point Light

{But this ability will be in DAZ studio and FREE!!} And everyone knows that DAZ Studio will be bigger than Jesus. This program will cure hunger and solve all of the world's problems. Oh, wait, it's not out yet? Wait, they haven't announced a release date? Then how do we know it will be so great? Back to the topic at hand: If P5 for the Mac is anything like the Windows version, you will need to tweak the Firefly settings to get better renders. I read somewhere that the "factory" settings for Firefly's Draft and Production modes aren't very good. Try looking through the tutorials to figure out what the settings should be, for the render that you want.