This is going to probably be a stupid question since I've just plunked down the money and bought Poser 5 but I guess I'll ask it anyway :P I have a ton of stuff I've bought for Poser 4 and PP from Daz and here in the MP and other sites. Will they all work in Poser 5 for sure? I figure if they don't, I'll just keep Poser PP loaded and work from there and import into Poser 5 if possible. Thanks in advance for any help :)

Yes, everything should work. I haven't had anything that worked in P4 not work in P5 (yet).

There are a couple of very minor things. I have one shirt for M2 that has a problem because of normals, but that's it out of thousands and thousands of items.

The most-encountered compatibility issue involves material settings. Ambient and bump values will need manual adjustment, even when using MAT files. Once you're familiar with the Material Room, though, it's easy to fix. And P5's new polygon-smoothing feature can have undesired results with some meshes, but you can turn that off.

I only ran into one product that had problems and the vendor gladly provided me an upgrade and instruction.

I haven't heard about anything that doesn't work in P5. There are a few things, as indicated above, that doesn't work perfect right away, but works fine with a little tweaking. Some hair models looks bad after rendering due to inverted normals, but that is easily fixed. A hair by Kozaburo behaves this way, and he has a fix described on his site (involves adding a very, very slight displacement in the Material Room, very easy to do) Some clothes might show parts of the mesh as transparent after rendering. This happens especially when you see the "inside" of the clothing items (like a long coat, where you see the part of it between the characters legs) and is due to the fact that these polygons are facing the "wrong" way. It's easily fixed by turning off the "remove backfacing polygons" feature in the render settings. This feature was introduced with the FireFly renderer to cut render times, but sometimes it creates undesired results.

Some lightsets have caused crashes or hanging of Poser 5. Hit or miss, just have to try them. Mostly global lighting sets are what I've had problems with.

Thank you all for your help answering my question ;) I was concerned as I had read that Daz3D was not putting out anything for Poser 5 because of glitches with the program. You all helped quite a bit :) I hit back to read new messages and the very next post after mine was one about Poser 6 and problems with Poser 5. Now I'm kind of questioning whether I really want to uninstall Poser PP and run with Poser 5 or not :P But, I'll have to wait and see which I like better :)

I suspect the real reason Daz3D are not putting out Poser 5 specific stuff is because DAZ Studio will not be Poser 5 compatible, it will only work with Poser 4 files.

considering how many people now have P5, if Daz Studio isn't P5 compatable for setting up scenes, that will be Daz first major public releations disaster

Farside, you may have a point there. I mainly use P5 now even with the few bugs. It would be a shame not to be able to use DS after creating something in P5. But with that said, I'm sure we will figure out how to combine the two. There is too much talent here not to think that.

I would have thought P5 files would only be incompatible with Daz Studio only if it includes P5 features such as P5 hair, dynamic cloth, animated textures, etc. As time goes on, more and more people will be using these things in their scenes, so Daz's target market is decreasing the more they delay releasing. Of course, if they release a buggy product, they'll be blasted- esp. as we've been waiting so long for it. My impression from what I've read about Daz Studio is that it will try to take Poser forward from version 4 but in a different direction that Poser 5 has taken. The big question is will Poser 5 users want to take a sideways step to DAZ Studio. It also means, in my opinion, that Daz Studio will not be complimentary to Poser 5, as some here have stated, but a competitor. I look forward to the release of Daz Studio and seeing what it can do, but until then it's only software we can talk about, which is what I call vapourware.

Squeeka, You might want to keep P4-PP loaded anyway, since you can link its Runtime to Poser 5, which can access multiple Runtimes. That way you don't have to move everything around.

I wanted to jump back in here as I did some digging last night and found a few models, buildings mostly, that with a Firefly render will distort. I just use the P4 render and the problem goes away.

The reason DAZ didn't develop for Poser 5 was that they didn't have a copy of it. And they didn't have a copy of it because of a controversy with CL over the Poser 5 EULA (End User Licence Agreement). The nature of this controversy has been speculated about in lengthy posts here and in other forums, let's just note that it's over and done with. The EULA is changed. DAZ products works just fine with Poser 5, according to my experience. However, it seems that DAZ does not develop anything that utilizes the Poser 5 specific features such as dynamic har and cloth, probably to ensure future DAZ|Studio compatibility.

Poser Pro Pack & Poser 5 use "jpg" bump maps, while Poser 4 uses "bum" bump maps. This can make a huge difference to you. Some products use MAT Pose files that include versions for P5/PPP, and for Poser 4 (P4). You really want to go over your stuff and see what's what. You can save lots of disk space by avoiding the BUM bump maps! That's why I don't use the P4 runtime in Poser 5.

There was an actual Post by a Daz representative somewhere in this forum that explained exactly why Daz doesn't do Poser 5 specific stuff. Anyone really good at Searching?

There was an actual Post by a Daz representative somewhere in this forum that explained exactly why Daz doesn't do Poser 5 specific stuff. Anyone really good at Searching?