Hi All, I've been using p4 for a few years now and I've been considering an upgrade to P5. However, I continue to see negative posts on various sites. P5 crashing, hanging, speed issues, funky behavior.... True, the upgrade and shipping is under $100 now, but it's still $100 I could use for something else. Can you all please give me your opinions on p5 with SR3 applied? I'm on Win2k using an AMD XP 2500. Thanks.

Well I bought P5 not long after it's release, and I've not had many problems with the over all running of it. The only major one I had was the Firefly engine crashing but a reduction in the bucket size has solved that issue. I'm running an XP 2400 with WinXP Pro and it's behaves itself pretty well - teh Gig for RAM helps too. Overall I'm very happy with P5, I've yet to have any serious problems with it, granted I'm still learning how to really get the best out of it. Others may be in a better position to give a more definitive response, but that's my opinion :o)

I've had little to no problem (well not major anyway) with P5. It's very stable on my AMD XP1800 on Win2K (1.2gb RAM here tho). There are some things that will forever annoy me. (Lights, anyone?) and others I am only beginning to explore now. (Cloth stuff and Hair) I only got it a few weeks ago, but used it on a friends machine from release to SR2. It was extremely buggy early on, things freezing for no apparent reason, renders stopping etc. Some is still around, other things have been fixed. It's up to you. But if you are still very uncertain whether you want to do it or not, why not wait and see what Daz Studio has to offer? If that's any good, it might be a nice alternative. (NO idea what it will cost in the end tho) And on top of it there will be a public beta from what I understand. I will likely run P4 and / or P5 and D|S, as will many here. I'm sure a few other people who have used it more / longer will give you some good pros and cons. There are differences between P4 and P5, no question. The question is - what are you looking for. A lot of people are quite happy to work with P4PP and wouldn't give P5 a passing glance, others are more than happy working in P5 and using some of the features it offers. Yet others use both. It all really depends on what YOU are looking for. Silke

No worries here either. You'll need an adequately spec'ed machine but that is covered in the declared minimum requirements. Frankly after the issue of the third service release I gave up taking much notice of most of the posts about "issues". I was too busy enjoying the program.

Is it a lemon or a jewel, it's kind of like a grapefruit..some parts are sour and leave a bad taste in your mouth and other things about it are Sweet..one thing i have learned it's more of a personal preference, you may love it. hold out for daz studio, as we haven't heard a word from curious labs in ages

we haven't heard a word from curious labs in ages CL was an exhibitor at MacExpo, London two weeks ago. They hired me as a freelancer to do the demonstrations (on a 667MHz PowerBook with 256MB RAM...I think I was the only one at the show doing a presentation on the minimum specs).

I say go for it. It's pretty unacceptably buggy in some ways. Both the hair room (collision detection) and walk designer are buggered up good, and I've had some probs with cloth room too (but I'm not sure if that was pre SR3 since I hanv't needed it.)Others have done good things with cloth though. Plan on using Poser 4 and 5 together because some things P4 still does better. And I've used dynamic hair effectively too, just don't expect collision detection to work. The reason to buy P5, is the AWESOME Material room. I have used high end apps, and I havn't seen a way to putv together shaders that is as easy (or fun) as the P5 mat room. The new render engine is a little slow but with tweaking is adequately fast and produces (potentially) much better results than P4. These new goodies come with some added complexity though so if you are a wuss about that stuff you may as well not get it. ^_- Personally I think it's a good deal at $100. Eventually Daz Studio may blow it's doors off, but since it's just an alpha now and will be pretty lacking in features off the bat, I'd go ahead and get P5 if I were you.

Using P5 with SR3 for 2 weeks now at WinXP Pro and AMD XP2100+. Didn't have any problems until yet. Didn't use many features until yet though. The conversion to Vue4.2 works also quite well. Only slight problems with multiple runtime directories. I think it's a matter of the OS (Win2k should solve the memory issues) and the installed RAM (equal or more than 512MByte). A common graphic adapter (I'm using GeForce Ti4200) and you should only have few problems. The multiple runtime capability, the new render engine, material system and cloth room are very useful extensions. Didn't like the face room and the new hair system though.

What do you get with P5 that you don't have already? The face room is useless and content parasite is worse than useless. The hair room takes a while to get used to and the results are not especially realistic - but it's worth experimenting. But I haven't experienced all the problems people claim are endemic in P5. It's rarely crashed for me and never since installing SR3. The material room and firefly take a steep learning curve if you're not already familiar with that sort of thing, but once you know how they work they're wonderful. The ability to nest folders is an absolute godsend, as is multiple runtimes. It's a quirky program. I don't like the way it handles some of my favourite hairs - the fix of applying a displacement works but I see a definite drop in quality when I do that. But in my opinion P5 is well worth the upgrade. Despite the quirks, I wouldn't go back to P4. And Daz Studio is just promises at the moment. I'll believe them when I see it working. Not before.

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?forum_id=4&Form.ShowMessage=62628

I've had P5 since day 1...have been using Poser since Version 1.... Initially, I was one of the big mouths totally POd at Curious for the terrible conditon of the release. They have improved the program overall and it works pretty well for most things since SR1...it is the only Poser I use...P4 is still installed on my system, but I haven't used it for quite some time. I still get render lock ups now and then.... My recommendation is for at least 1 gig of ram. I'm using 512meg with and AMD 1800+, GF3ti500 64meg video...the ram seems to be the limitng factor. Video card has little bearing on the program, and none on rendering--its the CPU and Ram doing the work...with 512meg ram, my virtual on the hard drive is cranking pretty hard..especially if you get into DAZ models and some of the big props, etc... Take a look at that render which is linked...Poser 5 Firefly in production mode....not bad, and the original looks even better..this is a jpg compressed image.... I would not hesitate to buy P5 right now, especially at that price...plus it has all the goodies from Poser 4 Pro Pack included, other than the plugins for LW, MAx...which most regulat folks don't need anyway...and I think there is a plugin to export to LW now..or max, can't remeber...

Grapefruit is the best description. . .Dirk got it! First-- look at the price of applications with a Cloth simulator, hair capabilities and procedural textures. There's a LOT there. Not all of it works, certainly not well enough for production use, but much of it does, and is far less expensive and better integrated than other solutions. For reference Digimation's Cloth plugin for 3D Studio costs as much as Poser I get a little annoyed sometimes with folks who badmouth what CL is delivering, a LOT of capability for not much money. I've also noticed a lot of folks trashing the hair, cloth, or materials applications without taking the trouble to really learn them. These are not trivial tasks, on any system. . .a lot of operator skill is required to get a hairstyle that looks, well, stylish. But the fact is that the capability is there . . .how much energy you choose to invest in using it is up to you.

I'm running a Kick *ss Dual CPU @ 3.06GHz w/4Gig memory. My OS is WinXP and SR is 3. The only problems I've had is that when I run renders in production using firefly it tends to lock up. It works fine in draft mode. Haven't solved the lockup issue in production mode so if anyone has suggestions let me know. Other than that it's real sweet!

No problem here either...never ever use P4 now.

Works great on all levels, but only if you ditch that Windoze box and get a Macintosh!

I run both Poser 4 PP and Poser 5 SR3 on both Mac and Windoats (think about it). Both run well on both systems. Dirk has it sliced and ready for eating - it's a grapefruit. Content paradise (I love eirian's "content parasite"), the Cloth room, the Face room, and Hair room are totally useless to me - rind. But, the Library structure, new render options, and the Material room (especially) are substantial highlights and improvements over P4 - sweet juicy fruit. IMHO, the improvements could have been an update (say, Poser 4.5) to the previous release most likely avoiding all of the angst that went with the new release. I think that the $100 is worth the library and material improvements alone.

Most of the new features of Poser 5 were exciting, but I never use them. Poser 5 runs and renders slower on my older computer, even with 512MB RAM. Forget rendering complex hair from Neftis. The PNG thumbnails are nice. Poser 5 doesn't need BUM bump maps, so you can save some work and hard drive space. In the end, some of my important Poser characters don't render in P5, unless I change them. I've been using Poser 4 almost exclusively for months, but I'm yearning to go back to Poser 5. Things that gripe me: 1.) CL's copy protection scheme. It must have caused problems, or why would they eventually get rid of it? 2.) The manual is useless since there are so many errors. 3.) CL says Poser 6 will be essentially a "fixed version" of Poser 5, with no features. So why not give it to us, rather than ask us to pay once again?

Hmmm.... The big selling points for me were the Face and Cloth. crocodilian IMHO, the collision detection shouldn't be hard for a user to implement. It works fairly easily in Hash:AM. I had really hoped it would work as well in P5.

Using Poser 5 and being very happy with it (admitedly, I don't use the face room nor the hair room, and I seldom use the setup room or animation palette). I'm not going back to Poser 4 now that SR3 has solved the stability problems. Most of the "issues" I see reported here are from people who use hair room / collision detection and walk designer, or from people who are struggling with the learning curve.

For anyone who was using Poser 4 on its own, I think it makes sense to upgrade to Poser 5. For anyone using Poser 4 in conjunction with Bryce, Vue, Cinema 4D or anything else, the benefits of Poser 5 are very marginal and mostly restricted to the improved library system.

Admittedly I am very new to Poser let alone Poser5, so far I've only been able to make 2 figures that looked like people with all extremities in the right places. :)

I didn't know about the SR3, will have to go check that out, but I run on WINXP with 512mbRAM with a P4 processor. It has not frozen up/locked on me yet. Then again, I haven't figured out how to get it to do everything I want to anyway. As far as the manual is concerned, well, I've learned more from the trials and errors I've done than I did the manual.

I dropped p4 support for p5. Fire fly is a better renderer if it doesn't lock up. The lib support is much better which allows sub directories. My favorite is the material node system. I can add make up, masks, gloves etc to characters all with just using blender nodes instead of special combined textures. For example, if I want bruises I can blend the skin texture with a generic bruise map right on the fly. Same with torn clothes. I can blend the cloth's alpha with a generic torn transmap. Tattoos, masks, makeup etc are real easy to apply and customize. About 1/4 of my textures are now on the fly procedurals instead of bitmap textures. Saves a lot on bitmap space. The material options are 1000% times better than p4's simple 4 materials. Plus you can do true bump, displacement maps and light maps.

Mason: you forgot P5 can also do true reflections (ray tracing). i love Poser 5 even if i've had a lot of problems with it....i just got used to it and just work around em..... the FireFly engine is unrealistic compared to Carrara 2.1....P5 has a weird thing it does when it renders.....the textures get a shade that isnt in the texture map....it ends up looking a bit plastic.....Carrara reveals the true colors of your texture maps....no weird color blending.....Carrara's "Material room" is a nightmare dough....um still trying to get used to it....for instance, in P5 setting up a transparency is very very simple....just open your texture map, the drag a node to the master shader......in Carrara you have to study how to set one up!!! in P5 i was texturing as soon as i installed it!!!

I'm just a hobbyist. I also thought deeply before purchasing Poser 5. I have little spare money.... but I do have one jewel which is the best investment I've ever made.

It's neither a complete lemon, and far from ajewel. It's a way to get a figure that you can use in some other program, but trying to render with it is a disaster. Pose your figure, export to something that has a rendering engine, poser doesn't have anything but a miserable excuse. Yes, poser does have some miserable raytracing options, none of which are useable once you've used something that really works. Atmospheric media, fog effects, all are possible with poser, and the addition of several hundred dollars worth of "postwork" software. LIghting control in poser is poor, and that's giving it a lot. "IF" things in the program worked as stated, and IF the instruction manual was worth anything, IF it would not hang up the memory, it might be useable. The slowest and least capable of my dosboxes is where it now resides, I export an obj and then import that into another program where I can actually do the work that I want done. (After jumping through the normal exhorbitant number of intermediate hoops.) IT's a tool, and should be looked at as nothing more, it is not a complete kit in itself. (Art of Illusion, BTW does the most beautiful job of translating between formats that I've found yet. Good stuff, if not especially intuitive to work with.)

I've found an easy solution to the P5 render lock-up problem. I bought Vue d'Esprit 4.2. It worked for me. No more render lock-ups.

For the raytracing, displacement, material room, cloth room, directory structure, multiple runtimes, built in ProPack features... For the price and features, I can live with the slightly slower render speeds. Besides, since SR3, I can't recall too many issues.

Love the new box cover

Is that Ernest Borgnine? What a clown! :)

Ernest Borgnine for some years walked the annual circus parade in Milwaukee as a clown. Colors in the pic are hashed enough, can't really tell, but think that's the clothes he used to wear. Always welcome, sadly missed.

"Is it a lemon or a jewel, it's kind of like a grapefruit"LMAO,That Made me LAUGH SO HARD!!!Thanks Dirk5027..lol..Posted by eirian.."The face room is useless and content parasite is worse than useless"lol,sad but true.They still don't work as advertised.Then from Bobbie Boucher.."3.) CL says Poser 6 will be essentially a "fixed version" of Poser 5, with no features. So why not give it to us, rather than ask us to pay once again?"...Are you SERIOUS Bobbie?Not for nothing,but I paid FULL price when it was released and franky if there is a Poser6 if it is not free to me then No way in Hell am I buying it.I learned from Poser 5.But with all that said,I still have Faith in CL.They HOPEFULLY will do the right thing.I really believe they are a company full of hard working men and women.It is just that they really need to TEST things BEFORE they roll out a new Version of Poser,and then expect us to accept the mess that it was when it was first released,and franky,still is,in many respects.If there is a Poser 6 I think they would be wise to see whom purchased Poser5(I bought it DIRECTLY from them on blind faith)and GIVE them Poser 6.Hopeully a WORKING version.