Hi, Since the thread on the survey is becoming an older post, I wanted to copy the last communication from CL. There were a couple of topics that concerned dates SR4 release plug in that I wanted to respond to. But also, 2 very good posts made by Numanoid listed below would be valuable threads for CL to gain more details from if you care to post: 163. Survey add-on: Poser 6 associated programs (14 replies) by numanoid on 2/5/04 19:38 164. Survey Add-on: Wish list for Python for Poser 6 (7 replies) by numanoid on 2/5/04 19:37 Survey Post: Thank you all very much for the feedback. There are some very good points throughout - both could be seen as good and bad - and well taken from within CL. Just a point or two. The date of release expectation as it relates to a companys communication externally. Most companies prefer not to communicate too many date expectations but rather prefer to wait until all of the development and business pieces are properly put together. Working within forums however, more details are desired. I believe in this thread earlier, the mention that there are many mainstream companies such as Adobe who refrain from posting and interacting within forums. Mostly because it is conversational with very visible and often conflicting expectations from the various forum or product users. The date expectation of SR4 release for example. I think any company would prefer not to announce an expected date, but rather to just say we're working on it. But as many of you feel and/or have read from other posts, it can be unacceptable to not have a bench mark of expected date from a company that interacts within a forum. CL has tried to post dates only when it can be trusted to be accurate by at lease 90%. With in software development, not to state this too simplistic, but programming and testing and fixing bugs can be a bit like a puzzle. You know the focus, you see the end picture you need to put together and you know how a puzzle works, but can not always be certain of how long it will take to complete. With SR4, we first through Jan/Feb04 was that 90% benchmark, but quickly after re-announced a winter expectation due to the additional time needed during this verification/test period. With the plug in development; weve been working with 3rd party companies to help develop the plug in products whether it be working with e-on or Eovia while they develop plug in support, or through Reiss Studio who has been handling the 3rd party plug in for Maya, 3D Studio Max, upcoming Cinema 4D or Lightwave. With this, its impossible for CL to set a date of expectation because the development is not happening solely in house as it is with Poser. Many have commented on Lightwave. All I can say is that this is due out this year. Its work in progress. There will be times with dates that no matter what we try to offer in communication, that it will cause a certain % of people frustration. I wish that wasnt the case, but hopefully if CL can stick to offering only whats 90% certain, and notify when and if there are any delays, our hope is that most will understand. Thank you again for all of the valuable feedback both in this thread and the other 2 threads started by Numanoid for associated program use and phython use. With appreciation, Katherine

Not to cast a negative shadow, but wasn't Lightwave support promised by year end last year as well? It's great that you are giving us more details, and updates, after a very long dry period, but it is also very disheartening to hear that a feature that was supported by the old version, (what almost 3 years ago now?) STILL has not been implimented. And I have a feeling at this point, since it looks like it will be a 3rd party plugin now, that it will be almost half the cost again of poser.. very unacceptable. Nothing will change the way you are implimenting new updates or plugins, but at least there is SOME developement going on. Thanks for the update.

Thanks for the update on the update.

I'm looking forward to downloading the update. Whenever the update is ready.

I'll be checking back in for future updates. As they become updated, of course.

Seriously.....thanks.

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Thank You

As a programmer, I understand this perfectly. The rule is, "Programming always takes twice as long as expected, even after you've compensated for this rule."

I have a different programming rule: If something can go wrong, it will. If something can't go wrong, it will.

Thanks for the update and clarifications. beat your 3rd party programmers. I can't say any better what Gareee already stated, and what I have stated in the survey thread. I will add this though. If a forth coming Lightwave plugin from Reiss Studio costs more than Poser 4 errr Poser Artist, and propack then I will not be buy it or Poser 6 and I will take the step backward and buy Poser artist and Propack from someone other than CuriousLabs, be it ebay or something. you have competition from Greenbriar Studio with their set of Lightwave tools. I await to see what happens in the following months as I have little choice to do otherwise.

Katherine - thank you for explaining any delay in SR4. I think we'd all rather have it and Poser6 be well alpha'd and beta'd before it is released to the hungry hoards. Also look forward to e-frontier's contribution.

Your survey page refuses to accept or acknowledge results posted ... very frustrating

Hi Catherine, sorry to butt in but whilst I've got you here, can I just ask a question please? I bought poser 5 fairly recently like maybe a few months ago, and I looked on the CL website to see if I need any of the updates you already have, but you don't seem to state anywhere which ones are for mac and which are windows only. I don't even know if this SR4 thingy is going to be for mac? Could you please ask that CL makes it's site a little clearer on these points? Love esther

Esther, afaik the MAC version has all the updates already included. You should not need to download any of the service releases.

The good thing is that Poser seems to be alive. We all know what happened to Bryce and I do not want to see this with Poser again. The combination of Poser5 and Vue4 works very well for me. Still I would like to see some Poser material features in Vue. Dynamic hair and dynamic clothes seem to be supported now with Mover5. What I really would like to know is the strategy of Curious Labs and their new owners. SR4 is a must. Will P6 be a supplementary product to other programs like Vue, C4D, Lightwave and so on, or try to have all features themselves? Will it be open with the ability to put in 3rd party plugins? Just curious - Walter

Walter, Since you use Vue, you have simply got to see the latest incarnation of Mover. It fully supports the dynamics -- hair and cloth -- of Poser 5, and it's new -- brand new. There's a thread lyne posted about it here -- just totally killer stuff. (Oh, and hey, did I mention that RDNA has a killer P5 forum? yeah! www.runtimedna.com! -- ok, ok, I'll stop, lol)

I just started using Poser 5 sr3 and after hearing all the griping and complaining here I must say, it's actually not all that bad. As a matter of fact, plain Firefly renders look lotz better than my best P4 shtuff ever did with lots of work. My main concern with Poser 5 service paks and Poser 6 is memory management. I'm sorry but Poser 5 sr3 is still an absolutely lousy memory manager. Being able to make subfolders inside of the runtime folder and have infinite files = exquisite!! All the material room options = fantastic!! Raytrace rendering capability with other rendering options = a great step forward from previous releases. Having to constantly play the control-alt-delete song = SUCKS rawcore!! Memory management kills all other spectacular features of Poser 5. Please please please support better memory management. I love the user friendly interface and all the other features but it's like a tank being powered by a gerbil running on a wheel. I"m really looking forward to Poser 6!!! Lotza luv, finski

Thanks ynsaen, I've been there and the P5 community there is fantastic. Poser 5 seems to be quite useable since SR3 and I like the way Vue goes with Mover 5, though I do mainly stills and no animation. Just got Xfrog yesterday and so I will be able to do outdoor pictures with Poser 5 alone, but also in Vue the additional plants will come in handy. I saw the thread by Lyne. Just wait a bit to get the first feedback from Mover5 users. It's not always a good idea to buy an initial release ;-).

Ahh, but if you already have Mover 4, then Mover 5 is and will be a free upgrade. Can't comment on the stability of the beta, as I'm currently up to my non existant hairline in building and testing configs on a new box, but the short animation by Phoul is =impressive=. Now if someone could only work out a translator for the shader nodes... :D

This probably isn't the thread for this, but... 1) Preview render modes (like Vue/Bryce) 2) When you press cancel on a render, it actually cancels and doesn't hang the machine 3) Single frame export of dynamic cloth/hair to Vue without mover 4) Enhanced content management... The ability to mark items as commercial/non-commercial, assign key words, search engine/db; I hate having to bring up MS explorer to do a search of my content... 5) Increased speed... 6) More efficient memory management... 7) Full (and official support from CL) of DAZ CR2 Hacks (MAT Pose, Injections, etc) 8) Real light system 9) Stability, Stability, Stability

Notice no mention of fixing the hair room. Marque

okay maybe no sr4 in the near future... but weren't they suppose to give us a list corrections in sr4? P5 Cost me $500 Canadian..that's one week salary for me.. and I'm still living with stupid bugs.. Would be nice if you have some bugs corrected.. then release them.. don't wait for a nice neat package and call it sr4. how about an sr4.. this month... and maybe an sr5 next month.... get the point.. regular updates. Not this crappy one update every 8 to 9 months.? on a buggy prog...(sr3 was released in may 5 of 2003) maybe I'm a little peeved.. that I spent $500. and have been ignored for 8 months. So we get an update today from CL.. that tells us we can't give you an update.. because we don't know when sr4 will be released. A little advice... like I said before... smaller more frequent updates = happy customers. because I tell you one thing... this sr4 better solve all my problems.. because after 8 month of development.. it better be truly amazing!!

Sorry but any loyalty I might have had is gone as far as CL is concerned. I see lots of folks saying oh give them some time they'll get it right. I wonder if the bugs can even be fixed. They said P5 was to be rebuilt from the ground up, so that these new items could be implemnted and old bugs dealt with, but I haven't seen anything impressive out of them for a long time. So much evasion and so little info. I didn't spend as much as you did alamonos but I'm still ticked off. Marque

What's really interesting is that this sorta proves they are damned if they do, damned if they don't -- a lot of people have been very vocal about not even wanting to see the update until it works entirely. They won't give out a list of the fixes yet because they want to make sure they get them all fixed, since SR2 was very ugly. SR4 will be the last update for P5, just like the 4.03 update was. Whatever is left will be (hopefully) done in P6. The hair room was mentioned a couple of times in the survey, so I think they may be doing a fix for it, though that is pure speculation.

That's for sure. I said that in my survey....forget everything else, forget Poser 6, just give me a Poser 5.1 where everything actually works! The other thing is....Poser isn't that interesting by itself. It becomes el neato when you add in the third-party products, supports, add-ons, plug-ins, etc. Every time I see CL working away with no regard whatsoever for the incredibly useful and powerful "hacks" like ERC or MAT poses....I wonder if the program really has a future.

I basically stated the same thing that nomuse did in my survey. Get P5 working and fix the memory leaks before even thinking about Poser 6. I have SR3 installed, and some bugs that were "fixed" are still present. Ever hit the enter key in response to an OK/Cancel dialog box and have an animation start playing instead? It was supposed to be fixed in SR3, but it still happens. And I DO have SR3 installed.

I wonder what p6 will be like I can't think too much of what they could possibly add to the software, P5 has alot of great things I never expected,except that it loads slow because of some internet software linking to content paradise, an option to turn that off would be nice, no disrespect intended. Also speeding it would be nice too, I have a pentium 4 at 2 and a half gigaherts and poser 5 runs slow on it, it may be that I have too many files, or that I use 36 lights in my renders as well. I do have to add this on my wish list, please put the old p4 texture pop up back in as an option for us who want to work without having to guess at what node this is, and what node that is, it would be great to have that back as a quick way of texturing and for beginners. other then that I can't think of anything new to add because the product even though it can be bogged down for speed with too many files and complex renders, Is exceptional, I can't complain about it because I remember a time when having a 3d figure in a scene was almost impossible unless you purchased them. those were the old days.

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"I wonder what p6 will be like I can't think too much of what they could possibly add to the software" Mesh Magic, Why more bugs of course! ;-) Sorry couldn't resist.

What could be different in P6? I apologise for reposting the text below, but I think it got buried in its original thread. The thing that really has to be addressed in Poser 6 is ease of use; the whole ergonomics of the program need revision. Poser can be used in two different ways. We can call Type 1 use using Poser as a posing tool for figures that are then exported to a higher-powered program for scene arrangement and rendering. Type 2 use is doing everything, including the final render, in Poser. I get the feeling that Poser started off with the intent of being a Type 1 program and has gradually drifted to Type 2; emphatically so with Poser 5. The problem is that the basic model of Poser is still Type 1. All the features that you would expect of a good rendering app (like being able to lassoo a bunch of objects, duplicate them, and drag the duplicates to a new location) are missing. Thus trying to lay out a complex scene in Poser is a nightmare. There is a reason for this. Suppose you could select multiple things, and you selected Figure1/R_forearm plus a chair, and tried to bend them, what would happen? Suppose you selected Figure1/Chest and tried to duplicate it, what would happen? However, some resolution of this problem is necessary unless you want to go down the route of placing Poser emphatically as for Type 1 use only. Here is my solution: modal operation. You can work with a file in either Pose or Setup mode and switch back and forth between them. Pose mode is similar in operation to Poser now; you can only select one element at a time, and you can do all the things you do in Poser now. Flip to setup mode, and now everything behaves as it would in a normal 3D app. Figures are now static meshes; you can rotate, move and scale them, but not pose them. But you can select two figures, three props and a spotlight and drag them together round the scene. You can duplicate an entire figure (clothing, parented props and all) just with Ctrl-D. Flipping between these modes would have to be with a very easy hotkey like TAB. One of the things that convinces me that the Poser interface was designed by someone who didn't understand software design is the choice of hotkeys. Changing cameras is one of the things you need to do most frequently. Yet you have awful combinations like Ctrl-; that mean the user has to drop the mouse and pick it up again. Here is some suggested behaviour. In Setup mode: Click on an item, it is selected. Shift-click, it is added to the currently selected items. Ctrl-click, a pop-up menu appears listing the items directly under the cursor in order of increasing distance; select the one you want from this. Drag with mouse, selected item(s) are moved. Hold down X and drag, the selected item(s) are moved along the x-axis only (sim for y and z). In Pose mode: Click on a body part, it is selected (this does NOT happen at present, you get a semi-random part). Shift-click, you select Figure/Body. Ctrl-click, same behaviour as in Setup mode. Drag with mouse, selected body part is moved (as far as is possible). Hold down B and drag, body part is bent. Hold down S and drag, body part is moved side-to-side. Hold down T and drag, body part is twisted. And so on. With intelligent use of keys and mouse you can make a program that would be much more pleasant to use. I would rather have improved ergonomics than any number of new dynamic hair rooms.

Phantast, ya got me going :) lol Gonna post my comments in a separate thread, though -- I sorta ranged far afield...