When was POSER 5 first released and when is a new version expected; roughly.

Poser 5 was released about 15 months ago. Poser 6 has no anticipated release date (at the earliest, though, we are likely talking early next year, but that's based on rumor and analysis, not satements from CL)

http://www.cocs.com/poser/poser5mess.htm Came across this the yesterday, its long and as the title specifies, an editorial. It was great to have some one lay out the whole history of what happened and over what period of time Poser 5 was released and in what stages. If you want an in depth answer to your question, go there.

Note regarding that op-ed: It does contain innacuracies. It is, however, a reasonably fair look from the point of view of a dissatisfied customer trying very hard to be happy with a product they love because of what it enables them to do. Good link, deci6el, thanks for posting it.

The poser review was very interesting but my main interest is really to determine where my best investment is for the next 2 years. Unanswered are the questions of Curious Lab's viability but I assume Poser is too valuable an asset that someone won't buy it. A question raised, for me, is what is the competition for Poser, especially on the Mac? I am still unfamiliar with products available in this area.

Hehe, good one, Geep! Actually, that might really be an improvement ;)

LOL@Geep!!! You know, that is a good idea, Geep! There are almost no standalone products that compete with Poser, rocks, on any platform. All of them -- and there are several -- function primarily as plug-ins for high end modelling packages such as Maya and Mirai, Lightwave or 3dsMax. DAZ|Studio is in development, and is the closest thing Poser has to a competitor at this time in it's own space. The Viability of Poser as a program is entirely dependent on the people buying it. The bulk of the posts at rosity will tend to seem rather detracting from it, but that's because people who are happy about things very, very rarely actually say anything, while those that are unhappy or need help will tend to ask or vent off frustration. Curious Labs is still a young company that is very small -- as noted elsewhere, smaller than DAZ is. They now have the backing of a fairly strong enterprise from Japan that's weathered some incredibly tough times ovr there and kept growing, and there is a great deal of potential. My take is that for the next two years there will still be a CL, and that Poser is not going to vanish anytime soon. In fact, I think it will only grow stronger as Daz | Studio is released. I am very confident that there will be both a D|S 2 and a Poser 7 to really surprise a lot of people, as I truly expect Poser 6 and D|S 1 to be grounds for solidifying what is presently available and for setting up what will be a pretty wicked battle for market share. :)

Meanwhile, back in the "IMVHO" Dept. ... Poser5 is an excellent program but is slightly ahead of it's time. When the speed and capacity of the hardware "catches up" to the (Poser5) software, we're really gonna have some fun !!! cheers, dr geep ;=]

Yes, I agree...we're all going to have to upgrade so we can run software that was written in 1998 or '99 ;)

Dear M. Rocks, Re: seeing what to commit to for the next two years First a question: Do you primarily want it to animate or do you mostly want to do still images? I've been using Poser since P2 and I'm up to P4 Pro at this point. I find Lightwave much easier to animate in, although the learning curve is a little more steep than Poser. Despite my best efforts and lots of help from people here at Renderosity I have never successfully gotten the Poser plug in to work with Lightwave. The result, Poser is still part of my production pipeline. Do you need to get crowds of people on screen at once? Do you have a high end, lots of RAM lots of CPU power machine? Poser is a bit of a hassle when it comes do dealing with a lot of characters. I have work arounds but it would be nice to deal with several characters at the speed at which lightwave does. This is very much a subjective opinion that can not include several pkgs as I have never used any others, except for Wavefront and Softimage but they don't really count here. PS, I don't mean to rustle feathers of any die hard Poser fans in their own forum. I'm clearly still loyal to the pkg but the whole Poser 5 drama has made me take a wait and see attitude before I continue. I hope some of that rambling helped.

But Dr Geep!!!

I thought the interface for Poser 6 was going to look like this.

I am so dissapointed. Your interface looks like I still have learn something. Oh well, I am sure there will be tutorials.

geep:
That interface looks like a 3-d version of the old Poser interface, which you can see by typing "po2" (without the quotes).

And, as everyone knows, here's what we'll actually see in Poser Sux, I mean, Poser Six:

• It will require a screen resolution of 1280x1024 and a 21" LCD monitor to properly see all the floating palletes and widgets and tiny text.
• Keyboard shortcuts will be removed completely because CL still couldn't figure out how to send the keystrokes from the floating pallete to the main Poser applicaton.
• The OK and Cancel buttons will be moved to the top of some dialog boxes, but left on the bottom of others. In some boxes, "OK" will be renamed "Oky". CL will claim that they can't control the button placement or labels due to the use of their cross-platform development tool. (Why they don't use a native Windows development tool is still beyond me.)
• In an attempt to get as a large a market as possible, CL will claim that Poser 6 will work on Windows 98. Those users will install it, find out that Win98 has crappy memory management that causes P6 to crash, then they'll complain that P6 is bad. Yes, even next year, in 2005, people will still be using Windows 98: The Patch for Windows 95.
• Jean (the P6 male), Beverly (the P6 female), William (the P6 male child), and Deanna (the P6 female child) will be made by outside vendors again... and still be called "Figure 1" when you load them from the library. They will include full-body morphs again, but it probably won't work correctly until SR2.
• Clothing will be given even more weird names: Dress Shert, Dress Pents, Runing Shoos, Le Chapeau, Dos Manos, Bikini 10 (but no bikini 1-9), and so on. CL will claim this is because they outsourced everything and didn't have time to standardize the names.
• Other neat-o typos will show up in the manual: "To change the material on an object, click the tab at the top called "Face Room"." Or, "When rendering in FireFly mode, you will get the best results when in Draft mode. Using Draft mode will give you quicker renders when compared to Production mode, which is better quality, but slower." Or, "For more information, please see page 675." (the manual only has 653 pages).
• Poser 6, Service Pack 1 will be released the following month, which corrects the 450+ known bugs that were "acceptable to leave in" when P6 was released. The next day, SR1.1 will be released... to fix all the breaks that SR1 caused. The day after that, SR1.2 will be released to reset the interface that was mistakenly set to a programmer's screen of 3240x2560. The following week, SR2 will be released to fix the 85+ bugs found in the original Poser and found in SR1. The week after that, SR3 will be released, which includes a few new features like gloablly-illuminated-volumetric-smoke. But, some bugs from SR1 are still not fixed.

Okay, okay, this is only speculation, and not an actual fact, but it's based on the events of P5.

ROTFLMAO @ JohnRender !

Good one(s) John.

You know, they say that for humor to be funny, it must be rooted in the truth. That is why I found your post extremely amusing.

Poser6? ........... Only time will tell, eh?

I hope CL doesn't read this ... no, wait a minute ...

I hope they do read this thread.
Maybe, just maybe ...

Hope springs eternal in the Sity ... or something like that.

Your comment about ...
"(Why they don't use a native Windows development tool is still beyond me.)"

Yup, me too!

Maybe it's the good ol' NIH factor rearing it's ugly head once again.

It is pretty obvious (from the different type of windows used, i.e., "Hierarchy Editor, Joint Editor, Sketch Designer, etc.), to even the most casual observer, that there were many different hands stirring the pot.

Having said all that, I still think that "Poser" is, with all of it's faults, the most amazing program ever devised.

I know of no other software which has kept me fascinated for almost a decade, and continues to do so!

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

I know a software that has kept me fascinated for more than a decade, and continues to do so. Photoshop. :)