Hi, I'm Nikita, a California girl. I have never ran a Poser program in my life, so in some ways I'm not spoiled. I don't know what's difficult or what's easy. I wouldn't know one operational set-up from another. So, theoretically, I can learn just about anything without being hindered by the set-ups, environs and habits of a previous program. So...since Poser Artist (Poser 4 under a new name)with the Pro-Pack and the Poser 5 program are about a +200 hundred dollar commitment apiece, I have to make up my mind. I have a mid-range computer: P.4, 1.8 ghz, 256 meg RAM, 32 meg video card, 60 gig hard drive. Is it strong enough for Poser 5, or am I going to crash? By unanswered e-mails, Curious Labs obvioiusly isn't going to tell me. What were your initial experiences with Poser 5? Are the renders in P5 superior to P4, enough so that you were impressed and wanted to run naked through the streets telling all who would listen? Is Poser 5 really that hard to use or is it only because you're used to Poser 4 and Poser 5 confuses you because of it? (be honest here) O.K., I can let you take a breath now and we can start here. Thank you to all who respond. You guys are angels. Ciao, Nikita

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com

personally, I prefer Poser 5. Greater feature set, better library controls, improved resource handling. ProPack is my second choice -- again, the feature set. I also believe that despite what you will doubtless hear, that P5 is less buggy than P4. ProPack is sorta in the middle there, but as you are growing in poser, you'll want to learn some of the tricks to creating things, and ProPack is a better choice for that in my estimation. Regardless of the version you opt for, 256MB of RAM is too little. You did not mention the operating system you are using, which can make a difference as well (poser again runs better on windows 2000 or later for wintel systems). You will want to increase your RAM, as Poser does not, at this time, take advantage of your video card. RAM, in your case, is all important (and evenutally you'll want a second hard drive, too, lol). Once you get it, though, come on over to RDNA, too -- we gots lots of neato stuff...

Agree totally with Ynsaen! I started with Poser 4 and quickly moved to Poser 5. Poser 5 definitely outshines Poser 4 from my limited experience. I had only 256 meg of Ram when I started on Poser 4 and renders did take considerably longer. Now, I have a Gig of Ram and Poser 5 rocks out renders that used to take 5 minutes in about 60-90 seconds. RDNA also has a forum specific to Poser 5 if decide to go with Poser 5 and everyone over there is as friendly and helpful as here. Most of us bounce back and forth as well as to everyone else's sites. Welcome to the community and have fun!

I'd say go for Poser 5 as well. Since you haven't tried Poser 4 you have no expectations of how what should be like, so you might as well get all the goodies at once :o) As it has been said, 256 Mb Ram is in the low end. You can run Poser 5 on it, I've done so for a long time, untill I upgraded to a new computer this week. So now it's REALLY fun, but it's in no way unusable with 256 Mb Ram. Just be prepared to wait a while during renders, that's all. Also you should preferably be running Win2K or WinXP instead of Win98 / WinME due to the better memory-management. The graphics card doesn't matter in regards to Poser, it doesn't use ANY sort of graphic accelleration. For a lot of FREE Poser goodies, visit my site:TrekkieGrrrl.dk

Attached Link: http://www.trekkiegrrrl.dk/

heh. I'll say it in BIG letters: For a lot of Really cool, actually USEFUL cool freestuff (and some not so free stuff that's even better), visit the link above...

Poser 5 has a much steeper learning curve than Poser 4. If you're a quick study, or already experienced with 3D software I'd say go straight for Poser 5. It has its faults, but so does P4, and you can do so much more in Poser 5. On the other hand, if you're someone who struggles to learn a new piece of software (as I am), start with Poser 4. It's easy to learn, there's oddles of free stuff available for the Poser 4 figures, and you'll be able to concentrate on being creative rather than struggling to learn the technical stuff. Then upgrade to Poser 5 or Pro Pack when you're a confident P4 user. You'll be in a better position to make an informed choice between them by then (and depending on how long you wait, Poser 6 may be another option to consider, too.) BTW, I have 256 RAM on my PC and Poser 5 runs happily. I do occasionally get crashes, but no more frequently than others report, and none since I installed SR4.

Most of the poser 4 free stuff works with poser 5 too.

All right, you guys, way cool! I love this place. In answer to your query - I do have Home XP. So what you are saying is 1.8 ghz is fast enought and I should upgrade to a gig of RAM if I want to kick it on Poser 5? This has been a real eye-opener because I went into a chat the first week I joined and I asked the question Poser 4 or Poser 5?, and everyone said Poser 4. I went to Amazon.com which sells everything under the sun and read their customer critiques on Poser 5, and I don't think I read a single favourable review which was really dis-heartening, because I really wanted to get it. Even knowing absolutely nothing about Poser, it just sounded so cool, especially about the part where I could scan a friend's photo and create a model with their face; now that's worth the price of ticket alone. So I started to read more about it and I got this feeling that if you had a computer with less than 256 of RAM you were going to crash; anything less than a Pentium 4 or 2.0 ghz clock and you were going to be waiting an eternity for your renders to matierialize. You guys are the first positive remarks on Poser 5. Keep it coming. Additional question: I read that people complained that they had to go back and forth to too many scroll down windows, supposedly (I'm para-phrasing here) leaving them in the dark as to how the render was turning out until the final product was complete. Did that make sense? I got this feeling that one couldn't see everything they were doing until it was too late. Anyway, more, more, more responses! You guys are so cool to do this for me. Ciao, Nikita xoxo

Well, I jumped from Poser 3 to Poser 5, and I'd agree 100% about more RAM. But, with Poser 4 re-released as Poser Studio, and the sheer volume of extras that are P4 compatible, either option is good. But with P5 I've struggled to figure out how to do stuff. Most of the tutorials are aimed at P4, and there have been a lot of user-interface changes. P5 seems to be aimed at the more experienced user.

I just want to say.. If you're longing for Poser 5 in order to recreate their faces you MAY be in for a dissapointment. Yes, Poser 5 has the Face Room. Yes it works. To a degree. There are some facial features you can't make, imo there are too few control points (morphs) on Don/Judy's (the Poser 5 people that comes with the program) faces to REALLY make it look like "someone". But I think it depends on how you look from the start L And the face room is really great for creating various characters, so that multiple people placed in a scene won't look like they're all identical twins :o) Yes, a gig of Ram will make Poser 5 more fun. The more the merrier. Poser 5 in it's initial version (before the latest 2 Service Packs) was more or less useless, it may be that version that people have based their Amazon reviews on. Again, I'll say Go for 5. Untill a month or two ago I was an AVID Poser Pro Pack fanatic, but since SP4 I have been reformed GG Search this Forum For Geep's Primers (search for Primer) - he's currently reposting old ones and adding new, Poser 5 based tutorials :o) Also consider buying the video Poser 5 Demystified by 3-Axis. It is money well spent on how to do a LOT of things in Poser 5. Almost all content labeled Poser 4 and 3 will function perfectly in Poser 5, only VERY few exceptions, and those often have a workaround.

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Ynsaen, thanks for the nice words blush

I'd say go for P5, as well. While there -is- a lot more to the program, and thus a steeper learning curve than with P4, it isn't all shoved in your face at once. The Pose window of P5 is practically identical to the main window of P4; the only functional difference you can see there is in the libraries window on the right side. P5 has =much= better library management than P4 does (easier to read text, for one thing), and the ability to link P5 to multiple runtimes outside of the Poser program. Not something that seems -needed- at first, but after a few months of scarfing freebies from the web, and finding -all- the sites that have pretty toys for sale at incredible prices, you'll find that ability to be a godsend (at the moment, I have a 22 gig external runtime...and mine is not the biggest, by a long shot.... :P ). Things change once you move off of that front panel, though. The material room, once you wrap your mind around the GUI interface, is easy to use...at least as far as texture and bump maps go. P5, due to the rocky start it had, is only now really getting the attention of the community's tinkerers and tweakers. The material room uses shaders to create and extremely broad set of effects, and right now we are in the stage of figuring out just what can be done with what nodes. Both the hair room and the cloth room can be monsters; each of them is actually a plugin from the high end market (I can't remember what the hair room is off the top of my head, but the cloth room is actually Stitch, most used for dynamic cloth in 3D Studio Max) adapted for Poser. But you don't have to go into them until you are ready, and the purchaseable prducts that use them also include the setup files, so you essentially just have to tell the program to 'calculate dynamics'. The setup room is the same as you get with Pro Pack. Content Paradise....isn't worth messing with, and so should be ignored (there are ways to remove it, as well, if you are comfortable hacking into .ini and .xml files. Not for a beginner, though). Another thing to consider is that Curious Labs has announced that they are working on P6, with something like a year's development schedule. If CL keeps it's past practices, then there will be a decent discount for and upgrade from the last Poser to the new one.

What exactly are you thinking of doing? Digital cartoons? Animations? Character illustrations? Scenery images or portrays? ... My personal interests are such that PPP is enough for me. You see, "better" for me may be "worse" for some1 else because they have different goals than me. I do not do animations - heavily postworked illustrations are my field - you may regard that us nonsense and want to your own Poser-video. So maybe you could enlighten us of what you are planning on using Poser for.

GUI = Graphical User Interface

Getting an on-the-fly RAM defragger is probably more important than going up to a GIG of RAM. Poser 5 can just as easily suck up a gig as a half gig. Go with P5.

does anyone else use freeramxp pro? ive seen my ram go down to 2 rendering a heavy p5 scene... and thats with two sticks of 512.

I'd be willing to bet many people never use the extra rooms in Poser 5: Cloth room, Face Room, Hair Room, Setup Room & Content Paradise, etc. I am still learning to use the Material Room to easily setup textures. I most often prefer to use the MAT Pose files that come with most everything these days. In my estimation, the best features of Poser 5 are: 1.) The ability to use sub-folders to organize your stuff, and avoid the 256 folder limit encountered with Poser 4. 2.) JPG bump maps as opposed to Poser 4 BUM bump maps. You don't need to convert your bump maps, and you save hard drive space. 3.) PNG thumbnails as opposed to Poser 4's rsr thumbnails. You can easily create your own customized thumbnails. The problems I do experience: 1.) Poser 5 is SLOW on my Celeron 533 Mhz with 512MB RAM. I'm working on a computer upgrade. 2.) There is not much room for your document considering the HUGE size of the paramater dial pallette. 3.) Curious Labs has still not released many items they'd promised from the beginning. 4.) The Content CD was useless since some items were missing, and I never could figure out how it was supposed to work. That's about all I can think of now.

Welcome Nikita. If you increase your RAM, P5 will run better. But, in my experience, it will always run worse than P4/ProPack. P4 is much smoother, faster, easier and more fun to use. Also easier to learn. IMO, the P5 renderer is not noticeably better than the P4 renderer unless you use the advanced materials of P5, which are pretty hard to get a grip on even for an experienced Poser user. Plus, those features slow the renderer to a crawl...if it works at all. Trust me, it's a huge drag to sit around waiting to see what every single change you make will look like. There is no "area render" in either version...you have to render the whole scene. A lot of people say their P5 problems were fixed with the latest Service Release (SR4). That's not been my experience. I've found one bug fixed in that release but loading and render times have increased for me. I still stick to what I've advised others before: even if everything worked fine in P5, there's no way a beginner needs (or will even use) the add-ons it comes with. Without those add-ons, P5 is P4 with ProPack. Go with P4 and by the time you get proficient with it, Poser Six may be out. By CL's own words, P6 will focus on stability and workflow. I don't think they'd have said that unless they knew P5 has stability and workflow problems. But, if you have your heart set on P5, go with it (just make sure you up your RAM). It will be slow and clunky compared to P4 but since you've never used P4, you won't know what smoothness, speed and fun you're missing.

I'd go for P5. If you don't have the preconceived notions of how materials work in P4, P5's material shaders will just be a learning experience, and P5 is soooo far and away better than P4 in this regard. On top of that, P5 includes real dynamics for hair and cloth, when you want to get into that. Your machine is fast enough that P5 should run fine (I run it on a 1.7GHz Pentium 4), but I would recommend at least 512MB of RAM (more if you can). Additionally, though the new renderer won't win any speed competitions (except maybe going up against Bryce :) it is a pretty decent render engine. Many people have said that they don't see an improvement over P4's render engine. That may be true when rendering things that are just using straight bitmap textures (such as many products designed to also work with P4), but the new render engine really shines when combined with procedural shaders from the material room. I think perhaps because procedural shaders are new to the Poser world, even a year and a half after the P5 release, many people are only now starting to make much use of them. Anyways, I'd definitely recommend P5 over P4 if you are at all serious about 3D in general. For example, even if there is a bit of a learning curve to the material room at first, P5 has one of the friendliest shader network editors, and concepts learned here will transfer into other 3D apps. My $0.02 :) -Jeremy

..."Are the renders in P5 superior to P4, enough so that you were impressed and wanted to run naked through the streets telling all who would listen?".... For me no not really..... I just like to run naked thru the streets! SWAMP

Some previous threads re 4 vs 5: www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1692382 www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1643151 www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1141326

--"a gig of RAM if I want to kick it on Poser 5?" Not needed. 512 MB is fine for all but the most intense uses of Poser 5.

Attached Link: RuntimeDNA Poser 5 Forum

shameless self promotion, as well: If you do have P5, and you happen to like it but want help using it, there are Poser 5 specific forums at a couple of other sites. The material Room, in detail, is going to be covered throughout the month of April in the one at the link above. The other one is PoserPros: www.poserpros.com membership is free to both (though natch I hang at rdna, lol)

Oo-la-la!!! Gosh, I can't believe this! This is like a dream - all of you giving me all this earnest information. You guys are the best. Shoshana was the one who suggested I post on the forum. I've never done something like this before; I'm shy even on the web. Go figure. My sister will be so proud of me: YOU POSTED ON THE WEB?! YOU!? Yeah, she's the computer geek, I'm just a geek. But now I'm going to be a Poser Geek. Ha! So, someone asked, what did I want to do with Poser? Good question. Basically everything it can do. It's a kick-off point into CG, which is something I have always wanted to get into. I want to try everything and then find niche, let things marinate, you know. CG classes in school are hard to sign up for, because upper-classmen and computer majors get first crack at the limited classroom space, so the classes are always booked, leaving simple geeks like me in the cold. If I'm going to want to learn, I'm going to have to teach myself. With you guys, of course. Best teachers in the world, I think. Coolest classroom, too - I can cut and go to the beach whenever I want. Ha! Can you really do literal animation with Poser? This is new to me! Now I'm really over the top interested. Can I make my own movie short in Poser 5? I'm still on the edge of that fence, just teetering, trying to absorb all you have sweetly taken the time to share with me. I've read and reread what you have told me of your experiences, and trust me no piece of info was too small. I am really moved. I did notice that there was a Poser 5 tutorial with a CD and a video on sale for sixty dollars or so. Has anyone bought it; did it help? Yeah, I've got like fifty million more questions. Kid sister forever, you know. ciao, Nikita xoxo

One thing you might want to look at when thinking of upgrading your memory. Consult your computet or motherboard manual to see how many slots you have for memory. Then see how much memory your motherboard can handle. For instance, let's say your computer has two memory slots, and can handle a max of 2GB of memory. You could buy two 1GB memory modules to max out the memory. Or you could buy 512MB at a time, and go to a total of 1GB, over the long haul. If you already have a 256MB module in the motherboard, things get complicated. If you only have two slots, you'd need to dump the 256MB and get two 512Mb modules. That sounds pretty tricky, unless you happen to have two computers, and like to swap stuff.

"It's a kick-off point into CG, which is something I have always wanted to get into." Well, I personally think that poser it a great kick off place. I'm a lousy artist, but workin on it, lol. But I've been in computers and multimedia for 18 years now, primarily from a hardware and training end. There are much better 3D Programs out there, from a strictly technical viewpoint, than poser, but none of them has the sort of community and depth that Poser does (although Lightwave is starting to really come up). And they also have a much, much steeper learning curve. Much steeper. With P5, the slope to them is a little less, as you have before you, in one program, all the things they do as separate modules (sometimes costing as much as poser does, but usually more) with the single exception of actually modelling (although I've used poser to model plenty of times, and still do. More my speed, lol). "Can you really do literal animation with Poser? This is new to me! Now I'm really over the top interested. Can I make my own movie short in Poser 5? " yes, you can. I routinely make 20 to 30 minute videos with it. Part of the reason I opted to use Poser for this is that it allows me rapidity, provides me with a way to store characters that I usually have to use several times, speeds up time to production (I don't have to model, bone, and joint the figures, which you do in higher end packages), and allows me tremendous flexibility in animating. The one thing I really do want for it is a point light. With that addition alone, I'd be in heaven. lol Caveats, though: animating is hard. It takes a lot of time, and what you can never do is just start setting up the whole movie at once and try rendering it. Poser is the tool you use to create "shots" -- individual camera shots. You'll do a bazillion renders. but by doing it that way, you save time -- because you are not trying to do things your tool isn't designed for. (truth be told, if you want to do long involved shots, invest in a high end package and kiss a couple years of your life away to learn it lol) That means planning out your stuff ahead of time. Just like in a real film, you have to assemble your casts, your sets, your storyboard (critical), and your effects team. That takes time. But Poser lets you do it fast once the basics are in place and you know what you are doing.

nikita_s_cold; I'm with ynsaen on this; Poser is actually an excellent animation tool (always add the caveat 'in its price range' to any positive statement about Poser. :P ). And if you -are- interested in animation, definitely get P5. You will have a lot of uses for the dynamic cloth abilities. And once you get comfortable with Poser, you need to check out Vue d'Esprit. This is a terrain generator program, like unto Bryce is (save that Vue is still in active development, whereas Bryce is dying due to lack of interest from its current owner). Vue, though, works very well with Poser; it can import a PZ3 file natively (this is the extension on a Poser saved file; the other one you will see is .pzz, which is a compressed version of same. P5 gives you the option of using either). And to get an idea of just what Poser and Vue can do together, sneak on over to www.belino.net, the home of Phoul. Be sure to have Quicktime 6 installed, and have a lobster bib and pan to catch your eyes when they fall out. There are demo versions of Vue available for download, to check things out with. Vue also has an add-on called Mover 4, which is what allows you to import Poser animations into Vue animations; and Mover 5 is in beta right now, which supports the dynamic cloth and hair in P5 (just about the only other program to do so, at the moment). One thing about the 'long involved shots' that ynsaen mentioned. You -can- get away with them in CG, as your actors never have to go potty, but if you study scene breaks in movies, TV, anime, etc, you'll see that most scenes are quite short, with lots of cuts. Those long, sweeping panorama type shots that last a minute or more are extremely rare, as getting them right are a royal pain in the butt. But you can composite lots of little shots in a video editing program, and they are available from the cheap up to the current cadillac (Adobe Premiere). You will find there are several animators running around loose here who will be more than happy to torur--er, give any help they can. And as ernyoka1 said, hunt out Dr. Geep's tutorials. He not only explains the esoterica, he does in a way that both beginners and experienced folk can comprehend and enjoy. (Actually, you will find that the manual that comes with Poser doesn't really answer a lot of the questions you will find yourself asking; one of the big reasons this community popped up). Oh, and just to add to the torture, over at www.DAZ.com (which is the modelling company (Zygote) that provided the P4 figures, and became a spin-off business unto itself selling Poser content), there is a program called Mimic2. This takes a sound file, analyzes it to identify the phonemes of the speech, and controls the facial morphs to 'lip-sync' the chosen character's mouth with the speech track. So there is a way to have characters doing dialog as well.... >:)=

Aw, heck. Here's a still I did a year or so ago, that uses both Poser and Vue. The fauns are the DAZ Micheal 2, Victoria 2, and Millenium kid models, and the fairy is Vickie 1. The faun legs and horns are from the 'Monster Parts' kit that one of the Guru's of Poser, a nice fellow called Traveler, who hangs his hat over at RuntimeDNA now, created. The faery wings are in the Rosity marketplace (do a search for 'flutterby'). The pipes the male is playing are freebies from one of the better sites, I just can't remember which one off the top of my head. All the rest is created in Vue. You did say that you were interested in fantasy in you IM, did you not...? ;D

I just wanted to say, to all who came to my aid and contributed priceless information, I thank your from the bottom of my heart. As far as I know, I thanked everyone personally, but if by chance I missed someone, I apologize and I thank you here for your generousity and your kindness to a neophyte. I think I'm going to go with Poser 5. It's pretty much unanimous with the Poser pros. I thank you for helping me. Be seein' you on the boards. ciao, Nikita.