Hi folks, I'm new to this and need help. Should I get Poser 4 (Poser Artist) or Poser 5 ? I would be using it with Bryce. and can you use poser 4 files in Poser 5? Thank you for any help.

Welcome aboard TR! I use Poser4/ProPack and am quite happy with it. Before I even plan to get Poser 5, I'll need a newer computer and more positive feedback from present P5 users. Apparently, Poser 5 is rather unstable and gets moreso with each service update. Keep in mind that I've been viewing this forum since last September and most of the Poser 5 posts that I've seen tend to be "why won't this work?" rather than "how do I do this?". Some folks might disagree with me but, just browse through some of the 500+ previous posts and you'll see what I mean. It's kinda sad really, because Poser 5 sounds like a really cool app compared to P4. I guess your choice mainly depends on your current machine. If you have a Pentium 3 or 4, then maybe Poser 5 is worth trying out. Either way, try to have at least 512mb of RAM before using any version of Poser. As for file transfering, I'm not quite sure ... sorry on that one. Either way, good luck and have fun! CyberscapE

Most poser 4 files work in poser 5.

Thank You for your time and help. TR

...also, if i recall, you wont be able to use the dynamic cloth and hair (p5) with ease in bryce, and animations are rather difficult to bring over as well (p4 and p5), so if you have no plans to use "don" of "judy", i would save some costs by going with p4, that way you can buy other things for poser. Regards, E.

looks like I'll be the one to disagree with you cyber ;) Poser5 has been rock solid stable for me since SR1 & I haven't opened poser4 to do any renders since I got poser5, maybe it's the 1Gb of ram & WinXP that helps I don't know but I'm happy with poser5 :)

Can't see any reason why I would ever want to use P4 again. P4's material system and renderer are from the stone ages when compared to P5, multiple runtimes are a bliss and stability isn't an issue since SR3. Once you got the hang of dynamic clothing, you don't want to go back to conforming poke-through-morph-me shells either.

I back C1rcle and Stewer. Once bitten by the material room and dynamic clothing... I opened P4 the other day (brushinfg the virtual cobwebs from it. It annoyed me - a lot. So clunky and archaic. Perhaps I'm just used to P5 now -and it is a long learning process- but I would never go back to p4 PaulC

IMO, Poser Artist (Poser4 or P4) is much more user friendly, especially for new users. And easier to learn. In my experience, P5 is much less stable and much more buggy than P4. Also, P5 is much slower than P4 (even slower yet with SR4). P5 can't handle as many characters in one scene as P4 can. P5 has more features than P4 but, again my opinion and experience, they are hard to learn to use. They also make P5 even slower and clunkier than it already is. Use of these special features mostly requires using the Firefly renderer which is WAY slower than P4's renderer. Sometimes it just quits altogether. The makers of Poser have already stated that Poser 6 will focus more on "stability and useablity" than new features. In other words, they are going to make P5 work properly. Besides, IMO, Poser 4 is just plain more fun than Poser 5.

You Have P5 Do you Jackson, put all the service releases in and so on? The reason why P4 renderer is faster is that it is only half a renderer not a proper one(most software ray tracers are slow) good for fun not for proper stuff

Somethig else to keep in mind is that importing Poser content into Bryce can be.....an adventure. Bryce simply is incapable of importing Poser content in any format that Poser works with. You have to export the .obj after you posed it, and then you have to import each texture separately, and you will spend some time tweaking it to get the orientation, transparency, etc correct. The results can be gorgeous, but it is not an easy process. You may want to check out the download of Vue d'Esprit from E-on software. Vue will import a PZ3 file, textures and all. If you have the Mover 5 add-on, it will import the entire Poser animation (and Mover 5 supports the dynamic cloth and hair in P5).

Attached Link: Cast Iron Flamingo

If you do decide to go down the Poser to Bryce route, a great tool to use to speed up the process is Grouper from Cast Iron Flamingo (link provided) it doesn't support the dynamic stuff in poser5 though. There's also a tutorial explaining exactly what to do so you're not shooting in the dark :)

I have a real hard time going back to Poser 4 from Poser 5 - P4 seems less stable and absurdely incapable nowadays. I've found most of the extra in Poser 5 easy to learn - not harder than Poser 4, just more of it. However one must consider what you want to use it for/with. If you still intend to use it with Bryce then aside from asking "why" (important question) I'd have to say that Poser Artist (aka Poser 4 under a new name) would suit best. Part of the reason for this is that a number of the improvements in Poser 5 apply to areas that traditionally made people want to use a different program for final composition and rendering (e.g. material capabilities, renderer capabilities). Those would be lost in using Bryce, as would features that do not export well (such as dynamic hair - which is iffy anyway - and the spiffy new material abilities). If you only need Bryce to produce a landscape backdrop and/or for final rendering, you COULD consider bringing Bryce renders into Poser 5 as backgrounds, or textures on simple props, and doing your final render in Poser 5. Alternatively Vue sounds like a fairly reasonable bet...(I've not tried Vue).