I heard that Poser 5 was very buggy. Have those bugs been ironed out? Or should this newbie stick with 4?

Almost all of them, and some of us, like myself, never ran into one at all. You'll get two types of replies to this question.. people who hate poser 5, and people like me who love poser 5. Think "Ford" and Chevy" people, or "Mac" and "PC" people.. LOL!

I had a few of the minor bugs surface with Poser5 but since SR4.1 it's just fine for me, I have the PC version :)

Been using P5 for over a year and I've never had any serious problems - I have noticed a huge leap in the quality of some of my renders since SR4 was released - shadows render really well. I've found myself happy to have invested the money in it.

Thanks! Hopefully I'll be able to buy Poser sometime soon.

Works in some ways great, in some ways pretty bad. It's worth the upgrade though. The materials room and the directory control are sweet. Hair and face are pretty bad. Animation problems too. However, over half of it works well.

My sense after using both for a couple of years: If you're mainly interested in animation, or you need fast and precise control of placements and motions, use 4. If you're mainly interested in good-looking still pictures and surface effects, use 5.

I have heard that Poser 5 is affected by which operating system the user has. I have Windows 98. Which I am now very thankful for, because Windows 98 is immune to the new dangerous Sasser worm.

Poser 5 is slow with windows 98 but it is useable. I haven`t seen it running with windows xp to compare but when I had windows xp installed on my computer there was no increase in the speed of any program. One good thing about windows 98 is that no one seems to write new viruses for it anymore (though there are plenty of old ones that still effect windows 98).

" My sense after using both for a couple of years: If you're mainly interested in animation, or you need fast and precise control of placements and motions, use 4. If you're mainly interested in good-looking still pictures and surface effects, use 5." I've heard you say this a couple times now, and I'm curious what,in your opinion, makes 4 better than 5 for animation? Also why you think Curious Labs is going to move more towards still images and away from animation in the future versions?

I prefer P5 for animation, myself. The number of tricks you can accomplish with the Firefly renderer, dynamic cloth, and fully-animated materials more than makes up for the relative sluggishness of the interface (as compared to P4). And P5 has better antialiasing.

Sr4 has really killed most of the major bugs. Still renders slow as molasses under Firefly, but there's no such beast as a fast raytracer. Gotta love the shaders ..

" Sr4 has really killed most of the major bugs. Still renders slow as molasses under Firefly, but there's no such beast as a fast raytracer. Gotta love the shaders." Agreed on almost all counts. Except that there are such things as fast raytracers, just not the same kind P5 uses. There are some available as expensive plugins for other equally expensive apps that take advantage of some different technology.

I have Poser 5, but it is not installed. (I installed it and found it faulty and uninstalled it and went back to using Posewr 4.) How can I find which version of Poser 5 I have? How can I download the update packages to make each version of Poser 5 into the next version?

Attached Link: http://www.curiouslabs.com/article/articleview/1020/1/84/?df=1

You can download the service release 4.1 at the link. It updates all versions of poser 5 so you don`t need to know which version you have, as long as your version number is lower than 5.0.4.325. You have to download the service release 3 figures updater too (newer versions of the figures werent needed for service release 4) unless you have already downloaded these.

I just reinstalled P5 on the laptop, determined to learn where they hid all the controls I'm used to. I mean, I shelled out the bucks for the program, I should at least give it a decent go. I do like the Firefly render, it gives far better and sharper results that P4. I would love to find some more free materials for it. There's some over at RuntimeDNA, but I've not found any more materials anywhere else. I ran the service release 3 on the P5 install when I put it into the laptop. My question: is the service release 4.1 really worth the download wait time?

latexluv, well I don't have any free shaders yet .. but in making shaders for poserworld I've figured out some nifty things, so I'll be making a couple freebie sets. I've figured out a decent latex, rubber, patent leather and matte/reflective striping among other things. Shaders have always fascinated me, ever since I finally grokked the Bryce3 DTE shader system :) Anthony Curiouslabs is your ticket .. you can get all the sr's there. Don't be afraid, its relatively painless :) Lyrra