Hi,

I've got Poser 4 -- but no experience with it yet. Expected to upgrade to P5, but a poser artist advised ProPack instead due to severe bugginess of P5.

Figure I'll do that, but since my fantasy-techie-greed was stirred a little by extra features & nice interface said to be in P5, wanted to know if that's general experience with P5 vs. Propack.

Expect a learning curve, just hoping not to feel like tossing the machine out the window at 3am.

Opinions, or more about specifics of the tradeoffs very much appreciated. Feel free to email direct too. sks15@comcast.net.

Thanks

IMO, get some practice with P4 first. See if you need or want those extra features in P5. I have P5 and hardly ever use those features, mainly cuz they tend to bog down or lock up Poser. Also, P5 needs a heaftier machine, especially if you're going to use those extra features. The interface in P5 is virtually the same as P4/ProPack. Check the galleries. I think you'll find your "fantasy-techie-greed" would be quite satisfied with P4 until you learn the ropes.

I bought Poser 5 when it first came out, waded through all the issues and bugs. The latest SR4 is fairly stable and really made Poser 5 much better. That being said. My 1st exposure was to Poser 4 from a friend no propack just vanilla Poser 4. I got Poser 5 and was overwelmed. I am still having issues with the material room and nodes and settings. I recently got Poser 4 and ProPack and I must say that as far as ease of use Poser 4 has been much more of a tool for me, I still have Poser 5 installed and I still try things in it, but Poser 4 works and I can follow tutorials etc. It's been much more pleasurable for me, other dunno, like I said that's my experience yours may differ. If you own Poser 4, I would certainly get used to it, ProPack can help with some of the old Poser 4 issues but unless you really need the plugins for either max or lightwave you don't then need propack nessisarly as a beginner.

I have both pro and Poser5. The only thing I have ever used poser 5 for is exporting hair for my P4 stuff. To be honest, Poser 5 takes twice as many resoruces and runs half as fast as P4 does. While the files are a bit easier to browse I just find it much more cumbersome than the old PP. If you are interested in fancy renders Poser5 is not the way to go. Any main stream modeling package that can import .OBJ files will do a much better job in my opinion.

Since the service releases came out, I find P5 is actually less buggy than P4. You won't get consensus oppinion on it. People fight about which one is better all the time. There are some very vocal anti-P5 people, many of whom claim to have hardly used P5 or never used it, so I don't really understand where they are coming from. Personally, I think you'd be crazy to get Pro Pack because it will add hardly anything useful to what you have already with P4. P5 on the other hand will open up a world of new features. The material room takes some effort to get to know but the results are amazing. From my point of view it's the single biggest reason to go with P5. Dynamic cloth is great if you want to do flowing robes, dresses, cloaks etc. That's one area that is somewhat buggy though. All the same, it's good once you know the things to avoid. IMO the new dynamic hair is great, but probably more for things other than hair (grass, tassles on clothes etc). I don't use the face room at all since it only works on the P5 people. Content storage is easier in P5 since you can use sub folders. The biggest disadvantage of P5 is that it requires a lot more computer power than P4, but that's the price you pay for the extra features.

Wow -- if the program is even half as helpful and intelligent as the forum folks, it'll be great. Your comments are clarifying -- and saved me expense of ProPack. Poser 4 sounds just fine for now. And if I win a small lottery and more powerful machine & get into materials, nice to know 5..or 6 will be there eventually.
Meanwhile, I'm off to start some serious play.

I'm still using P4 and ProPack at the moment as it does everything I need (along with all the extra goodies I've bought and downloaded from Renderosity, of course!). I did try P5 briefly but didn't bother to upgrade as I'm happy with my current setup. There are some nice new features in P5 but as many have already mentioned, they are things that maybe you won't use all the time. Also, I still prefer the P4 render engine over the newer P5 "firefly" one. But I guess that's down to personal taste. I'm sure you'll have lots of fun whatever version you use but don't think P4 is obsolete just because it's not the latest edition. There are still lots of users out there!

I haven't used the P5 face room, the P5 hair eats up tons of memory, and I haven't messed with the dynamic cloth at all. But the P5 material room compared to the P4 material page is like graduating from highschool to college - when you look back, you will laugh at yourself for all the needless trouble you went through with that joke of a P4 material interface. I'd only buy ProPack if you want to plug into Cinema 4d or Lightwave or 3ds. Otherwise, like those that said it before, why bother? But then you're stuck with Poser 4's 256 file limit which will quickly start to drive you batty unless you wanna have files stored outside of your runtime. Poser 5 allows endless content by using multiple runtimes and/or subfolders. I heard a lot of people complain about P5 too and I held off on buying it. Now I wished I wouldn't have listened to them and gotten it a long time ago. The merchants were kind of hesitant on it too for a while, but now are releasing their goods to work well with P5 too. Even if you're a newbie, I'd say get P5, because even P4 users will have to learn the material room (and all the other rooms) basically from scratch and that's a very powerful element of P5. rammy

Even tho I changed over to Poser5 last year & will not be going back any time soon I agree with what the others have said here. Stick to Poser4 until you've got a good grasp of what you're doing, the new features are very nice but they can get in the way if you're only just learning what poser can do. Poser5/6 will be around when you're ready for it & so will us people who use it too :)