Attached Link: My personal homepage as a photographer

I have heard so many negative things about Poser 5 being buggy and having troubles, that I tested both Poser 4 and Poser 5.... After all required updates, I still had a program that locked up after every 10 changes, without attempting to render anything... with Poser 5. With Poser 4, I never had a lockup, no troubles... however, not all the details are there in the figures and models I have available, at least I cannot find the dials to them all. I was wondering if there is anyone who has had success with Poser 5, and would really swear by it? Any suggestions, or comments would help alot. I am relying on this tool for my photographic artwork and my living is relying on a good stabile tool. Thanks! Antonio Rodriguez Photographer

I have P5 and found it to be at least as reliable as P4; in some ways, more so. I bought it around December last year and had maybe 5 or 6 crashes. I never actually lost any work, though, and sometimes I really push the thing with lots of reflective surfaces, atmosphere and the like. I honestly think the results with P5 are well worth it. I wouldn't use any application, no matter how many features it had, if the thing was unreliable. My only complaint is the render time but I guess that's to be expected with raytracing. I guess P4 spoiled me to the point that I think a 10 minute render is slow. :)

So I assume the rendering is also memory intensive and hard disk intensive? I don't have a ton of memory on my PC, only 256mb, and hard disk space is not alot at the moment, however I am adding a 160gb hard drive this month to it. So would Poser 5 work on that? Greetings, Antonio

Add more ram, if possible.

256mb is asking a lot of any renderer, including P4. Definitely add more. I have 1GB in this box and I'll be upgrading to 4mb later in the year. The bigger HD will definitely help.

Mostly I swear AT poser 5, not by it. I find that having both on my system helps. Setup goes faster in 4, and then I switch to 5 for dynamics and shaders. Sr4 has really stabilised it, but get as much RAM as you can, defrag your working drive often and don't run anything else while rendering.

lol- I'm with Lyrra on that. but if your just doing pose samples for your models then P4. It has a slightly smaller footprint. You won't need to use shaders or the hair room ect...

Poser 4 is a royal pain in the ass compared to Poser 5. If you have lots of stuff with Bump maps, you need to convert all the bump maps from "jpg" to "bum" bump maps. You could easily spend a few hours searching and converting because some artists don't take the time to inform you of that situation. And the darned bum bump maps consume large amounts of hard drive space as well. On the other hand, Poser 5 uses jpg bump maps, and require no conversion. There is less space consumed on your hard drive. You can easily make customized thumbnails with Poser 5. Not so with Poser 4. If you're going to do serious graphics work, you need an up-to-date computer with at least 512mb of ram, and the largest hard drive you can afford. You really should get Windows XP as well.

If you are really anal retentive and like to have everything neatly subdivided without overcrowded folders, then P5 is the way to go. Updates have really made P5 a lot more stable and I think if you are open to experimentation, P5 has a lot more "in-house" features than P4 like the morph putty and dynamic hair. In addition, some of your face photographs could be used as textures for the P5 figures in the face room. Just have a really good operating system to actually run the program and be really patient.

Antonio, which operating system do you run? Your problems sounds alot like what people with Win 98/ME are reporting, operating systems that does not play very well with Poser 5. You should consider using Win 2000 or XP, systems with much better memory handling.

Your RAM is also definately too low for Poser 5, even if it's within the spec recommended by Curious Labs.

Message edited on: 05/23/2004 05:21

I just got Poser 5 about a weeek ago as a birthday gift for myself. I had been planning to keep using Poser Pro as my primary program and just go to Poser 5 toward the end of a scene for shaders, dynamic cloth if needed, and a lot of cursing. But when I tried P5, you may think I'm smoking crack, but it was faster. A lot faster! Not rendering, but loading up and bringing in figures and stuff. And if I'm just doing a test render, all special features turned off, Firefly seems to take around the same time. (Admittedly, I multi-task like an octopus with an attention deficit, so maybe I'm just not noticing the difference. And more final renders with the options on does take longer, but I'm OK with that.)
I'm on an XP box with 448 MB ram, and I did a nice neat install as suggested in a stickied thread at Poser Pros. Install P5, then install the latest SR and remove Content Paradise before opening, then properly install all the content I want to use instead of just copying over my P4 runtime.

Thanks for all the answers, although quite a unique mix of opinions... My system is an AMD Athlon XP system (op sys: Windows XP) with 256mb Ram, and an 80gb hard drive (at the moment) a 160gb drive is on order. I will get more memory that will probably help the matter. I have Poser 5, and got the SP3 and SP4 downloads from the Curious Labs site. I will try to reinstall it, and apply the service packs, and see how that goes. To PapaBlueMarlin's comment about being anal retentive about the folders -- how did you know that??? I tend to want to keep my things in order so I know where to find them... I also noted that alot of you mention the ProPak alot, with regard to Poser 5... Is this the same ProPak that is for Poser 4 or a different one??? Thanks again for all the friendly advice and help! Antonio

"If you are really anal retentive and like to have everything neatly subdivided without overcrowded folders..." That would be me then :-D

Yup, Propack is the P4 thingy. I also like my folders in order. I'm old enough to remember when it used to be called being "organised and efficient". Yup, I'm that old.

If you want the best insurance that Poser works efficiently and happily, you might consider buying CorrectReference Pro in the Marketplace. Poser starts out with a handicap, even from a brand new installation. Your default Poser 4 installation contains 1195 bad (texture) references while the default Poser 5 installation contains 3486 bad references. Poser continually tries to find those files, and your performance suffers. Oh, yes, you still need more memory, and a larger hard drive. You might consider devoting that 160GB hard drive to Poser alone. Keep the 80GB hard drive for your other programs. Poser is happier if it is not working on the same drive as your Windows swap file.

yes- it's lazyness on our part- but when we say P4 99% of us are talking about the pro pack addition.

I'm a forensic scientist so I was speaking for my own anal retentiveness :)

"With Poser 4, I never had a lockup, no troubles... however, not all the details are there in the figures and models I have available, at least I cannot find the dials to them all.

I don't understand this. What do you mean, "not all details are there?" There shouldn't be any difference between 4 and 5 in that area.

On my machine, P5 is slower and clunkier than P4 in everything it does, whether I use the new features or not. And I never render with firefly any more. It's extremely slow, buggy, and sometimes locks up completely. And now, with the new SR4 installed, even the P4 renderer in P5 messes up occasionally.

My suggestion would be to increase your RAM and maybe upgrade to ProPack. If you want to be "organised and efficient" about your folders, it's pretty simple to use Windows Explorer to just drag and drop them in and out of your runtime as you need them. You can do this with Poser running.

Message edited on: 05/23/2004 12:08 BTW: My machine is a dual-xeon 1.7 w/1 gig o' ram and 100 gig hard drive.

Message edited on: 05/23/2004 12:14

my 2 cents.... I found that the Pro Pack is much slower than P4 on my Mac OS 9.1. Also, Poser 4 and Quicktime 6 don't play nice. I can do my work and even render, but after the animation is done, when I close the window, it freezes. If you're stuck on an old system like mine, I'd vote for P4. I started with Poser 1, wayyyy back in the 90s, and I think P4 is just as resposive and flaw free as the best of em. No crashes ever.