Okay, I always said I wouldn't upgrade to Poser 5, because of all the horror stories I heard about people who couldn't get it to work and other problems with it, but I've heard many times since the release of SR4 that it has been greatly improved. I've heard that there are still bugs (stuff that was there from the beginning, basically), but it seems that it was a huge leap in stability and functionality. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Input to consider? I'm in a position to upgrade and I've had enough annoyances with Poser 4 and I'm thinking of actually doing the upgrade... And yes, I know that D|S is supposedly going to be in release stages soon, but I can't get it to work properly on my machine, even though I can run other high-end, OpenGL programs just fine. I'm sure that eventually D|S will be usable (or I'll upgrade my computer, haha), but I don't expect that to happen for some time and in the meantime... Anyway, thoughts? bonni

.BM.

P5 has given me very few problems since I started using it. The only problems I have are the occasional choke up when trying to render a complex scene in Firefly. I've never yet had a real crash, which is more than I can say for P4PP. If you are going to buy it, definitely use the upgrades up to and including SR3 before you run it. SR4 is entirely up to you. I have installed it and don't really have any issues with it, except I believe I had a few slowdowns at first. That seems to have resolved itself, though, so it could have been my error and not a fault with the software. I tend to use Firefly all the time, only using the P4 engine for testing a scene or texture. I definitely would not go back to P4 now.

DazStudio is in no way ready to take over from Poser5. Poser5-SP4.1 runs more than acceptably stable on my system (PIV 3GHzHT, 1,5GBDDRam, XPPro). Up to now, I never had a freeze or a crash. (I don't game, and I don't install "any" soft on my puter, run a virusscanner, firewall and SpybotS&D) I never used P4 or PP, but I did read lots of threads in which people complained about P5, so at first I thought I had made the wrong choice. I don't think so anymore. - I like the material room. The node-based shader system is very good. - the content room (a fossile from egisys) can easily be deleted - runtime folder organisation is very handy with subfoldes etc. - rendering quality is good. Not as good as Cinema4D (can't speak of anything else), but good. Radiosity is best ok. - dynamic hair is not bad, etcetc Poser is a brontosaur, and has never been created for what it is used for now, but it works. So I don't think I wasted my money.

I wouldnt say that poser is a brontosaurus. The firefly renderer is a vast improvement to the older poser 4 renderer and you can use the poser 4 renderer too. The materials are excellent. I have hardly ever had any major problems with poser 5 either with sr3 or sr4, the worst problems I have had have been with the cloth room but that could have been my own fault. The cloth room is actually another very good feature. I also like the face room though it is a bit basic and could be improved. You say you were annoyed with poser 4 but some of the things in poser 5 havent changed, the setup room is the same as propack and on my computer p5 runs a bit slow so I use pro pack still for making figures and when I dont need the firefly renderer etc. I would say forget about daz studio, at least till they get the major problems ironed out. I would say buy poser 5 if you can, you wont be dissappointed.

...I use P5 all the time. The improvements to the directory structure, the material room, and the cloth room make it worthwhile. Firefly freezes sometimes, but I've never had a problem with the P4 render engine. Things that don't work are some animation things, hair, and a few other items. They don't work, and they'll never be fixed in P5. Don't buy P5 for any of these. Some people like the face room. I think it's a good first attempt at something, but it doesn't meet any need I have. It runs best on a real 32 bit operating system (XP or Win 2000). It takes LOTS of memory. So if you have an underpwered machine, pass on it. However, with a gig and a half of memory on fast machine, I'm fairly happy with the result.

IMHO, DAZ Studio isn't going to be a serious competitor or replacement for a couple of years yet. I bought Poser 5, followed the installations in Poser Pros stickied topic in the P5 forum, installed the SR4 and killed the Content Room before even opening it, and have been very pleased with it. I had been planning to use P4 for most work and then go to P5 for the materials room, renderer, and cloth room, but I was pleasantly surprised by P5's performance and am moving over entirely. On my system, for whatever reason, P5 runs faster. A firefly test render with minimal extra features turned on is about the same time as a P4 render. I LOVE procedural shaders; always have, always will, so now I'm a happy little Fyre-chan to have them right in the program and not have to export to another. Nested folders in the library and extra runtimes is nice. There are some quirks, but mostly just small annoyances to me. I have no qualms about suggesting an upgrade, based on my experience.

I'm another happy P5 SR4.01 user. Up untill SR4 I used it, but still relied mostly on my old trusted PPP. After SR4 I think I've opened PPP 2 or 3 times, and in all cases only to test for compatibility. I just can't go back to that primitive material assignment of PPP. The Material Room is SO COOL and the firefly renderer makes very nice pictures. It's slower than P4, but not all that much, the thing that takes time is still calculating shadowmaps, and since I use one raytraced light and a few fill-lights without any shadows, there are no shadow maps to calculate :) Oh and I do not have a gig or more memory. Only 512, and still I don't expirience any noticeable slowdowns.

I only have 128 megabytes of ram and poser 5 works fine on my computer with no slowdowns maybe thats because I don`t have a "real 32 bit operating system" ;)

When I bought Poser5 two months ago, every SR was already applied except for SR4. So I applied SR4 before even opening the program. I never had any problem with Poser since I started using it. France

I haven't had a lockup of any kind in Poser 5 for months now (even before SR4.1). Once I figured out how to tweak Firefly to optimal render settings for each particular scene, renders went much smoother with no problems other than it's still a little slow for me. If you're not familiar with procedural or node-based materials, you might be a little intimidated by the Material room, but once you catch on, it's really powerful and 10x better than the texturing meathod in P4. There can be no doubt about that. Be aware none of Daz's products fully support P5, but that's not to say they don't work well on it. They do, but sometimes require some tweaking to the materials. Cloth room is fantastic, and once you learn it, you'll love it. You might not want to cloth your figures any other way after that. All in all, I'm happy with it.

I've noticed a few lockups (don't render with the joint editor open), but this has happened in PP as well, so go figure. I love the material room, and the dynamic clothes make certain types of conforming clothing way inferior. Some things, like suites or stuff that has no natrral draping are probably best done with conforming clothing, but otherwise, cloth room is fantastic. I am using V3 for a number of renders, and the system (512 megs) gets slow if I add more than a couple of textures and too many morphs. With mil 2 figures, though, I have no complaints whatsoever (not sure I've ever actually loaded a P5 figure, heh heh) Poser seems to sit at 1 gig with the settings I use, so a system with 1 gig of ram would make a big difference. Also, the smoothing feature is great (except when it smoothes things you don't want smoothed:) V2 and M2 lores are a perfect match for P5! I say, do it! You won't regret it. eric

Be aware none of Daz's products fully support P5, but that's not to say they don't work well on it. They do, but sometimes require some tweaking to the materials. Actually, they do. Garee's Power Pixie for instance uses Poser 5 materials. I think his Heavies Expansions does it as well, and probably other new things. Daz does not OFFICIALLY support P5, but some of their brokers do :o)

Bonni, don't know what ya think of my thoughts but: buy it. Play with it. Don't uninstall yer old version -- P5 is different. It took me a couple months to get used to it. Check out my stuff at rdna and poser pros -- both of those sites have some dedicated forums with oodles and oodles of good info in them.

I agree with ynsaen. It is different and has a learning curve. Be prepared for a slow down in productivity that will pass as you learn more.

P5's worth persevering with, the results of the Firefly renderer are worth it alone Plus the multiple, nested runtimes & the material room that knocks P4's material settings into a cocked hat "Be aware none of Daz's products fully support P5, but that's not to say they don't work well on it. They do, but sometimes require some tweaking to the materials." Be aware that some of DAZ textures are crap and won't look good no matter which version of poser you use [Note to texturers - just because you can create a 4000 by 3000 texture doesn't mean you have to, especially when you use jpeg compression to keep the file size down A smaller texture at higher quality gives better results thn a large texture at lower quality Naming and shaming - DAZ' Summer Siesta, the tiger skin rug texture is way fucking pixellated, didn't realise this until I'd posted several images to R'oticas Premier gallery and received a couple of comments pointing out that although they were great images the artifacting of the textures ruined the overall affect & DAZ' Med Balcony, the stone texture looks shit, and I don't bandy that word around lightly Self imposed moratorium, no further DAZ scenery purchases unless I see positive feedback on the scenes' textures from other poser artists first Sorry about the rant but when it takes three frickin' hours to do a render only to find the result is worse tha useless I feel the need to get something off my chest]

Yep, as Eninyoka said, everything I do is in P5, so If I've done it, I've managed it in P5. NewSara also has her headmorphs organized in P5 nested "folders" in her head.. (Dark Whisper also pushed the P5/Daz broders a littel as well. That said, I did have to dumb down a few things for P4 release, though exactly what, I don't recall. (I think it was bump mapping for the Puss Set.) (BTW, a nice little trick, which works well most of the time, is to just plug the color maps into the bump map channle in P5. Sometimes it'll look great, sometimes it won;t but many times, it's worth the effort. You don't use memory for a new imagemap, and in some cases, the results are great! (The Hippolicous moose texture is a good example of that.. if it's not, plug the color map into the bump map node, set at about .5, and see what it looks like)

"Actually, they do. Garee's Power Pixie for instance uses Poser 5 materials. I think his Heavies Expansions does it as well, and probably other new things. Daz does not OFFICIALLY support P5, but some of their brokers do :o)"

Ah, yes the brokers do. Sorry about that oversight.

Message edited on: 06/20/2004 22:32

All right, I'm pretty much convinced. I didn't get those Eagles concert tickets (sold out almost immediately, sheesh), so the money I was going to spend on that rather expensive night out will now go toward upgrading Poser. :) Thank you for all the input, and even if all I do with P5 is take advantage of the better rendering (and the ability to render a large image without that #$%&ing "not enough disk space" error message bug!!!), it'll be worth it, but I will actually endeavor to take advantage of some of the advanced features, as I go along. :) bonni

Yes don`t punish yourself with an eagles concert, get poser 5 instead.

No worries with it here - actually enjoy using it quite a bit :) However, I have hacked the XML files to death too ;)

P5 blows P4 away, wouldn't switch back if you paid me (well... depending how much anyways). Looking at where D|S is at I'd say Daz is at least 18 months away from getting that proggy to only SR1 levels of bugs.

don't do it.. if you want speed.. p4 render engine is twice as fast. Not sure why.. but if you render the same scene in p4 and then again in p5... it will take almost twice as long to generate shadows. if you tend to only render with a few lights... then it's no big deal. but if you render with some of daz global illumunation sets... over 25 lights... you can add an other 30 seconds to you render if you render in p5 vs. p4...

30 more seconds is nothing in the 3d rendering world. Try turning on all the lightwave options, and waiting for 20 some HOURS for a render.

Bryce has very long render times too when doing special effects. (longer than 20 hours)

Quote: Re: Poser 5 with SR4, input? Thoughts? by alamanos on 6/21/04 09:48 don't do it.. if you want speed.. p4 render engine is twice as fast. Not sure why.. but if you render the same scene in p4 and then again in p5... it will take almost twice as long to generate shadows. if you tend to only render with a few lights... then it's no big deal. but if you render with some of daz global illumunation sets... over 25 lights... you can add an other 30 seconds to you render if you render in p5 vs. p4... /Quote Go to Poser Pros and check out their lighting tutorials, lotta work up front, faster renders on the back end ....

Speed isn't really an issue for me. I work in bits and pieces of time anyway, and can find other things to do while waiting for a render. So, hey, thirty seconds here, a minute there, no biggie. :-) And I did get those Eagles tickets after all (yay!), but I'm still getting P5. ;-) bonni

The DAZ Global lights include hacks to make them work -- hacks which take advantage of the weaknesses of the P4 renderer and the way the system works with them. P5 is about 300 times more sensitive to lighting than p4 is -- you actually have to learn to light your scenes effectively in order to get the best out of it.

"...but it seems that it was a huge leap in stability and functionality..." A huge leap backwards, IMO. And all SR4 did for me was slow P5 down even more and create new problems with the P4 renderer. But heck, go for it if you want to play with the new flashy stuff and don't populate your scenes with more than a few characters. But don't expect much improvement over P4/PP, it's essentially the same program; just slower and clunkier, IMO.