Do you like Poser 4 or 5 better? I'm going to buy one and can't decide. Please tell me what you think!

Poser 5 for the better materials and Firefly renderer.

IMO, the material room makes Poser 5 the better choice. A bit steeper learning curve, but you can get much better results.
Besides, the Poser 5 content CD has much better toys on it than the Poser 4 content CD... Plus, although I may be in the minority on this, I really like the P5 figures...

Message edited on: 08/03/2004 22:50

Have you got a good machine and lots of memory? Then P5. An older machine with limited memory? P4 then. P4 is less resource intensive. However, P5 has some VERY nice features. The library structure is much better. THe material and cloth rooms are great. I have no use for the face room, since I'm one of those who don't like Don and Judy (the P5 figures). Hair uh...well it has some problems. It works, sorta. You can get some very nice hair in P5, but it IS high overhead, and it does take some work. Setup is very nice if you're going to be making your own clothing or characters. I use the cloth room every day. None of these features are in P4.

If you haven't used Poser or any other 3D program before, you might want to start with P4 (now sold as Poser Artist) as the learning curve for P5 can be quite steep. And of course P4 is cheaper, as well as (as mentioned above) a lot less resourse-intensive on older machines. You really need a processor of at least 2gb and at least 512mb of RAM, 1gb for preference, if you want to avoid renders that take forever or crash halfway through.) :) However, I now couldn't live without P5. The cloth room I would miss but for still shots you can fake it in postwork, raytracing again can be faked with a lot of work in P4, but the materials room I could NEVER lose!

I get by fine using P5 in a 1.8 GHz processor ('course I got 640 MB RAM)...

If =all= you ever intend to do is stills with no venturing into animation whatsoever, then you can make a good case for P4, with Hogwarden's P-Booost to make up for the lack of runtime linking. But. If you have =any= urge to make motion, then there's only one choice; P5. There -is- a hellacious learning curve to it....but with the 'room' workspace layout, you can easily stay on in the pose room and materials room until you are comfortable with them. Don't let the shader system in the material room intimidate you; no one else has really mastered it yet, either, although a few are getting close. The dynamic cloth room can be very useful in stills (you have to set up an animation to get the drape and motion, but all you do is render whichever frame looks best to your eye and wa la), but really shines in animation. The hair room can also produce some nice effects, but there are still issues and people are still working on the tricks to exploit them (the battle cry of Poser: "Damn that bug! But if I do -this-, I've created a feature!!") Faster processors and more ram are always good....but how well behaved Poser is depends on what you are trying to push through it. One of Steffy ZZ's 4000x4000 skin textures can and will gobble up ram (as would anyone else's hi res texture); with the right lighting attempt, you can bring any system to its knees in agony. Same with super dense meshes.

I still can't understand, for the life of me, why the system requirements for Poser are so much higher than full blown 3d applications that include modellers and renderers, with features such as radiosity, particle systems, hair/fur (insert your own special feature here) and whatever else you care to imagine. Methinks that code needs a major overhaul.

Okay, thank you everybody! I'm definitely going to get P5, I've only used Poser a little but I learn fast so... Anyway, thank you for all of your help!

RubiconDigital; It's a combination of things. Poser's actual footprint in a system isn't all that big. But with the photoreal textures that can be 4+megs each, the old .bum displacement maps for P4 (those can hit 10+megs), you are going to get into some resource issues. Another issue is one of the things that makes Poser so flexible; the files are nothing but text files. The big boys use ecrypted, compressed propietary file formats; Poser uses .OBJ's, one of the bigger files structures out there. CR2's are textfiles. so are a lot of other files. It makes it very easy for even non programmers to hack them, but the cost is in parsing time and filesize. Part of it is the fact that Poser is a Win port of a Mac proggie, and there always seems to be some issue involved there. Part of it is the simple fact that we have this poor lil proggie doing things it was never intended to do to begin with....

Dale, I guess when you take all those things into consideration, it's no real surprise that things soon get out of hand.

Just my 2 cents on memory resources, since i am one of the few who still uses W98 (struggling with memory management issues...) with "only" 512 Mb RAM (i remember when a 16Kb ram extension was a luxury, yes Kb, not Mb). Aside of not having any other stuff running in background (anything* other than systray and explorer should be off), and of course having screen saver disabled, I could finally have my complex rendering done after enabling (here comes the * of above) a third party memory manager. There is an issue about memory management between Poser 5 and Win 98, causing Poser to freeze at the 2nd or later render attempts of a 'heavily textured' scene. But this way, with a memory manager that takes care of the ram swapping in a better way, it seems now to have been just a bad dream! :) Finally, to reply to the original question, definitely you want poser 5. Within service release 3 and later, you also get the still little used volumetric light (atmosphere material) and the even less known ProbeLight node, that can lead to amazing results for a very low price.

stemardue; You might want to check into 98lite at litepc.com. This lets you configure 98, 98SE, and WinMe to your liking, not Uncle Bill's. I ran 98SE as a 98lite config for years, and had some of the lowest issue rates out there. Getting rid of IE, Outlook, the windows scripting host and address book effectively bullet proofs you against 95% of the virii and trojans out there. You can ignore a good 99% of the updates, and if you have a copy of 95-SR2.1 or earlier, you can replace the shell and active desktop with the 95 desktop, which is a lot better behaved and far more secure. You can also replace the 98 windows explorer with the 95 one, which is a =lot= faster and better behaved. And this also has the effect of freeing up the resources the integrated crap hangs onto, even if it is 'deactivated' (the active desktop is -always- on, for instance....because you may decide to Give you soul to the Dark Side at any time. The only sure way to free the memory is to replace it with a non active version). And yeah, a mem manager does solve a lot of problems; mainly the program stubs that 98 leaves behind, and the cached files that Poser sets and doesn't know to remove (primarily the texture files; when you restart a job, they reload into memory...and if they reload at a different point in the memory map, the -old- textures just sit there, occupying space). It's kinda sad that current software has to be gimmicked to need the latest and greatest; most =still= will run just fine on 'ancient' 98SE. Although the games are starting to need the resource controls that 2k has...

To Dale B (sorry folks for going off topic...) Hey :) thanks for your good tips, anyway i tweaked my w98 settings so much that even U.Bill wouldn't recognize it anymore (Grin)... but maybe i could find something else where you said, so i'll give it a look! byes