Hello everybody !

I am a happy user of Poser 4 and I am considering buying Poser 5. But I read some bad article on this software and I heard that some buyers of P5 have given it up to go back to P4. So, I was wondering if I shouldn't buy Pro-Pack instead. What do experienced users think about it ?

Sorry if this question has already been asked a thousand times before !

best. app. ever. Don't listen to the barbs. Since SP-4 it's very stable. Many people who were reluctant are starting to explore the new features, make products, and open up the market for it. Sure, there are still problems, but the biggest issue I've encountered is certain people and companies refusal (for whatever reasons) to support it.

Flawed but still well worth the money I splashed out on it :)

Based on a survey that I'm running on my site Poser 5 users outnumber Poser 4 users 3 to 1. When Poser 5 came out a couple of years back there were issues. Probably caused by trying to get the software out of the door too quickly. The majority of bugs were fixed in timely manner shortly after. Since then Curious Labs has continued to stand by their product and fine tune as required. I am extremely happy with the way my Poser 5 runs. I highly recommend it.

PhilC: How many respondants is that based on, out of curiosity?

I would like to buy Poser 5, but I'll wait to Poser 6.

I would recommend poser 5 as phil c said most of the major problems are gone with service release 4.

I recommend Poser 5 for several reasons:

1. It's a good solid app now with all the service releases.
2. It's much more powerful and can produce better results than P4.
3. If you have any interest in 3D outside of creating just still images, P5 is a good introduction software to animation that can translate to other apps as well (ie., dynamic hair, cloth, and animation-capable node materials).

The only drawback is that it doesn't have network rendering or point lights, but neither does P4 for that matter. ;-)

Message edited on: 09/07/2004 14:45

There could be some reasons NOT to buy it, if you don't use it's specific strengths. If you render pics in Vue or Shade or Bryce, always use DAZ characters, don't do animations, prefer to postwork on conformed clothes rather than waiting for the system to calculate a simulation, then you can stick with Poser 4. Otherwise, I highly recomend Poser 5 too, for all of the reasons above.

stay with P4.. the only real feature that's hard to live with out is the librararies in p5...as far as dynamic clothes, hair room,face room,.. well they where fun for a week or so... they work.. but don't add any value to the project.. the only problem i find with p5 is the speed.. if you do alot of global illumination renders 10+ light calculating shadows.. be prepared for twice the render time.. with no incraase in render quality..(i'm not talking firefly. p4 render in p5) that's my 2 cents.

If you're determined to spend more money, go with Poser 5. I would never consider buying Poser Pro Pack. Heck, most of the Poser Pro Pack features are found in Poser 5. I still have both Poser 4 & Poser 5 installed, yet use Poser 5 most of the time.

Right now most of my projects use P5 features so heavily that it would be almost impossible to create the same for the old limited Poser 4. My modified P4 Man for example (attached image, still a WIP) uses displacement mapping for the geometry details, which means fast rendering, and no need for high-poly models. I couldn't get the same result with morph targets.

If you're animating characters with clothes on (yeah right, like anyone would do that!), you'll love dynamic clothing. You can convert most conforming clothes into dynamic ones, and new clothes are easy to create because no frustrating poserizing is needed... and you can make most pieces of clothing fit many different characters. I don't have "Vicky clothing", "Judy clothing", "Mayadoll clothing", etc. in my library, just clothing.

You know, I really dont' think people understand what they're getting with P5's material room. As in the example above, micro-poly displacement like that found in P5 is a very "high end" and powerful feature! Heck, you won't find it in any of the other apps within Poser's pricerange, and even the most expensive 3D apps charge you EXTRA for plugins to support it. Micropoly displacement is a feature that used to only be available to users of PRman, and is still used in high end VFX production a lot. It's full potential hasn't been realized yet by the Poser community I'm affraid.

And, for those inclined to manga and anime like me, the toon shader rendering is invaluable !

Oh, these are exciting times. Poser, Shade, Daz|Studio, ZBrush, Silo, TrueSpace, Vue, Carrara, Bryce, ParticleIllusion and so many more, all within the price range of the home hobbyist. And all capable of producing the most amazing work. Forget the occasional bug that comes with most packages .. isn't it better to be near the cutting edge, than following 'safe', well trodden paths? The marketing guys at CL might have screwed up a bit (hey, who hasn't?), but one can only imagine the pain the programmers felt when the initial problems surfaced with P5. I only have P4, and actually worry that I'm getting left behind by not having and learning P5 (can't afford it at the mo). I envy you .. go for it. Enjoy.

I still use Poser Pro most of the time. I have dabbled a little bit more into Poser 5, since I purchased a new computer, but I still find that even with the latest patches installed, it still tends to crash. I wished it was more stable, just for the file handling and relfections it's a great step up from Poser Pro. Doug PS: New machine Dell Dimension 8300 P4, 3.2 gHz, 1.5 megs or Ram. old machine was a AMD 1100 with 768 megs or Ram, Poser 5 would crash every time.

One thing, anyone knows when Poser 6 will be made...

Poser 6 wil be out sometime next year. Sturkwork -- have you tried the 5 things to do tutorial for setting Poser? Notably the virtual memory allocations?

With the advent of the latest update to Vue 4, you can import Poser 5 files, which means that you have the advantage of dynamic cloth and hair simulations. So, if those aspects are potential enhancements to your Vue animations and renders, Poser 5 still comes out the winner.

I love Poser 5. I love the Material Room, the Cloth Room, and the Hair Room, and use them more and more as time goes by. And multiple runtimes is terrific, too!

I am agree with almost all others.I still have Poser4 installed but i always use Poser5 now.Since i have upgrade my Ram,i have no problem with Poser5 with service release installed.Go for it!

Does everybody elses Poser 5 still do this?... When you roll your mouse over the libraries, down by camera, you can get the material library to appear. Doug

"Sturkwork -- have you tried the 5 things to do tutorial for setting Poser? Notably the virtual memory allocations?" SturkWurk: yep sure did, I just tried Poser 5 again, and suffered another crash, besides the trying to cancel a render crash.

It's a wonderful toy! Amusing, easy to use and gives good results for the low price. Firefly renderer (P5) alone is worth the money of the software. Raytraced reflections and refractions, volumetric light, depth of field, motion blur, depth cue... if you get to learn to use those well, you can get amazing results without needing any postwork. The material room has enormous potential. The drawbacks are: 1- definitely scarce manuals and documentation (but there are tons of good free tutorials around) and 2- possible crashes if the scene contains some improper geometry (most products sold around are good, but there are some hair packages that have many errors like intersecting polygons, stray vertexes and so on... those can cause most of the renderer's crashes). Buying P4 now is like buying a car produced ten years ago. If you have it and it still works, keep it. If you go for something new... definitely get P5.

I just got Poser 5 not long ago and I have to admit that I really like it. I don't seem to have the slow renders that some people do and nor any of the past problems either. Knock on Wood. Poser 5 is great.

When you get P5, you get nearly all of the features of ProPack (I believe the only things you don't get are the Hi end app export plugins). Plus the material room (which as others have said is very underrated and underutilized at the moment), dynamic cloth (based on the Stitch plugin for Max), which, while adding draping and rendering time to animations, also lets you avoid many of the problems that conforming clothing can have...and it is also just now being delved into by many. The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated (can't think of which one ATM), has a few collision issues, but is starting to show its promise as people experiment, and find out what it can really do. The library enhancements, and the ability to create multiple runtimes to link to P5 are worth it in and of themselves. Then you have the integrated Python scripting; a couple of apps like Metaform exist, and then there are the scripts that Ockham and others have written, that automate or expand Poser functionality. Poser itself does lack goodies like network rendering and several types of lights. However, Bryce 5, Vue4 and VuePro with Mover 5, Carrara Studio, Shade Pro, do have it in some form, as well as more flexible lighting and the ability to import most of P5's content animated (with Vue and VuePro, as long as you have the Mover 5 add-on you can fully import Poser animations with dynamics; the only thing it doesn't recognize is most of the shader nodes; and that may be changing. I -think- that Carrara also recognizes all the goodies in a P5 pz3, but I'm not sure). P5 is the way to go. And as there is no known timetable on P6, you would probably be better off getting P5, learning it, and then taking advantage of the reduced upgrade price when P6 comes out.

It works for me... i'm on a Mac OSX G5,, make great animation!!!

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated (can't think of which one ATM), has a few collision issues, but is starting to show its promise as people experiment, and find out what it can really do." You might be thinking of the plugin formerly known as "Shag:Hair" for 3dsMax. P5's hair room is very similar to the way that plugin functioned. I think it's now called "HairFX" or some such name. ;-)

P5, without a doubt.

I've never understood limiting oneself to P4. I've never understood it for individuals......and I really don't understand it for companies.

Once I installed Poser5 it was no looking back. A month later I sold P4.

It seems there are some items, such as complex hair, that just won't work well with Poser 5 & maybe the Firefly, vs Poser renderer. In fact, I pretty much gave up on Firefly. Maybe it's my puny computer?

I never had P4 or PP. I've only owned P5, so I can't really compare. Like many, I struggled with a lot of issues and it does have a bit of learning curve. In fact....I still haven't mastered it. The material room is great and many merchants are beginning to take advantage of the material room capabilities (RDNA, Sixus to name two). Multiple runtimes....something you can't do as I understand it, in P4. Multiple folders....three or four deep....in your poses, props and other main folders. The ability to finally import P5 .pz3's into Vue d'Esprit 4, makes P5 hard to pass up. Did I mention the material room? Get it, but be prepared to get frustrated and to spend some time learning all the nuances. BTW, I found it stable after SP-3 and never did update to 4 :) I pretty much know what I can and can't do and rarely have problems with it anymore.

"It seems there are some items, such as complex hair, that just won't work well with Poser 5 & maybe the Firefly, vs Poser renderer." This is actually pretty true. And for good reason. These hairs (developed by 3rd party content providers) are created using one of a few variations of method that takes advantage of flaws within the Poser 4 rendering engine to produce better results. In a very real sense, they are created specifically for Poser 4, using what is, in essence, a hack. Construction of hair in that same method for most other rendering engines today will produce similar issues in high end rendering engines. So, to not put too fine a point on it, yeah, you are absolutely correct: There is some hair that is not going to work well with firefly as is. It's not your puny computer. It's not Poser. It's not the maker of the hair. It is the eternal march of progress, squishing us all. Oh but for the days of carriages with horses! Hey, that gives me an idea for a pic. On the other hand, the Poser 4 renderer doesn't give you the precision of control over shading rates, alternative shading systems, light gels, and displacement, all of which can be used to create hair which is much lighter in resources (in other words, instead of a 1.3MB obj, you can use a 130KB obj, with the resulting difference in size for the cr2, as well), looks better (hey -- you can see the layers of the strands beneath strands -- and they cast shadows!), and renders faster with smaller texture maps. I'm fully in support of P5 -- well known fact, there. However, it is different -- not just from the standpoint of the user, but from the standpoint of the maker. Poser 6 will be out next year. I'm certain of that. When, no idea. But I am absolutely convinced that it will be out within the next 15 months. It won't offer significant new stuff, either, so Poser 5 and Poser 6 will co-exist fairly well, and there won't be much in the way of things which are different. So as folks become more comfy with this new program, you'll see the same sort of development for Poser 5 as we have seen for Poser 4/PP -- that is, hacks, which take advantage of the specific features of the software. The question isn't going to be P5 or P4 for new users. The question is going to be P5 now or P6 later for old users...

Given the radical advances in Poser 5 it was hardly surprising that the initial release of the software was going to be bug-ridden. Fair play... even Microsoft don't expect to get things right first time, and a period of user involvement is necessary for sublimation. Kudos to Curious Labs for responding. I personally would rather see similar radical advances in future versions of Poser, but I'd certainly not expect them to be stable from day 1. Ajax Thanks for the materials pack. I downloaded it some time ago, and remember being fascinated when I loaded the included pz3. Also I'm very impressed with your background materials, which I'm using more and more. I'm surprised that I've never seen mention of any other background materials similar to your skies. I think they're great.

The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?

All of the propack features are in poser 5 so you get propack AND all the new p5 features by buying poser 5 instead of propack. This is similar to bobbie boucher`s earlier post but I was just wanting to point out that poser 5 has all the propack stuff, even the cartoon figures.

Message edited on: 09/08/2004 02:53

Stewer, it was members of the PIASA group, carefully cultivated over a period of seven years to coincide with their upcoming release of UrPoser, with which they will destroy all other apps combined -- D|S, Poser, and all those plugins that do the same thing. I have been systematically hunting them down, one by one, and dragging them into creations by stonemason for proper treatment. PIASA: Poser Is A Sucky App. It has subchapters with better acronyms, I hear, but I haven't found any representatives thus far willing to fess up to what they are...

Contrary to compiler, I would say that for rendering in Bryce, P4 is better (P5 SP4 introduced a new bug that makes trouble for Bryce), but for rendering in Vue, P5 is better. The improved material editor and library system make a Poser-Vue combination work a lot better.

Poser 5 procedural materials don't import into Vue d'Esprit 4, nor Vue 4 Pro. So what is the benefit of Poser 5 over Poser 4 for rendering in Vue, material wise ? (I'd be very interested to know, cause I like Vue rendering style a lot).

Personally I'm hanging out to see whether Vue 5 offers some kind of support for P5 materials. For Vue, really the only advantages I see to P5 are the dynamic cloth and hair and even those are only properly supported if you get Mover 5 as well.

Wait Bryce 6 give to us, because if it can import poser animations, I think I'll update from Bryce 4 to 6. I think as oposite of bryce version 5 and 4 , poser 5 gives the user many more things that poser 4 does.Anyway, I'll wait to Poser 6 if poser 5 doesn't go the price down.

Bryce 6 ? I thought DAZ studio was going to get released first ?

Well, I didn't expect such a (near) unanimity for Poser 5 ! Thank you all for these valuable comments. You have convinced me.

The advantage of Poser 5 for Vue is this - while Vue doesn't fully read procedural materials, it does at least read colour correctly and makes a stab at bumps and reflectivity (but not reflection maps). So it is possible to set up textures in Poser that need little or no tweaking in Vue; of course, Vue reads in texture maps complete with masking colour as well. Now, setting up any sort of materials in Poser 4 is so unpleasant as not to be borne. And once you have one material zone done, there's no way in P4 to copy that material to the next one. You can use MAT files, but (a) they stunt your creativity because you get to rely on them, and (b) they overburden the crappy P4 library system which was not designed to hold hundreds of files. P5 provides you with an environment in which basic texturing (ignoring complex procedurals) is reasonably painless, and MAT files can be managed sensibly in the P5 library. I have two big projects on the go at the moment, one in Bryce and one in Vue. For the Bryce one I'm forced to use P4, but actually it's OK anyway. The Vue one I really could not manage without P5.

I came to the party late (upgraded to OS X P5 2 months ago). That said, it's a whole new world full of rich nougaty goodness. As far as Bryce import capability is concerned, please remember that Bryce is owned by DAZ and DAZ's record on P5 support is dismal. This position was understandable when CL was foundering and P5 was a bug-ridden joke, but Dan Farr & Co. are still betting the farm on DAZ|Studio as the new hotness and waiting for CL to blink. Time to grow up and face the facts, guys. P5 is here and it's here to stay. Either release a Poser 5-killer this year or start supporting what the majority of your customer base owns. As your ex-girlfriend says, "I've moved on; why can't you?"

duanemoody said: ".....As your ex-girlfriend says, "I've moved on; why can't you?" I like the analogy duanemoody :)

As far as Bryce import capability is concerned, please remember that Bryce is owned by DAZ and DAZ's record on P5 support is dismal. This position was understandable when CL was foundering and P5 was a bug-ridden joke, but Dan Farr & Co. are still betting the farm on DAZ|Studio as the new hotness and waiting for CL to blink. I'm new to the community, and I'm not aware of the whole back story, but my opinion is that DAZ really has nothing to lose by supporting P5 AND D|S. Not everyone wants P5, so having DAZ Studio around so that people can buy their stuff and have a renderer is a smart idea... but... By not supporting P5, and not using P5, they're losing any edge they have in the content market. Sooner or later someone will jump into the ring, and then DAZ will have to seriously re-evaluate it's thinking. Unfortunately, by that time, DAZ will be behind in R&D, will have to make up for all the know how they didn't take the opportunity to gain... It just seems like, if my income were tied to the content market, I'd be doing everything possible to keep on top of my game in case Michael Jordan showed up and wanted to play.

Poser 5 is well worth buying. It is a much more powerful app than P4, and demands a bit more technical savvy as a result. The Material room and renderer are the best parts. Hair and cloth can be great but require a LOT of patience. As for the way P5 renders transmapped hair... Adjust the Shading rate and you can get good results from the troublesome wigs. Keep P4 installed though, to work around the occasional surviving bug.

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?" Stewer, what -I- remember is this tidbit surfacing during one of the earlier Feature threads that both Kupa and Larry got into. If that's incorrect, please correct me.

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?" Stewer, what -I- remember is this tidbit surfacing during one of the earlier Feature threads that both Kupa and Larry got into. If that's incorrect, please correct me. I don't find this hard to believe. After using hair for only a short time, I can say without reservation that it's a very powerful tool. The only thing that makes me doubt the validity of that statement is the actual toolset created for using the hair room, which is adequate, but in some ways lacking. I hope for some new tools in P6. Besides, who cares what is "high-end" or "low-end", anyway? I use softimage|XSI for school, and consistently get better results with Poser 5, because P5 streamlines a lot of activities that take days in a non-linear animation suite. Add in the wide availability of commercially useful content, and I can think of several areas that I might choose Poser above Maya or Lightwave. Of course, I don't think the future is going to be found in continuously improved crystal clarity or multi-million production values. The only reason that Poser 5 lacks the potential to be implemented in a production environment is its lack of network rendering capability. Even so, with the proper dedication and a skilled post-production editor, even that restriction could be worked around. ;)