I've heard nothing but negative remarks about P5. Is there something horribly wrong with it, or is it simply bug-riddled?

Also, although slightly off-topic, why do most items focus exclusively on Victoria 2/3 or Mike? Aren't these models incredibly expensive?

There's lots of positive remarks now, probably more than the negative. When Poser 5 first came out, there were lots of problems, but most of them have been fixed. Except for the workflow issues, I think it's great. As for Vicky and Mike, I wouldn't call them incredibly expensive, especially if you compare to human figures from other sources. They are an investment, but they move better than than the P4 people (I haven't worked much with Don and Judy so I don't know about them), and look better than the P5 people (IMHO; that's why I haven't worked much with Don and Judy). And there is a lot of support for them, more than for most other figures.

Why the hate?

Because it represents change, and therefore must be feared and rejected.

Also, it was heavily bug-ridden on release, and a lot of people haven't gotten over that yet.

Aren't these models incredibly expensive?

Depends upon your definition of expense. Poser products are incredibly inexpensive compared to the content available for other 3D applications.

Just browse through TurboSquid sometime, if you don't believe me. Check out this dragon for 3DS Max. One-eighth the detail of the Millennium Dragon, at eight times the cost.

Poser 5 is fantastic. I have no problems with it. It rarely crashes. Like every 3d app, if you max out your render settings it will take a lot of time to render. The DAZ Millenium figures are not very expensive for what you get. If you want to see some high-priced 3d goods, look at Turbosquid.

P5 is actually more stable on my system now than P4.

One reason I tear my hair out about the app is because there are so many glaring and obvious errors that could be fixed easily. Things like P5 telling me its missing a file but it won't tell me the name of the file. Or absolutely no diagnostic dump of information from firefly so I can try and determine why FF stopped rendering. As it is, its like voodoo trying to get the thing to render at all. Or some regular information like how much actual ram I'm using in a scene. Or telling me the path of a bitmap in a material node. Or the double magnet channel bug when loading a scene. Also the lack of all function call outs in Python. Actors can be tested for visibility but figures cannot. Bend can be turned on and off but shadow cannot. All these should be very accessible in Python. If you can get to the bend or hidden flags then why not shadow? Also the lack of morph manipulation tools. You can finally delete a morph, which took till P5 to do so but you can transfer an MT from one figure to another without obj exporting> Morph manager should never exist IMHO. Its doing things I think a package that supports delta geometries should do automatically.

Also the lack of all function call outs in Python. What do you mean by function call outs?

You could delete morphs back in P4, from the hierarchy editor. It would be nice, though, if you could also select multiple items for simultaneous deletion. And I agree that CL should implement dragging-and-dropping of morphs (and perhaps other channels) from one figure to another. P5's new split-morph function is rather nice. I use it all the time when creating expression morphs.

"P5 is actually more stable on my system now than P4." Same here. I've had hardly a problem with P5 since I bought it almost a year ago. I would not go back to P4 now.

I have had very very little negative effects since going to P5 over a year ago and i started with P3then P4 P5 has a lot of functions which most people do not use and some are very scary looking at first glance but once you get over the initial shock and get your feet wet then it is not so daunting but after the last SR my P5 load from cold start in about 1.5 min if i close and reopen about 20 sec however i am not a power poser user where i use more than three figures at a time with a full environment

Ya know- the one thing that still buggs me is the burried parimator dials- I hate havening to go to select the part- go to window- select parm dials to bring the window up. maby it's just me

Poser 5 is much more complicated than Poser 4, and it requires a more powerful machine. Because it can do so much more. True, the first edition was bugridden and had a ridiculous copy protection scheme, now at SR 4.1 it's rather stable, the copy protecion is normal. The learning curve is steeper than P4. But I will NEVER use P4, since - it can't do raytracing; - it can't do displacement maps; - it can't do procedural shaders; - it can't do dynamic cloth; - it can't do polygon smoothing; - it can't do volumetric lighting; - it can't render really complicated scenes (Try rendering 9 V3 figures plus environment in P4!). It's really simple if you compare P4 and P5. When you do an image with P4, you need postwork to make it really look good. When you use P5, you can make great images straight out of the render engine. Why the hate? Some people just like bashing.

Poser resources are incredibly cheap. Example: The Warraok Kitt (beautiful 17th/18th warship) $15, half a million polygons. A comparable 3DS model (350,00 polygons): $400.

About Python, yes, I'd like a more consistent and more complete Python interface. But ProPack Python can do even less.

Wow, I didn't expect so many responses. Okay, let me try to get this straight... -Poser 5 had a lot of bugs upon release, but the majority of the bugs have been fixed. -Vickie and Mike are intended for non-amateur Poser users. -Poser 5 requires a G4/G5 or a very high-end PC, as it uses complicated 3d effects.

Last question: How's the Animedoll(my main reason for getting 5)?

You don't need that high end a PC, but faster is better, and the more memory you have, the better. And you don't need an expensive graphics card, because it doesn't use them anyway. How fast is your system, and how much memory do you have?

I've never had any problems with Poser 5. I did decide not to bother learning about Dynamic Hair, Clothing, the setup & the Face Room. Once that decision was made, Poser 5 was not so intimidating. I've temporarily shelved the Firefly renderer till I either understand it or get a more powerful computer (that won't happen in the near future.)

One great thing about Poser 5 is that it can use jpg bump maps. I recently installed something into Poser 4, and spent a great deal of time converting the bump maps to BUM format. That is a total pain in the ass. Yes, I keep Poser 4 around for some things that still tend to make my puny computer choke in Poser 5.

But Poser 5 is my main Poser app.

I started using Poser 5 on an Athlon 1.4 Thunderbird with 512 Mb and a Matrox G450 video card. Worked fine. A Mac G3 with a decent amount of memory should do the job too. More than 1 Gb of physical memory doesn't make much of a difference. 1 Gb is fine. I have the impression Poser 5 works a little better on Athlon boxes than on P4 boxes. I don't know the AnimeDoll, but MayaDoll is a good model, there's lot of clothes for her, she's free herself and most clothes and accessories are free too.

It would be more accurate to say that upon release, P5 was very configuration sensitive. My version v1.0 worked just fine. Other people couldn't get it up for love or money. As stated, that has been pretty much resolved with SR4.1. The DAZ Millenium meshes are pretty much meant for all. Each iteration has had problems, and qualities that keep them in use (one being that content creators have this urge to create content for the models they paid for). DAZ, in the form of Zygote, also created the P4 figures, which gave them something of an inside track. There are other models out there, some with better support than others, but with the advent of dynamic clothing, it is a lot easier to use the same resources across different meshes. DAZ also has what none of the other figure creators has...a substantial advertising budget. High end so far as your system goes is kind of subjective. Poser doesn't use any 3D accelerator functions; you get the same display functionality with a piddly little 4 meg Jaton PCI video card as you do out of the Radeon 9800+. What P5 needs is (1)Memory bandwidth. You are pushing a =lot= of information around with things like 20meg textures, 100,000 polygon meshes (the Dina model), floating point displacements with the shader nodes, and more floating point numbers with the dynamic cloth and hair. Probably the -best- solution at the moment is an Athlon 64, simply due to the onchip memory controller. But that is at the top of the curve;P5 runs quite well on chips that are a couple of generations back. (2) Storage space. The ability to add additional hard drives as needed; you can find yourself with a 10-20 gigabyte runtime before you know it. Plus you need space to store things like altered textures, morphs, etc. (3)Simplified processor architecture. P5 runs much better on AMD that Intel for that reason. Much of the Poser codebase is old; it simply was created in a time when the 486 was God. It doesn't know MMX or 3D Now, SSE is a mystery, and it sure as hell doesn't recognize hyperthreading. It's blind to multiple processors. The chip with the fewest tricks that require custom coding wins. At the moment, that is AMD. Animedoll is a derivative of Mayadoll, and is fun to work with.

Actually Poser 5 is pretty stable now with the newest SR. I was upset that they promised items that they didn't deliver. I wouldn't tell folks not to buy the program though as it has a lot of options that Poser 4 lacks, although I mainly use pro pack. As far as the mill chars go, I use them most, although I still use all but the posette and dork characters. Depends on what I need them for. Marque

"*>> Why the hate?

Because it represents change, and therefore must be feared and rejected.*"

This is both very untrue and very insulting.

After waiting years for a "brand new program built from the gound up," many were quite angered to find P5 was the same old P4/ProPack with other companies' technologies clumsily stapled on. IMO, most were mad because P5 didn't represent change. Same slow, kludgy interface, same old P4 bugs, and more new bugs. What made it worse is that P5 was CL's excuse to not fix the bugs in P4, they were "too busy working on P5." Right.

Add to that the Pace Interlok protection, known industry-wide to cause problems with legitimate buyers' computers. Then add no one could get a refund when the program wouldn't work. Add to that the head of CL admitted they released P5 with some 70+ known bugs because they "needed the money."

Add to all that the same old P4 bugs are still there! The only things CL have fixed are some of the new bugs they introduced in P5. In short, many people don't like waiting years for a new program only to find that--when it comes--they've been conned all along.

Yes, you'll see fewer and fewer complaints. IMO, that's because as new people enter the Poser world they'll buy the newest version. The won't know the history of it and they won't know how much smoother and faster P4 is. Also, many of the older users who've been through all this mess beginning with P4's release don't bother to post much about it anymore. I've passed up a number of threads because I'm just tired of arguing. And also, to CL's credit, because they did fix many of the stability problems.

Oh, and Bobbie Boucher: if you're not using Firefly and P5's add-ons, you're pretty much using P4/PP. It uses jpgs for bumps also. And png's for thumbnails.

Message edited on: 09/20/2004 23:05

"In short, many people don't like waiting years for a new program only to find that--when it comes--they've been conned all along" I wouldn't get Daz Studio then :)

This is both very untrue and very insulting. And was meant in jest. At least partially. I was paraphrasing Lothar of the Hill People.

svdl wrote: - it can't render really complicated scenes (Try rendering 9 V3 figures plus environment in P4!). On my Windows98 my Poser5 could only handle scenes which were much smaller than what my Poser4 can handle. Nor could my Poser 4 while Poser 5 was also in my PC. That is why I uninstalled my Poser 5. I have Poser 5 updates SR3 and SR4. Have more updates come out since, and if so, which and where? Which versions of Windows and which Poser 5 updates do I need for Poser 5 to run properly, and handle big scenes as svdl described hereinabove?

And why must Poser5 .cr2 files be so enormous? Can't Poser5 have been programmed so the texture nodes could be written in a much more compact style of language?

Which versions of Windows and which Poser 5 updates do I need for Poser 5 to run properly, and handle big scenes as svdl described hereinabove?
Upgrade from Win98 to 2k or XP, that'll make a huge difference, not only for Poser. This is 2004 - you shouldn't be using an operating system from 1998 any more. Seriously, 98->XP is one upgrade you won't regret. Message edited on: 09/21/2004 02:56

Jackson has it right. People don't like being lied to. CL announced that P5 would be all brand-new code; but it isn't - it's buggy old P4 with a lot of new features tacked on, rushed out when it was barely in alpha state, never mind beta, and with a user-hostile registration system which was included against all advice, and then removed when the advice proved (inevitably) to be correct. CL lost a lot of goodwill, and gave a lot of people an animus against P5, hence much of the negativity. The program still has a lot wrong with it, but as of SP4, is now definitely preferable to P4.

Agreed, and I was one of those who most strongly rallied against P5, and was admonished and demonized for it by people (mostly on Macs)for doing so, that didn't even have the software yet. I knew time was on my side, but it was a frustrating experience to say the least. Even if it weren't so horribly (and I mean horribly) bug-ridden in the beginning, the fact that it was P4 (with the same old glaring problems) with a bunch of 3rd-party addons dumped on top an already aged interface was a real slap in the face.

Anyway, P5 as it is now, is MUCH preferable to P4 and I actually enjoy using it. But Curious Labs has left a bitter taste in many people's mouths that were early adopters of the software.

I was in the first batch of UK buyers to receive a copy of Poser5 & while it had serious problems at the beginning I stuck with it. Now that most of the problems have been fixed or work arounds have been found I couldn't go back to using Poser4.

I love using Poser 5 and I've got nothing against it, I preferred it over P4 right from the moment I got P5. now I didn't get P5 right away when it cam out, I did wait for a while for all the dust to settle. As for DAZ, I agree all of there stuff is way to expensive. The best thing to do is when considering buying stuff at DAZ is become a platinum member and then it isn't that bad. You may also want to check the new 3D Starter Bundle's there offering at the moment, that is imo a very good deal. OK, you don't get the full M3/V3, but reduced resolution figures, but for me as M1/V1 user, there fine. Since stuff for M1/V1 is getting less and less, this is a good way to ensure I can still get new stuff for my Mill figures.

I jumped from Poser 3 to Poser 5. It's good, and the service releases have made a huge difference, but there's so much that's still badly done. The user can't easily configure the interface to get a pleasant, clear, combination of colours. Unless you can hack xml files, you're stuck with drab, low-contrast, shit-brown. The manual is badly written and poorly indexed, and the "help" brings up a .pdf of the manual. The changing of textures, colours, and other details in the Material Room can still need a rander before it can be seen. The ordinary, generally-used, elements of the Windows UI are frequently ignored, and it's not always clear which of the many windows within Poser is waiting to accept a command.

Like every other app I own and use, Poser5 has it's limitations and problems. But I adore it and you couldn't get it off me with a crowbar :o) It's a part of me, as Poser has been since '98. :] Fish

Everybody is right. P5 was pure crap when first released. CL released it early and VERY buggy due to cash flow problems. We went through 4 service packs until we have a fairly stable product, although some few things still don't work. We had a beta release forum here, after the release. People who bought it before the problems were know were told they couldn't get a refund. Promised added content was never delivered. 3rd party support for Content Paradise wound up never happening beyond the 'sity. There's a hack to remove it now, discovered by a user. Not to mention the internal company problems that were aired here in the forums (layoffs, reorgs, etc). That said, it's a ton better than P4 (now). Firefly, although at times a pain, gives beautiful renders. The material room and new expanded library structure beat P4's all to heck. The hair room still has problems. The Face room is often difficult to work with. Daz, the leader in 3rd party content, won't support P5 specific products. I love my P5, but CL as a company has lost any kind of trust or respect. They've been "merged" (bought) by e-frontier, a Japanese company, since all these problems. However, I for one won't be buying any other product CL has a hand in until it's been out for 3 or 4 months and I can see if the first buyers go through the hell we did on P5.

jim, I will let you know how things go -- I'll have P6 as rapidly as possible after release next year.

next year. What month? What features etc will be in it? Will we be able to change parentage and IK-parentage and IK-on/off settings as an animation runs? What price?

P5 was kicked out the door way too early so CL could rake in the dough during a cash crunch ...and left its customers with a craptastic app that still after 4 service releases sucks a mountain of ass.Sure theres alot of new and great stuff in P5 but they are mostly not fully realized and functional.Its resource usage is a train wreck. Thers no hardware accleleation or optimization of any kind. It behaves about as stable as a howler monkey on crack. I use P5 when it lets me but I really end up hating the expierence and its sucked all the joy out of posing for me. CL has lost me as a customer I never thought they would have boned their customers like that. There are many people are doing good things with P5. I am happy that some people are having a good time with P5. I am just not one of them. Thats just my 2 cents.

As hopeful as I am of a point light, I'd consider that a significant change. Don't count on it. Which means, in your particular case, you won't be getting P6. As for details, hell, you know as much as I do, lol. I've just paid attention to what I've seen stated by CL here, at RDNA, and at CL's website. P6 will be out in 2005, have limited additional features and focus on fixing stuff.

Ynsaen, That's what really ticks me off about the P6 info and CL. They're going to fix P5 and call it P6. Somehow I think they should fix P5 and call it P5. And give it to everyone who has bought P5.

I agree, PDXJims. Fixing broken features is NOT releasing a new version. it is fixing problems. New versions have new features.

Maybe you should first wait until P6 is released before complaining about it?

Stewer, we are just going by what CL has already publically stated about P6...it sounds more like a service release, then a new version.

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/news.ez?viewStory=644

Stewer, I'm not complaining about P6. I'm complaining about P5, and a corporate attitude that the buyers be screwed. I'm eager to see P6! I hope it has some new and exciting features. I also wish that they'd honor the promises their president made about content for P5. And fix the remaining bugs in P5. And apoligize for making the early release purchasers alpha test their product. A simple thank you for everyone who participated in the beta test of SR2 would be nice too. And the $20 discount that buyers got less than a month after the release would be nice too. I'll take mine in cash, please. I know. E-Frontier is a new company in charge. They have a great reputation in Japan. Good for them! They also purchased a responsibility to P5 purchasers when they bought the company. A P6 that is mostly bug fixes for P5 will definitly tick me off. As for "some new features", well, since we don't know what they are, I can't comment. I would hope they take better advantage of current software/hardware abilities, as well as doing some things that just about every other rendering package does now.

Even if they do add some new features, they would have to really be killer for me to upgrade. Why? Because some of the "killer features" in P5 still have not been corrected, and according to CL, will NOT be. (no more service releases) That said, they expect me to buy a new version when they never addressed features in the old version? Where's the fix for the preview bug introducted in the last sr update? Where's the fix for firefly's displacement mapping? I'm sorry, but if they refuse to fix issues in the current version, after many MANY people have run into them, how can I trust them to fix issues in another new version? I've avoided all the flavors of Vue for the same reason.. I see WAY too many people with problems, and the solution seems to be another new version, with something new fixed every 6 months. Fix the current version, and restore your customer's faith in you, BEFORE working on another new version.

Where's the fix for the preview bug introducted in the last sr update? Where's the fix for firefly's displacement mapping? What exact bugs are you referring to? I remember that the normals of displaced surfaces were fixed in SR4 - what else is wrong with displacements?

Displacements aren't distributed evenly over a surface. And occasionally, P5 "forgets" what the preview for an object is supposed to look like, and it appears white, as if untextured. You need to revisit the material room, and select every single material, for the preview to actually start working correctly. It's a sporadic thing, but I'd say with newly saved items, that it happens about 50% of the time.

Can you show me an example of the displacement problem? Maybe in a separate thread, so we don't hijack this one. Texture previews - I know what you mean, I've seen that too. Funny enough, the textures seem to work OK when being rendered.

Yeah they work fine, it's just that P5 gets confused when objects and or characters are loaded, and can;t display the preview properly. Honestly, every single time I play with displacement, I always get odd results. Someone said it might be the UV maps, some people said it might be poly size, but there is never a even displacement. (BTW this was with noise nodes, NOT with mapping, so the issue might be one of internal node math.)

You know, when you boil the whole P5 thing down to it's essence, this is what you get. P5 finally works. It finally has a workable library system, plus multiple runtime access. The material room is terrific and firefly is capable of some great renders. And the rest? Well, the face room sucks, the hair room sucks, dynamic cloth is pretty iffy, content paradise is a joke, and the setup room was a PP feature anyway. Now, I won't make any predictions on P6, but here's what IMO, CL should (could?) have done with P5. Dump the face and hair rooms and shove content paradise where the sun don't shine. Concentrate on the material and cloth rooms, fix the memory leaks, lack of undo and the 1000 other screaming faults that make poser a nightmare to work with. I got P5 from the git-go, struggled with it, gave up on it, patched it and now find it 'usable'. But I wouldn't say it's a pleasure to use. It's barely tolerable, at least, comparing it to practically every other upgrade I've used. If I have to shell out good money for a P6 that fixes what should have been fixed a long time ago, I may just do it.... but it'll be a minimum of 6 months after release, and very, very grudgingly. CL no longer has my trust. mac