Bryce is owned by DAZ and Vue by someone else. I seriously doubt CL would supply a conversion for their competitor's products. If anything, I would say that the compatibility would be with Shade since CL merged with its manufacturers. But then, its been mentioned that they might be trying to keep the 2 products as separate as possible...which is counter-intuitive to me.

What we need is a Magic 8 Ball prop with the names of all the developers who have been silent lately (which is a substantial number), and a couple of phrases such as "ask again later" and "I'm under NDA, too". We are assuming that there are new humans, although it might be interesting to extrapolate back from the 2 images of shadows and see if they could be cast by any of the known figures (multi-dimensional prying...... scary). The extra content in Poser 5 also included several themes such as Japanese and Medieval. It is possible that in lieu of new figures they are adding themes: Art Deco, Horror, Wild West, whatever. I just hope that there aren't more cartoon figures, the ProPack suite was pretty much wasted. Carolly

I really can't imagine them NOT updating the figures... As much as I love EJ, the out of the box judy is a bit of a nightmare. I HAVE gotten a few good caracters out of her, but it's hard. Don's OK though. The Cover art that the One store that jumped the gun showed had a pretty good looking male figure on it... I suppose it might have been a heavily morphed Mike (Given That Mike and Vicky were humerously enough on the Poser 5 cover) or it could be a new figure, perhaps... hmmm...

LD, wasn't ChrisD's orginal design inspired by some painting?

Frazetta.

Curious labs didnt buy Shade...the makers of shade bought Curious Labs. it was initialy only in japan but they slated CL to bring out the english version. and for Poser 6.. thay had better have started from the ground up. its time poser joind us in the present. at least they should have hardware support and openGL. If they knew anything they would just hire Daz3D to create there models. there models have always been odd and pretty much a jolk.

Message edited on: 02/06/2005 03:13

The animals promised for poser5 perhaps? Grace who do you think created the Poser4 figures? It was Daz3D, honest :D

"It was Daz3D, honest :D"

I don't think so, how about Zygote.....

Message edited on: 02/06/2005 06:27

In regard to the "I want it now" posts (which I understand were meant semi-kiddingly, but I will comment nonetheless), try to recall the fiasco when CL prematurely released a certain p5rogram in some part due to community demand. Egad, I hope they take their sweeeeet time with P6! Remember the complaints? The gnashing of teeth? The vehement chanting of picket sign wielding protesters? Remember the hours of time we wasted setting up scenes and having them crash on us? No? Well, nevermind then.

As for the "ho hum" attitude by some toward this single unveiled feature.....give it a chance. Maybe you farm out your rendering to a different program because you're dissatisfied with P5, but don't you CRAVE/PREFER/WANT a P6 that won't make that necessary?

Some features of P5 are actually quite astounding when used properly (and heavily considering its price point). Specifically, the Cloth Room is amazing. The Material Room, although initially horribly overwhelming, is capacious in its variety. If you refuse to explore P5's intricasies, or if your need for immediate gratification is disappointed by the lack of a "Magically Render Perfect Image" button, you will be missing out on a great deal of P5's greatness. P5 can help produce some excellent work. Likewise i've seen horrible imagery produced from Lightwave, CD4, Maya, etc. thanks to a lack of attention to detail and zero inventiveness. And at several times the price, yet.

Perhaps Poser 5 isn't capable of producing results that rival Lightwave or Maya in the hands of equally capable artisans. And perhaps there IS a particular unmistakeable 'look' to a Poser image that garners derision and scorn amongst the "real" 3D super-users. Perhaps. But remember: a masterful surgeon doesn't use a hammer to perform an operation, YET a carpenter wouldn't be caught dead without one. (*I swear there was supposed to be a point to this metaphor.)

All that being said......please release it NOW, show us more and better features immediately, make it be better than anything else, give us documentation that is compleat and invariably explicative, release the PC and Mac versions simultaneously, provide dual processor support, cut the price in half, and oh yeah, add a "Magically Render Perfect Image" button! :)

DAZ3D was the poser section of Zygote before it became independent.

Correct, the folks at DAZ3D were the "Poser specialists" of Zygote who later formed their own company. If you purchased the original Victoria 1, you'll notice that she installs in "Zygote People" folders and not DAZ3D folders. And, it was those same people (I believe) who provided the Poser 3 and 4 characters (not sure about previous versions).

Message edited on: 02/06/2005 10:25

All that being said......please release it NOW LOL No, please don't. Wait until it's ready. Follow the wise advice of Paul Mason ... "We shall sell NO program before its time."

Sorry I forgot the name Zygote (it's been a while) :D

Message edited on: 02/06/2005 11:50

I wouldent be suprised if they intergrated or made some or most of Shade into Poser6

Is there going to be a Lightwave plug-in available before Poser 6 is available or will I still have to use Poser 4 Pro?

No lightwave plug in that I've seen. Curious Labs does not produce plug-ins. Shade and Poser will not intermingle in the foreseeable future. Work on Poser 6 started roughly 3 to 6 months after Poser 5 was released. As in, before the first patch for P5. Curious Labs didn't relese the program only because it was demanded. The parent company at that time essentially gave them no choice -- they did not want, and did not plan, to release it the way it came out. They simply had no real choice in the matter at the time -- it was release it as it was, or cease to be. They will not repeat that again. Hardware support in Poser would kill the ability of the program to be used on the machines of people who buy more copies of it that we do. Don't get all hopefull for open GL, which is a bad means to an end. Ask instead that they improve what really irks you -- the display of transparency and the responsiveness of the preview window. If there are no new human figures in P6, it'll be a pretty serious change, lol. Animals: the horse is not just dead, the maggots are almost finsihed with it. Move on to the next one. P5 already supports light gels (most of the nodes can be assigned to a light). In order to bring over Bryce and Vue materials, those system would need to shift the way they create those matierals rather drastically. Shader structures between even the most expensive apps are not interchangeable -- you either have to go with a common rendering agent (a la renderman) or simply recreate them. Interesting thing about intuition is that it slides by logic. Poser and Shade have two different markets. We -- that is, the artist market -- are NOT the most important one. While there is a great deal of wonderful compatibility between the two already and that will most certainly be improved on, Poser will still be a stand alone, and shade will continue to be so as well. It makes a great deal of fiscal and market sense. But it doesn't give us what we all really want: the single app that does it all for under 300 bucks. model, pose, terrain, animate. that dream is still alive though. mebbe someday... (sorry for being somewhat terse in this -- busy day...)

"Hardware support in Poser would kill the ability of the program to be used on the machines of people who buy more copies of it that we do. Don't get all hopefull for open GL, which is a bad means to an end." Eh? OpenGL is the industry standard for 3D apps. Max, lightwave, Maya, Cinema4D, trueSpace, etcetcetcetc all have OpenGl support you know.. and have had it for several years. as to the hardware end? well OpenGL is supported by 3DFX cards, Nividia, ATI..... so please. how is it a bad means to an end? since as I stated it's used for apps that have a much larger dollar value than Poser, are the industry standard, is used extensively in gaming, is supported at the hardware level on any machine running a Voodoo/Geforce/Raedon/Diamond/etc, just HOW is it a bad choice???? I mean.. customers using Max/Lightwave/Maya like ILM, WETA, (the list goes on) are wrong? I think an explanation is in order you know... since you are making no sense at all? would you prefer DirectX support? (also in Max/Lightwave/Maya/Cinema4D/trueSpace.....)

Anyone who has had to deal with the OpenGL issues in Vue 4 (or any and every application that uses it, up to and including Maya. And let's not forget Daz3D and -its- troubles with OpenGL...) knows exactly how counterproductive it would be. And remember that there is a very large ($$$$$) difference between a hardware acclerator card for rendering purposes, and the kind of accelerated display card that I wager 99.99999% of the people here have. None of the game cards are actual 'hardware rendering accelerators'. They are for display purposes only, and output straight to the RAMDAC; no backfeed buffer to the system to output back into a running app as a rendered image. Admittedly, if you had an $800 Oxygen class card, it would be nice to fully utilize it. But old though it is, Poser's scanline renderer will work with hardware configs that a power gamer would split a giblet over. With the expansion of Vue Infinite's material editor, and the native .shd support, I wonder if it would be possible to write a Python translator for -many or most- of the material room functions (assuming they are exposed to Python in the first place). And I wouldn't hold your breath on that one, ynsaen. Someone would buy it and wreck it as soon as it appeared... :P

OpenGL is neither stable nor standardized. The specifics of the manner in which it is implemented differ and vary across each and every one of the programs and hardware platforms you just noted. It is also not backwards compatible, and there are more users of Poser (and more potentialones) without thsoe cards noted than there are with. OpenGL's current standard won't run on certain intel graphics chips -- which were a standard included with many affordbly priced OTS systems for several years that are still in widespread use (the general population base of systems worldwide is still at a point equivalent to about 4 years ago -- and this is a worldwide market that involves people who have never heard of any of us and are unlikely to ever do so) -- so it is NOT a reasonable standard for a package which is specifically targeted at the entry level, human motion based needs market. The marketplace that we are all part of here -- this rosity/pros/rdna/rotica, whatever groups of people that we all interealate with actually comprise only about a thrid of the overall market for Poser. The other two thirds are using much older systems and software than the bulk of us are. And it is for that reason -- the ongoing growth and wider range of potential systems -- that open GL is a bad idea. In short: because it makes more economic sense on the larger scale than we typcially think of.

heh -- xposted, dale. lol yeah, I'm not holding my breath -- but I can dream, can't I? I'll have to dig into VI's new set up -- I'm really, really weak in my vue knowledge...

I really do hope that OpenGL isn't implemented in Poser 6. I really love Poser 5, it runs so great. Unlike DAZ Studio indeed, it's so slow with OpenGL. I never use OpenGL (or DirectX) with TrueSpace either. Nover ever with Vue 4 or 5, it's a nightmare. Now DAZ is ruining Bryce with their OpenGL quest too, and they can't even get it completed at the moment. Also when running Shade, I'm getting all kinds of OpenGL related problems. If Poser 6 will become dependant on OpenGL technology then I will not upgrade, I don't need another OpenGL slowness nightmare on my machine. Just to make one thing clear, I can run OpenGL on my Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb, but once I'm working on a larger scene it's sooooo slow.

And the problem Khai, is that all those apps run different variations of 'OpenGL'. The standard has been rewritten almost as much as DirectX has, and the rapid fire introduction of Shader1, 2, and now Shader 3 has changed it even more. That fundamental standard has been shrinking steadily under the assault of corporations wanting to produce the -game card- with the kickin ass best experience. The further you stray from that base core, which is rather bland nowadays, the greater your fault tolerance slides. If they could implement an OpenGL option that was stable, releases resources correctly, etc, cool. But considering all the service releases of -every- major app that seems to include at least one reference to OpenGL (and considering the contempt some hold the CL coders in), it could be a bigger fubar than the copy protection fiasco of P5 v1.00 was. It's been pretty well proven that Nvidia and ATI are deliberately introducing code drift in blatant disregard of the 'standard' to try and woo gamers...and to make the other guys hardware look less cool. Plus if you really look at it, what are the justifcations for it? "Well, everyone does it!" In some locations, 'everyone' is tattooed from ankle to neck. Getting OpenGl display acceleration isn't going to give Poser any more credit with the app snobs. "I just spent $$$$$$$$$ on my nifty XDT346782620890 Super Gamers Card and this POS software don't use it?" Talk about asking someone else to justify something. And let's face it; the 3DFX implementation of OpenGL is pathetic to begin with. This is not easy to do; it never has been.

interesting.. I run OpenGL here with tS with no problems on a Geforce 4.... and again with no problems with Maya PLE... well, we'll see. I know that millions of users use OpenGL everyday with few problems.. in games like UT, Halflife 2, Quake...... while the implementation is different, the underlying codebase / driver base is the same...

Xposted with you, ynsaen... Not picking on you, Khai. But I spent some time playing around with the Crystal Space open source game engine, when they were trying to hammer out the OpenGL issues that were vital to its cross platform nature. It was a nightmare, and a couple of coders said to hell with it. They finally scrapped all they had and started over, and it works now, but there are still a lot of issues. And this is code that is designed to use a game card for what it was meant to be used for.

Not wanting Open GL is ridiculous! That was one of the main gripes when Poser 5 came out. No multiple levels of undo and no Open GL. It can't be hard giving the user the option to set up either software(the actual Poser 5 method) or OpenGL previews in setting preferences like 3D Studio Max and other programs do.

If you think it easy, offer to code it for them.

With the program being as close to release as it is, I doubt that it'll be possible to make any major changes in the software's features now.

The "P6 plan" -- if I can call it that -- is mostly likely pretty well set in stone.

Whatever the new features will be......is what they already are.

Hopefully, everyone will get what they want. As if that's possible.

Personally, I think that it's going to be all that I could desire in the program -- and more.

I run several apps with OpenGL on my NVidia card; no problems. I credit it with cutting my render times.

I know that millions of users use OpenGL everyday with few problems.. in games like UT, Halflife 2, Quake...... I run several apps with OpenGL on my NVidia card; no problems. I credit it with cutting my render times. I know of millions as well. However, go run those applications on a system with a 16MB onboard graphics card that pulls ram from the main memory. These systems outnumber systems such as yours by a factor of nearly 10 to 1 (about 9.2, iirc). hospitals, doctor's offices, lawyers, schools, dry cleaners, hairdressers, mechanics, printhouses, magazines, and more all use poser. The number of people like that using poser outnumber people like us 2 to 1. And they do NOT have nvidia cards or radeons. Poser works on them. Because it doesn't use OpenGL. (and note I have steadfastly refused to comment on DX) Also -- how exactly does open GL cut your render time? I'm curious. It can't be hard giving the user the option to set up either software(the actual Poser 5 method) or OpenGL previews in setting preferences like 3D Studio Max and other programs do. Well, it can be hard, but that's irrelevant. An option might be a handy thing to have. Options are always good things. However, what is the benefit of OpenGL? How does it improve the program? What does it give to it, specifically? You can search this forum and see that I'm not beyond changing my mind about the idea, as well -- I'm just waiting for someone to explain why it's a good idea given what I've already noted about broadest compatibility. And, that is the whole of my point. Thus far, the explanations I've been given for it are pretty simple: better transparency viewing and faster response in the window scene. The price for such is loss of the modes that are already present in Poser -- OpenGL pretty much sucks royally at anything resembling cartoon with line, doess wireframe shaded pisspoor (antialiasing is one of the things that is changed most frequently according to the mfg of the card -- no two ranges of card produced do it the same way), and it is slowed by the same things that slow down the current previes in the same exact way. Which is not to say that OpenGL is a bad thing. It's not. It's just not the best thing for Content Creation. It is one of the best things for Content Display. Games are Content Display. Poser is Content Creation.

Ynasen if you are going to quote me use the entire line. "while the implementation is different, the underlying codebase / driver base is the same.." I already noted that "Games are Content Display. Poser is Content Creation." even then you are wrong. Poser is rendering of already created content. not that much different from rendering a game figure. why? the figure is already made. all that is changing is the co-ordinates of the vertexes in 3d Space. same as a game. also do you know just how many Geforce 2 cards are out there? in the UK there was a phase where 60% of all machines were shipped with a Geforce2 or Geforce2 shipset. was the US different?

Penetration for the total market of GF2 was 7%. And that was 2% higher than Nvidia was shooting for. For the market of new units, penetration, worldwide, was 21%. Damn near killed ATI in the lower end spectrum -- but they were only then returning to competition at that point and I'd say have come back rather nicely. Was a good thing, too -- when I sold I made enough to make a down on a house. Intel's penetration, however, was 18% worldwide total, and 37% new. SiS was the big dog there, claiming all but 3% of the rest of the market across the board. With a crappier chipset than even intel offered. SiS has been the company to suffer the most, as well, with The Nvidia assault on the OEM quarter. I didn't quote that segment because I'd already addressed it, Khai. That's all. To repeat: The specific implementation by each game system and each hardware vendor is different. All of them change the code to suit their particular software prerenderer (games) or their firmware (cards). So no -- the underlying codebase/driver is not the same -- it's not even the same across versions (the OpenGL implementation in the Geforce2 is different from prior and later cards, for example). This is the why the development community around OpenGL is always bitching at the card makers. But we're not talking about final rendering with openGL here, I would hope. Hardware rendering isn't even close to the level of quality software provides. Which is why all game imagery is prerendered first. Using software engines or mattes. We're talking about preview display. And for preview display, I'm still waiting for the benefit of switching -- have been for several months -- when one remembers that broadest compatibility is the first key.

Looking at the customers that use Poser, I don't think that CL will force OpenGL upon us at all. Why, sinply because most of the user do not use high end machines. One avarage pc (AMD/Intel 2.00 - 2.8Ghz, 512Mb RAM and a GeForce 4 / Radeon 9600/9800) OpenGL tends to be very very slow when using a bit larger scenes. I'm not talking about one poser figure only, with that OpenGL will be running very well. The problem comes when one get's a little more creative and use more figures and some other items. That's when OpenGL tends to be very slow, it's too demanding for the system. I do simply switch it off when creating larger scenes in Vue 5, TrueSpace 6.6 or whatever application I may be using that can handle OpenGL. That's not stated that OpenGL doesn't work on my system, it works fine, but it's way to slow. To really take advatage of OpenGL, I would need a high end gfx card and I just can't afford that one. An avarage person just can't afford those and most people using Poser do just use average machines with it. I know their are some exceptions, a number of people do use high end machines and they are begging for OpenGL, but they aren't the majority. I cannot afford a system that can handle OpenGL comfortably when it comes to creating larger scenes, so that't why I would pass on a OpenGL only application, but I don't think that CL is going to create Poser like that, they will give us an option. By the way I'm not talking about rendering in OpenGL either, but about previewing and the workspace being OpenGL. That already is a nigthmare for me, and I can't image how terrible rendering OpenGL would be. I've seen it in DAZ Studio and DAZ was so proud of it when they announced it. I just looked at it and wondered why they get so excited about it anyway, the OpenGL rendering didn't come close to the software rendering at all.

Attached Link: http://www.sculpture.fr.vu

Please let us be able to customize the color and background of the interface for better contrast and aesthetics.

I have a couple of requests that probably wouldn't take much ... they're easy, I promise! LOL (1) Create some better default lights. More neutral (white and gray) instead of colored. Many people don't change the lighting, which is why so many Poser renders have a very heavy orange cast to them. (2) Change the default hair color in the hair room. The existing default is too light and too shiny.

Hmmm... I tend to wonder if the independent shadow rendering means they are adding a lighting room...

Adding a lighting room? A whole room just to play with lights? :) Since lighting is THE most important part of making an image, it would make a lot of sense. Carolly

Carolly, that's just my speculation... it could just be advanced render settings as well.

I would trade the Content Paradise with a Light Room... provided it doesn't take two minutes to open :) And I could live without open GL even if I have not had many problem with them in other softwares, but I could use some more support for MAT and MOR poses.

A light room would be brilliant (forgive the pun) but I doubt we'll get one in Poser6, I don't think anyone mentioned it when CL was asking for suggestions of what to include/improve in the new version.