Hi,
I work with poser 5.
I was wondering if Poser 6 is worth the update.
I am having a hard time manipulating Michael 3 and Victoria 3 with all those polygons.

I've read that Poser 6 now supports software and OpenGL hardware preview. Will this make a difference while manipulating the characters in the viewport?

Should I also consider upgrading my computer or bying a new one?

I have
Xeon Dual CPU 2.40 GHz
2 GB of RAM
ATI 9600 (Powered by Sapphire)

Thanks!

Message edited on: 02/21/2005 12:20

...dollar for dollar P6 is clearly a bargain in the 3d software world if you do stills, although you'll find lotsa folks who love to fuss about the price anyway ;)

P6 isn't even out yet, so it's impossible to say if it's worth the upgrade for you. Obviously, it should be worth it by far, since the new features it will have seem to be very useful and improved. Yes, with a good graphics card, OpenGL will help accellerate the viewport (or onscreen) display rate of your figures, and give you a more accurate preview.

Well, it was a no brainer for me, since I had been thinking about buying shade anyway, and am in the process of learning to do basic modeling. I kind of wanted the mid priced version, but starting out with the LE version is probably best anyway:) Frankly, for V3/M3 users in p5, the reduced res figures are a perfect match. The extra smoothing removes most of the problems with jagged edges, and the light weight figures don't have some of the problems that the others do. eric

The reduced res? The extra smoothing with jagged effects? light weight figures? Tell me more, never heard of those. Are those options in Mk 3 and Vic3?

...you're right, max. I'm taking a leap of faith that P6 will be usable out of the box, but hey, the glass is half full ;)

Two of the P6 features that convinced me to preorder are - point lights; - OpenGL preview. And I suspect there won't be any more service packs for P5, which still has some issues with dynamic hair, and raytraced shadows in large scenes sometimes completely mess up the render. The features mentioned above - especially the point lights! - are worth the upgrade price IMO. Your system is pretty cool, good processing power, good graphics card, and enough RAM. No need to upgrade, and I believe that a significantly faster system than yours will cost a LOT of money. I don't know what disk(s) you have in that box, it might be worth installing one or two WD Raptors (fastest SATA disks on the market right now).

Well, my boss will pay for anything. WD Raptors<-- Hard Drive?

Western Digital Raptor: 36 GB or 73 GB Serial ATA hard drives. 10,000 RPM, 8 MB cache. Pricey (I paid 200 for a 73 GB Raptor, while I paid 65 for a 80 GB 7200 RPM standard IDE disk, just a couple of months ago) but very fast and very reliable, the hardware comes from their SCSI assembly line. Your system might have a SCSI controller, it sounds like a server or fast workstation machine to me. In that case, Seagate Cheetah 15,000 RPM disks are the fastest solution - but they're quite noisy.

WD Raptor = Western Digital SATA hard drive. Note that SATA is quite different from IDE and EIDE (drives are not interchangeable between interfaces, like SCSI and EIDE). And as far as I know, you still need an EIDE drive to boot from. But, if you have a Dual Xeon board, it should have a pair of SATA interfaces (one drive each, I think). SATA drives run at 10,000 RPM and are usually configured in a RAID setup.

No, you can safely boot from a SATA drive or a SATA RAID array, my newest system is configured that way. Most SATA drives still run at 7,200 RPM, two months ago at least. Then the only non-SCSI 10,000 RPM drives where those WD Raptors. Serial ATA uses narrow cables, EIDE (or Parallel ATA) uses 40 or 80 pin flatcables. There are converters you can use to connect a PATA drive to a SATA cable. There is a difference in maximum speed. Parallel ATA maxes out at 133 MB/s (Ultra DMA 133), Serial ATA 1 runs at 150 MB/s and the new Serial ATA 2 runs at 300 MB/s. Of course, these are the maximum transfer rates of the controllers. No disk can reach those rates physically (yet!).

Okay, wasn't certain about that. I have SATA interfaces on my Intel Dual Xeon system, but have not used them (can't afford the drives and am not particularly interested in rebuilding my system at this time). :) What would be the advantage of putting an EIDE (PATA) drive onto a SATA interface? As you note, and I know, none of these drives can even reach the transfer rates of EIDE. RAID maybe, but I would rather SATA drives - right tool for the right job, as it were.

Advantage of putting an EIDE drive onto a SATA interface? None, actually. There was one, about 18 months ago: SATA interfaces were up and coming on mainboards, but SATA drives were very hard to come by. So by using a converter you could plug a PATA drive into a SATA connector. Useful when your mainboard has run out of PATA connectors. I my system of those days, I had a DVD player and a CD rewriter (both PATA) and two PATA disks. When I wanted to add another disk, I had to use the SATA interface on the mainboard, since the PATA interfaces were full. Then it came in quite handy. I seriously doubt whether those converters are still available. By the way, most SATA drives are actually PATA drives with the converter built right into the box. Only a few are "true SATA" Even those Raptors have ordinary PATA electronics inside, and a Marvel converter chip. Those Marvel chips can get very hot during operation. Be sure to cool SATA drives! An extra fan is no luxury.

The reduced res? Mike and vicky are available as lo res figures as well as their standard res counterparts. The benefit, much easier on the system than the original and they look almost identical to renders made with originals. The only draw back is that morphs made for originals don't work, so specially made characters won't look the same (they come with most of the regular morphs that came with the morph packs) >>The extra smoothing with jagged effects? I'm referring to P5s smoothing option. It will make things that P4 showed jagged edges on look smooth. >>light weight figures? Fewer polys means fewer resources required. These are seperate figures from the normal ones, and are available at daz someplace. I still find working with normal M3 to be somewhat frustrating in P5, so I just use the reduced res instead.... eric

I was wondering if Poser 6 is worth the update.

I'm betting a small amount of money that it is. I believe that it's going to be.

Ask the question again in a month or two.

" Well, my boss will pay for anything." starts writing a list for Mattsblood ;)

"Should I also consider upgrading my computer or bying a new one? I have Xeon Dual CPU 2.40 GHz 2 GB of RAM ATI 9600 (Powered by Sapphire)" That is hilarius!

Of course you have to buy a new one! For me, that is.

I take old run down systems like that and refurbish them. Then I give them to the needy (like me). If you would like to donate that system, IM me and I will send you a prepaid shipping label. Of course the donation is not tax deductable, but you will have room in your office for a new top of the line machine! ;-)

Oh, I forgot to add. I do not take old CRT type monitors, only flat panel displays 19" or larger. ;-)

"Should I also consider upgrading my computer or bying a new one?

I have
Xeon Dual CPU 2.40 GHz
2 GB of RAM
ATI 9600 (Powered by Sapphire)"

Mattsblood,

Just some food for thought about upgrading (machine and poser).

1. Poser is NOT multithreaded, which means your second CPU does nothing for Poser, in fact, when using Poser only, the second CPU actually degrades performance (but not enough that you would actually notice it without running benchmarks). There is no mention about multitreading support in Poser 6, so you could increase your performance with a single CPU running at 3.4 GHz or more. But, I use Poser 5 a lot on a 2.2GHz Laptop and have no real complaints about V3 performance, so your performance issues may reside in conflicts in the default IRQ mapping (Windows likes to assign everything to 11, especially the IDE controller and the graphics card - then performance really stinks for 3D work). Of course, if you tend to use your computer for other things while Poser is rendering, or if you have other applications that support multithreading, then the second CPU is a real plus!!!!!

2)If you upgrade to Poser 6, upgrading your graphics card to a Pro level OGL card may help a great deal. Although gaming cards do support OGL, they only support a small subset of the hardware accelerated OGL commands. Pro level cards (even on the low end, which are about the same cost as high end gaming cards) have much better OGL suport (hardware), and are much more stable in Pro OGL applications. Of course, this also depends on how much of the OGL instruction set that CL has put into P6. It may not have a real "rich" OGL implementation, and a high end gamming card may perform as well as a Pro card.

Bottom line, it's hard to say just how much of a performance boost the OGL support in Poser will give at this point. More info would be needed from CL to even begin to speculate (OGL support doesn't always mean good OGL support). As for upgrading your machine, first I would try to find and fix anything that might be causing performance hits. If your still not satisfied with performance, and have the funds, hardware upgrades almost always improve application performance, but then users will always push the hardware to it's limits, and things slow down, then it's time to upgrade (never ending cycle).

Just my 2 cents.

Good Luck!

PS: I pre ordered, too good of a price to pass up given the inclusion of Shade LE (may not ever use, but will be nice to give it a good try out) and the improvements in the render engine.

Actually, yes, you should upgrade you computer... to a Mac dual G5. (/me ducks and runzlakhell, laughing maniacally...) Okay, in honesty - the dual Xeon should run it well enough. Otherwise, it'll be hard to tell if P6 will be "worth it", since nobody outside of CL and their cadre of beta testers know what it can and cannot do yet. I'm personally holding out until I hear from other Mac users (post-release) on any increases in efficiency and speed before I bother. /P

Upgrade.... to what? 7 Xeon processors and 22 HD's etc,etc...lol and theres me quiet happy with my p4 2.4ghz and only 1gb ram, and an Nvidia 5950... and to what end... Poser 5 doesnt even use the graphics card...(ok poser6 will, finally) but will they fix that memory leek that was in Poser5? hmmm....lets hope so. and i hope they also put in support for Dual processors, as thats the route i would go on my next upgrade... ohh and what about 64bit? hmmm and custard programming with cheese sauce...lol... too much goobledeeegook

Ok Thanks you guys! since Its a Poser Forum, I was asking questions about Poser. But you gotta understand that I work as a graphic artist. I basically do 3D. I use Poser 5 and Cinema 4D 8.5. The Dual CPU is for Cinema 4D. I've been working with those softwares for years. I know that I have a pretty good machine. I have really big contracts (its in million $. I work for a big company). For the big time lines and delays, I think I need faster. Everybody at my job are asking me: What can you do to make it faster... Thats why I'm asking those questions. I have asked questions in 4 forums. I need suggestions. Xeon Dual CPU 3.5 GHz? NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400? Max the RAM available? Cinema 4D 8.5 upgrade to Cinema 4D 9.1? Poser 5 to Poser 6 (when available)? Thanks guys I need the info for today!!!

• Faster processors here won't gain you as much as the cost. Adding (in quotes here) "1 GHz" only increases performance by a small percentage. HT is enabled, right? * Video card isn't going to improve speed, but a Pro card may improve visualization before rendering (better OpenGL support). Personally, I prefer nVidia to ATI. Your mileage may vary. * Unless you get 64-bit cpus, 2GB is max. I have 4GB on a Dual Xeon, but only 3GB is seen in WinXP Pro and applications are still limited to 2GB. * C4D R9.1, IMO, is faster than 8.5. Plus, the new features (such as SPDs) are worth the upgrade. * Poser 6, but your workflow may be hurt for a while if it has flaws. Robert

OOOhhhh,

This is for work, not home, that makes a big difference.

Xeon Dual CPU 3.5 GHz? - yes
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400? - yes (PCIe right?)
Max the RAM available? - 2 Gb or more
Cinema 4D 8.5 upgrade to Cinema 4D 9.1? Can't say
Poser 5 to Poser 6 (when available)? Yes, if it will remain a part of your workflow for some time to come.

If you are pushing your machine on a daily basis, the hardware upgrade makes VERY good business sense. Improved productivity will pay for the cost of the machine in a few months (2-6, depending on your salary, and work "habits"). You could also use your old machine to start a render farm, which will also boost production a great deal (I'd upgrade it to at least 1Gb of RAM though).

The upgrade to Poser 6, I'd say yes, but it's crap shoot right now. To me, the $40 savings over the regular upgrade price make it a no brainer, if you plan to keep Poser as a important part of your tool set. Just make sure everyone understands that it may be a while before Poser 6 is fully integrated into the workflow, since the status of usable plugs for Poser 6 to C4D isn't known right now. The improved render engine in Poser 6 should be justification enough, as you can use it to create high quality demo images without the exporting to C4D. Anything that streamlines workflow is always a plus. Of course Shade LE could prove to be a very valuable addition to your tool set as well.

"Just make sure everyone understands that it may be a while before Poser 6 is fully integrated into the workflow, since the status of usable plugs for Poser 6 to C4D isn't known right now." Well it is now with Reiss Studios. They just came out with BodyStudio for C4D. The company bought it and it works like a charm!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2077843

And upgrade your disks to the fastest you can get! Disks are often the main bottleneck. You have Xeon processors, they can handle 64 GB RAM max. If your mainboard supports it, go for at least 3 GB RAM - preferably 4 GB, then you can use dual channel - and try Win2003Server (Enterprise) for an OS. It'll make use of the available RAM. Poser still won't use more than 2 GB, it's not designed to work with larger memory sizes. I don't know about Poser 6 memory management, but 2 GB is a Poser 5 limit. Why more than 2 GB physical memory? To give other apps, including the OS, some breathing room. With 4 GB of RAM, your system cache will be large enough to prevent disk swapping while running Poser (or C4D). Still, using the fastest disks you can get is advisable. There's been quite a discussion in the Poser Technical forum about building an optimal Poser rig (see attached link), you might get some useful info there.

Ah yes, BodyStudio for C4D. 1. Windows only. 2. I've heard that it has problems with C4D R9.0. 3. I doubt that it will work completely with Poser 6, but should work with Poser 5- features as long as the file formats haven't been updated/changed. 4. I'm decidedly biased against it because it took 2.5 years to release (I think that I may have had something to do with its recent release, but then I could be paranoid), it costs $180 (more than most people paid for Poser 5!!), and they have no intention to release a MacOS version. In regards to svdl - I'm glad his company is paying for this! A mainboard/cpu/ram/Windows/drive update of this magnitude could be thousands!!! ;)

If Reiss Studios is already stating that their Plug will support Poser 6, then the upgrade should be an easy decision.

They do not state that.