Hello all i'm an owner of Poser 4 and Poser 5, . i like poser 5 because of the dynamic cloths, etc. but it's slow , SUPER slow. so i keep using Poser 4. Now i hear of Poser 6 coming soon and it seems good. but will i see improvements ? can i count on the foloowing? : - Can i use DAZ figures, like Vicky 3, etc. - Can i use other Poser figures and props that i had - Will rendering be faster and better? - Will there be aclothing room and its functionality near perfection, cloth that really attaches perfectly to the body of the figure , no matter what Pose it has.. I want for example, if i have a figure sitting, i want perfect flow of the cloth. will the dynamic clothes that i downloaded from some site here in renderosity, will it work in P6? -Will turning dials be as smooth as possible, unlike in my Poser 5 in macos x, where i turn the dial and it kind of locks up . -Will there be lighting effects such as Lense flare, etc INCLUDED in poser, so i don't have to always use some other 3D product. -I always download stuff from the net , but i seems i always have to convert it using Poser Maconverter, will my converted files work with poser 6. Well that's all i could think of . I know maybe nobody knows yet what poser 6 has, but maybe some ideas??? thanks

OH Guys, it's me again. I forgot another question - Will Poser 6 have a lip sync functionality , or can i at least use the current version of DAZ's Mimic?? that's all, thanks

As in the P5 release, it seems CL is only announcing new features. Improvements and bug fixes are not being mentioned, AFAIK. And there were very few in P5. So if you go by past experience, you can forget improved speed or memory handling. But, of course, we won't know for sure til the beta testers get their hands on it. I'm still hoping the new CL crew has better sense than the old one. Overall, for me, Poser 5 was a waste of money.

With Shade thrown in, it is for me. I had been thinking about getting Shade anyway. So in effect I am getting Poser 6 for almost free.

"Will there be aclothing room and its functionality near perfection, cloth that really attaches perfectly to the body of the figure , no matter what Pose it has.. I want for example, if i have a figure sitting, i want perfect flow of the cloth." Its nice to want-- but no program delivers this. Cloth simulations, whether Syflex, Maya, Reactor, Lightwave, XSI or whatever, nearly always require attention and tweaking. You won't find "perfection" in Poser 6, or anywhere else, I'll wager. . .

we won't know for sure til the beta testers get their hands on it. I assume by that you mean all those who have pre ordered and will be buying it as soon as it comes out. Real beta testers are under a non-disclosure agreement and could suffer heavy penalties and fines if they say anything (good or bad). tropob, We have not been given any (legitmate) reason to believe that p4 or p5 content for will not work in p6. re: render speed - faster or better compared to what? My bet is that if you turn on all the bells and whistles in p5 and turn off all the bells and whistles in p6, then p6 will be faster. If you turn on all the bells and whistles in p6 then p6 will render better. Assuming you or I have the ability to adjust the settings and lighting to produce a better render. re: clothing room - Can it get near perfection? sure, can you or i get it to operate near perfections? I doubt I will and I wish you luck. re: dials turning as smooth as possible - how smooth is that? P5 works smooth for me. re: Maconverter - what does Maconverter do? I know it convets files form "pc" to "mac" but what does it actually do. re: lip sync - I wouldn't count on it.

Short answer: Maconverter became obsolete when P5 came out. Longer answer: Prior to P5, Curious Labs had separate, somewhat incompatible file formats between the Mac and Windows versions of Poser (because CL did something Mac-specific with those file formats Apple told developers NEVER to do). MartinC wrote Maconverter as a Mac utility to convert Poser files back and forth between Mac and PC formats (for technical reasons this cannot be done in Windows). When P5 came out the file formats were standardized on a simpler model with no OS-specific features and no need for conversion. [this ought to be a FAQ item]

Repeat after me, Open GL. It may not improve the rendering speed, the the time saved not waiting for P5 to do test renders is worth the upgrade price all by it's self. WAG(Wild A** Guess) Will Poser 6 use the Shade rendering engine instead of Firefly? It make a lot of sense since Curious Labs is owned by the people who make Shade.

Will Poser 6 use the Shade rendering engine instead of Firefly? Seriously doubt it. I think the Shade/Poser relationship is too new for that depth of intigration. it may happen in the future, but i think they need to establish a translation from P5 materials to Shade materials before something on that level can happen.

Actually, Maconvertor isn't obsolete totally on OSX. It fixes thumbnails from PC rsr's :)

Yup, but you don't need MacConverter to create Mac thumbnails from rsr files. You can do it from the OS X command line, and I may have a Python or shell script somewhere to automate that as well.

stewer, what is the command for converting the rsr's to png?

You don't convert them to png, you just copy them to the resource fork of the respective file (.rsr files on Windows are just plain copies of what the Mac versions of Poser <= 4 keep in its resource files). Mac OS X has exposed the resource fork to the command line as a virtual directory (IMHO a very ugly dirty hack, but well...). E.g. if your file is called pose.pz2, you can access it's resource fork as pose.pz2/rsrc. The command to copy a pose.rsr file to the resource fork of pose.pz2 would then be

$ cp pose.rsr pose.pz2/rsrc

Message edited on: 03/08/2005 17:14

So they really did use completely unadulterated decompiled resources as RSRC files. Dayum. You can call that hack ugly, but it sure saves the bacon here.

Well, the way Poser does it on Windows is fine, IMHO - that way, the code to parse the resource can be identical on both platforms. What's hacky IMHO is how OS X' shell has a duality where the resource file pretends to be in a directory which otherwise appears as a file only. It doesn't make sense to someone coming from a Unix background, nor does it to someone from a Mac background, and it's highly inconsistent with the rest of the system.

Message edited on: 03/08/2005 18:40

Think I will still run it through mac convertor :)

Do you want Shade? If you do, Poser 6 bundle w Shade is not bad. If you don't want Shade, and since you already have Poser 5 it's kind of hard to tell since CL hasn't said much about Poser 6 yet. :P Depends how into OpenGl you are I guess, and they'll leak more "secrets" as the launch approaches.

"Depends how into OpenGL you are" As opposed to what? DirectX? OpenGL was made by Silicon Graphics for this kind of application. It's built into pretty much every box made in the last four years, Mac or PC. While it didn't come to pass that it would replace software ray tracer renderers (yet), rendering is time consuming and any opportunity to reduce development time is a [martha]Good Thing[/martha].