After 9 days of testing and experimentation and manual reading, there's a lot to like about Poser 6, but...

Hair props losing their parenting during cloth simulation.

Python scripts returning various new kinds of error messages.

Poserfusion failing to carry P6 morph changes into Shade scene.

Firefly giving odd rendering artifacts like grayed out hair and eyes in some frames.

Final render options all significantly slower than Cinema 4D.

Sudden out of memory error messages with scenes much smaller than those which ran successfully under PP.

Odd error messages about being "unable to locate Body part (0)."

Jessi a disappointment.

Double-clicking a parameter dial to open dialogue box but then having to click again to select settings box.

Inability to pare frames off an animation.

So... I think it's back to good old trusty Vicky 2 plus ProPack linked to Cinema 4D... until at least the bulk of these issues are addressed.

Wishing everyone better luck and a better fit with Poser 6 than I've experienced thus far...

Poserfusion failing to carry P6 morph changes into Shade scene. From what I've heard, the Poserfusion plugin doesn't work with P6's external morph system yet. You have to switch back to the older internal morph system via your General Preferences.

Yep, Shade doesn't work with external morphs as of yet. Works fine once you turn them off in Poser. - Noel

Odd error messages about being "unable to locate Body part (0)." Have not heard that one before Jessi a disappointment. Well what did you expect ....V2 Rules :-) Double-clicking a parameter dial to open dialogue box but then having to click again to select settings box. I'll have to check this one out Inability to pare frames off an animation. this has to be a windows only thing. ON Mac OSX I can add and delete frames at will just like poserpro

"Hair props losing their parenting during cloth simulation." Haven't encountered this one yet. I do have a scene right now with a figure containing a static hair prop and two cloth sims. The hair seems fine, even with two dynamic cloths. Not doubting you had a problem, just that I haven't been able to reproduce this yet. "Python scripts returning various new kinds of error messages." Interesting. What Python scripts? The only problem I had was when I tried to run RealSkin shader script on the new P6 figures. I should have known better... it's not going to work because they don't have the same body part groups as the millenium figs. I think Face_off is adding P6 support. However, I was so far able to run all my scripts without much problem. So what scripts are giving you trouble? I'll try to reproduce it here. "Firefly giving odd rendering artifacts like grayed out hair and eyes in some frames." The one thing I was most impressed with in P6 was just the opposite. I didn't see any artifacting in my first test animation using AO, which by comparison, using real GI with medium settings so as to produce roughly equal amount of render time in a higher end app, on the same PZ3, produced flicker. I'll try more animation tests to see if I can reproduce this as well, but so far I haven't. "Inability to pare frames off an animation." I was able to do this right in the animation palette.

Hair props losing their parenting during cloth simulation.

Do you mean dynamic hair? Don't turn off the visibility on the skull cap.

Python scripts returning various new kinds of error messages.

Please what script and what error?

Firefly giving odd rendering artifacts like grayed out hair and eyes in some frames.

Screen shot please. I haven't seen this. Could ba a shadow artifact that shadow bias would fix.

Sudden out of memory error messages with scenes much smaller than those which ran successfully under PP.

SP1

Odd error messages about being "unable to locate Body part (0)."

Havent seen that one either, in 3 over months of testing.

Jessi a disappointment.

SP1

Double-clicking a parameter dial to open dialogue box but then having to click again to select settings box.

Press [TAB]

Inability to pare frames off an animation.

Works the same way as PP and you can have 99000 more frames than PP.

BUGS! BUGGY BUGGY BUGGY CREEPY CRAWLIES! AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH! LOL :D

White Tree Studios Pasadena, CA Friday, April 1, 2005 Open Purchase Order Will purchase licenses (up to 5) for Poser 6 Win for $49.99 Please tender offers to me by IM. You will have to make the arrangements with Curious Labs for the license transfer, but this is SOP and fully acceptable. Payment by Check, PayPal or CC upon transfer of license. Serious Offer. Purpose: building up my RenderCondo, 10 seats needed. John Donohue Preseident, White Tree Studios

I, personally love PP and after reading some of the disappointments about P6, I'm kinda glad I avoided the rush with this new release. :)

"after reading some of the disappointments about P6, I'm kinda glad I avoided the rush with this new release."

What about all the positive posts made about P6? Just curious why the bad always seems to outweigh the good for some people, when clearly there's been more positive things said about it in the forums than negative.

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 02:36

P6 ROCKS THA PARTY THAT ROCKS THA BODY!!! I love my little P6 snookums!!!!!!!! Sillyness aside, I'm flabbergasted as to P6's EVERYTHING! It's such a leap from P5 that it's certainly not the "P5 Service Release or Poser 5.5" that folks were worried it would be!! In my not so humble opinion it's definately a step up from our Mom & Dad's Poser 4 & 5's!!!! (I'm alluding that you're not cool if you're not running P6! and totally just kidding around!) G

I'm known to be very reserved towards a new version of software, but imo this version of Poser is absoluteley great! I'm loving it each minute, I don't think I've so excited about a piece of software in my life.....

What about all the positive posts made about P6? Only very few positives in this forum that I have read so far. The diehards are 'NEVER' gong to say anthing against a new release, ever. Even if they are not 100 percent satisfied, they will keep on gushing about it. I really don't see that much diff. The only thing that looks really cool in P6 are the way the renders are coming out and for me personally, I don't require all the added, extra features or the new figures that P6 comes with. When I see some real positive reviews about P6 without the gushing and the sucking up tossed in with the reviews, then I'll let you know. I've spent a small fortune on Poser & poser products from DAZ already, I am too tapped to even consider an upgrade right now. Message edited on: 04/01/2005 05:15

"The diehards are 'NEVER' gong to say anthing against a new release, ever." You're talking to someone who came from 3dsmax to Poser in an attempt to speed up my character animation workflow. I'm NOT a diehard in any sense of the word. I was always rather critical of Poser, aside from some obvious things that I did like. P6 makes me enjoy the experience a lot more than previous versions... so far. "When I see some real positive reviews about P6 without the gushing and the sucking up tossed in with the reviews, then I'll let you know." There's a lot of people giving calm, honest views. Just that no one is listening to THOSE people. Only the people who announce "P6 sux, I'm going back to P4..." or whatever. "I've spent a small fortune on Poser & poser products from DAZ already, I am too tapped to even consider an upgrade right now" That's perfectly understandable. No one would expect you to pawn your girlfriend's diamond ring just to buy Poser. It's cool. ;-)

LOL!!!!

Most of the reviews I've seen have been positive, even glowing. If you're only seeing complaints, you're reading very selectively.

Didn't someone say that you had to edit your preferences file or some such, in order to delete animation frames in P6? I read somewhere that it was accidentally set to the wrong value.

There are bugs, no doubt, but they are far from fatal. P6 is just a much better product than previous versions. and CL has frankly gone above and beyond , to accomodate those of a "less technical inclination" (AKA: P4 luddites) by providing Simplified versions of both the Mat room, and render settings palletes, which allow you to use firefly's advanced features thru a P4 style interface if you so choose.

Of course you can get at the good stuff just like in P5 once you feel at home. I personally think this is great. It takes a lot of the frustration and guess work out of getting comfortable with new software.

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 08:11

I have all Poser releases from P4 to PPP to P5 and now P6 and I had all the service releases. I liked PPP the best until now. P5 was full of bugs, sluggish, crashed and was just plain awful. P6 rocks!!! I haven't had a crash, rendering is a dream, the interface has improved, and miracle of miracles the walk designer works! I tried one 30 frame walk cycle with Glamorous Vickie by Jim Burton and a P5 walk animation from Nerd, there were no more leg jitters and no slow loading. The walk was plain smooth! I will try it with a walk path next. But I must say this time Curious Labs have done the job!

renaylor, can you save that animation in display mode at least and post it? Would LOVE to see Glamorous walking as you describe. ::::: Opera :::::

Many thanks to those who responded with ideas, solutions, and additional questions aimed at clarifying these issues. Some of the questions will take some time for me to respond to, especially those where I need to try to reproduce the problem with better documentation of the relevant procedure so I can provide a more elaborate description or verification. So I'll take these various issues / complaints I raised one at a time, starting with the hair parenting issue, and addressed as a response to nerd (though thanks also go to others such as maxxxmodelz who also weighed in on this): Issue #1) Hair props losing their parenting during cloth simulation. Do you mean dynamic hair? Don't turn off the visibility on the skull cap. Actually, it was a standard .hr2 hair prop: Koz' All Back Style. I just tried reproducing the error using the same figures and props, and pose and cloth sim settings... but the loss of parenting didn't happen this time. I'm suspicious it may have had something to do with the hair prop and dynamic cloth prop coming from different Runtimes (including, therefore, Geometries folders). Will keep experimenting. One odd new issue which arose while building new scene for attempt to reproduce: I followed svdl's process for ramping up P6 MTs prior to cloth sim, but instead of using Spline Break I used Constant Section (the grey coloring for keyframes) for shape MTs so they would stay at a constant value of 1.0 after having ramped up from zero in frame 1. Odd thing I found when changing keyframes for those MTs in the Animation Pallette is that changing from Spline to Constant went fine for all body parts except the head. For the head, the keyframe type did actually change to Constant... but the keyframe color stayed green rather than switching to grey in the Animation Pallette. I'll need to investigate this more using other characters, but looks like it might be another (minor) bug.

That's perfectly understandable. No one would expect you to pawn your girlfriend's diamond ring just to buy Poser. It's cool. ;-) Er, I happen to be a female, LOL. I like reading the honest reviews from people who don't gush or glow etc. Not the ones who just praise it. I like knowing what a package does and doesn't do without the raves in between. I'm single so income is really tight for me. Message edited on: 04/01/2005 10:22

Here are the issues numbered, and with indications re retractions / clarifications / future elaborations, etc.

1. Hair props losing their parenting during cloth simulation.

Retraction, at least until I reproduce the effect from scratch. I have a PZ3 which continues to show it, but haven't been able to reconstruct it, so maybe just a random glitch.

1. Python scripts returning various new kinds of error messages.

Elaboration and examples forthcoming.

1. Poserfusion failing to carry P6 morph changes into Shade scene.

Thanks to Little_Dragon and spiritual for the responses on this. I will try LD's solution re internal morph system.

1. Firefly giving odd rendering artifacts like grayed out hair and eyes in some frames.

Will post pics shortly.

1. Final render options all significantly slower than Cinema 4D.

I do LIKE Firefly (which is new to me coming from P4PP) esp it's better handling of smoothing functions than what I've been able to manage with Cinema 4D. It's just that, as an animator who wants a 512 frame animation to render overnight, I find Firefly too slow... though this is not news... just a trade-off everyone has to make for themselves.

I also like the improved Preview rendering, though that ghoulish paring of small faces between close vertices is more than unsettling, and I don't really like having to shorten camera focal length and dolly in to get it to go away.

1. Sudden out of memory error messages with scenes much smaller than those which ran successfully under PP.

Not much to be done re this I guess.

1. Odd error messages about being "unable to locate Body part (0)."

I remembered it wrong (sorry)... it was "Cannot locate body part [0]", which I assume was for the suddenly unparented hair prop in Issue #1. This message was followed by two additional messages saying "Cannot locate body part [Real]" which I assume was the two RealEyes props I have in this figure. Again, this may also be just a one-time random glitch, but I'll keep trying to reproduce from scratch. (The existing PZ3 does still send these error messages on opening.)

1. Jessi a disappointment.

I agree with maxxxmodelz: V2 Rules! (My V3 characters --on which I spent about 5 weeks trying to make them functional and attractive-- are still locked away in storage.) I had just hoped Jessi would be better, but life goes on.

1. Double-clicking a parameter dial to open dialogue box but then having to click again to select settings box.

This looks like it will be a major annoyance. In P4 and PP, double-clicking a parameter dial opens the settings dialogue box and automatically highlights the numerical value in the Value settings box. Therefore, all you have to do after the double-click is hop to the keyboard and type in your new value. With P6, after the double-click of the parameter dial you have to navigate to the Value box and manually highlight the numerical value in order to overwrite it. Annoying because this seems to be one of those instances where "upgrading" actually turns out to cause a loss of function or efficiency.

1. Inability to pare frames off an animation.

Thanks to nerd and maxxxmodels for responses. I found I can indeed pare frames in the Animation Pallette, though not in the animation control panel. I'm guessing (hoping) they'll fix this in SR1.

best wishes to all... and maybe I'll hang in there a little longer before making the jump back to PP.

i am SO glad to hear that the walk designer finally works. but what do you mean by pare frames?

Pare animation = Remove frames from an animation. Can't pare frames from animation pallette? Weird. I'm still running the last PR. Could be a bug introduced right before the CDs were burned. I'll have to see if I can reproduce it when the CD arrives. I imagine that will be very soon. Don't be afraid to report bugs at the CL site. Be as descriptive as possible and include steps to reporduce if you can. Don't forget to include system specs and your graphics card details if it's an OpenGL issue. #9 I begged them to make the fields highlight when you tabbed into them... It's more like every other app out there. Oh well. On the up side, the joint editor can be tabbed through now, a great improvement for content creators. Nerd3D

hi Nerd3D--

Thanks for your latest message. On the frame paring, I actually CAN pare them in the Animation Pallette, but CAN'T in the animations control panel at the bottom of the main window. I recall seeing others complaining about that specific problem.

That's good news about the tabbing in the JE. That will be useful. And maybe if enough of us add our begging to yours they'll reconsider their choices re Issue #9 in a future SR.

To that end, I will go over to the CL site and see if they're collecting comments (or begging) anywhere. And, as you suggest, I'll also do the official bug reporting thing... at least once I'm sure I DO see a general bug and not some unique issue on my setup or characters.

On the other outstanding issues where I had promised pics or verification, I'm away from my P6 setup so will have to get to that stuff in the next few days.

BTW, I think of you and am thankful for your creative problem solving skills every time I set up a new scene since your EMC Fixer is embedded in all my various versions of Untitled.pz3, keeping those crosstalk demons at bay; so... thanks again!

cheers...

As promised, here's the first example of a new python error unique to P6:

:0: SyntaxWarning: name 'Deletables' is assigned to before global declaration

This error message popped up after initiating ockham's delprops.py script. I'll check with him over in the python forum to see if he's aware of it.

Python Script errors : There is a problem with the SSS Wacro (and one of the others), in that it disables any further use of the str() command - so any script you run after that which uses str() will crash. I've reported it to CL, and published a temporary fix.

thanks face off!