Has anyone here got Poser 6 yet? If you have, how is it and how does it compare to older versions of Poser. Mostly, I want to know before I go ahead and buy P6 if it's got all the bug and performance issues of P5 and whether or not I should bother or just wait until there is a service pack release.
Thanks!

i dont have 6 i have 5 but from reading the forums and ppl talking about 6, just wait for a service pack release and read up on reviews then decide! just my thought tho..

P6 is way better than P5, but any program always has a step up from their previous programs. More lighting options which helps on realism and a whole lot more, I am unable to list. Right now I am waiting for the patch. Not able to do anything due to memory issues. So, right now on my system doing nothing. I did happen to finally get a render out last week without memory errors and constant reboots. I have 2GB of DDram.

hmm...it's good to know that about P6. I was planning on upgrading my current comp to maybe 1.5G 2 if I could afford it. I seem to remember something about P5 or P4 having issues with memory greater than 1G. But, from the image, I can definetely tell that lighting options have improved in P6. It looks more like it could've been rendered in Bryce or 3DS. Before, that's what I had to do for decent lighting import into other programs. Perhaps waiting till they patch it is the best idea ^^ but damn, do I want to play with those new lighting options!

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We've got a lot of people waiting with great anticipation for the first P6 service release. In theory, it should be here any *second* now.........

IMO -- P6 is far and away the best version of Poser ever -- bar none. Memory bug and all.

Once that &(^^%%%$###+***===+++!!!! memory bug is gone, P6 will have no peer.

BTW -- the infamous memory bug doesn't affect everyone. Just some of us.....and with varying degrees of severity. For some it isn't so bad.

You might also want to consider some of the P6-only specials that are beginning to be offered on e-frontier's (formerly Curious Labs) Content Paradise website -- like the astounding $150.00 Magellan spacecraft which you can now have for $1.99. If you own P6.

Poser 5 lighting is better and more versatile than Poser 4 lighting: it introduced raytracing, procedural materials and displacement mapping. Poser 6 lighting is better and more versatile than Poser 5 lighting: it introduces point lights (finally!), ambient occlusion, image-based lighting and soft raytracing. The advanced lighting options have a serious drawback: renders can be awfully slow (right now my Athlon64 3500+ is at about a quarter of a render, and it's been rendering for over 30 hours already!) And the scenes can't be very complex; one V3 plus dynamic hair and a simple setting is about the maximum. I hope this will be improved somewhat in the first P6 service release. I don't mind waiting for a render, but I do want to make more complex scenes!

Rendertimes vary don't forget. I've had a couple slow renders, and a couple that were VERY fast, compared to the same lighting situations in P5. One thing to remember is that AO is raytraced. So it's going to take some time if you use it on a diffuse IBL light. It's excruciatingly slow if you have lots of other raytraced materials in the scene too... like raytraced reflections or refractions. It also slows to a crawl if you use AO with transparency maps, such as that for hair. Dyanmic hair and AO is particularly slow. However, there are workarounds. You can disable the AO on your diffuse IBL light, and instead use it as a material node on only certain objects that you want those soft, dark, area shadows. For example, you can use an AO node on the body and head of Jessi or James, and not use it on the hair itself or areas of transparency. This will speed up your rendertimes dramatically. Doing this technique, however, usually requires you have some other form of shadows on a light, such as a shadow map, so that those materials without AO get some form of shadowing.

Many of my firends including myself have jumped and find it a joy, better than P5. From what I head the service release is soon. You'll love P6 I was a P4 diehard as were many of my friends and we ahven't opened P4 in weeks. lol Do a search for: AKmaterialroombookmark here in the Poser forum. SOme great threads will pop up.

It's just great. As long as the memory bug doesn't effect you it's even awesome. The memory bug doesn't affect every one in the same way, but it's there for sure when attempting to do larger scenes. But if you're unlucky it's there with smaller scenes too. Besides the bug (which being addressed by CL) P6 is truly awesome. All of the small improvements they made are great. I love the new content. The redring engine has been improved a lot, it made me drop Vue 5's rendering engine as my main rendering engine. Only using P6 to render now. Dynamic hair has been improved a lot. Even content paradise has been improved :-) Poser 6 is the way Poser should have been a long time ago as far as I'm concerned!

One workaround for complex scenes that many people seem to overlook is to simply render in layers. If you render, say, a foreground figure, midground figures and background props individually, you maintain much more control and don't choke your machine. Often I find that the foreground element benefits from AO, where the background looks just fine using P6's P4 render engine. Another benefit of this technique is it provides more flexibility for post work, where you can tweak each layer individually. You might also explore P6's Shadow Catcher, which does NOT require raytracing and works great with the P4 engine.

I was planning on upgrading my current comp to maybe 1.5G 2 if I could afford it.

If you have less than 1.5 Gb of RAM, you probably won't have too much trouble with the memory bug that's driving so many of us crazy. It seems to be more of a problem for people with a lot of RAM.