I currently have Poser 4 PP and am thinking of upgrading to Poser 6. My question is: Is there that much of a difference (in the rendering engines) between 4 and 6 to make the upgrade worthwhile?...beyond the cloth room and hair generator. Is the lighting better ect. Thanks in advance to all who take the time to share their thoughts!!

There is a vast improvement with the Firefly rendering engine, although I still use the P4 one for some projects. Dynamics is, quite franky, a pain in the arse to work with - although I find it extremely useful when posing robed characters kneeling.

I have Poser 5, I started with pro pack....the render engines are crappy in both apps..don't own p6 but I expect it is just as bad. I render everything in Vue5 now..best render engine I've used so far.....but if I had to pick I would pick P5.I wouldn't purchase P6 as all the posts I've read here are full of nugs with P6 IMHO I would buy P5 at least you get all the service releases with it and it's practically bug free, as with P6 it's probably going to take them another yera to fix all the bugs it has, just like they did with P5. You would think that Curious Labs or E Frontier would have thought about this before releasing P6 but as usual they just slap it all together and sell,sell,sell and use the faithful consumers as beta testers. So I personally would keep away from P6 untill it has been fixed up. I know I won't be getting P6 untill I know it's pretty much stable.

As of the last service release, P6 is fine. It's a big step up in usability over the previous 2 versions, and it allows you to do things with materials and lights that you can't in either P4 or P5. And if you want to drop back to the P4 renderer in P6, you can just use that, too. My advice: Get P6. -jjsemp

I bought P5 just over a year ago and once I got used to it I never used the P4 renderer again. P5 is a whole order beyond P4 in terms of rendering and material capabilities. I haven't ever used the Dynamic cloth or hair (shame on me) but in all other respects I find it far and away better than P4. I bought P6 just over a week ago and I'm still learning the ropes with the new rendering and material capabilities. So far, it's been stable and reliable. On my limited use so far, I'd recommend it.

I started with P4 never got into P5 But I'm very glad I made the jump to P6...You will not regret it..You will see a great improvement in your renders.

dayjo, having both, I would say P6 is better than P5. More stable, faster - especially the Hair and Cloth room, more lighting options, more material room options. I don't even use P5 anymore. I would recommend going right to P6 if you want to upgrade from P4.

I started with P4, then P5 and now P6. If it wasn't for having to test the stuff I make in all versions, I would not have P4 installed. There are the lights in P6 that the other versions don't have. IBL/AO. P6 is the current version, why take a step back.

A weird little thing happened when I was rendering yesterday. I was rendering over a P6 render using the P4 renderer and the P4 actually looked a lot better. The firefly renderer does a lot more but it is always blurry and I have seen a lot of comments about that before but it was really evident yesterday.

Thanks to all who replied. I am in the market for a new 3d software and am either going to upgrade to P6 or go from Bryce to Vue so I am listing the pros and cons of each :)

I have Bryce5 and Vue4 ...and I'm waiting to get enough green to upgrade to Vue 5pro..I really don't have a need to upgrade to Bryce 5.5 when Vue does so much more when it comes to realism.

I either render in P6 or Vue5Infinite. Vue is much, much better when it comes to reflections and water, but I found that I can get some awesome effects from Poser 6 using subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion, features not present in P5. The improvement in lighting and material in P6 over P5 are at least as big as the improvements of P5 over P4. Python support in P6 is also better than in P5. Since P6 service pack 1 I haven't had much problems with bugs, though there's still a memory leak somewhere. The Poser importing capabilities of Vue are much better than those of Bryce. I ditched Bryce in favor of Vue4Pro and now Vue5Infinte. I never could get the hang of the Bryce user interface, while I was up to speed within twenty minutes in Vue4Pro. If you're going to render only in Vue, then the upgrade to P6 isn't really worth it. You can upgrade to P5 to take advantage of the cloth and hair room, you wouldn't use the improved material and lighting of P6. But if you want to use Poser to render, I'd definitely recommend P6.

fazzel, I was just worried about the constant posts about P6 being unstable and in need of fixes. That's why I would personally wait untill P6 is mostly clear of bugs..after all I wouldn't buy a car with the steering wheel missing or the speedo not in the dashboard, so why should I buy P6 when obviously it's not really free of the bugs, I've seen many a post stating it desprately needs fixes and surely all those people can't be wrong but I guess it's down to personal opinion. That's the great thing about this place everyone can voice there opinions :) By the way..I don't mean to go on but Vue5 really does blow Bryce out of the water ;)

Also consider the price. Right now Poser 6 (full) is available at Content Paradise for $129.00 US (upgrade's even cheaper) I've only seen Poser 5 here in the Marketplace -- it seems to be AWOL at the CL/EF website -- for $239.00 US. Say, does anybody know what $129 might be in Canadian?

Message edited on: 06/27/2005 15:20

Dayjo, that's the problem with going on hearsay when you voice your opinions. You haven't heard all there is to say on the matter. Certainly not enough to make a valid opinion. Going by the naysayers alone you're only getting half the picture. Poser 6 is quite stable on quite a lot of people's systems. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing if your system is going to be one of the flakey ones without actually buying the software to find out. I did make the jump from Poser 4 to Poser 6 and all the new features and content that you get for the upgrade price (Content being all the Poser 5 & 6 Figures via the free downloads at CP) make it a fantastic deal! And With PhilC's Wardrobe Wizard none of the figures that come with Poser need ever go nekkid again. (Unless they just like to run around temples nekkid with swords!)

Hey Miz...help me with this: What is Content Paradise? I'm a P4 user (posette, dork, etc.) and I'm wondering what characters would be available to me if I upgrade to P6 (Judy/Don as well as Jessi and that other dude)? The P6 features blurb on Curious Lab's website didn't make this very clear to me. If I upgrade to P6, I would save posette, the dork and any stock props before uninstalling P4 so they can be imported into P6? Thanks ;)

Here's some facts about Poser 6 - no hearsay, my personal experience. P4 2.8 HTT Northwood, Gigabyte 8000MX mainboard with Intel 865PE chipset, 1.5 GB DDR 400 RAM (2x Siemens, 2x Kingston), ATI Radeon9600Pro: Poser 6 works fast and fine. Never had the dreaded memory bug, even before SR1 Athlon2700+, Abit mainboard (VIA chipset), Highpoint 472 ATA RAID controller, 1 GB RAM (2x 512 Transcend DDR333), Ti4200: Poser 6 works fast and fine. The pre-SR1 memory bug hit only once. No problems at all since upgrading to SR1. Athlon64 3500+, MSI mainboard, nForce3 Platinum chipset, 4 GB RAM (4x 1 GB Transcend DDR400), GeForce6800LE: Poser 6 works very fast and very fine. Acer Aspire 1700C portable (P4 2.66, SiS M650 chipset, 1 GB Transcend DDR333, SiS integrated graphics card, 64 Mb shared memory) Poser 6 runs fine. Not very fast due to the slow graphics chip though. All systems run WinXP SP2, latest patches. About the price, $129 is only for US citizens. Non-US citizens pay more - seems to have to do with export fees. Still, CL doesn't overcharge as much as (for example) Adobe or Apple.

pdog: don't uninstall P4. Just install P6 in another folder, you can link to the P4 runtime from P6 (Dr. Geep has an excellent tutorial on how to do this) and your complete P4 folder is available and usable in P6.

Nuts! Do export fees apply to the download version?

I'm loving poser 6 so far. Plan on posting some work soon. So I recommend poser 6.

Byrdie, yup they do. Here in the UK we have VAT whacked on the price, whether it's downloaded or shipped.

I have all three.
I use P4 propack mainly - It still satisfies my needs.
I use P5 and P6 to test products.

The poser core is so archaic (over 10 years?), sophiscated scenes with multiple figures and props and advanced lighting will not be rendered to your satisfaction. And that goes for P5 or P6. You'll be ok with minimal figures and minimal props.

It doesn't matter how much 'bells and whistles' EF or CL put into their Poser versions. Until EF revamp the poser core, I'll stick with Propack. If I want more sophisticated scenes, I'll export them to Vue, bryce or C4D.

So, if you want Poser 6, by all means go for it, but please, you must have brycean patience to use it.

Message edited on: 06/27/2005 16:43

I'd express my opinion on that, Sam, but it'd get me TOSed and my keyboard scrubbed down with Granny's lye soap. ;-) ::hexes taxman polka dotted::

Message edited on: 06/27/2005 16:46

PDog, Content Paradise is EF's storefront website that has the built in tab in Poser 5 & 6. (I never access it from inside Poser though because they still don't have the login ability fixed so I log in via my regular browser.) When you buy the upgrade from Poser 4 to Poser 6, you get the added content of Poser 4 (Your base runtime stuff), Pro Pack (Some toony people), Poser 5 (Don, Judy, Will & Penny and their hair and clothing - This content is an extra download at Content Paradise) and of course the new Poser 6 Family of Jessi, James, Ben & Kate and their outfits. All of the human figures are already supported by PhilC's Wardrobe Wizard, except for the Pro Pack toons, so any clothes for any default Poser figure can be fitted to any other default figure that comes with Poser.

imagebuilder, I would recommend you buy Poser6. It is better and renders do come out betetr in P6.

Content Parasite can be hacked out (I just didn't do it right evidently).

What I do is install all Extra content into my Poser 4 directory. That way I only have one large runtime and just link to it from later versions. (Why have duplicate huge runtimes).

I usually use P4 PP for most work.(P5 once in a while)

Always export to VUE or Lightwave for rendering anyway.
Better Lighting control than Poser ever had IMHO.
Cameras are easier to control too.

Tom

Message edited on: 06/27/2005 22:15

Byrdie, As a Canadian, all you need to figure out for a D/L version is the $ convertion. So, how ever low it is for that day. I bought the box set so I had to pay for shipping and got nailed for duty tax on top of that. Unless they have changed this in the last couple of months.

Thanks, must check it out.

P6 for sure, it's so much better then the ones before. Mind you, the full version of P6 isn't $129 at all! It's $249 even at content paradise and even for US citizens. Only the P5 upgrade is $129. People need to check more carefully before quoting prices. Just select full version and you'll see it states (US $ +120)!!!!

aeilkema is correct. I paid full price ($249) for my copy of Poser 6. The last version I had was poser 3. LOL

Ya know, I thought that seemed kinda odd. Why on Earth didn't CP have something like "Upgrade: $129 US" and "Full Version: $249 US" or whatever? Less confusion that way.

Attached Link: Content Paradise

Hmm, when it's in my wishlist it sez US $129 but when it's in the cart it jumps to $249. Weird, huh?