Good day. finally back to this forum for abit. I finally have set up a new puter and with the b-day approaching decided to get poser 6. well almost decided. I have a few questions I need answered by just normal folk.lol. I am -not- technically incline. meaning unless I have someone to literally physically show me how to do something I tend to bog down and the words of a tech manual starts to look like the adult voices of a snoopy cartoon(waa waaaa wa waaa wa waaa wa wa). SO..... 1-how user friendly is it.

Have you used poser before? It took me awhile to get used to poser 5, i never tried 1-4... But poser five overwhelmed me, but now that i look back, it isnt so hard. Its pretty easy now, i'd suppose. Check out some tutorials and learn the interface. They got 2 great tutorials called "10 things for beginners to poser" or something like that. Helped me out a lot. The only problem with poser 6 and any other poser is that it has limited props, clothing and hair and bullshit. Spending so much money on a program makes buying other shit a pain so i stick to the free stuff and its limited to all girl bullshit. Can't find anything useful for the dudes :(

Reddz: if the free stuff is all for the girls then it cannot be bullshit, because bulls are male. it would all be cowshit. DarkElegance: if youve used poser before the very basics havent changed. there are a few new features that may seem overwheming, but feel free to ask questions.

ack my post didnt post fully. grrr actually yes I have used pp for around 3 years now(ack it has been that long now bloody heck) the post was suppose to be 1-how user friendly is it. 2-is the learning curve very steep as I am NOT tech minded and reading a manual is bad due to after the first paragraph or so it starts to read like the adult voices from a snoopy cartoon(waa wa wa waaaa wa wa waa waaa) 3-is the lighting as great as it seems and is it as hard as it sounds to use the "nodes" 4-(most important)how easy is it to move my existing library to a poser 6 one? I have been told the library and folder set up is different? can I drag and drop? 5- is it realllllly worth it? there I think that asks what I needed to now lol.

Hey DE, long time no see :-) Why not download the demo version of Poser 6 and play with it for a while? It's a no risk way to find out exactly how steep the curve would be. For me, I moved to P5 around 2 years ago and wouldn't have looked back, even as buggy as it was. Since I got P6, I'm loving it even more, especially the cloth room, which now works much faster than under P5. The materials room alone is worth it for me, and the lighting, although I haven't investigated that much yet, is lightyears (haha) ahead of PPP. You can link your existing runtime from within P6, it's as simple as pressing a button and browsing to the folder on your hard drive. No drag and drop required :-)

If you've got previous experience with Poser, there won't be too much problem adjusting to the differences. I'm guessing that "pp" means ProPack. P5 added a few new features, such as the cloth and face rooms, and the material room has been expanded. P6 didn't change any of that, only improving on some lighting techniques, and adding the "area render" function (which is exactly what it sounds like, you select the area of the scene to render). I haven't playes around with the new light options much, but they seem to give a far more realistic look to renders. The basic library and fold set up hasn't changed, but P5 added the feature of "external runtimes", which allow you to place your content in a runtime folder outside of the main Poser folder (mine are on my F drive, Poser's installed on the C drive), and link to them from within Poser. There's also the option of nested folders, so you can rearrange things according to creator/store/character/whatever. Finally, IMHO, Poser 6 is worth it, even with the quirks in the program (I've not run into many problems, but I'm not working Poser to it's limits either), especially for the price. Hope this helps, if it's not clear, I'm sure someone else here can exlpain it better. ;)

Bullshit, cowshit...Ok :)

I like P6 a lot more than P5 but I still have a fondness fo the simplicity and speed of P4.

Initially I found all the bells and whistles in P6 difficult to use. Initially I just used it like Pro Pack until I had the time or need to use the new features. The re-learning curve is not too steep and now I use nothing but P6. I have been lucky in that I have had very few if any problems with running P6. Whatever... playing with P6 has gotta be better than playing with your PP..!

Download the demo. It's the only way to really know if it's "realllllly" worth it for you. ;-) Since you're coming from Propack, I will warn you that YES, the learning curve is steeper, and yes, the lighting is as good as it seems (it's IBL, not HDRI, so it's as good as IBL can be). You may be faced with some technical challenges at first, as you adapt to the new workflow and (especially) the renderer and material room, but that's what these forums are for. You can post here with any problems, and hopefully you'll get a solution rather quickly. Almost all the images in my gallery were produced with Poser 6 with very minimal or no postwork on many of them, so perhaps it can help give you an idea of what the new lighting, materials, and render features can do? Good luck.

I have Poser 6 and its novelty quickly wears off leaving buyers remorse.

Since you'll be paying the upgrade price, give it a whirl. Face and cloth rooms are very useful, and the app is pretty stable and relatively fast.

Fast no way. And the face room is terrible it only works well for james and the new children aren't supported in the face room. Jesse looks like james when you use her in the face room. Big let down.

Message edited on: 08/29/2005 12:04

User friendly? Well, the workflow you're used to from PP still works fine. So everything you learned there is still applicable. Fast? Faster than P5. I can't compare with P4/PP, the demo wouldn't install on my machine (probably too much RAM for a program dating back 8 years). Probably it's somewhat slower than P4/PP. The OpenGL preview is very, very nice. You can actually see transparent materials, and response to camera movement is much better. Much depends on your graphics hardware, however, a decent 3D graphics card is recommended. The lighting and rendering is totally incomparable with P4/PP. Much, much better. You are going to LOVE point lights and raytracing. Volumetric lighting is beautiful, but renders very, very slow. Image based lighting plus shadow catchers allow you to render a scene over a background image without having to patch in the shadows in postwork. Dynamic cloth is very, very useful. Naturally flowing long skirts and wide sleeves. No more pokethru, doesn't matter what morph or pose. Extremely useful for animations. The new material options are very, very useful. No more glowing nostrils, for instance, when using Ambient Occlusion. Raytraced materials can give you true reflections - making a mirror is a breeze. Realistic water is now possible. Scripting support is much, much better. Sounds technical, but for a layman it means being able to run Python scripts that can do amazing things for your image. See the work by face_off for instance - totally impossible in the old P4/PP. I haven't used the face room, so I don't have an opinion on it. Dynamic hair can give you very realistic hair. It's especially well suited for animations - hair that blows in the wind and bounces as the character walks, all calculated instead of frame by frame posing. The material room has a very nice feature: you can switch between basic (which looks a lot like the P4 material dialog) and advanced (if you're feeling nerdy). Harnessing the full power of P6 is not easy. It has a lot of features. But you still can use your P4/PP skills, and slowly go from there. P6 is well worth its money. Especially at the upgrade price. All of your old content can be used in P6.

I have it I like it I use it. Also have pro pack installed and 5 installed so I can bring stuff into Vue infinity without a hassle but as soon as they fix the 6 for vue I will be using it exclusively. Takes work to figure some stuff out but I'm finding that the end result is worth it. Marque

you can have a runtime on another drive? how? so the lighting is well worth it. I have seen pics with the shadows and it was just wonderful looking but I simply do not have the knowledge nor real patience to play with something called nodes to get them. is the lighting easy to work with?

To get lighting that is vastly improved over P4 lighting, enable Ambient Occlusion on the strongest lights of your scene. Simply by setting a checkmark on each light property tab. You'll have to enable raytracing too. Just move the Quality slider one or two notches to the right (higher quality) on the Render Settings dialog and presto. To REALLY get your lighting perfect requires twiddling in the material room and the lighting settings. And - shameless plug maybe - there's a Python script by face_off called AOMaster that'll do a very good job of the material room twiddling for you. One of the things you should know: it is no longer necessary to use dozens of spotlights to get some kind of global illumination. The new IBL light type will do it for you. 1 IBL light can replace 20-30 spot lights that way. In short, getting good lighting is quite easy. Getting the best lighting possible is difficult. Not surprising, actually.

is the demo fully functional? and what is this that you can use a runtime that is not even on the same Hard drive? I can put my old runtime on another drive to save space?

I don't know what's in the demo. But extra runtimes: yes you can do that. And it's quite simple. Dr. Geep has a little tutorial on how to do it. One of the things I like most about P5 and P6 is the ability to organize in subfolders. You've got dozens of !INJ and !REM pose folders for the Millenium 3 figures? Put them in a subfolder V3INJ-REM, S3INJ-REM and so on. MAT poses? Put them in V3MAT and V3MAT Clothing and so on. Makes navigation a lot easier. A neat trick: the Poser library understands shortcuts. I've got some pose sets by Schlabber for V3, M3, MilDragon and the Poser snake. Just by putting shortcuts to the actual combined pose folder in the V3, M3, Dragon and Animal pose folders I can reach them easily without having to duplicate everything.

O.O just on that point alone I think I am sold LOL.

Depending on your pc, it can be a little quirky in the beginning. Great new features but none are set correctly at default (AO). It's an easy fix. It rarely crashes. It even reduces some rendersettings (bucket) if it gets in trouble...! It is worth it for this alone.