I'm sure this has been asked before. But I haven't asked this before, and input would be appreciated. I have Poser 5. I'm a recreational user. Is it worth a hundred bucks to upgrate to Poser 6? What would I be gaining in the upgrate?

I'm the same as you, a hobbyist if you like and I did upgrade from 5 to 6 and overall I'm glad I did. But, and there is a big but, for me it's still too buggy, but hey so was P5 until SR4. I still get memory issues, not as many but they're still there and I have a decent spec PC. I'm still glad I upgraded though, the cloth room is quicker, the point lights are a god send and adding volumetric effects and IBL can all be done with either 1 click or more hands on if you want to! Hope that gives you something to go on! thefixer, poser coord.

Besides being quicker, is the cloth room less buggy? The Cloth Room in Poser 5 is a very delicate creature and I stopped using it because it wasn't worth all the tweaking needed to get it to work.

So far I've had no issues with it but then I probably don't use it to it's fullest. My journeys into the cloth room are to just do an item of clothing to a figure and not much more! With poser 5 it regularly locked up or froze on me and so far with P6 it hasn't! thefixer, poser coord.

Having fewer lockups doing the same kinds of thing is a good sign. A more usable cloth room would be worth the upgrade price.

I also upgraded recently (about 2 months ago). I'm also a hobbyist.. I have installed SR1 (after reading the threads, I realised it was a necessity). So far I am happy. I have my cavils, but then I alway have them with any new software.. The cloth room IS quicker, but the cloth room preview is inaccurate. Which means I can't watch a sim and decide it's going wrong and stop it before it's finished. When the preview in P5 started showing long lines coming from the clothing and other effects, it was an early indication that something was wrong (intersection, cloth being squeezed out from tight areas, that sort of thing) so I could cancel the sim and address the problem. In P6 I have to wait til the whole sim is finished before I can see what has happened. OTOH, The point lights are worth it (although I wish they could be shadow mapped, and they seem to strangle P6 if there's both point lights and reflection involved) The Mat room upgrades are also good! Cheers, Diolma (who still hasn't ventured into Dynamic Hair)

Might want to try the P6 demo onEF's site (under Downloads-Free Trails). The one I tried (got it off a magazine) was fully functional but had a 30 day limit, watermarked renders and restrictions on max texture size. I stayed with Poser 5 ;-)

I too am a hobby user and I'm very glad I upgraded. P6 is 1000 times more stable than P5 ever was though it's still one of the most ill conceived and horribly coded applications I've ever used.

Anyone else upgrade lately? How long did it take to ship for you? I paid for it over a week ago and got the cheapest shipping, 7$, and it STILL has not arrived... Contacted Content Paradise, not a word from them...

Stability of the cloth room has a lot to do with how you set it up. Drape from zero pose often doesn't work, you're better off setting up an animation starting at zero pose on frame 1 and ending at the desired pose+morphs at frame 20 or later. Check the animation for intersecting body parts before you add the dynamic cloth. This goes for both Poser 5 and Poser 6. The cloth room in both apps works just fine for me. Ambient occlusion and point lights alone are worth the upgrade. The material room has also been improved a lot. Poser 6 has Python support for the material room and the cloth room, P5 doesn't. The hair room has also been improved. The OpenGL preview allows for much smoother camera movement when setting up a scene, provided that you have a fast graphics card that supports OpenGL 1.5 (I've got an nVidia Geforce6800LE tweaked into a Quadro FX 4000, and it literally flies!) I upgraded in March, and I'm very happy with the upgrade.