Is it worth buying yet? Are there too many bugs in it yet? Are they fixing the bugs? What are the new characters that come with pro pack?

1. YES! 2) No 3) Yes, we are working on a patch. 4) Please see the Curious Labs website. Anthony Curious Labs

1. Yes (mostly, since I don't use the setup much) 2. A few but the forums and the creators are helpful to keep you going. 3. Yes it would be nice to know as well. 4 cartoon ppl ( not really impressive, but Catarine Preznak has made a shork movie with them and it is posted here someplace, and it looks pretty good. and in the cd there are a few cool freebies from DAZ (gremlin) Alverson Hack hobby fantasy artist

My biggest problem is that using it with Max seems to be very resource intensive, for instance I'm working on a ~20MB, 3 character file, and once imported into Max my system uses ~300MB of RAM! Also, it very (very!) frequently corrupts the Max file when I try and reload the .pz3. And all the transmaps have to fixed by hand. Hopefully these will all be addressed soon. And the stuff Bushi et al. is working on with python will make the purchase price cheap for animators! Furture: I'd love to see a plug-in for Cinema4D and Strata too. Cinema because it is much (much!) faster and far (way!) more stable than Max, and since it presently lacks good character tools it would be a perfect match for Poser. Strata because it has a very nice raytracer and is free.

I think the pro pack is a hell of an investment, especially if you are thinking about creating new characters in any program that outputs an object file. 8^) I am very excited about it, and if my husbee will let me have more time with it I will be doing some cool things soon. lol Marque

1. Yes, if you have need of the new features. You can download the manual (in PDF format) from Curious Labs. My favorite new features include the Setup Room, which makes it easier to split up an imported model into body parts for posing; multiple views; and motion blur for animations. I haven't gotten into Python scripting yet, but that has a lot of potential. If you use Poser mainly for stills instead of animation, and aren't interested in setting up your own models, the Pro Pack probably doesn't have much else to interest you. 2,3) For me the biggest "bug" (actually as I understand it, it's an improved file-reading function that shows up bugs in the way Poser originally wrote files) is that some characters with a lot of morphs will load in with polygons missing. The workaround is fairly simple (search the messages here for "missing polygons") and Curious Labs is reportedly working on a patch so all existing characters will load as expected. 4) There are 7 cartoonish figures from DAZ included. You can see them used in many of the web banners advertising the Pro Pack. DAZ has also relased freebies of cartoon kids and a dog, so grab 'em now from their web site.

My biggest gripes thus far are: 1) The idiotic network check!! I shouldn't have to buy 4 licences JUST so I can render on one of my machines and continue to work on the next scene on another. (See my other posts on this subject.) 2) The Walk Designer is messed up ... it will not load in other figure files. 3) The morph problems mentioned above. And here are some things I was hoping would be added/fixed in a major release like this, but were not: 1) Still no RENDER BUTTON! (Call me lazy, but I like the Bryce render button.) 2) Render Engine isn't the greatest in the world. 3) Shadows still exhibit odd behaviour in animations from time to time. (See #2) 4) Materials setup still has a LONG way to go. Although the Python scripting should help with this, but it would be NICE if it were NAITIVE to the interface. 5) NO SUPPORT FOR QUICKTIME!!! WE WANT ALPHA CHANNELS!!! On the bright side, most of the new additions are very cool and I personally really like the cartoonish characters. Naturally they are not appropriate for all projects, but they render fast and are a breeze to articulate. -Tim

Seems to me like 1,2,3, (and sort of 4)and 5 could all be handled by a stable plug-in for Strata3D. Since Strata is free, CL could save time trying to re-invent raytracing, renderosity, MIP shadows, etc. and focus on collision detection, a more usuable animation palette, cloth and hair dynamics, etc...