Question 1; For those of you who own Poser6, is it worth it? I am considering upgrading from the ProPack, but I've heard of people having alot of problems with it. Question 2; A graphics card is suggested for proper usage of P6. The same people who have said that they had problems with it said the card fixed them. Could I potentially get away with a lower end card, or does the program require a higher end model? any info would be helpful ithkinlore

I have Poser 6 and have no problems. But I did buy a new computer in January. You will want a decent graphics card and possibly upgrade your memory if you are on an older system. Here is what eFrontier recommends: *256 MB system RAM (512 MB or more recommended) *OpenGL enabled graphics card or chipset recommended (recent NVIDIA GeForce or ATI Radeon preferred)

I don't know about your second question, but I can chime in and give my view on your first. I am pretty new to Poser myself (bought Poser 5 in the spring of 2004 but didn't really get into it until October 2004). When Poser 6 came out I had only learned how to dress a figure and do a render 4 months prior so I didn't feel a need to upgrade to another version of the same program. Over the months I've seen the odd post about a feature in Poser 6 that I felt I would like to have access to, but it wasn't enough to get me to spend more money on the same program for a few more bells and whistles that weren't really a necessity IMHO. In December that changed. I saw a post about using the Morphing Fantasy Dress in the cloth room. I tried to do that using Poser 5 but it wasn't working. Someone suggested editing a file prior to rendering, again that didn't work. I really love dynamic clothing, but I also love the MFD but have always hated the way the skirt always looked "posed". The fact that the Poser 6 cloth room would allow me to have the best of both worlds sold me and I upgraded at the end of December. The cons: - most premade light sets that I grew comfortable using in Poser 5, previewed nearly black in Poser 6. Apparently if there are more than 8 lights in a scene Poser 6 doesn't like that and won't preview them, but the light will render fine. The Pros: - IBL Lighting. I love being able to take any image and use it to light my scene. - You need less lights to light a scene which speeds up render time - Area render - No need to edit an .xml file to increase number of thumbnails viewed - Cache of previous renders - Gather Node that allows you to do some really cool neon glowing effects. See these links: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2217752 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2505946 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2222447 - Being able to save render option presets. I'm sure I've missed some pluses. But I see very few cons and would recommend upgrading if you can afford to.

poser 5/6 over propack, you get material room, which opens up endless posibilities, especially if you want realism

Poser 6 IS worth it, but only if you have a high-specification PC. P6 is much more of a memory hog than ProPack.

I have 2 gig memory, and even then I sometimes get problems, although I can usually clear them up by saving, exiting P6, restarting it and reloading the scene.

The big advantages of P6 over P4 are:

1. The Firefly ray-tracing renderer (not for all scenes, but for a good many of them). FireFly includes ray-traced reflections and displacement (like bump-mapping, except that it actually moves part of the surface, so it can be seen in 3D).

2: The materials room. This is a vast improvement over what P4 offers, 'tho it takes a while to get used to it.

3: Dynamic cloth (one of my favourites). For loose-fitting clothes especially, you get a much more realistic drape than conforming clothes, and the draping can be influenced by wind...

1. (Not so sure about this one) The Dynamic hair room. In the right hands it can provide spectacular results, but, alas, I don't have the right hands:-((

(I've probably forgotten quite a few..)

Disadvantages:

It can (very often) be a lot slower than PPP. It is (much) more resource-hungry. And it can be a right pest at times.

But all-in-all, I'd say go for it. Just don't get rid of PPP.

PS: You can link P6 (and P5 for that matter) to your existing PPP runtime and keep it separate, and switch between the two any time you want. Be sure to install P6 into a totally separate directory tho' (it can even be on a completely different disk) to avoid naming conflicts.

Oh, and the latest Service Releases seem to have cleared up the majority of the P6 problems, although there will always be niggles..

Hope that helps:-))

Cheers,
Diolma

(oops X-Post - but maybe my 2p worth will help)

Message edited on: 02/25/2006 17:06 2nd edit ('cos I forgot about it 1st time), re: graphics cards: ensure you have the very latest updates for them. P6 uses a lot of relatively new features...

Message edited on: 02/25/2006 17:11

Uhm, about the system recommendations, you DEFINITELY want lots of RAM when working with P5 or P6. 256 MB is enough to start the app, but then you can't do anything. 512 MB is enough for simple scenes, but unless you have 1 GB or more it is not fun to work with. A reasonably fast CPU is highly recommended. 2 GHz P4 or better (AMD Athlon/Sempron tend to do better than Intel with Poser). Hyperthreading is NOT used by Poser 6, neither are dual core CPUs. As for graphics cards, you don't need a high-end consumer card or professional card. A decent nVidia or ATI with the latest drivers is good enough. I do most of my Poser work on an Athlon64 3500+, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 6800 machine. Which works fine. My previous workstation is an AthlonXP 2700+, 1 GB RAM, GeForce Ti4200. Still works fine, even though the Ti4200 is hopelessly outdated when it comes to games. The machine is not as fast as the Athlon64, but I can build and render pretty complex scenes with the older machine.

The main thing that sets P6 out over P5 is the spot rendering feature. I don't use any of the rooms (I hate them) but in order to keep up compatability on the models I want to use I had to upgrade from the Pro-Pack. Poser 6 is a resource hog .. the bigger you go, and the higher you set your render settings in Firefly .. the longer everything takes. I'm running a 1.5 ghz pentium with 384 megs of memory and even a small, simple render maxes out my system's resources. Only step up if you have a system with the capabilities to handle it.

Thank you, everyone. Your input will give me alot to think about in the coming weeks as I mull this potential purchase over.

In regard to kathym's post: it's not surprising that P6 maxes out that easily, 384 MB is not enough memory. When you have enough RAM (1 GB or more), P6 can render more complicated scenes than P4. I've made many scenes in P6 that could only be rendered in Firefly - the P4 rendering engine crashed immediately.

I'm running an old AMD Athlon 1.2GHz chip with 768mb of ram and a 256mb graphics card. P6 installed and worked fine straight out of the box, as did both Service Releases. Yes, I could use a faster machine with more memory, but it gets by. Feature wise...I bought P5 mostly because of the materials room, and I felt (and still do) that P6 had enough enhancements on P5 to warrant upgrading. I think I must be one of the few people that actually likes Poser lighting, and with the improvements to it in P6 along with the enhanced rendering capabilities I'm not regretting the decision to buy it.

Quote - I think I must be one of the few people that actually likes Poser lighting,

I admit to being somewhat upset about the lighting Poser6. I had always used premade lights in Poser5, and when I tried my favourite lights in Poser6 and found the preview nearly completely black I was less than impressed, and very frustrated. Even though the lights still rendered ok, it made them impossible for me to work with because I like to try several light sets before settling on one. Anyway, Poser6 pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn an area of Poser that I had found completely daunting, frustrating and pretty impossible. I still have much to learn about lights, but I'm learning and I've even managed to do a few of my own light sets that I like. I still prefer premade lights because they are faster and more convenient but it's satisfying to know that if I need to I can actually do it :)

Acadia - Like you I started out using premade sets, but 9 times out of 10 they weren't "quite" right so I set to adjusting them...and so it began. ~lol~

Sometimes I've got great (to my mind) results with a couple of globals...and for other images I've created ten or more spots. It's being able to choose that makes it fun ;)

I'm not out to plug my own gallery, but here's a couple of P5 examples.

10 lights in this one...

The Controller

11 in this one...

Lusyydia

Message edited on: 02/25/2006 19:39

My only problem with p6 was I not was abel to use quictime and render to mov. in my c4d. Tis was fixed trew rename a file in P6 "ImageIOPlugins" folder.

In run P6 with a 1 GHz processor and 640Mb of RAM. It can be sluggish at times (especially if I'm silly enough to have other big applications open at the same time), but I don't have too many problems with it. I'm sure it would run much, much better with a faster machine with more memory, of course. ;-) I will say that I GREATLY prefer Poser6 to ProPack in terms of what you can do with it. For me, it's worth a more sluggish performance (and I really do intend to upgrade my computer soon! LOL!) bonni

It is worth it, like Acadia I wanted to use the v3 dress in the cloth room and I wanted the better lights. The materials room alone is fun! The image I include here is my recent play in the cloth room and links to pictures were I played with materials. Please be aware some of the links lead to nudity. http://www.deviantart.com/view/20367622/ http://www.deviantart.com/view/17797331/

One other advantage that P6 gives you is Point Lights. At last, this allows you to set up candles, lightbulbs etc. that really do emit light. They have their own drawbacks tho... they can only be used with ray-traced shadows, so getting decent blurred shadows from them is a bit of a nightmare in render terms (especially if you also have reflections in the scene)... Still, I suppose it would be rather difficult to program a shadow cam from a point that looks out spherically.. Cheers, Diolma

I upgraded from Poser Artist to Poser 6. I kept Poser Artist around on my hard disk for a while, just in case. Good thing too, because there was an annoying period until Poser 6 Service Release 2 came out and cleared away some niggling hiccoughs. Now, I can say that I don't use Poser Artist except to convert BUM files from legacy commercial content. I use Poser 6 everyday now. I have an nVidia video card - definitely helps to get the latest updates for the drivers.

Message edited on: 02/26/2006 18:06

ithkinlore, I just upgraded from Pro Pack to Poser 6 last August and have been very happy with the udpates to the gui. You can choose body parts from the parameter dials window (saves you from sliding all the way back across the screen to the main window) Point lights!!! Multiple runtimes with nested folders, this means you can really organize files into groups that make sense to you. The scroll wheel works in the library. Plus the library has a drop down menu so you can pass through several folders without having to open each one and wait for the little icons to load. I held back upgrading through the whole Poser 5 trial and think that Poser 6 is a really good upgrade from Pro Pack.