And amen to that Stahlratte !

BTW, by reading some of the posts here I know exactly which merchants don't want P4/PP users money. Sad.

nods to stahlratte i dare say that some 90% of poser "art" still looks like p4. accordingly, i am sure that 90% of poser "artists" would be perfectly happy with p4, because they don't use (or understand) the "bells and whistles" of p5 and beyond. well, apart from face_off's scripts, that is. i mean, how many of you guys who preordered p7 could tell me what HDRI is? btw, has the "glowing nostrils" problem been solved in p6? A.

"i mean, how many of you guys who preordered p7 could tell me what HDRI is?"

High Dynamic Range Imaging.

Use it quite often and have created my own maps. Sorry, were people not suppose to know that simple question?  Daz even included it in Bryce 6 now. It is pretty common.

I'm really glad that everyone is so happy with their Poser 5, 6 and soon 7, but I just don't understand why some feel the need to jump for joy at the thought of Poser 4 biting the dust.  I've read all the above comments, but still don't see the point.  I know I'll be flamed for my unpopular opinion, but what else is new.  I say to each his own.

Haven't used P4PP in years, and won't miss it disappearing either.  It's about time.

However, that won't change content providers from using it.  I get tired of having to convert RSR's to PNG's though.

Moving to P5 made managing the libraries a lot easier which was the only reason why I upgraded from P4PP.  Otherwise, I really liked P4 and it rendered must faster than P5/P6.  It was also a lot less complicated as well, but large Runtimes were a problem in P4.

I'm looking forward to all the new features in P7 and hope it has left behind the bugs from P5/6.

hi, beryld! it was just a rethorical question;) but:"aren't people supposed to use such a simple thing as 'shadows' in their realistic renders?" is not a rethorical question... winks friendly A. ps: so, how about glowing nostrils in p6(p7)?

I've never been on a "quest" for photoreal renders.. look at my gallery.. it's mostly toon stuff.

That said, Having AO added was a godsend for any render type. Not glowing nostrils, "crease" shados without a bazillion lights just good advancements.

I also rarely ray trace as well but when I need it, I NEED it, bottom line.

And anyone saying using th ematerial room only has "limited" use is waering big honkin horse blinds. Check any of Ajax's shader, or any of the mathmatica shaders baggins bill has been creating, and your eyes will open BIG time!

Why the cheering for the downfall of P4? Simple. A lot of additional work has had to be done for every single product in the store to support it still. it add a lot of additional testing to get a product "store ready", and there's already a HUGE number of things to suport and double check to create something for the masses.

And so many people clung to P4's apron strings, that very few people even bothered to explore the powerful new tools we were handed in P5. Without that P4 crutch, people are forced to finally make the leap to at least P5. The more people using it, the more people will discover new and better uses of the tools made available to us.

Plus all that time that used to be used testing and supporting P4 will go into product improvement for existing versions.

From a creator's standpoint, one of the biggest issues facing content creators, is the time involved to create something, and the bottom line in making money doing it. Poser content is VERY undervalued for the work time involved, and w've lost MANY outstanding artists because of this.Plus many artists who MIGHT have created the new outstanding advancement just didn't out the time into it, knowing they wouldn't be able to even make minimum wage doing it.

You think Anton, or Neftis would have left if there was a bigger financial "carrot" giving them incentive to stay?

How many tutorials utilities and posts are there about runtime management,  when EF gave us multiple runtimes, an dexcellent management tool, if used properly? And it took like a year or two for everyone to catch on useing it. (Heck some people are STILL discovering it!)

Most other 3d communities embace new tech advanacements, and exploit them as much as possible. Many in the Poserverse however still remains mired in old tech, and refuse to learn some very simple tools that makes thier poser use life easier, faster, and yeilds better results.

That HAS been shifting though, since P6's release, and even moreso since EF made P5 available for free.

That means more new users will also be drawn to the fold, more people will push the tools we have as much as possible, and we'll ALL benefit from these advancements.

Look at tools that would have never been created if we didn't have advancements:

Wardrobe Wizard
Poser Toolbox
Puppetmaster
Shader Spider
Particles 1,2,3
PoserPhsyics
Matmatica
objtocr2

Each brings more powerful tools and in some cases amazingly easy tools to the Poserverse, and we're all lucky the artists have stuck arond to create them.

Netherworks is a good example of one of those artists who tries to push the tools we have as hard as possible to yield new and creative results. Support the guys doing the legwork to make our poser life richer, rather then holding them back supporting 8 years old technology.

Quote - Neither do I -- until I attempt a render with more than 3 mil figures with hair, clothes, and background props.  Exceed that, and firefly gets iffy.  It might work, and it might not.  Even when applying the various "tricks" like adjusting bucket sizes, etc..  This is with 2G of RAM.

I know that some others claim to have no problems rendering 9+ Mil figures in a scene -- but such results with P6 have been well outside of my experience.  Perhaps they aren't using features like raytracing.....that might force a render -- if they render with no extras.  But doing so sort of defeats the purpose of firefly.

Vue, anyone?

I still have an image I did in p5 when people said you couldn't do more than one figure in a scene without it crashing.  This was before sr1 with mike & vic 2.  The figure list was extremely long..plus I used the hair room, raytracing, materials etc.

I've found that you need two things:  patience and a lot of tweaking in the render settings.  I'm working on a new image that is completely lit by Antons Magic in p6.   It needs  alot of the fancys to get the reflectios in the eyes etc.  I just up the buket size...takes 12 hours...but it renders at 20000 x 20000.  It only has jesse, freak and various waves of antons magic though.

I hope the reason 7 is a resume render feature simlar to Vue's.  That thing works amazingly well. 

stahlratte & vilian...no one is going to stop you from using p4 or the p4 renderer. 

However your arguement that firefly and the material room is not as good and/or only good for realistic renders is convoluted and false.  I'm not trying to flame but your both a little caught up in not knowing what you're talking about.  Stahlratte, you're arguements very assuming.

p4 is fine if all you want is painted textures and basic poser lights.  It can have very realistic or even artistic results.  I used p4 for years and loved it.

Then I got p5. 

Being a now former brycer, I pined for the material depth that bryce had in p4.  With p5 I finally had it.  With p6, I got even more.  With the material room, I can light the room anyway I choose, I can make things glow, I can make things look fuzzy and give skin a painited look.  I can make mike any color of the rainbow still using the same texture map that he came with.  With ao the glowing nostrals are gone.  I make things look cartoonly or wooden or velvety.  No postwork involved. I can add hair effects that can double as grass or other strange pheonme...but it takes knowledge of the material room to make them look as toony or as realistic as I need.

This isn't a realism debate.  Without p4 it means content creators can move forward.  I'm sorry that you don't care or want that.  I'm sure people will still make p4 compatable stuff.  It depends on their precentage of sales.  If you don't buy p4 content, then it will go away.  Without ef support of p4 content creators are going to have less of a guarantee on their product. 

You don't want to take the time to learn it.  Fine.  But saying it's broken because you refuse to learn to use it is unaccaptable.

First, I really don´t care what anybody finds "acceptable" or not.

I already said that to me simply the results Firefly delivers are not worth the ludicrous render times, and that includes using AO and/or any skin shaders.

I also simply deny a small minority to dictate their values to the majority.

Poser did not become what it is today because it was "advanced" or cutting edge,  but because it brought a very, very  simple and fun version of CGI to the masses.

And if it changes this direction, if it wants to become something it isn´t just because some people all of the sudden got starry eyed and started to dream big important professional dreams, then , yes then Joe and Jane Average might decide that all the fun has been sucked out by the "professionals" and just pack their things and "move on".

Not to Poser 7 or 8 or 9, but to another programm that takes their REAL  needs seriously, and doesn´t twist their arms  just to make a nice picture.

And all the vendors that now can´t be bothered spending time to create a rsr, will then have a LOT of time, because there won´t be many people left to buy their wares.

If you all are so bent on "moving on", why don´t you do yourself a favour and move on to a real professional programm ?

Then you can all show off your L33t  P0z35 2k!llZ to likeminded people and don´t have to be bothered anymore by all the lowbrow riffraff that populates the poserdom and "holds you back"

Stahlratte

If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude.

I'm not one for 'hyper-realistic" images, and yet I almost always use firefly when rendering (the only exception is for those few items with textures that seem optimized for the P4 renderer) without either taking hours to render (unless I use AO, but I expect that to be slow) or having massive numbers of problems.

And I've got several images, both here in my gallery, and on my computer, that I couldn't have done in P4 or ProPack, because they lack the feature (P6's Gather node is very nice), or the renderer lacked the functionality to do the image in a way that I wanted it to come out.

And for those unwilling or unable to get a better computer to run P5, P6, or P7, you're going to find yourselves slowly becoming more abandoned by all the other computer programs out there, as they move to take advantage of the newest technologies.

So eventually, in order to use anything without some compatibility problems people will have to update their computers. It's just a fact of things, I wouldn't expect to find many new programs that can run on Windows 98 anymore, nor would I expect software developers to even bother making programs that can run on 98.

If your computer can only run P4, and you can't upgrade, well, it's a bit of a bummer, but don't expect anyone else to give a damn, especially those who have moved on to P5 or P6. And as for not buying from people who don't support P4/PP, that's probably a good thing for you P4 hold-outs, because you'll be unable to properly use some of the features in products made for P5 and up, so it really would be a waste of money for you. But don't expect the merchant to spend time making sure they're product works in P4 if less than 50% of their customers still need that compatibility, it's a waste of their time to do so.

Asking a Mod to lock this.

I did'nt start this for what it has become. I refuse to have a flamewar thread started under my name.

Sorry it's come to this, because some realyl useful info was posted here.

Thread locked at request of original poster.