I'm a mac G5 1.8Gzh, 2GB RAM poser user. All i have bought is Poser 4 and 5. didn't buy poser 6 but had a chance to use it and it wasn't all that Seen the Poser 7 webpage at e-frontier It looks good and all from the webpage. It attracks me because -I like that supposedly it will have better more realistic Preview mode , so you can even render in preview mode display and get some good stuff. That's usually how i made my poser movies with Poser 4,5 cause i'm an average user with not alot of time. So knowing that preview mode is even better than before, sounds nice -I like the included Lipsync thing. You don't have to go out and use Mimic anymore -There's animation layers and according to my theories that will minimize the annoying effect that poser 4, 5, 6 have which is that you animate one body part by hand or something.. and you get unwanted torso or hip twists and distortions. That is one of the most annoying things , in fact i haven't done much animation because of that . -Rendering is better IN poser. and more effects with light . -etc etc, there's a variety of new things that i like My question now is...i have tons of things that i bought for poser 5, and i wonder if they will work in poser 7. Like V3, m3, etc and clothes etc. Also is V4 even worth buying. In sum, am i gonna have to buy everything new for poser 7 or can i reuse my old stuff? And do poses and pose animations that i bought for poser 5, work in poser 7? Ok well to end this message my overall question is, Is it a good idea to buy Poser 7 ?

it's definitely better than p5. in regard to hardware shading, it may not work with older video cards having insufficient vram, and sr1 may have also caused a new bug in that regard. old stuff from p4/5 still works, but the business model dictates that large numbers of users, possibly including you, need to buy new items (e.g. V4) at regular intervals.

P5 ran like dreck, P6 was an improvement, P7 runs like dreck (for me). I hear it is that way for a lot of non Intel users.

be patient - they may need until sr3 to pummel it into shape for everybody. unfortunately, sr2 will probably be a fix for sr1, which was sposeta be a fix for sr0. they also hafta gear up for the big leopard release.

G4 Powerbook, 1.67 GHz, 2 GB ram, 10.4.8 ............. Poser6 was awful on my setup- I hated it ! It crashed frequently and generally behaved erratically. I had gone straight to 6 from 4ProPack which I had never had problems with at all and it still ran perfectly. I only got 6 so I wouldn't keep having to reboot into classic however . 7 works very well for me, glad I got it. I haven't yet installed sr1 though. From all I've read I will wait until sr2 or 3 I think. So I think Yes 7s good. All my previous props and figures work. I rarely use bought pose or light sets but the few I do have seem to work fine. Can't say anything about animation at all or how lipsync works. I bought V4, didn't like her at first, still preferred V2 &M2. Have tried her out for a while , do really find her easy to pose and will probably now ditch V3 from my runtime. But softwares unfortunately do seem to vary a lot system to system more and more. I also could barely run Vue5Inf however 6 works pretty well. Other mac users said 5 ran really well for them.

Attached Link: Poser 7 Render Errors

I went straight from Pro Pack to Poser 6, skipping P5. So, from PPP to P6 was a fantastic improvement. P7 comes with two really great features: Multiple Undo's and "duplicate". "Duplicate" I find great for adding similar lights quickly. And of course, you can use it to add people or cars, etc. My own complaints are well documented in the attached link. In this and other threads, others report they are having no problems with SR1. I personally have not used the "layers animation" in Poser7 but it seems to be very much the same as the Motion Mixer in Lightwave. And yes, its a great way to animate using defined motions, editing them in a non-linear way. The concept is a good one, I have yet to see how it works. Yes, I think the preview looks pretty good, depending on what you need it to look like. V4? http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=1942 this is a tutorial that covers a lot of what is different in V4. The changes are good as it further develops the Vicki line. And it is sometimes frustrating because V4 is not always what I'm used to. And therein lies the double edged sword of change. ; ) As always, you gotta ask: What are your needs? Animation vs Illustration, Deadlines vs Time to Experiment.

In my experience, P7 runs better than P5 and P6 on a G5 Mac (and has great features overall compared to P6), so it's worth upgrading, but if you ever upped yourself to a multi-processor Intel Mac, you will be stunned at how much faster the rendering performance is. P7 is universal code and multi-processor prepped. It smokes on a MacIntel.

Quote - It smokes on a MacIntel.

But other machines it doesn't work as strong.

Quote - "It smokes on a MacIntel."

Not on my iMac it doesn't!!!! The original P7 crashed repeatedly; just clicking on any node and poof P7 was gone. The backgrounds were invisible. It was so slow. Now with SR1 it's worse! First everything I loaded was totally black. It seems that 'hardware shading' worked preSR1 but not after. Rendering 2 - 4 processes caused the first bucket of each to be transparent. There must be a memory leak because after a few renders some of the textures were gone, then a long pause, then .... poof..... P7 was gone!

I went back to P6 which was not meant for intel. The backgrounds are invisible here also. After a few renders it starts rendering pure black! And of course it crashes too.

I was so upset that I set up my old G4 and am back to P6 on that. What a waste - I bought the intel just for Poser 7!!

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24" Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, 2.16 GHz, 2 GB ram, 667 MHz, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, OS 10.4.8

I've got Poser 7 running on two different Macs: Dual 1.8 gHz G4 Quicksilver with 1 Gig RAM, and a Dual 2 gHz G5 PPC with 1.5 Gigs RAM. Both have OS 10.4.8 Tiger and the program works flawlessly on both. I have no problems or complaints. I don't know why some people have trouble and why some don't. Personally, I felt it was worth the investment to upgrade.

Nagus, I meet all the requirements so why doesn't it work for me?

Macintosh

• Mac OS X v.10.3.9 or 10.4 (Universal Binary)
• 700 MHz G4 processor (Intel Core Duo or 1GHz G4 or faster recommended)
• 512 MB system RAM (768 MB or more recommended)
• OpenGL enabled graphics card or chipset recommended (recent NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon preferred)
• 24-bit color display, 1024 x 768 resolution
• 1 GB free hard disk space (4 GB recommended)
• Internet connection required for Content Paradise
• DVD-ROM Drive

I'm tempted to load P7 onto my G4 MDD just to see for myself. But my 22" Apple Cinema Display is wearing out. It's got a bunch of vertical blue lines on the left side for the first hour or two then it's fine.

nagus, it appears you're rendering without shadows. if you try a render with big shadowmaps and shadowlite cams zoomed in (or a render with finely-detailed AO), do you still find poser7 to be stable? poser7 works o.k. for me, but I can make it crash reproducibly, hence I just avoid doing the things that make it crash.

Perhaps PilotHigh's problem is not enough RAM. P7 appear especially sensitive to that when it renders an animation, so if he/she is still working with 512MB or even 756MB, there might be problems. Poser 7 will work with 512MB, but "work" is a relative term. I have 4GB of RAM on a Mac Pro 2 x Dual-Core, but also run Poser 7 on a Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM. No issues unless I try to render out a loaded-up 1,000-frame animation, during which it might burp around the 800th frame. Try rendering in a separate process (go to preferences and check the requisite box).

skeetshooter, I have 2 GB of ram and you're saying that's not enough? I don't do animation or use the hair or cloth room either.

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24" Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, 2.16 GHz, 2 GB ram, 667 MHz, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, OS 10.4.8

> Quote - nagus, it appears you're rendering without shadows. if you try a render with big shadowmaps and shadowlite cams zoomed in (or a render with finely-detailed AO), do you still find poser7 to be stable? poser7 works o.k. for me, but I can make it crash reproducibly, hence I just avoid doing the things that make it crash.

Took a while for the attached render to finish, but Poser 7 did not crash. I have more lock-up problems with Poser 6, especially with larger renders. Are these enough shadows, BTW?

Sorry, PilotHigh, I missed the part about your having 2 gigs of RAM (there have been a few Poser Mac users on the forum who have gotten all flustered when their new machines with only 512mb of RAM won't run Poser well -- you're obviously not one of them). PilotHigh, try going into your Poser 7 Preferences and under the Render tab checking Render as Separate Process, and move the slider to 3 Threads (assuming your iMac has two processes with two cores each). I've discovered that this greatly improves stability. Pushing the slider to 4 is asking for trouble as the machine then seems to have no breathing room for anything esle you have running. 2 GB should be plenty for you to avoid your problems -- in addition to my Macbook Pro with 2 GB(for when I travel) and my Mac Pro (for my office), I have almost exactly the same configuration as you (including 2GB of RAM) have in a 24" iMac at home, and simply don't have those problems. The iMac doesn't run P7 as fast as my Mac Pro (which also has a souped up video card and 4 gigs of RAM), but it's still faster than my MacBook, and in any case neither have any of the problems you cited. I do multi-character animation -- big, fat scenes with lots of morphed-up figures and textures, rendered at relatively high resolutions -- and, at least in that way, push my machines to their limit. Thought it can get slow at HD-type resolutions, it almost never crashes (although "undoing" certain actions in the Keyframes Editor several times risks a rare freeze, though never a crash).

I'm really losing it here -- I just realized that in addition to missing your point about the 2 GB of RAM, I just gave you basically the same advice in a March 16th post above. God, I need a vacation from my job and four kids. I need to finish this darn animation project. I need it to be summer.

PilotHigh I'm gonna step out on a limb here. Would you run your hardware test CD? Maybe there's a bad RAM chip either in memory or on the graphics card. Its worth a try, just to eliminate that possibility. sure hope that helps