After spending the last three days working pretty intensively in P7, I will warn you, the new functionality comes at a price of incredible flakiness. Some examples:

When I go to the Materials room, actions in there cause materials to flip 180 degrees. Another action will normalize them.

The keyboard functions go skiwopus with no warning. Suddenly Del doesn't delete, Down Arrow doesn't move you through lists, etc.

Older figures come in with screwed up previews. If you try to fix them, you screw up the renders. For example, hair is suddenly "too small" and skulls show through.

Things will just go nuts. I'm working with an old Steph2 PZ3 right now. The Ground won't render, so she's hanging in space. Ok, I remember: Ground is just for previews now. So I inserted a "floor" with the Cloth Plane. No, that won't render either. So I moved y 0.1. Nope.

Same model, about three years old. She came in with AutoBalance on. I didn't turn it on. I never use AutoBalance. But I was warned: Mysterious square plates with little rings attached were visible on screen. I'm so used to seeing things screwed up, I ignored them. Then I tried to move a selected element. The entire figure rotated into some IK-like pretzel like a perverse animation. Right. Just what I wanted. Undo. I selected something else. New plate. Moved something a smidge left. The entire figure folded up like a corpse in a trash compactor. Right. Undo. Yes, this is what AutoBalance is supposed to do, and the problem went away when I discovered it was on and turned it off. But the result of AutoBalance is supposed to be a better, more natural look, not something from a horror movie. I consider it the evil twin of IK, surely the dumbest "helpful tool" in the Poser kit.

The new Select option on Right Click is indispensible, because Poser 7 is actually worse at letting you click-select the only bloody thing that is under the cursor. I try to select hair, and I get GROUND. Right. Worse, you can click select something in the Doc Window, and the Parameters panel selector doesn't update. If you don't notice and you move a dial, you move the thing selected in the panel, not the thing selected in the window. And still worse, you can click something, it turns red, and when you move it, the selector shifts to something else in the vicinity -- your only warning is a screwup, fortunately fixable with the other indispensible new toy: Undo.

The usual inexplicable refusals to load, refusals to redisplay, refusals to do what you just asked it to do.

The usual total disconnect between the light in the Preview and the light in the Render.

It continues to amaze me, after 5 releases, that Poser is so riddled with trivial annoyances and major flaws. Accounting for it is beyond me.

Would I give up P7? I guess not. But if it had a neck....

M