After having used Poser 5 for years now,and still not fully trusting Poser 7, I've decided (or rather, I'm deciding) to take the plunge and upgrade to Poser 6...

I'm mostly doing it for the IB Light, which I seem to be needing more and more everyday, and hoping Poser 6 is a bit more intelligent?? I'm really tired of cr2 files browsing through my entire 200 gig HD trying to find a single file, to then ask me where is it, and then browsing the entire harddrive again for the next file...  and I would also hope Poser 6 handles RAM in a better way than Poser 5 (I just came back from a freeze-up because I only had 1 gig of RAM)...

so, any words of advice? should I risk it and upgrade, should I just stay with Poser 5 until Poser 7 estabilizes??

thanks in advance

I have 6 and 7 at the moment but I'm still mainly using 6.
My reasons for that though are mainly due to using Vue6Inf which is better with P6 than P7 at the moment.
I maily use Vue for lighting because the lighting is better than Poser, including version 7.

Poser 6 IMO is far better than Poser 5 ever was and I think Poser 7 will be better than 6 [eventually], so the question is will you wait for 7 to be sorted.
When I have used Poser 7 I've liked what it does and it handles memory and textures much better and makes use of my Pentium 4 HT technology which 6 doesn't so I'd prefer to use it over 6 but I can't risk it if I'm doing a cover for a client because of some bugs which I'm led to belive are there!

If it were me I'd wait and not bother with 6 but I'd never tell anyone what to do, it's up to you, but that is what I would do!

P6 and P7 still do the old hunt the harddrive, although you can set P7 to a shallow search so it throws it hands up in disgust a lot quicker than P5.

For my money I would bypass P6 and go straight to P7 - no, honestly.  Yes there are still some issues being reported by some users but not all of us are experiencing those issues and P7 at least makes a modest stab at HDRI lighting.

 Unlike P6 you can at least try to force P7 to render a scene it doesn't want to know about.  I had one yesterday that simply refused to go but by cranking my bucket size down to 2 and my adaptive threshold up to 1 it went through without me having to dump my raytracing which would have killed my nice shiny kitchen surfaces.  P6 loaded the pz3 (just!) but asked me what I was taking if I thought it could render that.

I advise plunge headlong into P7 and cross your fingers you are one of the lucky people who find it relatively bug free.

I've had considerably less glitches with P7 than I ever had with P6. If you have a dual (or quad) core processor it's a lot faster at rendering. A minor niggle is that when you delete a figure, it's slow as hell (due to P7's multiple undos), though this has been improved slightly with SR1.

If you load up the wrong figure, it's quicker to do a CTRL+Z than delete it.

I see.. so the consensus would apparently be on waiting for P7 to maybe stabilize a bit more... it does make sense, why should undergo another learning curve with P6, if it's going to be obsolete in a little while when P7 gets a litte more bug-free...

thanks for the input, I'll really put more thought into this...

my vote would be for P7, unless P6 is available as a freebie somewhere.

In my opinion P7 renders faster than P6, the OpehGL-Preview is better and I have not found a critical Bug since SP1. If you don't use Vue (which at the moment seems to prefer P6 scenes) I would strongly suggest Poser 7. I have both here (both licensed, since I upgraded a free Poser 5 license to Poser 7 so I still have a valid Poser 6) and use just P7.

P7 definately seems to the winner here...  I do use Vue 5 Infinite so guess I'll have to consider that as well..

thanks again for all the input

I found Poser 7 to be pretty stable , but , I turned OFF the save external binary morphs as soon as I got it.   That seems to avoid a few fairly nasty problems with saving and reloading stuff.

The upgrade cost when I upgraded was the same , in fact I didnt see an upgrade to Poser 6 after 7 was released.

I've been thinking this over, and pretty much the only reason (if the RAM managemente is just the same as always) to upgrade to Poser 6 would be using the IB light...

is there a way to get anything similar to that kind of lighting on Poser 5?

Regarding P6 and P7 I would highly recommend P7 - at least: Why should you spend your money on some outdated sotware?! My PC is several years old and except bigger harddrives and a lot of additional RAM it still runs with the old CPU and such that I bought in 2004. I found P7 to be far more stable and a bit faster than P6 - okay, "fast" is a relative term because as soon as I find something to be faster I try to render more elaborate images
The first update for P7 gave me nothing but crashes and problems (while working perfect for other people) but the second update that is available since some weeks (SR 1.1 or so???) works fine and solved all problems I've found (so far).

is there a way to get anything similar to that kind of lighting on Poser 5?
It's not really the same effect but you may want to try "Poor Man's hdri"

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2517857

i started with P5 and am using P6, it is way better than P5, for me the inclusion of point lights( i use 'em for backlighting) wins it, and as long as you have service release 2 with it, i think you'll find it to be way more stable, i've also had no probs with exporting stuff to Vue5 inf, and until they build some kinda shrine to P7, 'cause of how awesome it becomes, i'll be sticking with P6.

so if it's on offer, or you can afford it, i would say get P6.

I'm upgrading at the end of this month to P6 because I've been on P5 since it's first release. After the P7 horror stories I've been reading, I'm staying clear of it & it might not even work on my system as it's old so P6 sounds like it will work for me.

As your question is especially about lights: P7 has two extremely useful features regarding lights.
First you can undo light settings in multiple steps (if you don't use the delete-lights-script), second you now have a button to combine lights (called "Select") what means you can build some lights on your own and combine them with a premade set or single light. or whatever - and, as said, undo your settings step by step. I can't think of being without these features anymore.

thanks to everyone (already checked that thread Karen, thanks!)... and I'm gonna take the plunge into Poser 6 only, for the time being.,..I know it may seem weird to go for an already outdated software, but seriously, until the Poser 7 horror stories stop (or until the "I have Poser 7, but keep using Poser 6" stories die out), then I'll just dive into P6 and hope not to drown...

wish me luck! and thanks again for aiding my decission!

I'm pretty sure that there will be a P7 bargain for you sooner or later if you buy P6, so with a little luck you can upgrade for less in a while! And about outdated software: Don't worry, there are even "I own P7 but prefer my P4" statements. At least: The most important thing is that people are happy with their apps!

A month after you buy software, any, software, including Poser, IT's considered out of date. Just like buying a computer, 6 months later, you're out of date. :)

heh , true true... well, I really think I juiced P5 for all it was worth, so it's time to tackle on P6 features now (specially that darn IB Light I so seek after)... eventually, when P6 is dried out to me, I'll have a (hopefully) stable P7 to take on...

I think that Poser 7 is better than P6 and the service release patch solved most of my issues with it that I had.  If you have a multiprossesor computer it definitely renders much faster.  The multiple undo is great and prevents a lot of frustratons.  

I know you've essentially made up your mind, but you can always try the  P7 demo and see how it runs on your machine before making your final decision.  I've learned a while back that buying outdated software is rarely worth it, unless you're using it to upgrade to a newer version :0).

*Just like buying a computer, 6 months later, you're out of date. :)
*If so you are lucky! I've found that there is a newer, more powerful pc available (of course for just a few bucks more!) as soon as you tuck the box with your new computer in your car

I agree with the sentiment here. Poser 7 is the way to go.

I have had a completely pain free experience with Poser 7 thus far, something I cannot say about Poser 6.

The differences between the two are really very minor in the grand scheme of things, and minute compared to those between 5 and 6.

well, my main worries with P7 is that I don't have multiprocessors and actually have some very old computers with 512 ram tops, and I know they can handle P6, but I don't know they could tolerate P7 like that...

I already have P6 ready to be installed, so I guess I am going for it for the time being... and it history repeats itself, by the time I'll want to head for P7, P8 will aready be here :/

but who knows... I've had Photoshop 7 for like 7 years already? and I still find new uses for it, reason why I haven't stepped up to Photoshop CS 2 yet (there's a CS 3 out, right?)..

in other words, right now I wouldn't want to skip one step of the evolution and jump from P5 to P7 straight away... I'll use P6 for some time and see what happens...

and yes, I might try that P7 demo if some of my machines can handle it...

APS cs3 is out, and works o.k. (OS X). cs3e has the ability to import several 3d file formats for display and retexturing, but there appear to be some bugs, and IMVHO it's a waste of money for anybody with a 3D app that has a "texture reload" function (probly all of 'em nowadays). one of the reasons for using P7 instead of P6 is that, in OS X, the python scripts work in P7, but they usually don't work in P6 AFAIK.

I've just installed P6...  been on P4 all these years.

I love Vue, and if it gets along with P6 i'm satisfied.
 

I have Poser 6. I started with Poser 5 and TBH had it not been for the fact that it's possible to make a hybrid out of the Morphing Fantasy Dress in the cloth room of Poser 6, I would still be using Poser 5. That was the reason that I took the leap to upgrade.

Other than the multiple undo option in Poser 7 which I find appealing, there isn't enough new bells and whistles that appeal to me to upgrade again (I had version 6 less than a year when Poser 7 came out).

Here are pros and cons of Poser 6:

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 far less lights to light a scene which speeds up render time

• It's much much easier to make your own light setup in Poser 6 because you only need between 2 and 5 lights. Even I can do it :)

• Area render. I so love this!

• No need to edit an .xml file to increase number of thumbnails viewed

• Cache of previous renders. Ths comes in really handy)

• Gather Node that allows you to do some really cool neon glowing effects
  P6 Lighting without Lighting using gather node
  Creating bioluminescence with P6 shader nodes
  glow effect in poser

• Ability to take some conforming clothing into the cloth room and make parts of them dynamic:
  http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2517340&page=1