Y'know, I'm a big believer that, if an update doesnt have features I want, I dont bother updating. The CS series from Adobe, for example -- there's nothing there I cant get from my current levels of Photoshop and Illustrator, so I didnt bother with them, and I dont miss them one whit. I'm sure Mac's OSX10.5 will be just chock full of really great stuff, but it's really great stuff that I dont need or want, so I'll probably plod along with 10.4 until I'm forced by my software to upgrade.

But having said that, I cant imagine why anyone would stay with Poser 4. Honest, folks -- and that comes from someone who didnt bother with 5 and gave 6 only a cursory run. But the moment I opened 7, as buggy as it was (and minimally so, I might add, for a first release), I was hooked. I could see a drastic improvement in the renders -- and Firefly, as much as people bitch about it, was a whole new world. And that's not even taking into consideration the Hair, Set Up and Dynamic Cloth rooms, which I've only barely hit after having P7 for months now.

Sorry, but IMHO, as rock solid as P4 was, you're just cutting yourself off at the kneecaps by not going after the upgrade. Yes, the renders done in P4 are still perfectly acceptable, and for most users about the best they want anyway. But --- and again, this is just IMHO -- the folks who steer clear of it and complain loudly that it's "too complicated" or "too weird an interface" havent even looked at it, let alone done anything with it to merit that judgment. The interface is only marginally different from P4 until you wander into the set up rooms noted above. Everything else, folks, is virtually the same, so let's just set the whole interface argument aside, okay?

Is it tougher to learn? Only if you go deeper than the usual "insert from column A here and conform to column B here". Aside from that, things are exactly the same. You still conform clothing to a character. Yes, now they're considered props, but big whoop. It's still the same process. You still change the materials in the materials room with the same process you used in P4 -- I know, because most of the time that's as far as I go with material assignation, although I'm finding some real gems to be unearthed by gingerly stepping into that Advanced tab,

If you want decent quality renders, yep, P4 will do it for you. No argument there. But if you want to push them to the next level.....

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