Quote - 2. WHERE THE -BLEEP- is my P4 render engine???????  Am I nuts, or does the included paperwork in my DVD case show a distinct lack of the P4 engine tab on the rendering options?

I think your review was critical, well-thought out, and nicely written, so I think that shows you're definitely not nuts.

But, yes, SM did remove the P4 render engine from P8. The official reason is that it's not supported by their new architecture. I'm pretty sure this means they don't want to spend any more development time trying to re-write the P4 renderer so it works with 64-bit operating systems.

To answer the question about why people are missing the P4 renderer: because it renders a scene in a fraction of the time it takes to render it using the Firefly renderer, simply because the P4 renderer doesn't show the procedure-node shader effects.
Even when I set Poser 7 to the most optimized Firefly settings, a scene still takes 2 to 3 times longer to render. Now, sure, for finished artwork, I want Poser to take its time and render everything nicely. But when I just want to see how the scene looks, I don't want to wait 15 minutes when the P4 renderer will give a good preview of the scene in about 30 seconds. I don't need ray-traced reflections and depth-mapped shadows when I'm looking to see if the character's eyes are looking the right way or if a pose is causing a person's arm to poke through the shirt.

Yes, I can fiddle with the bucket size and rendering threads and ray-traced bounces and so on, but for simple, fast previews, the P4 renderer can't be beat.

It's sad to hear that they're no longer sending out thick, printed manuals, but I think this is typical of the entire software industry. How many other programs ship in small jewel cases instead of big boxes? This reduces shelf space in stores, reduces the shipping weight of the product, and lowers the cost of the product since all those manuals don't have to be printed.

And I wonder if the SM techs finally listened to all the complaints in the forums where people said they only used the Poser manual as a doorstop.
Let's face it: most people will post a message in the Poser Forum instead of opening the manual. And after the initial replies of "read the manual", they'll get answers to their questions that aren't even covered in the manual.

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