I sometimes wonder how many people use the current animation capabilities of Poser. I think that Curious Labs is absolutely right to add and improve features like animation, hair systems and collision detection. And I believe that those type improvements will figure into many folks buying logic - but I doubt any large percentage of Poser 5 purchasers are going to use it much.

I know that I don't use the Poser animation abilities because animating in Poser 4 is (for what I see as work I would be happy with) simply not going to happen. Without collision based hair and clothing animation is an exercise in futility for me - and I have no interest in keyframing all the clothing motion.

Nor are we going to toss out the gigabytes of Poser files we've accumulated through freestuff, purchases and our own hard work just because there are new models available. I still use P4 clothing with Michael/Victoria figures (usually the head on a P4 body) all the time.

Well, speaking firmly as one of those who is in Curious Labs target market, I know we will be dropping most of the old stuff from our work almost as soon as anything remotely useful shows up in the new formats. The added realism is simply worth the processing cost.

Of course, in our business work we compete against Maya and Lightwave and 3DS Max all the time... and while it is great that we can use (and rely on) Poser 4 it crucial that Poser 5 gets closer to the current state of the art.

While I am sympathetic to those vendors for whom this will represent a sales problem I also think that it is important that we know what's coming so we can start making informed decisions. Hopefully as more details come out we will be able to make choices on what to buy and not to buy with confidence.

Right now, my policy is that I'll buy it right now for Poser 4 anything that I will actually USE right away. I won't buy it because I might use it sometime (like I did before) or if it is just "cool".