Attached Link: http://www.perpetualvisions.com/articles-and-graphics/review-mini-poser5-sp.htm

Thanks for this. Interestinger and interestinger. Q

Paula, this was a very thorough and inspiring article. Thanks! Kimberly

Thanks, very good article. My mouth is starting to water again. Pretty soon, I'll have to wear a bucket around my neck. Tashar 59

"The Cloth Room will contain with many cloth files. It is easy to create dynamic cloth from static cloth." Does this mean turning existing clothing dynamic is possable? perhaps it's too much to ask for but one can dream can't one. boy these tidbits are maddining they reveal one thing only to bring up a dozen new questions. I feel like pavlov's dog, and Kupa's ringin the bell.

What will be the fate of the stuff we made or downloaded for Poser4? How transferable? The clothes, etc?

Sounds great. I was getting worried, but know I'm excited again. I'm going to start a new short film as soon as I get it. Hopefully I can render in Poser instead of max. I hate to throw questions at you, but do you know if there are any enhancements to the animation palette?

Paula, Thank you for sharing this, I've bookmarked your site so i can return and read your other reviews. Really good site! (Enjoyed the art, as well...)

The little movie file of the cloth animation in Poser 5 looks great!! Can't wait! The stand hair is my biggest thing I look forward, too, tho I know it will take a lot of tinkering to get good looking results... but hey, thats what makes art and hobbies fun!!

August!!!!!! Paula said August release, woohoo it's august today, only a matter of weeks away from the biggest shakeup of the 3d art world we've seen in years :)))) Rob

I'll just add a few things. I have seen a few questions asked here and I don't have any asnwers. Steve Cooper sat with me and showed me Poser 5 for one wonderful hour. I asked as many questions as I could thnk of. Unfortunately, I didn't ask some that you are asking. I can comment on one though. I did see him create hair from scratch and it was easy and I don't think just because it is his program. The steps were not hard. One reaction I had to some of the new versions of software that I saw demoed at Siggraph was while they were more powerful, they were also easier and more intuitive. I like to think that might be a trend for the future. I, also, want to thank everyone for their nice comments.

Paula, Do you mind if I post this link at 3D Commune? mac

Be my guest. I posted this because I was so thrilled with Poser 5 I wanted to share it.

Thanks Paula, There are only 20,000 of us but we like to keep up to date. LOL mac Ps And thanks for sharing the news.

I dont see any reference to collision detection. Yes the clothing will move with the object (or figure, oops!) but is this ct? If its not then that blows a major project I was to do in Poser 5. Doesnt matter, I can do it as a still photo and not bother with Poser. It will be mire expensive, the model will talk back, the whole kit will be in a different arena but it looks like we have our first problem. No, our second problem.

I wrote about most of the features but not in outline form. I'm sure I left some out like Collision Detection. I am looking at the press release Curious Labs gave me and Collision Detection is a feature. Since I saw this Press Release copied somewhat verbatum on other websites, I didn't want to do the same. However, I can list the features from it if it will help. The following statements are directly quoted from the press release of San Antonio TX-Siggraph-July 23, 2002 "FireFly Renderer-hybrid-polygon Subdivision Surface and Raytracer render engine that enables: Rendertime smoothing of facets Displacement mapping 3D motion blur Depth of field Procedural textures Luminosity, refraction and reflection Shader tree with material nodes Dynamic Cloth with physics and parameter controlled cloth atributes Dynamic Hair with growth, styling and physics controls Facial Photo-based Modelingwith scanned 3D human head and texture database FacePutty for interactive sculpting, and caricature and random head generators All new highly accurate 3D human figures with fully articulated hands and feet, featuring photo-realistic texture maps and facial morphs from RuntineDNA MorphPutty Tool Collision Detection Content paradise Portal for in-Poser 5 access to online resources." I hope this helps.

xvcoffee, There is a clip showing collision detection where a furry cloth square drops down onto a sphere and "pours off" or "drapes down" depending upon how stiff the fabric is. IIRC, the link to 2 motion clips is in the California Dreaming thread. We haven't had the program under our very own fingers to tweedle the knobs ourselves, but as Paula said in her interview, we have seen it on a laptop in real time. An hour isn't nearly long enough, though! I still have questions!!! Carolly

Paula, you forgot two rooms in your mini-review: Pose and Setup ;)

Huolong, We've been told that backwards compatibility was assured.

I told you all that I probably forgot some things. Thanks. This info helps everyone and I appreciate it. I, obviously, skipped over them in my notes or I would add them to my review. I just checked my notes.

"Movies can also be used as maps"

Yes! YES!!! Ah, the evil I shall unleash upon you all ....

Little_Dragon, I've heard you do animation and do it well. Do you have any samples on the web that I can check out?

I don't have a web page, but I can provide you with some links. I'm not completely convinced that I "do it well," but I try my best.

Florence #1 (MPEG format, 536KB)
Florence #2 (MPEG format, 265KB)
Mike the TV (MPEG format, 540KB)
Architecture (MPEG format, 2.74MB)
Sabrina #1 (MPEG format, 1.92MB)
Sabrina #2 (MPEG format, 1.37MB)
Sabrina #3 (MPEG format, 779KB)
Sabrina #4 (MPEG format, 633KB)
Tobi (MPEG format, 293KB)

Florence Mark Stanley, Freefall
Sabrina Eric W. Schwartz, Sabrina-Online
Mike the TV Mainframe Entertainment

These are a hoot! You did a really nice job at bringing the characters to life. I'm talking about the subtle nuances in facial expression and the timing of the pauses and motion in your talking characters.

The dances were so smooth I'm thinking maybe BVH, but I notice your characters didn't go through the floor. Obviously you did a lot of fixing. I take it you're pretty picky about getting it "right." I like that.

I really liked the texture and over all look of the architecture one. What did you create it in (as well as Mike the TV)?

I realize these questions aren't relevant to this thread so this will be my last ones - at least here. ;-)

AHA! To bring it back to the thread:

I can't wait to see someone using a looping movie of flowing water to texture a dancing skunk once P5 is realeased. It'll be totally shagadelic, baby!

I also hope they've added bezier curves to the animation controls. That makes it so much easier to control the flow of the animation as well as keep track of what specific keyframes represent what specific activity in the timeline.

Collision detection? How does a hat fit on a head full of hair in P5? Does the hair give?

L.D., lookin' good. What codecs do I need to update? sound's not coming through right. - TJ (bikermouse)

Physics simulation, Huolong ... the hair can be assigned qualities like thickness, weight, springiness, give, etc. Same as the clothing.

The dances were motion-captured BVH files, Bobasaur, and I did manually edit them to some degree. Mike the TV is in Free Stuff; he's by Talon69. The architecture video was created with Maz's cartoon dungeon props; I don't think he's released them yet. Everything was rendered in Poser 4, even the room with the reflecting mirrors.

bikermouse:
Some of the videos have sound (the Sabrina clips, Florence #1, Mike the TV); others don't. They're all standard MPEG-1 videos. They should work properly in both Windows Media Player and Apple's QuickTime player, with no need for codecs beyond the ones already built-in.

Cartoon dungeon props rendered in Poser 4? I was thinking some kind of Lightwave super-cell shader with noise added to it. FWIW the sound came through fine on my Mac. AS promised, I'll hold other questions for another thread. Good night.

o.k. must be my browser then. I'll just have to wait for them to load and look at them later offline in my temporary internet folder. Thanks Little_Dragon, - TJ (bikermouse)

L.D., "Architecture" looks similar to the "Quake" example from Micael Abrash's Graphis Programming Black Book. Exellent Work L.D. . Some day someone will mentiom Little_Dragon and Michael Abrash in the same sentance. I don't think that day is far away. Infact I think someone already has. Keep at it, L.D.! - TJ

Did you hear anything on mulithreading? I'm building dual CPU system and would like to know if Poser 5 wil take advantage of it.

Apparently not, Im sure its been mentioned that it will NOT be multi processor aware, but I could be wrong. Re- my earlier post on collision detection. I had seen the California Free Dreaming thread (was that its title?) and presumed it was CD but the article said it was Dynamic Cloth, confusing. ... and I just thought of something else, LIPSYNCING (?)

Yes, someone started a thread asking exactly that and it was confirmed that P5 would not have enhanced support for dual processors.

They could change there minds about the dual processor readiness. I still think the MAC version will be late because CL waiting to see if we get our dual blower G5s. (It may as well be late because we spent all our money on Mimic.)

we already have dual processor G4 's curious labs has no incentive to "wait" For apple to deliver higher processor speeds to release poser5 for the mac. the delay is because they are releasing it for OSX and thats a new programming experience for them.

Paula, It was great meeting you at Siggraph. Glad to see your post here as well. Just to be clear, Poser 5 will not be able to support dual processors. Supporting the many flavors of hardware configurations (dual processors, hardware acceleration) would be a prohibitive undertaking for a team our size.

At the risk of sounding like a "brown-noser", I'm continually impressed that KUPA takes the time to try to answer questions here. I've seen previous message threads which were critical of CL and Kupa for not being more forthcoming with information. It amazing that he tries to provide information at all. (I'm sure Bill Gates regularly browes Windows user groups to answer their questions.) :P

Any one herd if they have introduced any measuring tools within P5.

The hair and cloth features sound something like Digimation's Shag:Hair and Stitch add-ons for Max. Shag:Hair does not use geometry - to help save resources. I wonder how P5 addresses this? The whole thing sounds pretty damned wonderful...

I believe poser5 is geometry based :-/ since i see no mention of a particle based post rendering system for the hair so be prepared for LONG processing and render times!!

Interestingly point nwalker, I've been waiting for someone to mention this. Stitch is an amazing cloth system for Max. It's developed by Size8. The wierd part? Seems that if a crane my neck to the side a bit and twist the P5 box around just so, I see this tagline that sezs something like "Poser 5 cloth technology licensed from Size8" hmmm. Go figure. re: Real world measurement systems in Poser 5- We now are using measurements that range from millimeters, centimeters, feet, etc. So now Poser scenes can be correltated to real world measurements. Now we just need some clever end user to build a tape-measure for pulling distance, to set focal points for depth of field blurring in the new renderer. wolf, I did a rendering yesterday of a great new hairstyle using about 8000 hair strands. Maybe a posting is in order... Anyway, it took me less than 6 minutes, with three shadow maps to render. The hairstylist?, she's well known here for great hair, and has created some amazing styles that'll be included with P5. I'll et you guys know as soon as she's wrapped up the last plans. Don't want her getting buried just yet. Kupa

EEK! ...but now that I think about it, it makes some sense for Poser's hair to be geometry based. Poser characters are rendered in too many other products to make something like that unusable if you render in something else. I'm glad I'm planning on buying a new machine soon.

it sounds like the render engine is much improved then for stills at least But since this version of poser has a heavy emphasis on character animation how long did that Bald posette dance with all the moving cloth , you posted, take to render???

re:rendering times on the dancing woman- I'll ask the developer. It was one of his early tests.

Thanks Steve, you confirmed what someone asked the other day about propack & plugins, we get a decent render engine, the cloth simulation, realistic hair, atmospheric effects like wind & (gravity?), collision detection, almost everything people used 3dsmax/LW for with poser4 is now built in, plus it looks from the pictures you've posted that it's going to be infinetely easier to use than them too. Rob