First of all...I would like to say thank goodness there is no Mac version of Poser 5. As a Mac user and a Poser addict since version 1, the mere mention of a new version of Poser would have had me signing a check over to CL with the amount blank. I now appreciate the fact of being in the minority and not even being given the opportunity to purchase, or the opportunity to use a program seemingly full of bugs.

Following is a list of reasons I will not be getting Poser 5. I agree that for some it's a worthy investment. For me, it doesn't offer enough to justify the upgrade. In the future I may change my mind (it's happened before). But for the time being, I think I'll sit back and let the other, more capable people, work out the bugs.

That said, I'd like to express my gripes about the program. (Remember, these are comments reflecting the way I USE the program and from what I ascertain from previous messages).

One. Firefly renderer: useless to me, I render in other apps, and even on the rare occasion I do render in Poser, version 4 has suited my needs just fine. I dont see it as obsolete. I ENJOY doing post-production in an image editor. (For me, it seems more personal than having a render of some models other people built and calling it complete). Anyway, from the messages on this forum, Firefly isn't all that better. Its slow and flawed.

Two. The new figures: Limited and ugly. I've spent YEARS making my Poser 4 figures and Mill figures versatile. I'm not in the mood to do it again with Judy and Don. Note, except for face close-ups, I still see the Poser4 figures as the better option for doing images than the Mill figures anyway, they have more to offer clothes and morph-wise. Why would I want to subject myself to even more limited options with the new Poser5 figures at this point.

Three. Face room: Doesn't have much to offer. I have no desire to see myself or any one else I know, as well as celebrities as Poser figures. (I'll just look at a photograph).

Four. Hair: No good if you export to other programs for rendering. At this point I do my own hair in PhotoShop using brushes. When I do use Poser hair, Koz hair works fine as a base to build on.

Five. Speed: Poser 4 is slow enough, nuff said.

Six. The security system: Seems useless and cumbersome. I backup and re-format my system ever six months, think of the headaches. It seems it would be easier to get a cracked version. (Not gonna do it though, for my own principles as well as for reasons 1-5)

Well, that's all I can think of at this time. So as a Mac user, I want to thank CL for NOT giving me an opportunity to be disappointed.

DavidH
Happily waiting to see what Poser 5.1 will offer.

Well you do have points, but I hope you are not judging what you have seen us do in Poser 5, remember we are all axious and trying to learn it all fast, making mistakes along the way. To be honest I don't render that much in Poser either, but when I do I am happy to have a very detailed render at my finger tips. I guess my biggest boost, for you would be the cost, it does not cost that much to upgrade and with the things you can do with it for that cost is AMAZING (my opionion) as far as the face room, I was in there this morning thinking okay if I am not going to use it for people what do I do with it...I messed around with the morph tool, which I have never done before, even in Poser 4, and let me tell you it is out of this world, you start with the basics and you can apply texture maps that were made for Judy and Don and your faces will be endless. Remember...my opionion only. Sharen :-)

I have to agree that the renders I've seen so far of Judy and Don don't really thrill me. I think Mike and Vic still look more "human." Hopefully all that's missing are some decent textures that are yet to come and then Judy and Don will start looking less like aliens and more like people. I will, most likely, purchase the Poser 5 upgrade for my Mac when it's available. I do like the idea of the face room. Seems much more flexible in creating new characters than currently available in Poser 4. I'm also hoping that the current reports of bugs in Poser 5 will have been resolved by the time the Mac version is released. :-)

I've spent YEARS making my Poser 4 figures and Mill figures versatile Looking at the out-of-the-box renders of D and J, I like the new joint assembly around the elbows and knees; those two features alone are long overdue. Like you, I'm on a Mac, and originally I was pretty POd that this wasn't released cross-platform. I'm still getting it, but it's nice to know the windoze folk were so nice to beta-test everything for us Mac people. :) You're certainly right about the default characters' appearance, but I suspect that's to give us more versatility, in a way. They both have plain, unordinary features, which makes them ripe for morphing work (Duane, get busy!!!). With the right morphs and textures, I'm sure we'll be able to get them looking right smart, just as we could with the P4 folk after a while. I may not know much about this program, but I still get a kick when people look at my P4 work and swear it's really Michael :).

I think you have misjudged the P5 software, based on cursory gripes or spurious bug reports you've seen here. They will fix the real bugs, they will fix the performance and stability issues. I'm grateful that the Windows users were willing to pay for being testers, mainly because it gives Curious some much-needed cash and profit projections, but also because it means the Mac version will be more stable than the Windows version, as it was for P4. Regarding the hair, how long do you think it will take for an export patch or plug-in for that? The Vickie and Dina characters started out being called ugly or scary or limited, but that changed, too. Give the new renderer a chance. Once people have read and understood the manual and applied the patches, it should look pretty good.

Mateo Sancarlos... I have no problem with giving Poser 5 a chance, but in it's present state, it doesn't justify to me a reason to spend money for the update (even though in my opinion it's a good price). Later on, when the bugs are worked out and the P5 figures get morphs. Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about a patch for the hair, especially for exporting to Bryce. I don't see how that could work, but then again, I'm not a programmer, just an artist. Hopefully, the bug fixes will carry onto the Mac version whenever it's finally ready to premiere. In the meantime, I'm still as happy as a flea on a dog with my Poser 4. DavidH

The Vickie and Dina characters started out being called ugly or scary or limited, but that changed, too With all respect to Dina's creator, she's still ugly, but then that's part of her charm. :)

I pointed out way back when it was first announced that I was glad we'd be able to have the Windows users go figure things out for us. That's why it's called "the bleeding edge" Macs are more uniform in configuration so I'd expect the beta testing to be easier and more trustworthy. I still expect bugs but by the time our version comes out the "user error" bugs should have worked themselves out. The speed issues etc. will also be a completely different beast. If the Mac version is optimized for the Altivec engine in the G4s it may have far superior performance than on PCs. I think Don looks better than Dork. Judy looks like a person, not a Barbie doll. However, I'll still use Posettes' Barbie doll figure (she looks better with the subdivision thing) so she's not going to be thrown away anytime soon by me. My hope is that Don, Judy and the gang have better abilities to simulate real normal people. I haven't seen anyone render a 20 overweight Judy or Don yet. I haven't seen anyone render Don as a short, stocky beerdrinker or as an old man. The Firefly renderer may require finesse but the key to good renderings is in the lighting. I've seen the stuff at RDNA. I'm convinced it's capable. I'm convinced people will figure it out. I'm convinced I'll go through their tutorials. I don't mind not being the first. The world won't end. My wife and family won't leave me. And I can learn from the mistakes of others. On my beloved Mac!

"The speed issues etc. will also be a completely different beast. If the Mac version is optimized for the Altivec engine in the G4s it may have far superior performance than on PCs." Not likely Bob, the altivec engine of the G4s are part of the chips hardware"instruction set" if curious labs could not build dual processor support or graphics card acceleration into poser5 its not likely We MAC users will see any special Hardware chip support. "The Firefly renderer may require finesse but the key to good renderings is in the lighting." But good lighting requires a good lighting system :-) as a Lightwave owner i dont need to tell you this Poser5's lack of volumetric visible lighting is a major drawback in that you cant simulate real world scenes like a woman sitting in front of windowblinds at sunrise and the beams peeking through.

That's where my knowledge hits its' limits. I understand the big picture -each operating system will have its own opportunities and challenges - but I'm not always up to speed on the technical details. I know that even with Lightwave I don't always use volumetric lighting - it's that render time thing as well as style. Best I can tell the lighting system in P5 hasn't changed. I've recently seen someone post renders where the Poser lights had been really finessed and he'd gotten results that are much better than the norm. I've also seen one of Kupas posts where he really went into detail how they could be optimized. There's so much that can be done even with basic spots (that have falloff) if you know what you're doing. If we learn how to use the basic lighting better, our renders should be better and Firefly may have some kind of performance curve where all of a sudden it "shines." Obviously I'm just hypothesizing. I've noticed that the comments of the pix at RDNA suggested that the renders, while still not up to the high end apps, significantly reduced the postwork required. That to me, sounds like an improvement. I don't have the trained eye of an artist so I'm at a disadvantage as far as making my own judgements and presenting them.

(I tell people Dont be first, be second. Not NEVER be first, never is for jumping over a cliff without a parachute, DONT is for jumping With a chute, unless your an experienced Base jumper.)

If Apple had bought Poser may we have had P5 at the same time ish as Final Cut Pro 3? What would we then be waiting for in Poser 6? Or, by Msoft, and with the slimmer chance it isnt buried have them put out a Mac-user placating version like Office X and the other one. The Apple version of P4 may have been Mac only but what can one do.

Most bugs seem to be in the system if not the current users hardware, lack of skill or, the most vocal, their literary skills.

Theres also a thread where KUPA comments on a bug fix upgrade.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=868935&Start=1

P5 Windoze supports 98, 2000, ME, and XP that's 4! different versions and it's supposed to work perfectly on each one? Give me a break. On reading all the whineing and bitching the PC heads are doing I've seen that a good portion of the troubles are coming from thos that are running AMD CPUs and some others have 'memory issues', that is not enough :-) and still others just plain don't RTFM. We will have it lots easier since P5 Mac will only run on 2 versions 9 an X so we won't have to deal with creaky code needed to let P5 run on creaky old OSes (win98) so none of us should look at the problems the PC crowd is having as symtoms of a bad, buggy program, it's just the windows world being it's normal buggy self. :-)

but that changed, too. Give the new renderer a chance. Once >people have read and understood the manual and applied the >patches, it should look pretty good. Nothing personal, but I think this is BS. A good renderer should render well even at default settings. Any "finessing" should be for some really stunning movie quality results, not just for decent render results. Not having worked with the rendering engine myself I wont be able to speak on it too much, but I can say that I have yet to be impressed by any images I've seen so far. Most figures still have a plastic dusty sort of look to them. People bitch about Maya's rendering engine yet it is still of high enough quality to be used for television and major motion pictures. Firefly is a far cry from that. I agree completely with budgie on this one. And I would add that a late P5 for Mac delivery really locks the Mac users out of the Poser market. There are limited products that can be in that pipeline and most of them will be in place by the time a Mac user get's their hands on the program, much less learns it. And in the mean time this decision could impact people that were earning significant part of their income from Poser content sales.

well my one content item in the marketplace is BVH animation files for mike,vicky and the p4 animals. and my sympathy goes out to any mac user who does not own a real CG application like lightave ,cinema or even vue. Poser pro4 animations rendered in cinema has worked flawlessly for me and we small minority of poser animators who own the propack and cinema 4DXl ,have our own hair system avalable that CAN be attached the the hosted poser figure VIA thier imported BVH skeletons in cinema4DX7 Firefly offers nothing to us Cinema and lightwave users. and the face room is a spooky distraction at best. so i can wait for the MAC version if there will be one if not ......Yawnnnn :-)

"Firefly offers nothing to us Cinema and lightwave users."

Actually Wolf, I somewhat disagree with you on that one. Sometimes I just do animations for fun and amusement. It's alot more convenient to do those in Poser than going through the process of setting everything up for Lightwave. Adapting all the textures etc. can be a real pain and consume lots of time.

For my serious work, however, Lightwave can't be beat.

I've seen stuff that I thought was good come out of Firefly. I've also done stuff in Lightwave where the default set up obviously wasn't adequate (frankly, lighting in Lightwave still kicks my butt). Since I don't know the skill level of most of the users who I've seen posting pictures so far, it's really hard to evaluate. Would they really have gotten better results in Lightwave or Cinema?

I've seen enough to know that good renders can be done. I'm keeping my eyes out for images from people who've established that they know what they're doing - both PC users, and eventually Mac users. The dust will settle soon and we'll be able to make more informed evaluations.

I'm glad I'm not on the bleeding edge but I can not conclusively "write off" P5 yet. I can wait awhile. I've got a Poser/Lightwave project in works that will still take me a few months to finish and I won't switch anything till it's done - even if I absolutely confirm that P5 for the Mac was completely, totally, 100% excellent and bug-free.

BTW, Wolf, how's your movie coming? Are you still looking at a Christmas Release?

its been horribly side tracked by NON 3D personal matters that have taken most of my free time, ( a series of disruptive small crisis) but i shall get back to it when things settle down.

Keep me posted - I really do want to see how it turns out. And I hope the series stops soon. This place is rarely boring, don't you think? [grin]

thats for sure!!!! :-)