Hey all! Some thoughts as I come to them...

***hmann - "*I can tell you that once CLabs has refined and tweaked the firefly renderer...you will not need to export to render.

Based on what you know now you may find that difficult to believe, but its true you will not need actually need to export and render.

Now some people may argue with this point, but untill they have spent at least a few hundred hours in Poser 5 playing with the renderer and material nodes its difficult to take their comments really seriously. Why??? ....because the Firefly renderers power lies in understanding the materials and nodes and lights..thats why."

No offense, but this simply isn't true for many of us... and will be even less true as time goes on. I get the feeling that CL wants Poser to be considered and important and viable tool in the professional world of animation - and there is simply no way that is going to happen on a large scale unless P5 can interoperate and export to the big software.

There are a large number of capabilities of Max that dramatically enhance the renders... capabilities that simply do not exist in Firefly. Even assuming that someday they might exist in Firefly, the production stream of a professional animation house will rarely change to render with a completely unfamiliar engine.

Skip the renderer; the work environment of Max (as an example) for placement and lighting of a large scene is superior to the Poser environment in many ways, and the ability of camera motion is dramatically more flexible.

Then we have the extensive libraries of materials and assets that companies have in the larger systems (Lightwave, Max) to be considered.

Then all the plug-ins and special effect filter abilities. Let's not forget fluid dynamics and particle systems.

Add all that together, then let's add the advanced rendering engine. Firefly is a nice tool but ray-tracing is no longer suitable for much production level work - GI and radiosity shaders are crucial, as well as the ability to switch between rendering engines as needed. For instance we use Illustrate! often for jobs here to do cell shading,

Poser is simply not suited to be the final rendering/compositing system of a higher end production house. It wasn't designed for it... and that is clear throughout the tool

Nor should it try to be!

CL doesn't have the money and staff to take on Max and Lightwave for the hearts and minds of animators. For the high end Poser is a particularly interesting "plug-in" that has some rendering abilities of it's own useful for previews.

I think CL understands this. I cannot imagine they think it i a good idea to present Poser as a final rendering engine to the larger customers in the animation world.

***musicat - "*i need not go into the major problems, cept the hardware issues when you want to upgrade your puter. those were my main concerns & also the subscription payments. think of it this way, instead of paying $200 for the OS, think of paying $20-50 a month for using it."

It is worth pointing out that XP has been widely adopted and the "hardware" problems extremely small. In fact, there has not been verified incident of a single user being denied legitimate access to WindowsXP due to the protection system.

Further, the EULA of WindowsXP make no provisions allowing MS to charge a subscription fee. There is no mechanism in the software that allows for it.

sparkel - "So.. CL does not really WANT us to export.. they want P5 to be an entire world to stay within in almost all cases?

I think it much more likely that CL simply didn't have the resources to handle Max/Lightwave exporting by the delivery date. Though a strong statement that such support is coming soon would really help. They are smart people, and they seem to understand the market so I am sure it is coming.

Unfortunately we will be keeping most of our work away from the P5 features in our production stream for just this reason - the P4 compatible work we can re-use.

Spit - "Musicat: You went out and bought a new program (Vue4) because of a rumor about Bryce, not 'news'."

As was the choice of OS apparently.