I've been working with P5 all weekend and last night I was so pissed off at it I was ready to ship it back to CL. My biggest problem was that whenever I tried to move the camera or change the pose of a body part using the dials or moving it on screen P5 would just bog down. If I turned the dial long enough it would eventually jump to a new setting usually far past what I wanted. I'm running a 1.8 GHz machine with 512 meg of Ram so resources aren't the issue.

I finally grew so frustrated that I went back to P4 for a while to pose a project I was working on.

What I discovered this morning though was if I clicked on the smooth shaded button rather than the texture shaded button every thing worked as smoothly as it did in P4.

I hope that CL addresses this in the patch, but for now the work around should help if poser is posin slowly. Hope that helps anyone else suffering from this issue.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give that a shot!

There are also major issues with FOCUS ... the interface is really crippled by not being a standard Windows GUI. You have to click on things twice (or more) to get things to work, or to drag them around. Also, as I have mentioned in another post, there is a cursor bug (among others).

Also, the lack of a REAL UNDO (let alone multiple UNDO's) is equally as aggravating as the unresponsive interface. Although I doubt we'll see that in a patch unfortunately.

Finally, currently the parmater window does not appear to be a real part of P5 ... like an application on top of it or something. If you minimize P5, sometimes it stays on your desktop, and of course gets in the way of the library-pop out, instead of being underneath it as it should, etc. I really hope they make some changes to this in the patch ... making it have a minimize button would be IDEAL.

-Tim

-Tim

I agreee the funky interface was cool for a while but the '90's coolness has worn off over teh years and we need functionality. remeber KAI power tools? Everyone raved how "cool" an iterface itwas? Well it was cool- but never got used to it or used it for anything productive.

I DO LIKE the posing tools, etc ... it's just the non-standard windows, focus, etc. and the lack of INDUSTRY STANDARD functionality, such as UNDO, HARDWARE OPENGL 3D ACCEL, etc. I love the new features (so far.) But, it's just not cool if using it gives you a headache and leads to frustration. Personally, I don't think it was every cool enough to justify the headaches. Now Kai's was another story ...

I agree with you timoteo. I respect the fact that it will take me time to learn the hair room and the materials room to get the full effect of P5. I'm also used to encounting bugs in software but when they cause me to revert back to a previous version in order to perform the simplest tasks then something is wrong. I do have to thank CL for making it possible to leave P4 on the drive. Most upgrades I've installed before overwrite my previous installion. Lucky forsight on CL's part no?

I've got to agree, the lack of an OS-specific UI is a real disappointment, and is causing a lot of problems and driving up the system requirements. Did you notice that Poser has to parse through over 17 megs of Photoshop files every time it displays a screen? That can't happen too quickly. And 17 megs is their size on disk; they are bigger when read. Those PSD files even contain many many layers of images marked "oldunused". I understood the non-standard interface when the program was shipping with Mac and Windows versions on 1 CD, but I really thought we'd get more standard UIs this time since the versions were being developed separately and supposedly re-written from the ground up. Oh, well. I love P5. I hate P5. :) Phoenix

Well, so much for my speculation that the UI was a cross-platform compatibility thing. This a major disappointment and there is no excuse for it that I can see. No offense to artists and artistry, but having an artsy-fartsy, ooey gooey interface instead of solid, standard functionality is just stupid. Users should at least have the option of a standard Windows (or Mac) interface or the (apologies to hans and Franz) girly-man interface everyone is stuck with.. I still want P5, the functionality sounds great, but to still have it imprisoned in a gilded cage is a bummer. Note to CL, there are books on good UI design available, please get one.

i've been ranting about poser's gui for years. imagine that lost time that was needed to put an alternative interface over windows' - let alone the questionable design value... what a nonsense... we'd have a clean p5 without bugs if cl would use standard windows gui libraries.

AMEN BROTHER!!! I just started using some of the other ROOMS in P5 now that I have the FACE ROOM down. (I'm not a FACEROOM guru ... maybe a sub-guru.) Man is this thing buggy! I deinfitely empathize with what everyone is talking about for sure ... with unresponsiveness, cursor's not updating, rooms seamingly combining, rendering bugs, etc. It's a crying shame, because the new features are very powerful (and fun!), but would good are they if you can't use them because of an incredibly inept interface.

I agree that the "floating" parameter dials have to go! I don't care, just don't make them a floating palette that's separate from Poser. My workflow is this: -adjust a body part with the Twist parameter dial. -nope, wrong direction. -Undo: hit Ctrl-Z. (Body part moves back.) -turn the dial the other way. -Ah, perfect! NEW, changed workflow in Poser 5: -adjust a body part with the Twist parameter dial. -nope, wrong direction. -Undo: hit Ctrl-Z. Nothing happens. Hit it again. Nothing happens. (The "focus" is on the "floating" parameter dial palette, not Poser.) -move the mouse OFF the parameter dial -click somwhere on Poser's window to give "focus" so it will accept keyboard-press. -Hit Ctrl-Z to undo. Body part moves back -move mouse back to dial -turn the dial the other way. -(mutter under my breath about interface) This also happens when you do ANY keyboard shortcut: Render (Ctrl-R), Save (Crtl-S), etc. You MUST click off the parameter dials and on the Poser window for the program to accept the keystrokes. --John

"-nope, wrong direction." lol! happens every time ;)

btw, i just love the feature from max, where, when you notice that you are doing something stupid, you just press rmb (without depressing lmb), and it jumps back to previous state. seems that cl are using mices with only one button...

... and no wheel. Welcome to the 1990's CL.

There was a utility in the Windows Powertoys XMouse I think) that automatically switched the focus to the window the mouse was over). That would save the extra click to shift focus but with our luck, the parameters thingy is not a standard window and it wouldn't work.