Although, let me make it clear, my position is the same as Little Dragon's -- there's plenty to like in Poser 5, and I expect most of its negative aspects to be cleared up over time; meanwhile, I use both Poser 4 and 5 -- but if you task me, Tirjasdyn, to make specific what I don't like about the Face Room, I'll do it, at the risk of sounding like one of those whining naysayers.

You say "Just cause it doen't work they way you want it too doesn't mean it is doesn't work." That would certainly apply if I went on and on about the complexity of the Materials room. It is harder to use than I would like, but that's because it's very powerful; it certainly works, and I expect to get more and more out of it the more I explore it.

But I don't think my expectations or my desired way of working is the problem with the Face Room. It's just not delivering. You say you've seen some good posts, but are they good likenesses? I've seen some good texture merges out of the Face Room, and if your target shape looks enough like Judy, a texture can go a long way to impersonating a shape likeness. But if somebody is getting great shape likenesses out of the Face Room, I'd like to hear from them and find out what I'm doing wrong.

What I'm seeing is this: You can move all the green control dots into the right places, but the red contour lines don't necessarily follow -- at all! And they are a good predictor of the shape you actually get. In other words, this feature doesn't work. And when you try to fix the shape problems with the Face Shaping Tool, you find out that all that stuff you heard about manipulating individual vertices is semi-fraudulent. Yes, you can move an individual vertex -- P5 will manipulate all necessary morph dials behind the scenes to get that vertex into the desired place. Trouble is, all the other vertices affected by those morph dials also move. The "pins" that are supposed to hold them in place will not do so, period. Maybe the pins exert some kind of measurable constraint in some sense of the word, but they are of no practical use. You cannot do something as simple as reduce the bump in a nose without shoving the whole nose into the face. And if you can't do that, then the pins don't work and the tool is just another way of applying blunt-instrument morph dials.

I wish it were otherwise; I'm not demanding my money back because I think it will get better. But I'm not simply complaining about something that doesn't work the way I wish it would; I'm complaining about something that doesn't work. Try it yourself and see if I'm so wrong.

P.S. On-target reference, Phantast. Safire definitely invented the phrase, but you're right, it harks back strongly to the Krazy Kat era. You could imagine W.C. Fields saying it, too.