Without getting too technical, here are a few thoughts about P5. This comes after about a month spent with P5 on my PC.

I will lose some of you right off the bat: I like P5. A lot.

Yes, in spite of the occasional "C Exception" program crashes, and in spite of the memory issues, and in spite of other technical glitches, I am glad that I invested in P5.

I have to admit that P5 got off to a bit of a rocky start with me. But, two patches later, matters are clearing up.

One word of advice: P5 doesn't really shine without help. That is, help in the form of a fast processor and lots of RAM. XP helps, too. I've tried P5 with an older, slower system. If you have a slow system, then stick to simple scenes in your P5 renders. You will be a much happier person for it.

But if your PC has the muscle, then things are possible in P5 that were not possible before. With a little patience, and a relatively small learning curve, I can now go to the places where my imagination takes me.

And imagination is what Poser is all about.

Thanks, CL.

Nice to see a positive post. I've not done any work in P4 since getting my preorder copy of P5. And quite frankly, its awesome. I do think CL is up to some interesting things considering that sp2beta1 came with additional features.

I would have to agree with XENOPHONZ. P5 has really shined up since the coming of SR2b. You may and likely will see alot of very miffed folks. And a good deal of negative comments. I've had a few bumps along the way down the new poser5 road, and I'll likley see others. But at this point I really would say that if you are contemplating P5 for yourself. Now, or soon would be a good time. Now there are parts of poser I really haven't used, and likey never will. But for what I got P5 for was the raytracing. True, there are a few apps that can do that, but i wanted to have it in poser, and in poser5 it does, with some pretty good effects. So for what I have paid fot P5, I feel I got a good deal. And the EULA? I'll be honest, I could care freaking less. about who owns the dial, or the file extention. It's on my system and last i looked, I still live alone with a cat. I haven't seen CL sitting in the livingroom eating nachos and checking up on what al is doing with poser..

The cat reports directly to them .... :)

Well, yeah the cat still blows P4 chunks...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=268283&Start=1&Artist=Dave71&ByArtist=Yes

I have to agree...I love the new features in P5...I am still working my way through the rooms, the Materials Lab and Cloth room alone are work the upgrade, then there is the render engine and the other things I'v hardly touched Hair, Face etc... I am more than happy with it and it cost me over $800 AUS Dollars... I couldnt draw cloth to save myself...the linked image took less than 15 minutes to prepare and render at 3000x3000 @ 300 pixels....not bad in my opinion.

Just add to that, I dont have a great speedy machine either... WinXP AMD 1.1Ghz 384MB Ram NVidia GeForce 64MB Graphics..

Agreed! I've had very little trouble with P5 from the beginning and every SR seems to make it that much better! I've tried all the rooms-hair and cloth are very cool :) but I seem to be stuck in the material most of all! LOL Thanks CL! Sassy

And the atmosphere isn't half bad either! :) (I know... they aren't perfect but it's not bad for my abilities LOL)

Your work looks good to me, Sassywench.

A little more positivism like yours might help to clear up the atmosphere.

In more ways than one.

You started the "positivism" and thanks for that! It's so hard to say good things in here lately... I'm getting too old to get drawn into the "let's burn the town down" lynch mob mentality that abounds here. Render on! And thanks Much for the compliment :) Sassy

I clicked out of here disgusted this afternoon, thanks guys :) I too love the new program through it all, it's got some amazing features.

in my opinyon P5 has made poser a viable tool for pro useage. I have used poser sence version3 from Meata Creations as a rigging platform to set a pose then export to use in my Maya for cloth and hair aditions. Now for most things i can do it all in poser :) saveing me even more time in my production work for customers. still learning hair and material rooms, the cloth room is fabulas as far as its goten way to go CL. looking forward to tweeks and aditions to it. With very few tweeks and aditions the P5 cloth room will exceed the cloth abiluties in Maya a program far far more exspencive, and by the way the calculation speed of P5 for cloth sym is bout 10 times faster than Maya's cloth sym. again way to go. only twweks needed are beter impingment handeling and the inclution of inertia to the symulation. If inertia is presently there havent figured out how to use it yet. thow can see how to fake it I think. Laters Vel

Ps my system is a 900 mhz athon 793 megs ram ATI 8500 EL vid card system works fine and speeds are defenitly on par with my othere software rendering programs, TrueSpace, World Builder Maya and Bryce5 Laters

I would like to say some things about the poor performance and the perpetual crashes of Poser 5. But damn, since the latest SR2 beta the bloody thing works for me. argh ;)

But P5 isn't a viable tool for pro usage until the import plugins for highend 3D programs are updated. Till then ProPack is still better for the Pro.

great, a positive thread about Poser 5, there has been so much doom and gloom posted about Poser 5 that I was beginning to think that I had a different version of Poser 5 on my PC, because mine ran well from day 1 as well and it just gets better with each service release. I hear what the "Pro" guy's are saying though and they need to have plug-ins for max, maya, cinema etc before they are going to start using Poser 5 seriously, so hopefully CL are still working on the plug-ins and will release them quickly,and then perhaps a few more people will start to view Poser 5 positively. I certainly hope so anyway. Graham

i am going to buy poser5 about christmas ... (if i can wait that long time ;) - i have a P4 1.6 Ghz with 512 MEG RAM - think it should be sufficient - and W98SE. the main things i am very eager to use are: the procedural textures and the hair studio and the face room. and i want to start with python-scripting - hope it will be possible to automate some tasks within poser. and i am glad to have some minor advances like using png and other file formats, improved libraray palette and so on. the other features? - i am just reading the manual ... joe

I'm really encouraged by the original post in this thread. I just recently started in with P5, and have found it to be a total nightmare - including getting some errors with SR-1 that I didn't get without it. I'm finding it slow, getting crashes, the renders inferior to P4 even with the 'quality' settings on, etc. And that's on a machine running at 1.6Mhz, 1 gig memory, and XP. In short, I'm still using P4 because I'm finding P5 totally unusable. But while I'm a bit miffed at CL for releasing the software in such a sorry state, I retain my faith in the company. I'm hoping for the final SR-2, and maybe an SR-3. As soon as they produce a P5 that works (and I'm sure they will) I'll start singing their praises again. Morphy

Problem child 5 just choked on my final render of a picture that I started before going to bed last night. It caught another C exception. (I was stupidly angry and didn't capture the error before closing the box.) I'm hoping SR-2BetaB will fix the problem. I also hope I remembered to save just before the final render. Time to go reboot my machine and get some chocolate. I was getting happy with P5 until this. Hopefully I'll be able to be happy again, soon.

hmmm.... P5 ratings (ignoring bugs).... Firefly: A- love the detail, and for the price it can't be beat. Materials: A+ Wow! Its easier for me to use than Bryce, and I get almost the same options. As soon as more third party matierials hit freestuff and the Marketplace, this will REALLY take off. Hair: Solid B Can really slow down render time, but the results can be so cool. Wish the collision detection worked better though. Cloth: C Looks good, but I'm a Mike person and most of the clothing available really doesn't work well with him. Its also so slow to calculate. Great potential here, but we need more cloth planes (round) and clothing that will work with Male figures. Setup: Solid B Love making my own characters out of props available, but I wish material assignment was easier. Face: C- It don't work with Mike. The generated texture is too small. The window to assign coordinents is too small for fine tuning. Again, great potential, but I really won't use it until a good male figure works in it. Models: D- I hate Don and Judy. I kept hoping that the new figures would have more morphs and finer detail than the Dork, but it didn't happen. Effects: A+ Wind an Atmosphere are amazing! More than I'd hoped for. Libraries: A For obvious reasons. Content Paradise: F If a student turned in a paper this late, they wouldn't even get and E for effort. Support: CL has made a very good job of getting Service Packs out, and they mostly seem to work. SR-1 hurt me more than it helped, but it was a god send for most users. And SR2-2 rally corrected a LOT of problems for me. Wish hair collision was one of them. Third Party Support: C There ain't enough of it. So far I've counted less than a dozen hair packages (all really good), one set of dynamic clothing (not for Mike), and a couple of material packages (3DWizard's is worth double what he charges - GREAT package). I think things will improve dramaticly when and if Daz and CL settle their differences. Well worth the upgrade price. CL made some bad business decisions that hurt the release, but I can't fault the feature set and the basic design. They needed someone who knew how to coordinate beta testing (there is NO reason it should have been released with so many bugs). The EULA scared off the biggest, most important content provider, with many of the rest following. CL seems to be making a real effort to fix the problems, and I appreciate it. The programming and design staff though deserves a medal, a pat on the back, free beer, and a hedonistic weekend with a live version of either Vicky in the temple or a barbarian Mike (depending on their preference).

I think the verdict might be that for anyone using ONLY Poser 4 for pictures, upgrading to Poser 5 is well worthwhile. For anyone using Poser to create figures for rendering in Vue, Bryce, Cinema 4D etc, the attractions of Poser 5 are relatively few. The money spent on upgarding to Poser 5 could equally well be spent on getting a PROPER render engine (like Vue, Bryce, etc).