On the same box, I find that the maxiumum size of PZ3 I can handle is half that of Poser4 (50 vs 100 MB). I find that I have to type in numerical values to move stuff rather than spin the dials.

The ability to manipulate objects in the Pose window in P5's Fast Tracking mode is slower than P4's Full Tracking mode ... Full tracking in P5 is not usable at all.

While P5 hair is righteous, the rendering time for a 35MB scene with one P5 hair is about thirty minutes vs three minutes for the same scene without the P5 hair ... ten times longer.

In these cases, I am using Raytracing .... any thoughts on this? How are y'all doing in this regard?

Which P5 patch level are you using? Rendering speed has been an issue that has been addressed in the patches. Which OS are you running? Poser 5 is more memory intensive, especially when using FirelFly, ray tracing and P5 hair. 95/98/Me appears to have problems with this. The better memory handling in NT-based Windows-versions (2000/XP) solves a lot of those problems.

XP, I'll check on the patch to see if it's the latest. I thought I loaded the SR2beta patch, I just reloaded it and will check it out.

Ray tracing will chew up your resources. If you are not using it for reflections or refractions, I would say stay away from it. The shadow mapped shadows in p5 are far better then they were in P4 and they render alot faster then the raytraced ones. Raytracing and P5 Hair.... that will make it 10 times longer to render.

There was an apparent bug that was never declared in Firefly that seemed to increase rendering times by a factor of 50 or more, even in simple scenes without raytracing or shadows. This may well be what you have encountered. I saw it with single sided squares at some specific camrea angles, but never experimented with hairs. This was apparently solved in SR2-Beta-2, even though it was lamely described in the read-me only as 'render speed enhancements'. Bill

For a wider rangeing discussion of this and other p5 problems check out the p5beta forum - link is at top of this page, and you'll be amazed it works at all. All things will pass, someday P5 will render as fast as my old amiga 2000. For now I'm sticking with Lightwave and Vue, dragonfly

I started rendering a 280 frame animation last night. The animation used to take 12 hours to render in Poser 4. I added some displacement mapping to some of the objects in Poser 5 and started rendering using Fire Fly using shadows, displacement and texture filtering. Each frame was taking aprox 45 minutes and it died during the nigtht after 7 frames with a C execption error. I'm using a Pentium III 850 with 1/2 gig PC 133 mem and I'm running in Windows 2000 with the latest Service releases. I've also got the latest drivers for my Geforce GTS 64 meg video card. I'm using the last beta service release of Poser 5 as well. I may just not have enough machine for Poser 5 so I'm going back to Poser 4. I will miss the new bells and whistles but over 8 days for 280 frames is more than I'm willing to comit to my hobby. I will continue to try Poser 5 as the patches come out but this is a hobby and it's supposed to be fun. :)

I noticed the same slow downs and I'm not even rendering. I have to cut my preview mode down to solid fill or wire frame to get even close the same speed as fast track texture preview mode in P4. In fact I resort to P4 for 90% of my work. Even loading one figure in p5 and revolving around it in preview mode (not rendering) is almost half the speed of P4 in the same preview mode. Now people keep asking system specs. Quite frankly that's irrelevant. Both p4 and p5 are run on the same machine which is an AMD 2200 with 1 gig of DDR ram and a gforce 3 card. Unless P5 is so huge an EXE that it eats up so much ram to cause disc swapping where P4 doesn't then both should run at the same speeds. I've even set the current render settings to p4 thinking if its set to fire fly that P5 is sending info to firefly to keep it updated even though it isn't rendering anything. I haven't noticed any improvement in the preview modes from p4 to p5 so its not like they added anything xtra. This makes p5 seriously useless to me. I work with large scenes with multiple figures (2 vickies, 4 mikes, several buildings and an entire city street scene with multiple car figures). Since I create comic book style material I have to render, pose, render, pose etc. Having a slow preview mode is a set back. Having to wait even longer for a render makes p4 much more appealing than p5. And I don't even dare try and put in any dynamic hair or clothes.

Likewise, I like larger scenes ... four Millenium figures to six P4 primary characters (with clothes, hair, and personal props) with a few P3's as background types, plus the props in a set, interior or exterior. One Poser4, I could handle up to 120 MB in a single PZ3. Now anything over 45 is a bitch. I maintain a rather large library and an even larger texture file directory and am loath to duplicating the runtime (less textures) directory to re-establish Poser4. My system crashed and I had to reformat my hard drive and re-installed the data files to Poser5. Any way to run both Poser4 and Poser5 with the same data files?

If you mean run the same pz3 files in both i don't think so, but haven't tried that yet. Personally P5 is no good at this point for productivity- I'm back to using P4 heavily just because of that. dragonfly

Yes, You can point Poser 5 to your Poser 4 library. I zipped a copy of Poser 4 before I moved everything over to Poser 5. So I will just uninstall Poser 5 and reinstall Poser 4 and bring back my library contents from the zip. I will then reinstall Poser 5 so I can try it out now and then as the service releases come out.

I'm running XP Home Edition and while I noticed slower performance than P4 w/PP before I installed the first patch, it seems to be better now. I haven't noticed slow rendering times and I've only been using the Firefly Renderer. One thing I do when full tracking slows down is to switch to a less memory intensive display style like wireframe or lit wireframe when posing and turn on the texture shaded mode only to "proof" you pic. These display modes use less system resources. Millieum figures can certainly slow things up quite a bit but are worth it as far as I'm concerned.

Dont necessarily blame P5 immediately, XP itself has some issues with processor use. Try going (if you havent already) to the microsoft site and having it evaluate your system for necessary patches, upgrades and service packs. In particular get the WinXP SP1. Dont get the driver upgrades, get them from the OEM sites (Microsoft may be behind a bit). Solved a number of my problems that I had been blaming CL for. Scarab<-"give blame where blame is due"

Helpful Suggestion. Delete and re-create all of your Virtual Memeory files. I just did this and my render times got less bad -- from 11 minutes to 8 minutes. I remember VM was a problem with P4. Apparently it is still a problem with P5.