OK I have been sitting in the background and watching and waiting now I have to do something....Should I wait for Daz's new Proggy or just hop out and buy Poser5....I have heard all the horror stories and have seen a few coming from P5,Have they fixed the Problems?When is Daz's coming out?This is a very serious decision for me Because I am going to purchase Lightwave and I need to know if either program is going to let you import animations flawlessly into Lightwave,And if Daz's supports openGL and does import and handle different types of 3D files(You would be a god DAZ if you could come up with a plugin to import animations into Bryce,You would have thousands of extra buyers)but hey I am just wondering because I want to get the right program and unfortunately for P5 it is looking like I might want to wait just a little longer....Can I become a Betatester please,please,please.....Yeah for Vicky 3

i had very little probs with p5 from the beginnig,and with the last patch no one anymore(think the very few were cause everything was so new and i did something wrong) My own opinion is ,that with the new DAZ program it will happen the same as with p5. There will be bugs in the first release,people have to learn a total new program and it will last some time to get it running on every type of machine and os. And i can see the complaints and so, filling the forum:-)

Each patch seems to improve P5. There are still bugs, and things that don't work correctly, but it's getting a lot better. There's no guestimate on the release of Daz Studio yet. If you've got the money and can't wait, P5 has more than enough new features to make it worthwhile. We're just starting to get teases on Daz Studio, so I expect it won't be released for at least 3 to 6 months. Dan Farr from Daz emphisized in his post yesterday that the example he posted was not the final version of the interface. That means they're still working on the base programming. They still have alpha and beta testing, documenting, and hype time before their release. If you've got P4 or PPP and are happy with it, and don't have money burning a hole in your pocket, wait. However, if you want all the new P5 features now, spend the cash for the upgrade.

this shold answer most of your questions http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=970361

I agree with pdxjims. Poser 5 has enough in it to make it worth the upgrade price, and I believe CL will be rolling out the Lightwave plugins for free to owners of Poser 5 (check their website). I upgraded recently and Poser 5 has performed flawlessly. Still, I have Poser 4 and PP on my system for exporting animations to Vue, and you'd want to keep that for Lightwave exports.

Even assuming P5 Mac comes out first, I'm still going to wait and see what happens w/ the DAZ app.

I think that either way your going to be dissapointed to some extent, but P5 you can buy today. later jb

The answer is very clear to me. Wait for the DAZ program! Are you kidding? The OpenGL previews alone is worth it. You can assume that the DAZ tool will have fewer features since it is a brand new tool, but the advantage to that is all those features will work correctly, and those features will probably be modern and more usefull. You know the code will be modern and more optimized since it's a brand new project. And I did see Collision detection and cloth tabs on that DAZ preview, so I would guess that many of the newer P5 features will be included in DAZ Studio. And there will be a Mac version of DAZ Studio! That alone is enough to get my money. I dont care if P5 ever shows up for Mac, I dont want it anyway. Slow bloated turd with no OpenGL preview? I just dont have that kind of time in my life.

I wonder if DAZ studio is going to use the silly copy protection scheme... or if I will actually be able to buy it.

Daz is committed to supporting Lightwave, check their site-- that doesn't mean their proggie will support it immediately but it will, I'm fairly sure, eventually. Poser 5 doesn't supoort Lightwave now-- none of the new stuff in Poser 5 is transportable to any other renderer: hair, cloth, materials. [I'm right on the hair, I may be wrong on the others, someone will say] Poser 4 and Pro Pack work with some version of Lightwave and are probably not going to be updated. If I only had Poser 4 now, I would wait or buy Pro pack-- in fact, I just bought Pro Pack. Poser 5 is still not stable for everyone and this may be as stable as it's going to get. Bottom line we do not know when Daz Studio is going to comeout. Could be Jan-- one rumor, could be next Summer. Could be later. No one wants anything like the bugfest we just got. Emily

The Upgrade price from poser 4 is cheap. The new Daz product will probably be in the $500-$600 range. (a guess but an educated one.)Plus P5 is out now. You won't miss the $200 you spend on P5 now in 7 months. :) If i had an AMD prosessor or a homebuilt rig, I might think twice... But I haven't had very many problems at all with my Dell P4. I'm glad Daz is bringing some competition to this market, especially with their reputation for quality. That being said, P5 is a fine peice of software with a tremendous amount of potential.

We have NO CLUE what the Daz program will do. None. Anything said about what it will do is only an assumption. There is no way to base a purchasing decision on the knowledge we have (or don't have) at this time.

I know.... we have all been so burnt in the past. AS a community we are all edgy and cynical. As Poser users ourselves, your disappointments and fustrations are ours as well.... well at least mine. :) $500-$600????? no way..ever. Anton Daz3d Platinum Club

Yeah, I think the $500-600 figure would place it out of reach for most hobbysits. Kind of self defeating for DAZ. Karnack the great says: $350.

zechs: * The new Daz product will probably be in the $500-$600 range. (a guess but an educated one.) * Probably not such an educated guess. DAZ's primary intention for starting development of this product back in January was as insurance against the prospects of CL going down the tubes (or blowing P5). They still consider 3D modelling to be their primary business (and by all accounts it seems to be a profitable one), and so, for them, 'Studio' is primarily a way of ensuring a future for their 'content' products. Now part of their intention may also be to avoid a need to move their product line down the proprietry path of CL's P5 technologies, which would also leave DAZ's future in the hands of CL. As such they can treat it as a loss leader, with their pricing strategy aimed at getting it into as many peoples hands as possible as an alternative to Poser. Obviously, despite anything that may be stated, it will be sold in direct competition with Poser and the pricing will reflect this, with competitive upgrades most likely aimed at undercutting (perhaps substantially) Poser's upgrade pricing. As for the release date, as stated no one knows, but likely they would have been looking for a 12 month development period for a product of this sort, so I would expect that would be aiming for beta testing around the start of the new year. We do know that they were integrating code at about the time of the P5 release, and that they have just started development of the rendering code (which should be fairly straightforward - someone should tell CL). However, all indications of the products features must be promising, not least as they have the benefit of having witnessed CL mistakes. Additionally, the developers seemed, in some earlier discussions on this forum, to have had a fairly clear and solid idea of what they want to achieve, in contrast to CL lead developers, who, many times demonstrated a disturbing lack of knowledge about the technology that was to be implemented in P5. Nobody should expect "Studio" to be perfect, its already been stated that plugin support will be lacking initially, which for me seems to indicate an weakness in its architecture (you are either modular or you aren't), but, on the other hand P5 is likely a technological dead end. If you want to be able to continue with any projects, stick with P4/ProPack until you have a better idea of which path to follow. Think of VHS/Betamax here and remember that Betamax was generally recognised as the better techology, although VHS had the better 'content'. In this case DAZ may well be the winner on both counts. I suspect that there will probably be some additional information from DAZ on pricing or schedule released before the end of the year. Bill

As for price? I just got a great marketing idea! In about 320 days when our first year at the Platinum Club expires, what better incentive to renew for another year than to get the new program for $1.99! LOL

Spit's right ... we really don't know what Daz Studio will actually do when compared feature to feature with Poser. DAZ certainly has had it's fingers on the pulse of the community and should have a good idea what is needed and what will sell. It's not likely that whatever Studio does, it will use what they have already been selling. CL has shown a tendency to be arrogant lately ... or is it Tuetonic fussiness over details, rules, procedures, etc?

foleypro, >>>Should I wait for Daz's new Proggy or just hop out and buy Poser5....<<< Wait and see the initial reaction to the Daz promgram. >>>I have heard all the horror stories and have seen a few coming from P5,Have they fixed the Problems?<<< No. I have yet been able to do an animation for ANY of our clients in ----- -. And I would say it is batting less than .750 on still renders for us. >>>When is Daz's coming out?<<< No idea. But unless you have the money to burn, I could not in good conscience advise anyone to buy ----- - at this point in time. If you have to have a program now, I would echo the advise of some others and go with Pro Pack for your LW imports. Even if CL came out with LW import capability tomorrow for ----- -, would it be any more reliable or stable than ----- - is at this moment? I have ----- - currently loaded on a P4 2.2 ghz, 1 gb DDR SDRAM, 64MB GeForce4 MX Nvidia graphix card, 80 gb HD and WinXP Home. Poser 4, Vue 4, Bryce 4, TrueSpace 6, Cinema 4d and Rhino 2 run with no problems. ----- - constantly crashes, freezes, locksup or otherwise chokes and pukes the BSOD. Until ----- - was loaded, this system had never, I repeat NEVER, crashed or locked up. Never. Take care and be well. casamerica P.S. - Love the nic BTW.

Honestly, giving it away for free or a nominal sum would be viewed by many as a bold marketing move on DAZ's part. After all the future of their modelling empire would be all but ensured and nobody would have any excuse for sticking with Poser. Keep you eye on the free section of DAZ, just in case ;-) Bill

Yeah, and any minute now my fridge is going to spontaneously fill itself up with bottles of Bass Ale.

Make it Newcy Brown and I'll be right over...

foleypro, depends, is your current version of poser sufficient for you for an unknown length of time? Daz Studio does NOT have a planned release date yet. they are still in early stages of development. it could be over 2 years before release. ( check the thread started by Dann Farr about Daz Studio in this forum. [ you can't miss it it's huge ] )

"Yeah, and any minute now my fridge is going to spontaneously fill itself up with bottles of Bass Ale." ROTFLMAO! To be honest, there are lot of things in process. Anton is right - $600 for a proggie, even this one (and after seeing it run for the first time, I was real damned close to just handing my Amex card overand telling them to charge whatever they thought they wanted for it), is way out of the hobbyists' reach. No matter what it costs, two things are certain: 1) A whole new market will open up for hobbyist and professional alike, and the move will be seismic enough that it will force even the big boys like Alias and Discreet to stand up and take notice. IMsortaHO, I strongly suspect that this will be the program that will kick all the high-end CG snobs square in the 'nads ...and that's just based on what little I did get to see of it. 2) Curious Labs won't be able to take the hobbyist for granted any longer. I doubt that they ever had, but now more than ever, they won't be so cavalier about releasing code before it is mature enough to pass muster. They will also have to drop their prices accordingly, which means that the big winner here is you and I... the customers. /P

You refrigerate Bass Ale? Barbarian. Remember this: They showed us the best possible face they could for the first look at Daz Studio. I'll grant you waaaaay better than CL showed us. Also, we do have some clues, I saw those knobs for moving things on Vicki 3's hip and elbow. I can't imagine they would be there unless for posing. Mind you, I hate them and can't get them to work with anything, but it is a clue. So is a cloth tab and Collision tab. So is a Render Menu. I tend to agree with speculation that the price would be low. It makes sense, with a new program to suck the people in as quickly as possible-- then upgrade often and make your money that way. The second or third upgrade can have the big price jump. I do ask one thing: get professional testing managers and professional testers. If CL had done that much, we would not be suffering the way we are. Do that and I'll give you a blank check for it. Emily I may wait to bottom my account out first. :))

"So that tells me one thing; that you're going to need some serious high-end power in your machine to run it in that mode." OpenGL takes advantage of accelerated 3d hardware, and passes a lot of the rendering onto the vidcard itself; Poser still has the CPU handle all of that, which is why it runs so dog-assed slow right now. From what I've seen of the demo, an Nvidia GeForce2 chipset card (about $30 nowadays) or better should be able to handle it without slowdown or incident. As for CPU horsepower and RAM requirements, I'd prolly match it up with Poser 5's requirements if I were to hazard a guess. However, I'm not sure on the exact requirements as of yet... let me go see what they've got in teh way of Hardware come Monday. /P

One thing that distinguishes Poser (and similar apps) from most other 3D apps is the extent of mesh deformation. For Bryce and its ilk most meshes are static (most of the time) so once the geometries have been loaded into the OpenGL (or DirectX) buffers they don't need to be changed and positioning or scaling can be done in single operation. In the case of Poser/DAZ, the (very large) geometries themselves are often altered during normal posing/morphing operations, and this may require some significant reloading of the hardware acceleration buffers. That additional overhead (which again falls on the CPU) has to be weighed against the speed gains for the accelerated pixel pushing power of the hardware. For me, this has always raised the question of whether Poser users would, in fact, see as significant speed gain in many circumstances as they expect. DAZ certainly seem to have confidence in this implementation, so having never tested the numbers myself, I'll be happy if they prove me wrong. Bill

Well, we don't even know if it will have scenebuilding. If it does, one thing is for sure, if they don't implement more than one coordinate system it'll be no better than Poser. I can't believe the nerve of Curious Labs adding a renderer and procedural materials and doing nothing about improving the scenebuilding capabilities. Bryce is brilliant in this regard, having 3 coordinate systems you can easily switch between (world, object, and camera). Poser just has one. So heaven help anyone trying to rotate something on the y-axis after it's been rotated on x or z.

You can get around some of that, though... and any efforts towards an increase in speed is better than none. Also, w/ Poser, there is none of the AGP advantages being used, none of the shading info is passed along to the vidcard (as it should on a PC w/ even a halfway capable vidcard), and none of the 3D video card's onboard memory is being taken advantage of, aside from the standard allocation to normal OS video display operations (which leaves a huge chunk of it unused.) Also, OpenGL (or DirectX) isn't as hard on OS resources as the Poser style straight-up pixel calculation is. To top it off, you can pass along a lot of the chores right to the card, like antialiasing, enhanced CPU instruction sets that are set aside just for 3D acceleration (which would take the load and distribute it more evenly across the CPU.) /P

Thanks for all the feedback I do have Poser and I love it most of the time,I was going to jump right out and get P5 But I decided to wait and now I am going to wait longer just to see...But I cant wait to see DAZ'S and especially Vicky 3

The only real concern I would have is the security system and if you want to give away that much controle over your computer. If someone wants to put that much controle over MY computer I would destroy my computer before I let them do that!

Dunno exactly what kind of serial number thingy will be in place, but since the programming isn;t anywhere near that far along yet, perhaps that's something to be dealt with as things near completion. /P

That to which I refer to is P5. Anything would better than P5s Drakonian security measures. I'm looking forward to the DAZ product big time. :)

hehe I meant the MSRP. I thought that was about what P5 was goin for new... But I think for some reason I was confusing it with Truespace 6 in my mind. (such as it is.) I also hadn't read the part in the other thread about them aiming to keep the price quite low when I posted. Pretty good strategy IMO. They definately know their market.

"You refrigerate Bass Ale? Barbarian." Hey, just trying to keep it at British room temperature--i.e., between 40 and 45 degrees.

queri {I do ask one thing: get professional testing managers and professional testers. } CL had about the most professional beta testers you can have. We found and reported most of the bugs everyone saw when P5 was released. The key is, you have to listen to your beta testers.

Now that's interesting...

WOW, a 3D program taking advantage of 3D accelerationNow THEREs a conceptWho-da thunk?!? Listen to their beta testers?!?!?! Now why would they do that? :-) I think this new toy is gonna be awesomeThank you so much Penguinisto for teasing userrkeeping us informed

WAIT for DAZ STUDIO. I too was looking at Poser 5 but soon there will be a new kid on the block. After seeing the screen shot of Daz's new program I have decided to wait and see what is cooking.

For me it's easy... Daz studio is in "early stages" and we have no definite release date. A good guess is sometime in mid 2003 but it could be as late as 2004. I need better capabilities than Poser4 >now<. It makes no sense for me to wait 6 months to a year for added capability because anothe program I have seen one screenhot of >might< be better. Why would I lose 6 months for that? I am running Poser5 and I will do it until something better comes along - maybe Daz studio and maybe a Poser upgrade. I don't have an political issues either way. Of course since I use it professionally the equasion is different for me... in 6 months I would LOSE more money staying with Poser4 than Poser5 retails for. It just makes sense for me to stay up to date.

Since the "non-rendered" examples on the DAZ website look better than my renders with Poser 5, I can't wait to get my hands on the beta. Actually I've put P5 on the shelf and gone back to Poser 4. It seems to be more stable and faster; in my application, I have no need to watch hair grow.