I have Poser 4 + PPack and was now wondering with the latest SR, if it is worth the upgrade? I know dumb question...but I do mostly animation of custom characters I either bring in or modify existing ones. The cloth is only important to me if I can some how use it for automatic secondary animation of a body part (ie. antenna, etc...) which I don't know if you can do? One of my other concerns is the slowing down of my machine with P5. In all the reviews I've read and posts it seems to really be system intensive (I know that depends on the scene, but I mean in general). I also read that you cannot use the Morph putty option on new characters you bring in, only the supplied ones...is that true? That would stink. Thanks for the time, Chris

What are your system specs?

Do you mean use the cloth room to make an antenna flexible and animate that way?

Give us time to figure out how far the cloth functions can be pushed beyond the intended use :-)

-Jeff

Chris, here's my biased input on your post... Morph putty works on any character's morphs. It works on the DAZ characters, and would work on any character you brought into Poser 5 that has morphs, regardless of what bodypart the morphs on associated with. The dynamic cloth engine is also useful for modeling draped fabric such as would be found on a tablecloth or even in modeled-in clothing. As a modeling tool, the cloth room can be used to calculate the drape, and the draping geometry can be used to spawn or create a morph of that draped state, which can then be applied to original non-cloth version of your geometry. Kupa

Attached Link: http://www.philc.net

Cloth calculations be it poser 5 maya, TrueSpace or 3dmax all requier a lot of system resorces. I use cloth sims in maya TrueSpace and Poser 5. of the three listed Posers Cloth Simulation is the fastest and next to the most versatal. as to antena drape and so on. I have exsperamentd with working with full box modeling and draping it works thow takes a lot of fideling to keep the mesh from calapsing in on its self, in short with your antenas on a charater you should be able to get the drape/flow of motion as your chars head moves around. hope this helps Vel

oh sim time 45 seconds to run this for 30 fraims but this is very simple and low polly set. see my it works post for hair and cloth high res high polly runs. sim times for 30 fraims 20 drapeing 45 mins total cloth and hair. hope this helps Vel

Chris, Like Jeff said, what are your system specs? Poser 5 does run well on a 500mhz AMD system. It runs better on a faster system obviously, but it will run reasonably on an "older" machine. One caveat - make sure to get at LEAST 256MB of RAM, more if you can. The more complex cloth calculations do take some time, but for most of us animating, we let our machines run overnight anyway, so this hasn't been a problem for me. Another option is to have a secondary dedicated render machine. I've found that I can't do without certain features of P5: The Material Nodes, Cloth, and the Multiple Runtimes. Not to mention Dynamic Hair - it just rocks. The only problems I've had are getting used to the new way of applying materials. But it is SO much more versatile than the P4 materials, and overall, the program is way more versatile than Poser 4. --silver

I believe on ordinary functions P5 does run slower than Poser 4 with PP, but the frist service release pack seems to have helped a great deal with that. I'm still not used to the lag and I have a Pentium 4 with 526 megs ram, plus a video card with 128 megs ram memory running Windows XP home edition. In my opinion, where P5 shines is the Firefly Rendering Engine. The results I've gotten with it are much more realistic looking and more in line with the results I've achieved with over 3D software. That has made it worth the upgrade for me, not having to export to get a good render.

Thank you all for the replies. My system is a Dell Inspiron notebook (for now)with a PIII 650, 256RAM and 8MB video card. It seems as thou P5 is definitely worth it for me... Thanks again, Chris

Having never had any problems with P5 at all, I can say that I believe it was definitely worth it. And FYI, I've got an AMD 1.6mhz Athlon, 384 MB RAM, an NVIDIA TNT2, and about 16 gb free HD space (rapidly depleting, good thing I don't have broadband or it would be GONE... ^_^)

I have P5 with the latest service pack running on an Athlon 1.6mhz with 500 MB RAM. I have yet to encounter a serious problem with anything I've tried to use in P5, including fringe functionality stuff like Easypose, that I thought would get broken by P5 for sure (good thing somebody at CL thinks Easypose is as cool as I do!) The Firefly renderer has virtually eliminated the need for me to do the labor-intensive "port Poser objects over to a real renderer" thing, at least at the JPG level. Add in procedural textures (FINALLY!!!), dynamic hair and cloth, and divide it all by a super-cheap pricetag ($169 to upgrade!) and you can't lose.

Thanks again for the responses...BTW, what is "EasyPose"?