I have Poser 3. Should I upgrade? If so, should I go to 4 or to 5? My current interest is in exporting to Flash but I can actually do that now using P3 and exporting as bitmaps. Do 4 and 5 export as vector? As SWF? What about the stories I've heard that P5 is extremely slow and unstable? Thanks in advance for your advice.

P5 is apparently still very slow-- it may be a bit more stable. I'm going by comments from friends and what I've read in the beta forum. The slowness is not just rendering but also posing and exporting. How powerful is your computer? P4 with ProPack, which I think is all you can upgrade to, can get by with 1G or less processor. P5 seems to really need 2G and a lot of Ram-- a gig probably. The benefits of transparency is huge and you get that in P4. The MIl like Vicki and MIke figures are also only P4 compatible as far as I know. Emily

If you can afford it the Poser 5 offers a lot more features - the Hair room and Clothing procedures plus the better renderer. I recommend checking out some of the test renders posted onthis very forum to see if your feel this is worth it. Whichever you choose you will get a load more fun than from 3, for a start the texturing process is much more dynamic and you can put actual clothes on people (hurray!)

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember someone saying that the lo-rez V and M were P3 compatable.

Definitely upgrade to either P4 or P5. The difference is incredible. P5 is coming along, but it's still a bit slow. I really haven't played with the advanced features, like dynamic cloth or hair. It's the little things that make it great for me. Nested libraries rock! I can't go back to P4 simply because of that. (I have gobs and gobs of stuff.) Measurements in feet rather than Poser units is also great. P5 uses .jpg files for bump maps and doesn't need to create .rsr copies of the .obj files so it really cuts down on hard drive space used. (I saved over 1/2 a GB in space by going with P5 and nuking unneeded files.) The one advanced P5 feature that I love is the Material room. There's some really great effects you can get with that. The P5 render engine is getting faster, but it depends on what settings you use. The P4 render engine in P5 is faster than firefly (a.k.a. stoned sloth), so you can pretty much have your cake and eat it, too. That said, I still think P5 is too slow in rendering sometimes and there's been a few pictures where the shadows seemed odd. With SR-2.1, P5 has been stable for me, and I was one of the people with a lot of problems with the program. I still wouldn't pronounce it perfect, nor recommend it for everyone, but it's up to 1 1/2 thumbs up from me. Hope that helps!

As far as I know, the low-res M and V are not P3 compatible.

Poser 5, definitely. It rules. Sure, it has its foibles just like P4, but overall it is no more troublesome for me than P4 was, and it has so many features that P4 lacked, there's really no comparison.

Lo-res V & M can be made P3 compatible, but it takes a lot of work. I've put together a sort-of-working lo-res Vicki 1, but she's not in any fit state for release.

You should definitely go for P4 at least - I'm hoping to do so myself. Don't know enough about the P4/P5 issue to comment on it, though.

And Mike and Vickie and all the DAZ stuff work just fine in P5. The only thing is that they don't work in the face room, but all that can be done in P4 with DAZ stuff can be done in P5.