Damn renderosity ate my reply once again....second try: Wolfgang, I strongly recommend that you change the text on the website, because it does says something completely different than what you say. First: it talks about 30 days AFTER the release and you talk about 30 days BEFORE the release. I copied & pasted the text in this thread right from your website. Secondly: There is no mention at all on WHEN you bought Poser4. Only on when you can make us of this special offer. It's not a translation issue either, because the german part of the website states exactly the same as the english part. There seems to be a misunderstanding within your company, or at least with the person that made the webpage.

The full price of their distributors in Germany is 499 Euro for all of them. Even if I add the same tax to the US price that still makes for a difference of 100$. Luckily I don't have to consider to full price.

If you have Propack it's 30 Euro cheaper than softline. But if you don't have Propack it is 90 Euro cheaper. Softline charges 229 Euro incl. vat for the upgrade from Poser4 without Propack and 169 Euro incl. vat for the upgrade from Poser4/Propack. (I hope shipping prices from Egisys are just as good as from Softline. Only 7,76 Euro to the Benelux)

Egisys has some new info on their website: http://www.egisys.com/products/?lang=EN&res=high&path=software/poser/pricing It states the following: special price Upgrade Poser 4 to Poser 5 in between 30 days after appearance of Poser 5: 140,- Euro incl. vat after this periode: 229,- Euro incl. vat Unfortunately they don't see where we can order. And what they call the appearance date of Poser 5. Is it that unknown data somewhere in september? I've just mailed them about it. But thinks are finally looking better for European customers. I think I'll make a new thread in this forum about it. Let's make sure everybody knows about it :-)

Basically the limit is the maximum amount of virtual memory you have. (RAM + swapfile) In a 32bit OS you will have a hard limit at 2GB. I have actually hit that limit myself by setting the shadow map size above 9000 :-) Swapping because of this isn't too bad, so don't hesitate to use sizes well beyond the amount of RAM in your machine. IMO Playing with larger shadowsizes is especially usefull for close-up shots of a face with shadows on it from hair strands.

When I read the title, I thought that blond girl had finally fallen off Jims sailboat... Didn't expect this from Jim :-)

Exactly what line was crossed? At what point does some law say that this is not just a personal opinion of somebody trying to help others and does it become counter advertising? (however that might be defined in the US) BTW if the book is really as bad as it seems I wouldn't worry about mr Mortier being offended. You shouldn't offend people without reason, but here the reasons seems clear enough.

laptop: Win2000 Pro workstation at home: WinXP Pro server at home: Win2000 advanced server Butch, I remember OS/2 Warp also. Used it for quite a long time in a dual boot with Win9x. It was a very good OS, but I think 2000 and XP are the same quality.

Maybe it's an electrical winch? ;-)

I'm sorry Kelderek, but if the higher European prices had anything to do with VAT or shipping costs nobody would complain. I've ordered several pieces of software directly from the US, so I pretty much know what to expect from VAT/custom duties/shipping costs. (And I guess I'm not the only one) Those costs cannot begin to explain why we have to pay TWICE the price for P4. With egisys being located in Germany I hope matters will improve for Poser5.

Jim, what are those dark stripes on the hull? It's not a texture is it? Maybe a higher shadow map size would fix that? (Might want to do that anyway for the shadow the genua throws on the mainsail. That looks kinda poserish :-)) I'm thinking about two details you might want to add to the boat: Most of such boats I see have some sort of railing at the bow. Sometimes just a short one. I think it would look very good on this one. And for shots in the late afternoon or evening, like your second render, navigations lights might give a nice touch. Something I would try with the first picture is to play with the light intensity. Set it at 150% for example. I find that that can give the impression of a very bright and sunny day with the a bright sun shining. Poser renders always give me the impression that there is a cloud in front of the sun :-) Then again, maybe that is what you intended since the shadows are also quite soft?

A bit off-topic but the boat probably isn't turning at all. These kinds of boats are hardly ever sail level. The wind in the sails always pushes it sideways, and with the resistance from the keel that means the boat will always tilt away from the wind. Only smaller boats that don't have a keel, but where the crew maintains the balance should be sailed level. Also judging the position of mainsail and genua the blondes' hair should be flowing backwards. (Wind coming in from around 2 o'clock). Poser5 should make that a lot easier :-)

Very nice shape and details (the boat I mean...yes really :-)) What kind of class is it? Can it use a spinaker? This reminds me that I haven't been able to sail for the last three weeks. Either no wind or thunderstorms :-(((( Marc P.S. I see the keel of the ship through the water, but I don't see the rudder?

Hammer is the name for the 64bit CPU that AMD is developing. Hammer is more focused on also running 32bit applications well than Itanium. Since Poser is 32bit, Hammer will probably run it faster than Itanium. On the other hand, the latest 32bit CPU might be faster still... For Poser4 a system with AthlonXP and a lot of memory seems to be the fastest solution today. (Some testing done in the Poser forum. Search for "CPU" and "test" and you should find a very long thread about it.)

There is some misinformation in the mail to which Curious Labs has responded. I'll try to claify in normal english. The techies should take a look at http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001120/p4-10.html which tells you the same, but with a more indepth and complex explanation. First: The P4 does NOT have 6 floating point units. How someone got to this number I can't imagine, but it is just not true! That person probably confused FPUs with execution units, but even then the number 6 is wrong. (just as the 2 for Athlon) Some background: The design goal for the P4 was a chip that had to run at as high clock speed as possible. (no matter what)Furthermore it would feature another extension to SSE to improve performance. The result was that some compromises had to be made which have produced a CPU that acts quite differently (and for some people unpredictable) than its predecessors. One of the compromises is that SSE2 has been introduced, but at the expense of FPU, MMX, and SSE1. And those are less powerfull then on the P3 and Athlon. That isn't a bad thing as long as everybody rewrites their programs and changes the X87FPU instructions into SSE2 instructions. (And as long as they don't mind that their precision goes down from 80bit to 64bit floating point) The result shows very clearly in the benchmarks. In programs which are specially optimized to use SSE2 instructions, the P4 shines, but in code that uses X87 FPU instructions the P4 does poorly compared to P3 and Athlon, because it was designed that way. Poser4 was of course made for X87 FPU instructions. Lots of companies find that changing software to let it make use of SSE2 is difficult, time consuming and thus costly. Therefore you can see that it is only done in very expensive software where reasonably big performance gains can be reached. (Lightwave, 3dsMax etc) The question is whether that is affordable for a small company like Curious Labs, which creates a low priced program: Poser5. Time will tell. (or maybe curious labs) Marc. P.S. For people that don't want to read the entire article I mentioned (or are put off by the technical terms) I've quoted some parts specifically about the FPU performance: "Things look worse if you have a look at the red boxes, which represent the FPU-part of Pentium 4. Please take the time and compare this part to the Pentium III block diagram. You will see that Intel has actually castrated quite a bit of the SSE/MMX part of Pentium 4. Pentium III used to have two MMX and two SSE units, but Pentium 4 has only got one of each. Intel claims that additional units would not have improved the SSE/SSE2, MMX or FPU performance. However, our benchmark results speak a different language." "Intel hopes that software developers will soon replace the old x87-FPU-instructions with the double-precision FP instructions of SSE2, so that Intel's currently false claim that Pentium 4 has the most powerful FPU finally becomes reality. AMD is very impressed with SSE2 as well, which is why it announced to us only a few days ago that the upcoming Hammer-line of x86-64 processors will include SSE2 as well. I personally have my doubts if SSE2 will be able to replace x87-instructions in scientific software. We should not forget that the original FPU is using 80-bit FP-values, not the less exact 64-bit FP-values offered by SSE2."