God, did that really happen? With a CL employee? This "Pirate Killer" guy sounds like a zealous warez-nazi to me. Any customer service person harassing and accusing a legitimate customer in that manner should be fired on the spot. It should be obvious to anyone (company and customer) that that kind of response is intolerable. I'm surprised this guy didn't ask you to settle the matter with him personally, in cash. That's how Napoleonic law usually plays out in practice, right? -Adam

I think this installation system sucks. It would be great if it would prevent piracy of Poser 5, but let's face it, this will end up as just another hassle for the legitmate user. It will be cracked readily by hackers, leaving us real users as the only ones who are put out. Maya 3.5 has a similar system, at that's exactly what happened. Reports of it being cracked hit newsgroups only days after its release. Maya's installer generates some kind of a Challege Code based on the MAC address of your computer's ethernet card. The same week Maya was released, a fake 'Maya License Generator" exe was already in circulation. Probably an inside job, or possibly a really clever hacker. Either way, it proves the point. Even software with USB dongles have been cracked. hackers find a way to replicate the dongle response with software, or circumvent the calls to the dongle altogether by editing the software at the assembly code level. it's been done for a decade, and no anti-piracy measures have ever been 100% successful (or even close). And the tip about installing on a P5 different hard drive? Anthony, you've probably already said too much. I'm guessing there's some geek somewhere already trying to figure out exactly what characteristic of the hard drive is being used as the seed to generate the challenge code... -Adam

the Sept 15 date is referring to the Windows version only. CL has never given even the slightest indication of when P5 Mac will be ready, nor have they even said when they might say. The website has said "Details on the Mac version coming soon" ever since they put up a P5 page. They ostensibly have a different idea of what 'soon' means than I do. -Adam

Curious Labs specified our minimum system requirements after extensive testing. Poser 5 may or may not run acceptably on machines that do not conform to the stated minimum requirements I think what he was asking is if it will in fact run at all at 333. No one expects it to run well. There is a big difference between running "unacceptably slow" and not being able to run at all due to hardware limitations. A lot of people can get by, satisfied with render speeds that would make owners of faster computers pull their hair out. Any computer can seem to be running acceptably fast to someone who has not experienced anything faster, and different people have different thresholds of tolerance/patience for slower hardware ("acceptable" is subjective). -Adam

OK, that makes more sense in context. It's well textured and clearly a lot of work has gone into it. If you're after a sort of star trek command post look, I would say it's off to a very good start. It's appropriately vague about what function it has, and I guess that would be a good thing if it's going to be in a prop pack meant to serve as any number of things. My only comment would be to be sure to include a very good, well layed out and labeled template, and an appropriate mapping scheme so that people can add things to the buttons if they wish (text, symbols, etc..). the better and more regularly it's mapped, the more attractive it will be as a prop. -Adam

If you don't get any meaningful feedback, consider the possiblility that no one can tell what this is. I would guess that its a sort of generic interior panel from a spacecraft, but your comment about the angled piece being a handheld computer has me wondering about the scale. -Adam

I think a lot less stuff will be obsoleted than people might imagine. Wait and see what dynamic cloth can really do in practice before you through out your runtime of conforming clothes. I believe I recall kupa himself saying that conforming clothes would still be a valid choice for all the skin-tight vicky outfits that are so popular around here. Also, most props, scenery, etc.. will still work just the same, without fancy replacements. I'd be willing to bet that the new hair features don't obsolete the hair figures either. The new hair may give great effects in movies (blowing, billowing etc..) but it may not be the best choice for stills. -Adam

Oh ok. In that case, a pass through poser certainly can't hurt. Normally, you can export an OBJ from a modelling program, tweek it a bit some more in that program and export it again as a morph target. This assumes you're working with a vertex model of course, whose number of vertices are already fixed (i.e. not a spline model that gets re-polygoned differently each time you export it) However... if you mess with grouping of the model, you may end up with the vertices of the morph copy being written into the OBJ file in a different order than the original. I know this can happen in Carrara, Cinema 4D and Rhino. In general, it's best to re-import your base obj to Carrara and tweak it and re-export. This is better than making a model in Carrara and trying to export various versions of it without ever re-importing the OBJ. -Adam

What is happening if you just load the morph target directly into Poser with "load morph target..." Is it exploding, or are you not able to see the obj in the import dialog box? Making a morph target in Carrara is about as straightforward as it gets. Export the body part from poser with "as morph target" selected, tweak in Carrara with the magnet and vertex tools, export as OBJ then load into Poser with "Load morph target" on the body part in question. If these steps aren't working, you probably have something checked off on export from poser, import to carrara or export from Carrara not exactly right. There's a morph targets with Carrara Tutorial that shows all the correct import export settings for each step. -Adam

That IS a typo, isn't it? I can't imagine software as advanced as this still relegated to ONE level of Undo. That's just a "hold-over" from the old manual, right? I'm assuming, timoteo, that you wrote this bit of sarcasm knowing full well that the manual is correct and not a "hold-over" from P4. Are you just trying to irritate CL or what? You just recently complained about mac users whining too much on this board about not getting P5 sooner. Have you stopped and taken a look at how many P5 whining threads you've personally started in the last few days??? Let me refresh your memory: P5 Manual: Does anyone else feel this way? Tell me there is QUICKTIME support in P5 ... please! Still no 3D acceleration !!!!!!!!!! How about mouse wheel support?? How about maximum render size? No TIF either??!? ORDER ISSUES ... Problems with order site ... Macs are INFERIOR for video editing as well ... Wouldn't hold your breath for a Mac version ... Sooooo ..... what about Poser 5 ?? Oooh, here's another one: How about PLOP Anthony: Since you're still up ...RENDERING?? DOH!!! Sorry, the mac users have nothing on you. All of them together have not whined nearly as hard as you alone. All those threads in bold above... you started threads of your own just to b*tch about P5, a product you don't even have yet. It's people like you that will make CL think twice about releasing a manual early again--CL did you a favor, and in turn you're doing everyone else here a disservice. -Adam

What an totally absurb and utter pile of horse crap. What decade are you living in?? The Windows NT kernal (NT4, 2000, XP) is rock solid. I agree that that comment about the mac version being more stable is misguided and wishful thinking. I have a 2.2 GHz Dell Precision on my desk at work running Win 2000 pro, and I wouldn't say that it's noticably more or less stable than OS X. In the end, sloppily programmed applications and device drivers can bring down even the most stable OS, so each has a small amount of crash potential still. I've owned my OS X based G4 since April 12, and I've had only one full-system "gotta press reset" crash, while loading Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It didn't technically take down the kernel, but it did blank my screen making it impossible to get to the task manager. Some apps still crash, most notably Carrara, but as in Win2000 they are just tasks that die, the system lives on. You should be greatful the software is coming out on your platform at all, unlike the thousands of titles, hardware, and web apps, etc. that do not. As I've asked other Mac-Nazis ... HOW CAN YOU NOT be used to it by now?? Poser is a real exception. Software releases from all major graphics software companies ship simultaneously for Mac and Win. Mac users certainly aren't used to waiting for anything. The only software genre that tends to debut on Win or be Win-only are games. If I were a hardcore gamer, I'd buy a PC for sure, but I'm not, I'm a music producer. I realistically spend about 24-48 hours in a year playing computer games. Do they still ship them with single-button mice though? And is multi-mouse button FUNCTIONALITY built-in yet? Yes and Yes. No productive mac user I know has anything less than a 2-button mouse with clickable scroll wheel. In fact, most mac powerusers have one of the microsoft optical intellimice or it's Kensington equivalent. i couldn't live without my scroll wheel. -Adam

You know, I've been an Apple user since 1986, but they are really starting to piss me off. Last week I paid $49 for a tech support call wherein their professional opinion on my problem was "I must have done something wrong". they did not resolve the issue, but a solution did emerge on maxfixit.com. Then tonight, Apple kicks off their 10:20-Midnight OS 10.2 party, and I was there at 10:20 "sharp", per their website instructions, and I did not get in. There were easily 100 people still ahead of me in line to get in the store when the cambridge police started turning people away. I didn't get any freebies, nothing except my name in a raffle. If I win a new mac, I don't think I'll be as pissed, but Windows XP and a nice 2.53 GHz athlon are looking pretty sweet to me right now... -Adam

yeah, like any mac user is going to go for the Win-to-Mac upgrade. Like buying another $2000 computer is no big deal... I saw that Mac version to win upgrade path and I just groaned. -Adam

Phew (wipes brow), thanks kupa. when does not matter much to me (I'm patient), so long as we are reminded now and then that it is still going to happen. I'm wondering too if "Content Paradise" will exist on the mac. I know it's cake to squeeze the Explorer ActiveX control into any windows app, but not so on the mac.. particularly troublesome in OS 9. -Adam

They seem obviously tight-lipped about this. Makes me think something is very wrong (mac version is not coming, or at least not this year). Note also the recently posted manual is clearly windows only, when I would certainly have expected the same manual for both mac/win.