Well, I just downloaded and watched both part one and the teaser.  Wow, what an amazing job!  This is a huge undertaking and I am very impressed.  Not only does it look great, but the story is very engaging and has a fantastic emotional impact.  You do the Star Trek realm justice and have created something not only to be very proud of, but something portfolio worthy.  Really, well done, you are an inspiration Tim!

Still, I think some people here are missing the point.  Poser 5 will run on a 500 mhz P1 if you are going to render with the P4 engine.  People give those machines away!  And aside from giving Poser 5 away earlier this year, aren't they still selling it uber cheap?

And really, what is the discussion about?  If you have Poser 4 already and are happy with it, well then, just be happy.  If you are complaining that you can't use newer content, well, my machine can't run the latest hottest Video game out there.  I just have to cope, I guess, until I can afford to upgrade.

Yeah, progress sucks in ways, but if you have been happy with what you have, then continue to be happy with what you have, just come to terms with the fact that vendors in the near future won't be making more available to you. 

The P4 rendering engine still has uses, even in P6.  I rarely use it for close up work unless it is something I intend to do a lot of postwork on, but right there, why spend time waiting for Firefly to render?  If I'm doing a backgroudn to comp in later and there are no reflections or displacement, they I use P4, again, why wait for Firefly?

I also often use P4 as a reference render that I save to a tif and use for the alpha channel, this is if I render a complex scene, but then want to isolate the characer(s) or props or some such for post work.  I just go delete what isn't needed in the alpha channel and do a P4 render.

But, why anyone would want to stick to Poser 4 or Poser Artist is beyond me.  Really, Poser 5 is available cheap and the improvements are well worth it even if you are going to render only in P4 mode.

Oh, and Daz has announced they no longer will be supporting P4 on their new items.  It's just time.

I suspect that textures is where the trouble will be.  I may be wrong, but if she is an entirely new mesh then her UV coordinates will be entire different.

Mind you, you can always take your favorite texture into photoshop and with a bit of work repaint it.

As I said, I could be wrong, but I really think that we will be looking at whole new texture maps.

Poser 6 and assumedly Poser 7 allow multiple Runtimes.  With this feature and some time you can divide your content into categories, each category being its own Runtime.  Right now I have three Runtimes.  The base P6 Runtime which only has what P6 came with in it, then my new stuff Runtime and then my old P5 Runtime.  Poser 6 always loads the last Runtime you were using (though there might be a way to change this, I just haven't looked yet).  Instead, I always make sure to switch back to the P6 runtime before exitting.  It starts up so fast now, that I'm often surprised.

It does take it's time when I go to open my huge P5 Runtime, but then it seems to swim along with the browsing much smoother then P5 did.

Still, I intend to break my content down to categories because as Sparrownightmare pointed out, there are just too many cryptically named things.  I also have a big issue lately forgetting which piece of clothing goes to which character since most clothing don't even give a vague clue in there thumbnails.

I'm figuring on dividing clothing and morphs by character, and then having Themed runtimes for props and scenes, like Sci-Fi, Western, Fantasy, etc...

Yeah, It's going to take time, but it will be worth it.

Poser 7 promises to be much better for animation.  The way the recent announcements have been going, ti looks like they are really targetting the animation side of Poser 7.  New features like "layered animation" and lipsyncing show they are really putting a lot of effort into re-creating Poser as an animation tool instead of just still image tool.

If you have purchased Poser 6 in the last Month, contact E-Frontiers, I believe they will give you the upgrade to Poser 7.  I'm not guaranteeing it, but I remember reading that in a few forums.  Contact them and don't miss your chance.

You know, I use the P4 Engine from time to time still and it really does a similiar job to Firefly in certain cases, and I never use the "Ignore Shader Tree" Option.

The only cases where Firefly is truly needed in P5 is when you want to use displacement or true reflections.  I use Face off's Skin Shader, which is a really complex node set up and it comes out almost exactly the same as in Firefly under the same lighting.  The only difference is the displacement maps, which don't really add much unless you are doing a Close up render.

In Poser 6, you can't use the fancy lighting options of IBL and AO in the P4 Engine, but not all art needs that.  A night shot of a thief in a street picking a pocket (for example) might not require any of that.  If you do a lot of postwork painting, then I'm sure that the P4 Engine is all that you need.

I almost always only use P4 for animations, my clients have never known there might be something better.  (and nine times out of ten they want the thing done the day before they hire me!)

I haven't noticed a significant difference in performance of the P4 engine from P5 to P6, but I haven't used it for anything other than a few quick preview renders.

The nice thing about P6 is that you can do spot renders and save them.  this means you could render something with reflections, once in P4, then reset for Firefly rendering, and just render the reflections, compositing them in later in Photoshop or some such.

Well, all that said, I do have to concede that Textures turn out much cleaner in Firefly, but the final call all depends on your personal style and what you do in your postwork.

Just my opinion.

I'm going to have to go through my files now and see if I have any of those!  Who knew? lol.

Actually, Poser 7, like Poser 5 supports multiple runtimes, so I think we are pretty safe.  I just upgraded to Poser 6 (the get P6 free with your pre-order of P7 deal) and I just left Poser 5 alone on a separate drive and linked to it's Runtime.  It's worked great.

My P5 Runtime has passed 21 GBs, by the way!

I have this noble idea that some day i will make different runtimes in catagories, one for each character and one for props and such of different genres.  But, when will i ever have the tiem to sort through all the stuff!? lol.

One other note, when I upgraded to P5, it left P4 on my system, When I upgraded to P6 it left P5 alone, and I suspect it will be the same with P7.  I'm backing everything up onto a separate drive just incase, anyway.

Hey Beryld!  A fellow Canuck is always pleasant to see!  Yeah, we had a huge storm out here that dump gunk into our water supply and 2 million people (myself included) are without safe drinking water.  Always great fun. lol.  But, I don't miss the Snow! (Used to live in Sask!)

Fixer, I should clarify, there is nothing lowly about hobbiests, lord knows that I've spent many more hours with Poser as a hobby vs professionally, and I think I've way surpassed the amount of money I've made using Poser with my hobby related purchases. lol. I'm a complete addict, especially lately.

Truly, though, Hobbies are those things that we work so hard to save money up to spend on.  Golf hobbiests spend tons of cash on Golf.  Latex lovers dish out thousands of dollars for their fetish, and even my Grandma can't pass up buying spools of wool every month for her knitting (and she never sells any of the tons of things she makes, just gives them away.)

So, yeah, it is always a bit of a spur when a new thing comes on the market.  I meant no disrespect.

And, hey, wasn't there a childrens book published that used Daz Studio?  See, nothing is constrained to hobby or professional anymore.

Cheers

In the Daz Forums they are running an unofficial "guess the release date" for V4.  This is the closest to an acknowledgement of V4's exsistance that I've seen over there.  But I do know they had mentioned it was on the horizon in a magazine interview (I can't remember which mag) back in August-ish.

I'm looking foreward to V4 and I still use V2 from time to time for background characters and I use V3RR a lot, I've even used her for close up work and been very suprised by the results.

I suspect that the changes in the new Poser 7 almost demand a new version of any cutting edge character models.  It is progress, and you have to rmember, how long has V3 been around?  Sure, when she first came out most people owned machines that would choke on two of her in a scene, but computers keep getting faster, and in three years, V3 is going to look like nothing more than a computer video game character in comparison.

As far as "hobbiest" software, if that is your feeling,t hen stick to Poser 4 or Daz Studio.  Poser 5 and since have been closing the gap with professional software and more importantly, the software has been being used more and more by professionals.  I have used Poser since version 4 for animations for Television and small budget movies.  Not because it was easy to use, but because it is the premier character software.  I know pros who use Maya and still rip characters through Poser first.  Unless you have a budget to hire model designers or you have the time to design your own models, Poser is essential for animated characters.

Poser 7 has (supposedly) addressed a number of rendering issues and will render our old scenes with two or more V3s with unequalled reliability and with vast speed improvement.  It probably will have no problems with V4.

I just hope V4 lives up to its heritage and promise.  I have high hopes and I will be anxiously awaiting the character to see what she is capable of.

Cheers.