You need to turn the interpolation value up high to avoid those arifacts (mine was sitting at 20%). Shonner thanks for the suggestion.

As promised here is a wee HDRI image.

bwtr - do you think you could reproduce this using just 3 point lighting?

Hi

Have to agree with Patrick. There's no competition between HDRI and the 3 light setup. Especially for Poser skin. I was about to post an example of an HDRI Poser scene I set up in Cararra to demonstrate but for some reason Cararra no longer will open the file. It gets to 50% and hangs. This is twice this has happened with two different files in the past day. Looks like I have another issue to get around now :-(

Hmmm, thanks for the suggestion Shonner - I'll try it out.

bwtr - I'll post an image in the gallery tomorrow showing off HDRI lighting. There's no way I could reproduce the effect by using 3 point lighting.

At the risk of getting flamed, I think a lot of people are missing the point here. E-Frontier is a business and they have the right to set whatever pricing structure they want. There is no law stating that they HAVE to even offer an upgrade price. If they decide to give previous software away and  then  allow people to upgrade from it then that is their perrogative (in fact it is down-right generous to new customers). I'm sure new users to Poser are very thankful to E-Frontier that they have been allowed to do this. Why should we be annoyed at their generosity. Like someone said before in this thread its like the parable of the vineyard. People are annoyed at the fact that someone else is getting a better deal than them. Well, consider this, if you had waited for Poser 5 to become free you'd have never had the chance play with it all this time so you have had a couple of years head-start with the software for your money over those poor people who had to wait.

For the record, my impatience to play with the new software has made me buy the Poser upgrades  each time simply because nothing else gave me the ability to pose and generate portrait images for that price. However, this time I am going to wait as I feel Cararra 5.1 gives be far better renders than Poser. With Poser 5 and Carrara 5.1 you have everything you need to create fantastic renders, and use all the superior content for Vicky and Michael at DAZ and renderosity (lets face it the figures supplied with Poser itself are a bit of a joke - if realism is what you are after then forget them!) Even if P7 was free, I'd have to see something very special in it to waste any more disk space and the pictures of the new content is not even mildly rocking my boat!

Good luck to all the new Poser users out there and congratulations on picking up a bargain!

Just thought I'd add my 2 cents worth here. It seems incredible that people would pre-order P7 before actually finding out what the improvements are. Right now all we know is that it has some new content (and even this doesn't look that good compared to V3 or Michael from DAZ). Buying an upgrade because a programme has jumped a version is not sensible and just serves to tell e-frontier that theres a large gullible user-base that will buy any old crap! I was severly disappointed with P6 and will not be making that mistake again. Lets face it, the only advantage of early adoption is to allow one to play with the software sooner. Specialist apps like Poser will only come down in price over time, not up - once the eager beavers have paid full price for it and e-Frontier have made as much as they can from the higher price.

Me, I'm leaving this well alone - at least until e-frontier actually tell me what the darn thing can do!

WOW!!! Hey thanks so much sfdex. thats excellent work. I guess its all about the right tools for the right job and sometimes 2d is a better option for visualization. having looked at this maybe doing this for real isn't such a good idea. You may just have saved me a packet Thanks again!

thnaks for the suggestions. Very impressive Ringo!

Well, no spurrious crashes so I guess its stable enough (if you can call about 30 minutes of playing enough of a soak test!) No new features unfortunately, just bug fixes. Would sure like to see some more goodies thrown in with the updates

COOL! Just goes to show, when in doubt, read the manual!!!! Thanks very much.

Will try the suggestions tomorrow - need to go to bed now. Thanks again for the help

Hi again I had a go at your sussestion but have a couple of issues On the V3 obj file, when I duplicate it and then go into the modelling room I just get a blank workspace On simpler obj models I get box allowing me to convert the mesh into a vertex model but then when I go into the modeller, the mesh is tiny, have to zoom way in to see it! Any resolution to the above two scenarios?

Ah, Ok - i see what you mean now. basically you just treat the actual object you are modelling around as a template in the vertex room and then remove it when you have created the prop over it. Makes sense. Thanks!

Hey Thanks for the suggestion Mark and ren_mem will have a look at the link now. Just wish there was a more direct way to do this - seems to me it would be quite a useful thing to be able to do in the next version? cheers

Just got this message from Eovia in case anyone else is having problems "If you have not yet been able to download your final version of Carrara 5, please note that we have significantly improved today the bandwidth capability of our server. If not already done, you should now safely get your final product"

Took hotsteppas advise and managed to download the full version this morning in UK. Advise to anyone having difficulties is to keep trying - the error message you get is not an invalid link but just the server being overloaded. Haven't installed yet - but looking forward to trying it out!