my.smithmicro.com/win/poser/updates.html

Poser 8 upgrade from v4 onwards is $129.99 + S&H

There is a legacy content bundle which seems to include everything.

Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn

You can use the advanced features (except 64 bit) for 30 days IIRC.

Many other sites (like DAZ for example) allow you to change your forum name for free and there is no human labor involved. I'd like to change my name on the forums here, but I'm not about to pay for it just because renderosity happens to have a suboptimal site setup.

Edited to add, I suppose it'd be possible to transfer my gift certificates to another account by buying a gift certificate with them. Assuming of course that creating multiple accounts isn't prohibited by the TOS here.

If only there were some good short hair styles for men. I'm so utterly sick of mesh based hairs that don't fit properly, only look passable under optimal lighting conditions and camera angles, take ages to render...

Installed P8 on the other computer which has Windows 7 and its own firewall which is configured to block outgoing traffic. No problems there.

The UI animations are misbehaving though. You know how the buttons highlight and then the effect fades out when you move the pointer away from them. This effect is really slow on the other system (W7, Radeon 4770, latest Catalyst). Doesn't affect usability, but a glitch is a glitch.

I didn't really do anything with it yet though other than confirm that the library is working.

Poser 8 is allowed to connect anywhere, but incoming connections are only allowed from localhost (notice I said IP OUT from any to any). I'd say this is secure enough, do you disagree?

Edited to add, for the sake of clarity, here are the two rules currently setup for Poser 8:
allow IP out from any to any
allow IP in/out from localhost to localhost

Allow localhost = allow IP in/out source 127.0.0.1 destination 127.0.0.1
With this alone it doesn't work.

A new discovery... If I add a rule to allow IP out from any to any, then it works. Am I to conclude from this that Poser 8 is not in fact communicating as localhost? Or what? I don't get it :(

Notification of updates is enabled in Comodo, although I haven't actually updated it in a while. If that's what you meant.

Edited to add that this is satisfactory, although I'd like to know what exactly is happening here. Thanks for your time anyway :)

No serving here, our ISP gives our two computers public IPs which are not in the same subnet.

I had two rules set up in the firewall (Comodo), one to allow all traffic from/to localhost and another to block everything else. This caused the library to remain blank. If I block everything, there's an error message in the library window. If I allow everything, the library works.

I'm using SR1, and the library works when I give Poser 8 full access.

Right, I forgot about that.

Allowing just localhost doesn't work either, the library still remains blank.

On my system it wants to use the public IP address (80.220.XX.255 UDP port 11423)

I noticed. Thanks :)

Sanctum Art has been around for a while, but I haven't followed this scene enough to know what drama there may have been. All I can say is that they are in a league of their own as far as quality is concerned and of course it shows in the price. At least the werewolf figure (Horde) is far better than the alternatives. I just wish this wasn't such a niche market so we'd have more professionals like them making Poser content.

I'm not too fond of the library either. It seems that there are a number of little glitches, like icons not showing up consistently, etc.