Excellent! I'll certainly download them if they appear in the free area.

Philip, Let me see if I can walk through this without doing an screen captures. For Confusius' Morphhair 2, I set the hair colour as the diffusion colour AND as the specular colour. I link both diffusion colour and specular colour to the curlstex.jpg map as well. In P4 you do this by telling it to apply texture to highlights. This gives the hair that nice fine quasi-metallic look that I'm after. In P5 set the specularity and diffusion values to 1. The transmap is connected to the transparency channel which is set to 1. Remember to zero the transparency fall-off channel. Usually, in P4, I use a bump map (curlstex.bum) that I made from the texture map, with setting that looks nice (experimentally determined). When it loads into P5, this is attached to the gradient bump channel. I simply delete it and connect the displacement channel to the texture itself and turn the displacement value down to between .1 and .3. Sometimes I clothify the transmapped hair and drape it. I usually render with shadows off for all but one main light for which I use mapped shadows (only way to get soft shadows in firefly that I know of) and a gaussian as opposed to box filter (seems to take the hard edge off the antialiased product without actually removing detail).

That Armour of Ages is heavily refracted and will behave oddly just on account of the optics. I had no trouble with the weave mesh on a sphere.

The peeking through on the P5 outfit can be tweaked by playing with the Y axis scale on the clothes' abdomen sometimes.

I saw the same thing. Now a while back someone posted (in the Free Stuff I think) a couple of pose files that do a pretty good job of refitting P4 fem clothes to Eve. And of course in P5 just throw her a rag. :-P

From the complaints I'm seeing, it seems to only look in the "usual place." Maybe that's why I had no trouble. I installed P5 where it wanted to go instead of in a special folder like my P4.

I'm running Win2K Pro, with the patch and the patch to the patch and my version is 4.1.1.1074 No problem here except for the occasional abrupt exit from the program when entering the Hair room.

I rarely use bump maps in P5. If I have the grayscale displacement map I use that and hook it to the displacement channel.

To get the depth of field setting, I do the following: Create a plain ball and position it where I want the camera to focus. Adjust the MAIN camera to display the scene I want, using the focal length and perspective params to get the perspective and view that I want. Then note the following params from the dials for the ball: xTrans, yTrans, zTrans. I'll call them xb, yb and zb Then from the Camera dials get Dolly x, Dolly y and Dolly z Make sure you're using Poser native units (or use the right conversion factor) and add 1.000 to the Dolly Z value. Call the results xc, yc and zc. Now compute as follows (xb-xc)^2+(yb-yc)^2+(zb-zc)^2 and calculate the square root of the sum. THAT is your focal distance for the renderer. The smaller the F stop, the more pronounced the DOF effect, so you might have to try a couple of partial renders in draft mode to get it just the way you want it. (I had trouble with this too until someone--I forget who--pointed out the fact that the main camera is one Poser unit back from its dolly position.

I run Win2K Pro with a 512Mb swap file. This is usually enough for Poser 4 but Poser 5 sometimes increases it to over 700Mb. Now I have to save up for a 3.6Ghz Pentium 5 system with two processors and 2Gb of fast RAM....which will probably be available by the time I save up the cash.

Actually, it feels like I am beta testing it now (and I was NOT a tester for CL, just an early upgrade). And if it was only in beta for a few weeks, I can see why. I'm testing another program, not 3D related but a game (and have been for a couple of months) and don't expect to see a release until late spring. Bugs are tricky. You step on one and ten more come to the funeral.

I do suspect a memory problem in P5's code but it is not really because of the above "symptoms." You CAN delete a node in the materials editor. I'm not sure if that returns the RAM properly to the pool or not, but the program actually seems better-behaved than P4 when it comes to managing memory-intensive tasks. I often see commit charges of over 400Mb and, until it gets REALLY bad, there is usually 20 or more Mb of RAM still available and a system cache in the 40Mb range (out of total 256Mb RAM). BUT, there have been several instances of system instability including major loss of browser functionality that could ONLY be cured by a reboot after stressing the system with a large P5 render. PLUS, the damn main document window decrements in height at odd intervals which is probably a sign that some process totally unrelated is accessing that piece of memory. This is what comes from writing programs in C that use pointers to arrays of pointers to pointers, etc. !!!

Just a word of caution. Ray-traced textures tend to NOT look like their rendered versions in the document window preview. You get a FAIR idea from the drop-down image at the bottom of the root node in the materials room, though.

P5 has a "Background" object and you can build any procedural texture you want onto it.

You might have even more luck by just setting it up on the "Background" and rendering to whatever size you want the texture.