The price drop on the upgrade from Poser 4 to 5 is only $10 but it is still annoying. I emailed Curious Labs asking if I could get a $10 refund. Unsurprisingly they said no.

This morning I got an email from Curious Labs letting me know that the price of Poser 5 has been reduced. I'm glad to know that pre-ordering the upgrade from Poser 4 to 5 got me the lowest price possible. Or at least I would be if it had gotten me the lowest price. As it is, I'm not amused. Poser 5 was released with too many bugs. The first service pack helped but not enough. To have to put the second service pack into a public beta within 6 or 7 weeks of the product being released is insane. I don't expect any piece of software to be perfect but the bugs in Poser 5 makes it a pain to work with. If/when DAZ comes out with a competing product to Poser, I'll probably buy it. I've been much happier with DAZ than with Curious Labs.

Speaking of Austin, it seems as if there might be enough of us here to start a Poser users group if people are interested.

I sent in a tech support question on how to get the Toon node to work. The first response I got back was that the materials room was complex (gee, big surprise there) and that getting a particular effect was difficult. I sent another email explaining that I was just trying to get any effect from the Toon node but that I had no idea where to plug it in. I got back a reply with instructions. Was that a tech support question? Yes. If the Poser 5 manual had explained how to use the Toon node then I could understand getting a reply that pointed me to that section of the manual. As it is, however, the manual barely states that the Toon node even exists. So, while the "how do I do this" sort of questions are clearly in the training area, they also far under the tech support area because the manual does very little in terms of training users how to user Poser 5. Think of it as tech support for the manual. Either way, these basic "where do I start" types of questions are perfectly valid things to send to Curious Labs after looking through the manual and finding no answers. Tech support, QA and documentation should be working together on things like training users, putting together tutorials and tracking bugs. This is a major area of weakness for Curious Labs right now.

Are you guys telling me that it was the lumber's fault after all?

I've had numerous problems with the materials window showing up in other rooms and being able to click through the materials window into other rooms. I'm not sure what graphic chip my system has off the top of my head (I'll check when I get home). Odd thing is, I haven't had any problems like this with any other program on that machine. Still. I'm sure Anthony is right and that it must be either a problem with the system or a user error. After all, the problems I'm having couldn't possibly becaused by the program now could they?

Joe Grover did the demos of Poser 5 at DragonCon and is one of the guys at 3-Axis. He was one of the people who tested Poser 5 for Curious Labs. I think he focused on the cloth room during the tested.

Seems my previous post didn't make it into the thread. Bummer. The Poser 5 manual doesn't give the context for using most of the nodes in the material room. The descriptions of the node properties are useless. Expecting us just to know how to use the material room (or any of the new features in Poser 5) is unrealistic. Expecting us to figure out the new features by trail and error is also unrealistic. The implication that we are unable to understand even the most basic of tasks (like "using a hammer") in regards to the complicated and unintuitive materials room is insulting and uncalled for.

I've tried playing around with the Toon node in Poser 5 but I haven't had any luck what so ever. The manual is of no help at all. This is one of the features of Poser 5 I'm most interested in and I've got no clue how to make it do anything. Very frustrating.

Don't forget to plug the new node into the right place or nothing happens. It took me a while last night to figure out when to plug in the texture map. I still haven't figured out what to do with/to the Toon node to get it to do anything. The manual hasn't been of much help so far with this.

As I understand it, the photo mapping feature in the Face Room probably won't work on the Millennium models until they become Face Room compliant. To get the map to line up right, the head might need to be morphed to fit the shape of the head in the photo. It is possible that the UV mapping for Don and Judy will line up with the UV mapping for the Millennium models but I have no idea if that is the case or not. (It sure would be nice if it does.) The post from DAZ simply said that the price was too high for them to afford, not that it was unreasonably high for what needed to be done. I took the comments from the person at DAZ to be simple economics and not as a slight against anyone. To be fair to Curious Labs, it very well could be the third party that developed the underlying code for the Face Room that is setting the price. Curious Labs may have no control over the price.

Oh, and for the record, while I'd like the DAZ models to work in the face room, I much prefer them to be affordable. After all, it really doesn't matter if they work in the Face Room is none of us can afford them.

Based on the demos of Poser 5 that I saw at DragonCon, the Face Room is code that was developed externally from Curious Labs. It has a set of morphs that are used to modify the face. These are different morphs from the ones available in the Pose Room. It is the modification of the head part of the model and the creation of these morphs that apparently is very expensive to do. In addition to creating the numerous morphs for the Face Room, the head model needs to have the geometry at the neck done so that the head from the Face Room can be put back on to the model. Add to all of that the requirements for the photo mapping and it gets time consuming and expensive. All of this information is based on what I saw and heard at DragonCon and could have no basis in reality.

I certainly agree that Curious Labs could and probably should be doing a better job of showing off the new features in Poser 5. Personally, I'd like to see what can be done with the Toon node in the Materials Room. Maybe they should have had the beta testers creating demo images and animations as part of the testing process. The situation will take care of itself though. I'm certain that within a week of Poser 5 being shipped to people this place will be filled with images and animations showing off the cool new features.

I saw demos of the hair and cloth dynamics and collision detection in Poser 5 at DragonCon. Those features do seem to exist. As for why Curious Labs isn't showcasing them and some of the other new features... I'm sort of curious about that myself. (I suspect that they are busy making sure the program gets out the door on time.)