**The day I got the notice that there were 7 reasons, I wrote down my own in a letter to a friend.  I won't post them here (I couldn't if I wanted to) because I don't want to steal thunder from the actual announcements.  I think I assumed all of the "reasons"  would be improvements to the program.  Content may be a great reason to upgrade, it's just not an "improvement".   **

**I have to say that it's funny that I never noticed the lack of multiple undos.  (Well, I noticed it, but it didn't occur to me as something to fix because I'd gotten used to it!)  The instancing is cool, as one of my wishful improvements was for some type of crowd simulation.  (I feel, having used versions 4-6, that maybe I'm not seeing the obvious problems with this program, but rather just the ways around them.)  The one thing I really hoped to get in version 7 is some kind of GPU usage.  I'd like to have, at the least, bumpmaps and stencil shadows in preview, and hopefully someday parallax mapping of the displacement channel like TrueSpace7 does it.  I'm not holding much hope for these features as they've already mentioned the improvement to the preview they made by supporting high res textures. **

XENOPHONZ:  I'm glad you had a laugh at that.  I was running out of time and couldn't find the exact words I wanted.  Of course some people around here will never be happy, what was I thinking?

I think it's more likely that every user eventually finds something that could be improved in Poser.  The more versions you've used, the more things you've probably found that need improved.  The things is, some of those things have needed improved for a very long time, and aren't peripheral things (like the faceroom was to me-I still haven't tried it) but are the core functions of the program.  I think we can all agree that Poser needed multiple undos (wondering if the camera undo will be seperate from the figure undo...) and has always had problems concerning rigging, or more precisely deforming of joints.  There's a tendency for many users to only notice when their own complaints are being addressed or ignored.  I can understand being underwhelmed by the lip-syncing if I already had bought and learned a 3rd party solution.  Who can't say though that Poser should have lip-syncing given it's aim and other features?  Of course that should be in there.  Likewise, we will eventually need better rigging or some kind of ERC/morph/magnet overhaul of the current deform system.  Things like soft select, or GLSL previews would have been crazy talk a few years ago, but are necessary and doable as witnessed in Quidam, Cinema4D etc.  I still don't consider content a "feature", but I'll concede that it may be a reason to upgrade for some.  Let's just hope there are more foundation improvements and refinements we can all benefit from, and a little something for everyone else to keep them happy.

Here are my tips, some of them have already been mentioned.  (I'm not sure if they're all useful, but my intuition said they were!)  Here they are:

Use simple figures when possible.  Poser4 has a few preclothed figures, and Poser3 figures are also simple. 

If creating characters, create a morph and delete the morphs you used to make the morph (not expressions, just the ones you won't be using again).  Poser 6 required for this(?)

Use jpg textures whenever possible.

If you absolutely need shadows, try using multiple shadow lights with very low (64-128) resolutons.  This help will keep your characters to appear on the ground, as well as provide the subtle tones that you miss when turning off shadow maps.

When using shadow maps of any resoution (especially small), remember that Poser calculates the map based on the total area of shadow casting objects.  So if you have two figures standing on the "ground", your render will look better if you turn shadows off for the "ground".

Get a copy of virtualdub and grab as many filters as you can find.  Try experimenting with your preview output.  Preview doesn't support shadows, smoothing (subdiv), or bumpmaps (or most anything else you need for realism) but the images can look great with a little post processing.  I've created a nice bloom filter that, when used sparingly, gave a real sense of atmosphere to the pics I tried it with. 

Avoid things alledged to be "dynamic"

Get a copy of Avid or Vegas and use still renders in your animation.  You can keyframe and output a simple pan and zoom (Ken Burns' effect) animation alot quicker in a video program if you don't need real motion.

Those are my suggestions.  Now I find I spend way more time setting things up than actually rendering them!

Quote - Quite a few software vendors actually DO charge more if you are upgrading from an older version - it was one of the BIG reasons I decided NOT to upgrade to World Construction Set. Why should I pay more when I never got to use the improvements in the version above mine? Well, this is just my opinion, but 3D Nature lost a sale because it charges more for older upgrades.

Well, presumably those improvements will carry over to all future versions, right?  For example, Poser 6 retains the firefly renderer from version 5.  So if you were upgrading to 6 from 4, why should you only pay for the features that were added to version 6 and not the ones added to version 5 that you never paid for?  I don't think the Poser 7 upgrade is unreasonably priced, but I expected at least a $30 difference between upgrading from 6 and upgrading from 5.

I still think blender has the best upgrade pricing. ;)

Maybe people had complained that content was the last reason to upgrade to Poser6, so this time they made it first to disappoint a different third of their users?  (With a remaining third left waiting to be disappointed when new content is one of the middle reasons to upgrade to Poser8, of course.)

I personally assumed that new content was being revealed first because it is of lower importance than the rest of the new stuff.  I expect each new revelation to be more impressive than the previous, or at least I'm hoping so.  I'd rather have new features that let the current figures pose better (as well as less set-up to the dynamics) than new figures to start over with.

So, they're going to tell us one new thing per week until release?  I didn't catch that they were scheduling it that way.

I have to have a DVD-Rom drive now?

I think the best way would be to make highres templates of the figures and manually line everything up, as compared to doing the shrinkwrap method or anything else based on the mesh.  I've converted a few P3 textures to P4, and it was basically a matter of moving and stretching areas of the map to new locations, which would somehow need to be automated.  I know that not all characters are unwrapped the same, but I do think someone could probably write a tool to do this.

I just popped in here to see if this discussion was going on. This looks to be the version that's convinced me to finally buy Carrara after watching it develop for several years now. The lack of support for zBrush displacements and subdivision meshes had mainly held me back. Also, I like that it doesn't just host Poser files, but claims to actually convert them to a native format. I'm very impressed, but I don't use a previous version.

No, it really isn't that obvious. There was a thread on this topic a week or so ago... http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2212575

I think it's really annoying that companies assume I'm online when they make their products. I have several ways of accessing the internet, but the system I'll be installing Poser 6 is not online, nor do I even play games on it. Didn't we go through this already with Poser5, or did they just assume we'd all be connected by now?

Two thing that seem promising me to me are the edge smoothing and the seperation of diffuse and specular in the lighting. If I'm not mistaken the smoothing is based on an angle, like the way UVMapper Pro uses an angle to split welded vertices and allow hard edges. This feature will let you pick the angle (usually less than 45 degrees)that the smoothing oocurs. Less than the number and the edge is smooth, greater and it is creased. The neat thing about the lights is now I can finally do the neo-tokyo renders I've always wanted where there are dozens of specular highlights without having to worry about washed-out diffuse lighting. Throw in the point lights, and P6 is going to be the bestest!

It's always seemed to me that those who complain the most about Poser5 and the announced Poser6 are those who use Poser4/ProPack with other tools such as Carrara or Bryce. If you use Poser to setup figures and animations, then the addition of Firefly probably wouldn't impress you to much. Figure in that most of the memory leak bugs were caused by Firefly and that initially users didn't understand things like shading rate and bucket size and you suddenly had people complaining that the new version (P5) produced inferior renders that took longer to make. Hopefully Poser6 will have benefits aside from improved rendering and new content, or these people are likely to start complaining all over again.

I don't understand the complaint. Is it that some people are getting a better deal than others? I have P5, almost but didn't buy Shade. I can get Poser6 with Shade LE and a bonus figure for $129. Since I use Firefly as my main renderer the Poser6 enhancements are very exciting to me. The other features are also very welcome. Hopefully stability issues will be minor. Anyway, I'm very pleased with the announcement, unless I've missed something.

And yet you do it almost every day. Does that mean you're insane?