I wasn't thinking of being a Poser purist in the sense of only using Poser. I always thought a purist, in the context of CG, was someone who wanted their picture to look right when it was rendered without having to touch it up afterward. I guess I assumed global changes like filters were OK, so long as there were no area selections or brush strokes involved. I remember switching from the P4 renderer to the firefly and being frustrated that I couldn't get my skydome to work. So rather than manually composite it in, I rendered it in the P4 renderer, mapped it to the smartbg prop and rerendered it in Firefly. Still made me mad though because I couldn't animate the camera with that method, even though I hadn't planned to.

I'm a purist in every 3D program I use. That's not to say that I don't do touchups on a lot of my work, but rather I try very hard to avoid having to. My reason is simply that I want every model I make, every scene I set up to work as an animation or still. It's certainly easy enough to deal with poke-throughs and glowing nostrils in a still image, but life is too short to do that for even one second of animation. Why couldn't they have made Poser so the renderer would always draw the clothes over the corresponding body part? I know it'd be a cheat, but it would save the purists alot of grief.

I like loading my textures into an image editor with an effects browser. Some filters like liquid can be useful in making bumpmaps that aren't simply the image in greyscale.

Hmmm... I was just having the same problem a few days ago. I solved it by setting the trans and edge trans settings to 1 and the trans falloff to 0. (Also, I set my diffuse colour to white, but the transparent parts are black in the tex map) The really important part though is to copy your trans map to the specular channel. This way the same parts that aren't to be visible also won't be reflecting highlights.

I like the effect. I've always liked the use of such filters to mimic photographic techniques, as the output of most 3D tools is too perfect. I do wish Poser could do the post processing instead of having to use another tool though. I have to ask, what do you mean by a cell?

I love Poser5. I think anyone who frequently uses P4 should give it serious consideration. While others are trying to get their Poser objects into other programs like Bryce, I'm more often trying to get objects into Poser5 from programs like nendo. I just love the interface and the material room and firefly renderer. I still don't understand why underlying objects stick through conforming clothes (couldn't the clothes be made to always render over the body based on surface orientation?!) and I do wish there were a proper omni- or area light. There are a few other hitches to get over but nevertheless P5 is a huge improvement over P4 and I recommend it to anyone already considering it.

What I hate about IK is that I have to also use joint limits to get good results. It seems even the simplest change to a figure's pose results in the unnatural twisting of the wrist, side to side motion of the knees, etc. (Limits are OK, but I find some of the default limits a bit too strict and others not strict enough.) IK would be much more useful if the hands and feet could twist/bend/rotate automatically as they are being translated to prevent unnatural bending.

I remember being excited when my copy of P5 came in the mail. My friend asked why I was so excited, and he replied "it figures you'd use a program called Poser", and even now when he sees my manual laying out he asks "is this your book on how to be a poser?". I think that's a big part of it. I know if I didn't have Poser's figures I could eventually model my own in TrueSpace or zBrush. But since they are there I always end up using them, even though I know if I ever created a suitable character I'd never be able to use it in a game or anything commercial. I don't have a problem with the program itself, I think it's incredible. I think the combination of the name and the knowledge that the included content is so extensive gives one the impression that the artist might not be able to achieve that same quality in Carrara or blender. I do agree that if photographing live models can be art, so can rendering figures in Poser.

So it doesn't work at all? I was only minutes from installing the patch, the so-called last patch, and now I' hearing it has broken the dynamics? I wonder is it working properly for anyone?

I'm blown away at what did make it in. I'd gotten used to most of the bugs, but that memory leak was the killer. I can always tell where the anims have been joined. It seemed as if the lights always changed slightly, or maybe I could just never get every option set the same twice in a row. I'm surprised caustics and GI are in such demand. I suppose I'd use them too but never thought they were so urgent as to be in a bugfix.

Fireflaw? I'm sorry to disagree, but I think the firefly renderer isn't entirely to blame. If I'm not mistaken the memory leak that people notice with P5 was also there in P4 but wasn't as much of a problem due to the lower overhead of the P4 render. It uses less resources, so it leaks less resources. Also, I find the poly smoothing and displacement mapping to be its best features and now that I've used them a bit I can't go back. Too bad the P4 renderer doesn't have the smoothing or I could get by with it once in a while perhaps. Off to check on RAMpage...

Yah, totally second that. Poser really doesn't have competition yet, and I don't think the first releases of DAZ Studio are going to be as powerful as P5. Also, I'm not sure that DAZ will be any cheaper than Poser given that alot of the plugins aren't going to be free. I worry about the future of Poser because of the rumours I hear about CL and their parent company. I just wish people weren't so worried to try P5 especially now that the price has become more reasonable...

I should let this thread die now that we've discussed it enough. I just wanted to add that I think it's a shame that companies don't admit their known bugs and post a truly helpful faq. The Poser faqs I've read always seem to assume I don't know what I'm doing when instead the program isn't behaving as it should. Surely CL know where this leak is and what will cause it to show itself. I would like some official statement like "Poser5 fails to return memory from raytraced shadow lights", or whatever it is that leaks the memory...

I read many threads on Poser5 bugs before buying it. This memory leak is really the only problem I ever have with it. Now that I think I can avoid the problem, I'm quite pleased with Poser5 again. I hope it works for you as well.

Yeah, I know that frames are safer than AVIs, but surely you need more space to store them right? So if you want to chance rendering an AVI, there is a way to minimize the risk. As I was working on my last project, it started seeming like Poser's bugs were much more predictable than I first thought. When I tried rendering an AVI it would always lock up somewhere between 90 to 100 frames on this particular scene. I assumed this was because the leak was always consuming the same resources (I wasn't running anything else at the time on my 512MB machine). At no time did this scene lock up when rendering the smaller AVIs. Just render the scene a couple times, find the general spot in the movie where it locks and then break the movie up into slightly shorter segments.