There are a lot of advantages to rendering your characters in Maya. You get the benefit of Maya's far superior lighting system and rendering engines, particle effects, dynamics or any other feature of Maya you would care to use. Although, you may be happier just setting up a Poser based mesh for animation within Maya natively without the need for Poser at all. I don't know the people at Reiss personally but have communicated with them through email and they are super nice folks.

I'm trying to be positive here, but this just sounds like spin and fluff to me. >Curious Labs currently has a Mac OSX version of Poser 5 up >and running. To fully support the entirely new engineering >standards from Apple, and to ensure the stability of the >Mac OSX version, Curious Labs has decided to extend the >time spent on development and quality assurance. Details on >availability will follow. TRANSLATION: "We have an early alpha version of a port from buggy and incomplete windows code running on OSX, but it is unstable and slow and incomplete, and we dont have any experience with OSX so we still have a lot ot work on and we have no idea when we can get this thing to work." Really, there is nothing new in this announcement. >In addition, Curious Labs is currently developing a new >process and partnership to allow better delivery of >Macintosh products in the future. TRANSLATION: "Even if we did have a Mac version finished we dont have a distribution deal to get it to you." Personally, I will believe it when I see it ship, and even then I'm still not enticed by the new features, and I would be REALLY skeptical that the program would run well at all. I mean really, we know what the windows version looked like...they have no experience with OSX and are admitting it themselves. Do you think the Mac product is going to be stable and fast? You be the judge?

.... so that's just, what, about 4 years before that happens! LOL! ; )

I agree with Bill, his explanation is the only thing that makes sense. Well, the other explanation that makes sense is that we have all been decived all along. Or even another explanation that makes sense is that CL just really doesnt have a solid business plan and is instead flailing about trying not to go under, thereby showing eratic business operation. Or even another explanation that makes sense is........

Ok... here is what I have to say. 1 - This product is STUPID! The web boom is over, and 3D on the web has been nothing but an absolute failure and will remain so for a long time to come because there is no business use for it and users really dont like tons of spinning and whirling junk on their screens. If 3D on the web were viable companies with GOOD programmers like Macromedia, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft and Apple would have been all over it years ago. Even Shockwave 3D is barely hanging on. They have all put up better efforts than this and they all bombed. I guess CL thinks that Avatar Lab was some kind of success? Or maybe another company just pumped some money into CL to get them to write this new turd. 2 - If you had any doubts that CL has absolutely no plans to put out a Mac version of Poser 5, let this be your eye opener! CL has ZERO focus when it comes to product planning and development, and very poor programming skills in house and their entire product like is demonstrative of this. 3 - If you ever expected to get a solid and speedy version of Poser 5 for PC let this be your eye opener! Actually finishing a program before moving on seems to be something that CL just cant handle, or doesnt care to. Interactive environments already exist online through gaming engines and MMOLRP, and many of them are almost photorealistic. The Viewpoint format and concept is dead and gone. Get over it.

Until the "Big Boys" become less concerned about tremendous >profit margins and bring the price of their applications Ok, I'll play. ; ) Until Poser 5 can walk and talk like a "big boy" program, us Lightwave, 3ds and C4D users dont need Poser integration! Ha! Hows that for spinning the tables round to the truth?

Never mind that Lightwave, 3DS and C4D integration you used to know and love! Now you have the priveledge of purchasing yet another program you dont need!

If you are using a Mac you wont have those color variations between programs, unless you've whacked out your colorsync settings. I always export as a TIFF image. If memory serves me correctly Poser doesnt use the LZW compression, but if you see it as an option apply it. The compression is lossles and does save some space. With the TIFF format you can also hold layers and chanels to handle alpha maps, etc. When you export an animation you can either choose some Quicktime settings for compression at render time or render out the Movie with no compression (Compression/None). That way you can use Quicktime to later make several different versions of your movie from one clean source.

The answer is very clear to me. Wait for the DAZ program! Are you kidding? The OpenGL previews alone is worth it. You can assume that the DAZ tool will have fewer features since it is a brand new tool, but the advantage to that is all those features will work correctly, and those features will probably be modern and more usefull. You know the code will be modern and more optimized since it's a brand new project. And I did see Collision detection and cloth tabs on that DAZ preview, so I would guess that many of the newer P5 features will be included in DAZ Studio. And there will be a Mac version of DAZ Studio! That alone is enough to get my money. I dont care if P5 ever shows up for Mac, I dont want it anyway. Slow bloated turd with no OpenGL preview? I just dont have that kind of time in my life.

ATI promises a lot of things, like optimized drivers for their cards, which then never show up. They are infamous for putting out hype like "our new card is twice as fast as anybody's, and it will make you breakfast and balance your check book". Then when it arrives it's just a normal good card. "Oh, we'll release a new driver update soon that will increase speed by 250% and also do your laundry." And they dont. In fact, the next driver update, MONTHS later, will only break some of your apps and games. But they fix it two weeks later. LOL! So the lesson here? ATI cards will always be great cards at a good price, but they are NEVER the bomb they claim the card will be. And never install a driver update right away. ; )

Dont buy into that hype! LOL

There was no way it was Poser. A lot of custom stuff was developed to do thing in that film. Some of it was brand new technology.

Jaguar specific fixes! hoooHOOOO! Count me in! I NEED those fixes! ; )

I used Bryce since version 1.0 way back in the before time, and have Bryce 5 now. I havent used B5 in months though. It is so frustrating and I feel like I spend all my time fighting the program. Vue4 has been everything I wanted Bryce to be and more. The textures actually look real, the render time is reasonable, the interface is MUCH better and the plants/trees are head and shoulders above the Bryce trees. No question about it, dont even think of getting Bryce instead of Vue. ; )

Vue is really excellent, much better than Bryce in so many ways. But I am having massive instabillity issues with Vue 4.1 and OSX 10.2.1. I would suggest buying the program but expect a lot of crashes until a patch comes out, which I hear e-on is working on now.