Here's the e-mail that I sent to e-On before I visited these forums to see if anybody else had received the same thing:

To whom it may concern.

Your e-mail is very misleading. The only way I could get get Vue 5 Infinite
for $199 is if I owned Vue 4 Professional, and your company knows that I
don't. The price for me is $499, as you know.

But you got me to check out your site and look for that special deal that
wasn't there. If that's all that counts, you are ahead of the game. On the
other hand, you've substantially reduced the probability that I'll buy
anything from your company ever again.

I guess it all depends on how you measure success.

Best regards,

Scot A. Griffin

----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 4:05 AM
Subject: Vue 5 Infinite

Dear Scot Griffin,

A while ago, you purchased a copy of Vue 4, and we thank you for your
business. We hope that you have been fully satisfied by our products.

We would like to remind you that Vue 5 Infinite (the professional version
of Vue 5) has now been shipping for over one month.

If you haven't looked at Vue 5 yet, we'd like to invite you to check out
our latest video presentation. Please visit
e-onsoftware.com/products/vue5infinite and see what e-on's breakthrough
advances such as the new EcoSystemT technology could bring to your
production.

If you like, you can also download a free 60-day trial version of Vue 5
Esprit here:
e-onsoftware.com/products/vue5/trial

Did you know? As a Vue 4 user, you are entitled to special discounted
upgrade fees: you could get Vue 5 Infinite for only $199 (SRP: $599)!

Why upgrade? Here are 5 typical reasons:

• The revolutionary EcoSystemT technology lets you animate scenes with
  millions of plants,
• The new Global Illumination and Radiosity engines produce stunning
  visual quality,
• Multi-pass and Multi-layer rendering makes compositing easier and
  more flexible,
• Fully Customizable Shaders let you create amazing visual effects,
• Infinite procedural terrains let you create scenes with perfect
  detail whatever the viewing distance.

The press and Vue 5 Infinite customers are enthusiastic: the power and
reliability of this new version is simply amazing!

For more information on e-on software products, please visit:
http://www.e-onsoftware.com

Best regards,
The e-on software team.

That's right. The e-mail is purposefully misleading. Note that it says you COULD get Vue 5 Infinite for $199, not that you WILL get it at that price. When you go to their site, it is the same pricing structure they had before for sidegrades/updgrades. Nothing has changed. So, if you paid $399 for the updgrade from the boxed version of Vue 4, you can feel comfortable that you weren't ripped off. If, like me, you visited the website looking for the deal that was seemingly offered, you were ripped off.

DAZ is not releasing DAZ Studio as a favor to anyone. They're not even worried about the stability of Poser 5, which runs just fine on my machine. The purpose of DAZ Studio is to commoditize 3D rendering programs like Poser so that people can spend their money on DAZ models instead of on the software itself. DAZ wants every single penny of your budget for 3D rendering. The real money is in models. They're a whole lot cheaper to develop than programs. DAZ Studio will never provide as much functionality as Poser (as long as Poser exists), but it will provide most of that functionality for free that people will opt to use DAZ Studio and use the additional money to pay for models. DAZ should be able to provide lots of tricks (in terms of models and utilities) that will make DAZ Studio "good enough," particularly when there's postwork involved. DAZ is not being alturistic in the slightest, but that's okay. They're brilliant capitalists, really. --Scot

Thus far, I have uploaded rarely (2 images so far), but I expect to be more prolific as I become satisfied with the medium and what I produce with it. That being said, it costs money to maintain data and serve it up. If you have a lot of data, it can cost a lot of money. I think it is fair to limit either the total number of images, or the size of the files uploaded. Limiting the file size is probably the best solution.

I have Poser 4 with Pro Pack, Poser 5, Bryce 5, and Vue 4 with Mover. Hands down, the best combo at the moment is Poser 4 with Pro Pack and Vue 4 (add Mover 4 for animating Poser scenes in Vue). Don't get me wrong. I think Poser 5 has gotten a bum rap and will ultimately be my "weapon" of choice for quickly setting up scenes and animations. The problem that I have with Poser 5 is no plug in support for Lightwave, etc.

Just spring for the upgrade. You can still continue using Poser 4. One key thing for me is that Poser 5 has fixed the crosstalk problem, so I can have multiple Mike's with different morphs applied without having to jump through the hoops of the work around. Because I want the option to work with Vue D'Esprit Mover 4 and Lightwave, I continue to use P4 PP primarily to give me that option, but as I develop projects that don't require that functionality, I am using P5 more.

What, in particular, is "broken" about P5? Seems to work for me. Just curious

In my experience, when a program crashes routinely, it is usually a result of drivers and/or problems in the windows registry. Invariably, by installing the latest drivers and cleaning up my registry, I get things to run properly without crashing. As to Poser 5, it has never crashed on my system.

I agree with pdxjims. Poser 5 has enough in it to make it worth the upgrade price, and I believe CL will be rolling out the Lightwave plugins for free to owners of Poser 5 (check their website). I upgraded recently and Poser 5 has performed flawlessly. Still, I have Poser 4 and PP on my system for exporting animations to Vue, and you'd want to keep that for Lightwave exports.

Try ICDSoft at http://www.icdsoft.com/ For $5/month, it can't be beat by anyone, and you can upgrade your services by paying one time fees, which are also dirt cheap. I actually have 2 websites with these guys (the second one is cheaper). In each case, you get 333Mb of web space and 5G/month of bandwidth.

The first POV is more dramatic and, I think, better composition overall. It's just more menacing having this guy looming over you with an axe while you are prone on the ground. I don't think the guy looks like a giant at all.

I think some folks are selling the P5 figures a bit short. To get the most out of them, you have to go to the face room and work with them there.

If you have a lot of hard drive space, install to both That's what I do (140GB of space)

I just got my Poser 5. The service packs are not on the CD, and I wouldn't expect them to be -- EVER. I bought Poser 4 and the Pro Pack long after the last service packs were released, and none of them were shipped with the product. In fact, I purchased Pro Pack as a download from the CL store, and I still had to download the service pack for PP. By the way, Poser 5 has run without a hitch on my machine under XP Pro. I'm really excited by the possibilities, but there are enough changes in how things are done to require a big time investment in learning the interface again.

You have to do the math and decide for yourself. If you already purchased all the club items (I have a fair number of them), then there may not be enough for you there. It was a no-brainer for me. There were enough things that I needed or wanted that I have already saved a bundle. (I just purchased 13 items for a total cost of $76, including the $50 membership. At least 1 of the items alone is regularly $45, and several of them are regularly $20+ each.)