New features will include:

Bullet physics for soft bodies, hard bodies and hair:

Pixar sub division surfaces:

Morph brush to support sag, tighten and loosen for better clothes fitting:

Magnets and deformers with weight maps:

and just in Poser Pro

Fitting room to convert clothes to any figure.

Plus usual upgrades to rendering and previews.

Sounds decent.

Found out the problem, and its fairly unbelievable. Nothing to do with UV, or smoothing or displacement settings:  if you lathe a polyline, once the  vertex object is finished, then before you leave the modeller you MUST delete the polyline which is still sitting on the working box.  After that the vertex object will take displacement shaders with no problem at all.

Not sure if there is a reason for this, or if it is a bug.  Thanks to all who suggested fixes.

Pretty sure now that it has nothing to do with displacement itself.  After numerous tests, displacement shaders work fine on anything else (vertex or spline).  It just appears to be lathed objects that cannot take anything at all in displacement channel.  Has anyone else tried adding displacement to a LATHED vertex object.  I begin to feel it is either a bug, or something to do with UV mapping of lathed objects.

Patrick_210.  No,  if I try to render the goblet it puts up a little sign that simply says "An error has ocurred"  but no more details.

I have just tried putting the cube primitive in there, and that displaces fine.  Is there something about my goblets (they are lathed polylines)  that stuffs up the renderer?

system
Core 2 duo
ati radeon X1950XTX
2 gigs ram
WindowsXP

smoothing only set to 1 on both.  Even if I turn it off...same thing happens.

I can apply fractal noise to a spline abject, no problems there.  And I can apply fractal noise as a bump map, which warks fine.  I can even use the displacement paint tool on a vertex object...works a treat.  Just ant kind o pattern (cellular for example) used on a displacement shader for vertex objects stuffs the whole system.

Is this just me?  can others use fractal displacement on vertex objects with no worries?

 Don't think I've ever seen such almost unanimity of opinion in this forum before.  Downloaded Apollo, and yes, he is great, and just what I needed.  Thanks to everyone for the advice.