A minor complication with my daytime activity will require me some time this month to actually (gulp) purchase my own PC . There, I said it without stammering. Previously a borrowed PC has been sufficient since the work has concerned one of those PCs but the things are about to get a bit more complex. The only requirement for this additional computer hardware (to be placed next to the current G4) is that it be able to run the rather quaint Access Database application (the clients choice). Since a large potion of my available workspace is to be significantly absorbed by this behemoth I think that while its here it can do some productive work. ie Poser 5. I realise that as soon as I commit to this new medium the Mac version of Poser 5 will become available for immediate download but thats a risk I will have to take, a bit like washing a car to make it rain. Maybe CL will provide a free crossgrade :-) Before I commit though, I want to find out the current state of play with the installation of Poser 5. I havent paid much attention the past months to all the goings on so I do not have a database of fixes and updated fixes. Is it really up to SR6? I am interested in hearing from anyone who...

• Has Poser 5.
• Only uses the Cloth, Gravity and Hair Facilities.
• Has very little problems with them and what were the fixes?

Would really like to know what hardware and/or system you are using. Animations from Poser 5 will be used on the Mac G4 to put on to video, the Mac was able to run cloth.avi and the other one from the C.dreaming thread using DivX Doctor. The two will be networked together.

SR6? Depends on how you want to count them. First, we had SR1, then six SR2 betas before the official SR2.1.

Many bugs were fixed, a few more things were broken, a couple of new features were added, the much-despised Interlok security was removed, Legume fathered Victoria's illegitimate love-child, general improvements were made in speed and stability across the board, etc. Visit the Beta forum for all the sordid soap-opera details.

Some users are still experiencing stability problems. I have a nagging suspicion that Poser 5 has compatibility issues with certain combinations of hardware, software, and/or drivers, which might explain why the application is running smoothly for some of us and not for others.

I've got a P4 2.4 gig machine with 256 megs of ram, running WinXP, and, once I patched to SR2.1 I've had very few problems. The hair dynamics are stable, and haven't crashed on me yet, though they can take quite some time to calculate, and tend to go flying in every direction when collisions are turned on. I still have the cloth room hang on me on rare occasions, but almost always its because I've tweaked a dynamics setting too low or too high (setting cloth density too high can cause problems). I simply save before I calculate any cloth dynamics, then, if it hangs, hit ctrl-alt-del and exit Poser 5. Afterwards, I re-open Poser, reload the project, and adjust the offending dynamics dial before recalculating the dynamics. As for systems, I hope your new PC has a ton of memory. My 256 megs isn't nearly enough, as Poser regularly is forced to using the full volume of my swap file (especially when rendering strand-based hair on larger graphics at higher dpi settings). I'm glad I've got a fast hard disk drive. I've got a friend who's got an older PC, with only 128 megs of ram, and Poser 5 just laughs at him when he tries to use the cloth or hair rooms.

Well I haven't had any trouble with it - but I'm running on a 'quaint' operating system - Win98. It's stable, ok? Most recent patches, of course. I've not gotten as far as the cloth room, but I have 4 different fully clothed mill figures, with hair, in one scene and nothing horrible has happened. crosses fingers

I have a Gig of RAM on a dual 1Ghz PIII, with Win2k and a dual monitor Matrox, 1.5GB virtual memory. P5 works fine. No crashes, but some things get so slow that I feel like I'm on a old 386 again. The cloth room is VERY touchy. If polys are even too close between the figure and the cloth it can go into loops forever (but the program is still running, since I can still hit "Cancel" and stop the simulation within 30 seconds or so). Raytracing and anti-alias renders are also quite slow, though I've been using V3, which probably slows things down. The results of the renders are nice. You could have the fastest, most feature packed PC made today, and this program would probably still bring it to it's knees.