Hi all, I've been eyeing poser 5 as of late but didn't get on the bandwagon to purchase it when it first was released. I had read too many unfavorable things about poser 5 that I just couldn't part with 4. My question is now that there have been bug fixes and SR03 has been released, how much better is Poser 5 over Poser 4?? Thanks

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if you can buy it cheap go for it! p5 is not lost! if im wrong, sue me, im worth millions...

Millions eh?....LOL!!! Thanks for the info. Not about the millions about poser 5...hehehehe.

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Actually, I would list your hardware/OS and then ask the question... Right out of the box on first release - almost everything worked but the time was unforgivable (am a contractor so cant spend that much time just loading a program and an eon to render animation). Using xppro on a 1.8 with 512 meg was a drag (however, 2.1 sr sped that up a bit) so I put together a new machine with massive harddrive and 2.8cpu and 1gig mem with 4096 virtual mem and turned off xp cute desktop stuff and now cant tell the difference [w/sr release] between PPP load and my P5. However, when loading from laptop (which is allowed by cl) with 128meg only 10g free harddisk P4 650? - I want to shoot myself. Luckily, only use laptop at poolside or if in bed with cold/hangover/headache/etc. So the big question is - what computer/os/mem/hd are you using? Then make the decision to upgrade. And you definitely want to keep your p4/PPP seperate from P5 for those quickie jobs! P5 will let you add the P4/PPP runtime to the P5 libary so you don't have to duplicate libraries. I personally think is worth the upgrade/addition but that's just one poor souls opinion.

SR3 has not been released yet. Should be in about 10 days per CL. Depends on what you want to do I guess. There are a lot of threads about it here. I suspect you've read most of them if you've held out this long. I never had P4, so I can't compare that way, but my machine is roughly the same size as cruzan's old machine (512 mb ram, 1.7 ghz processor PIV on XP Pro). The speed is not that great compared to Vue and Bryce, but if you have something to do that's not computer related while you're waiting for the renders or have another computer you can use while waiting, it's tolerable :) Unfortunately, I like my XP "eye candy" :) XP pro does help a lot though with the memory management issues.

I've been the same about it. Then Curious dropped the upgrade price to $145 electronic DL (UG from P4) and I bought it instantly. I'm loving every minute and not a hang yet. The interface is vastly improved and I just ignore the face and hair rooms, stick with what I need to do. P5 runs almost as fast as P4 did (on my 2.5GHz P4 w 1GB RAM) The materials room is a marvel. :] Fish

If you have the Pro Pack, and Vicky and Mike, my gut reaction is to say don't bother getting 5 until after the new service release is out, and then only if that fixes things. I have both poser 4 and 5, and wish I had heeded all the negative articles about 5 at Amazon.

Oddly enough I've been one the ones lucky enough to have had no problems. Yes the rendering time is slow, but I'm used to Bryce so .... I'd recomend adding it if you can, but leave p4 on your system. That way you can learn p5, but still have a dependeable (well sorta ..this is Poser after all) program to get work done in. You can link from p5 to the p4 runtime and use all the stuff you have installed without needing duplicate copies. Mind you, p5's nesting dir are almost worth he switch.

Attached Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30426.html

If you're running XP PRO with SP1 and automatic updates enabled, check that you haven't allowed MS to install the latest security patch. It can slow systems to a crawl. You can read more about it by clicking the attached link.

P5 has some serious issues. But, hey, so did p4 when it came out. The rooms are interesting, if not perfected, and the reason I won't go back to p4? Real reflections, and nesting folders. That's right. Less clutter in your folders! I've got about a million pose folders, and someday, it's nice to know that I can shrink them down nice and neat into maybe 20 folders with subfolders. The hair room is a neat toy, but it's really just that. A toy. The cloth room, however, is very useful for draping and the like. Makes cloth much more clothlike. As for the speed... Eh, I don't use the firefly stuff. I use the p4renderer with the shader trees turned off, for the most part, but it's a nice little bit to have. The p5 renderer improves on lighting, but for some reason, it sets the default transfalloff at .6. The p5 renderer also causes strange seams in textures, until you use the production level, and then it renders gorgeously.

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I never let anything "automatically update" my computer, except me :) Thanks for that tip though. I usually visit the Microsoft updates site monthly, read the offerings and upgrade what I think my computer needs. I did not get there during April. Hopefully I would have passed on this one, especially if rated important and not critical. There is a lesson here: Read what they do and only apply patches and upgrades that you think you really need. There's a lot of that crap that gets "auto upgraded" that you don't need. That's why I turned that thing off!