And it's only $200....

Even less if you're upgrading, or have P5 for the PC and want to do a crossgrade.

I have heard a lot about a bunch of bugs on the Windows version. Is the Mac version bug free?

From the limited testing that I have done so far(I only got it yesterday), it appears to have no problems. I am now undertaking the major (horror) task of reinstalling my Characters to Poser 5. I am doing this to make use of the subfolders in Poser 5 to get (hopefully) control of the mass of MAT files that now fill the pose folder in Poser 4. With any luck at all I well be done by the new year and still mostly sane!!!!!

(My post to 3DCommune) ====================== System: Dual 1.25Ghz G4 (FW800) 1.5GB RAM Radeon 9000 Pro OS X 10.2.6 I was quite surprised to see Poser 5 for Mac OS X. Especially considering the recent abandonment of Mac Bryce, and the amount of time it's been since P5 Win was released. I've been using Poser since Poser 1 -- ca. 1995. I'm upgrading from Poser 4 (never bothered with ProPack). I'm looking forward to spending this weekend with Poser 5. First impressions (I might pick some nits here): This is a serious upgrade from P4. I can see why some folks were turned off by the sheer depth of this program compared to 4, but I'm really looking forward to digging into some of the new areas... materials, etc. I'm a geek like that. It was kind of a chore to re-install Vicki, Mike, and Steph. I had to install Vicki 2, then upgrade to V3. Since I wanted to leave my Poser 4 folder alone, I had to extract and manually install the DAZ people. It went without a hitch, but the manual install sure takes a lot longer than the "Easy Install". Also the installers for the DAZ people are all Classic apps (even if you want to extract) - so don't delete that OS 9 System folder just yet. I haven't really pushed it yet, but so far, this version feels at least as fast as Poser 4 as far as working in the interface- rendering is slower. One of the very first things I noticed was lack of scroll wheel support. =( I certainly expected to be able to use the scroll wheel - like in just about EVERY other OS X app. Scroll wheel support is built into the system fer cripessake. Glaring omission: No "undo" when tweaking parameters numerically?!?!? If you twiddle the dials, you can undo, but if you input numbers, you cannot undo. I simply do not understand this at all. This is a MAJOR BUG. Hopefully a patch will fix this. Switching between programs will sometimes make the document window totally disappear. Have to click on a different room to get it back. Seems to happen if you're using Poser 4 rendering option. Worse still, if you switch out of Poser while rendering in Poser 4 render mode, and switch back to Poser after rendering is complete, the document is not rendered (!). Using Firefly, it seems okay. Rendering is slower than P4 - even using Poser 4 rendering style. (Draft Quality, No shadows, Ignore shader trees) Minor bugs: Cosmetically, Poser 5 feels a little slapdash. ex.: http://www.th0r.com/p5men.htm Non-movable rendering progress window- I miss the Poser 1 progress dude. ;) Inconsistancies in interface elements - pallettes, dialog boxes, title bars, buttons, fonts. ex.: Drop Shadow mask is missing from the moused over "Render Now" button. Command-h does not hide the app. Changing the orientation of the Tools or Document Style has become a bizarre experience. Used to be option-click the name to toggle horizontal/vertical. Now, you need to option-double click, and the toolbar changes but it disappears until you double-click the name again. Confusing. I wish I'd been a beta tester for this app. Good stuff: VERY stable. Thanx PC beta testers! Lots o' stuff to explore. Split document window. I think I like the new Library organization. Parameter dial/properties pallette. Materials room looks very cool. Looking forward to using the Setup room in conjunction with ZBrush characters. I was going to wait for DAZ studio, but I couldn't resist -- Poser 4 was about the ONLY app I used Classic for. I haven't deleted Poser 4... yet, but I just might.

Did they fix any of the Poser 4 bugs? I'm not sure if the Mac version has these, but the Windows version does: Multiplying magnets. Memory leaks. Keeping textures no longer used. Bringing in new figures, sometimes new figure isn't active, even though Poser says it is. Lock ups or looooong freezes when it can't find a file. After several figures are in a scene, clicking on one starts Poser activating every figure, one after the other, then eventually stops. If using Pose camera, it appears the camera is "jumping" from one character to the next. Thanks for any information.

The only item on your list that I ever experienced with Poser 4 (Mac) was: >Keeping textures no longer used. Re-launching Poser took care of that, though. With the new materials room in P5, I can't imagine that this is a problem anymore. Sorry I can't address the other things.

Non-movable rendering progress window- I miss the Poser 1 progress dude. ;)

The progress bar can't be moved in the Mac version? Odd ....

My other hope is for a OS X version of the free Cinema 4D poser plug-in Curious provided. I know there are other pay options, but they are a bit pricey for what I want . So I still have to go into OS 9(not classic, but reboot in 9) to run Cinema 7 and use the plug... plug won't work in os x, nor will it work in c4d 8.

Thor et al.: thanks for running P5X through its paces and giving us some honest evaluations. I hope you can continue to post your observations as new issues crop up. The previous beta testers may have also spotted these bugs, but Curious Labs will need input on how P5X works on various machines and various versions of 10.2.n (or the current Panther betas) if it plans to fix the bugs in a timely manner. Maybe there will be a new P5X forum to localize these evaluation posts, so they don't get buried too far down the list in this forum.

The price for Poser 5 is very good, as long as it's stable and from what Thor has said, it is. I will get the upgrade.

mateo, This bug is still in the Windows version: "Lock ups or looooong freezes when it can't find a file". When we click "Don't keep looking for missing files" make it stop looking for missing files please. -Mark

I've only started working with the OSX version. Thor, I move in and out of Poser 4 while rendering and have never had any problems. Don't know why you have encountered them. I chose to switch out my most used products to P5. Very simple drag and drop from one runtime folder to the other. I had talked with Will Duprwho had told me P5 seemed to like V3 in the P5 Runtime. So I decided to just move my favorite things there. No problems so far. Injections working fine. I agree, it is an annoying oversight not to have undo on the parameter dials. All operations I have tried so far (the regular stuff you can mostly do in P4) are fine and fast. I'll check out the P5 specific stuff as I go along. Material room for renders has checked out fine. Though the one thing I do not like is if you choose to save, for instance, a skin node to the Materials Library, it insists on saving any loaded map even if the node is not connected. It's nice not to have to start up Classic to go into P5, though DAZ's installers are built to start up Classic in the installation problem. Also, I don't know that there is a OSX version of Maconverter (will have to check). So I'm not out of the Classic woods yet. I've worked with the PC version, so was familiar with the Firefly engine and have always thought it was very nice. Materials and cloth room were the two things I wanted access to and now I have it. Cris

I said: >Rendering is slower than P4 - even using Poser 4 rendering style. (Draft Quality, No shadows, Ignore shader trees) Using Firefly, I set the Bucket size to 128, Production quality, disp. maps. Rendering is now as fast, or faster than Poser 4. I'll add other options and check the impact. I wonder how high the bucket size can be cranked? Cris, my comments about the disappearing document window were based on Poser 5-- and since quitting and relaunching P5, I haven't seen that bug again. Maconverter is still OS 9 only. I believe I've had to use it less since switching to OS X, and most of the time, simply opening a PC .obj file in BBEdit and re-saving it with Unix line breaks can help. Cris said: > Though the one thing I do not like is if you choose to save, for instance, a skin node to the Materials Library, it insists on saving any loaded map even if the node is not connected. Hmmm... if the node is not connected, why would you not delete it before saving? I haven't messed with materials too much yet, so I don't know if my question makes sense.

Cris, I'm sure you've seen MartinC's post at PoserPros regarding Maconverter, but for others: http://www.poserpros.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14693

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1371331

Any sign of this mysterious thingie that OSX can't handle as mentioned in the thread? No.41

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/renderer.html

*I wonder how high the bucket size can be cranked?* You can crank it up until you don't have any RAM left, in which case MacOS X will start using swap space on the hard drive as virtual RAM and your rendering will become terribly slow. If you turn it up too much, it can also happen that FireFly aborts the render process because the system denies its requests for memory. Note that the bucket size does not affect the image quality, what it does is speed up rendering at the expense of using more RAM. The default of 32 is probably set for systems with 256MB RAM - if you have a GB RAM or so, use at least 64 or more. I have 640MB RAM and use a bucket size of 64 most of the time, if not 96. As for the other rendering settings, I put a brief explanation of them with some example images on my web site.

Stephan, Thanx.... your site is why I upped the bucket size in the first place. =) >if you have a GB RAM or so, use at least 64 or more. I have 640MB RAM and use a bucket size of 64 most of the time, if not 96. As I said, I have 1.5GB RAM, and am using 128 bucket size. Works great. I'll try really cranking it up later. I assume the bucket size is in Megabytes of RAM? xvcoffee: Whew! I'm glad I stayed outta that thread! Poser 5 X continues to impress me, so far. >>...found out a few things that P5 won't be able to handel on the OSX Haven't found any yet.

No, the bucket size is not in MB, it's in pixels. It's the size of the "patches" in which FireFly renders the images. Bucket size is not the only factor that affects RAM usage, it depends also on geometry complexity, shadow settings, texture maps, shading rate and the number of pixel samples. That's why there is no general rule like "if you have X MB RAM, use a bucket size of Y".

! Just a book mark to follow whats happening. I haven't "ordered" Poser5 yet, but I did buy Jaguar in case I decide to. Thanks for all the info!