Hi,

What would I lose and what would I gain if I were to upgrade from Poser 4 to 5? (I'm an animator)

Thanks.

LR

I am an animator, and one of the biggest plus points of Poser 5 is the animatable materials. Also the cloth room for more realistic clothing, and the hair room, although I personally don't like it, it adds a new dimension to animation. You do lose the compatibility with some other 3d programs (Max and Lightwave I think), but if you have P4 you still have that compatibility there.

(1) How would you compare ease of animation?

(2) Render time?

(3) Is it possible to run both Poser 4 and 5 on the same computer? (the reason I ask is that I thought I remembered seeing something about this being a problem when P5 first came out.)

(4) How does P5 work with dual-monitors? (When I use P4, I have to re-set up the interface each time I use it)

(5) Where can I get the best price for P5 upg? (from a reliable reseller)

Thanks.
LR

1. Exactly the same as P4, except you can have Python scripts to help, and some of them are amazing. 2) Poser 5 has both the P4 render engine and the P5 engine. The P5 engine is slower, but has a higher quality and added things, like displacement mapping and raytracing for reflections. 3) You can run both and share directories from Poser 4 to 5. 4) I have seen people use dual monitors. I don't, so I don't know this one. 5) Where do you live? US, Europe, Japan, Kenya, Mongolia?

US. Do you get a lot of cool, new models, props and clothing with P5?

I'd say you lose nothing as Poser4 will still be usable, you gain all the great extras like Material/cloth/hair rooms & being able to use multiple runtimes.

What are multiple runtimes?

heh me & my big mouth ;) Multiple runtimes are the runtime folder you currently have in Poser4 but you can have almost as many copies as you might want or need (not sure what the limit is yet). Setting up a link in poser5 for each runtime takes seconds & you don't have to move any of your ready installed items out of the poser4 runtime if you really don't want to. You could easily have each figure (vicky 1/2/3, mike 1/2/3 etc.) in a seperate runtime with all their clothes & other bits & pieces so you'd never have to hunt through 300+ folders of mike poses to find that particular vicky pose you want to use. The new figures you get with poser5 are named after the Robinson family from lost in space (Don, Judy, Will, Penny) they haven't exactly set the world on fire though & support for them has been slow surfacing, but considering the competition out there it's not really a surprise.

Although there is a little support finally starting to surface for Judy and Don, if for no other reason than that P5 is starting to get a solid hold in the community. But they do add to the stable of 'Not VickyMike looking' meshes available. Also, you can copy the P5 people and conforming clothing items into the P4 runtime and they work just fine there, as well (Currently, I have all my content in an external runtime to P5; the only things I have installed -into- P5 are the !DAZ &!DNA folders with the INJ and REM morphs for V3M3S3. Those =have= to be in the root runtime of whatever version of Poser you use. keeping a lot of content out of the P5 runtime and external to the program speeds up the loading times a bit). And if you are a detail freak, the P5 models have articulated toes, so no more Poser 'shovel foot' with them. I've been experimenting with several of the freebie dance BVH files you can find on the web, and you can get results where your brain isn't telling you that the dancer is actually wearing ballet slippers. And numanoid is ever so right about the Python stuff! Ockham has been turning out some excellent little scripts (from one to simply delete the default light set in one click, to 'jiggles', which does a nice job of setting false soft body dynamics to certain soft body objects...and is flexible enough to use with other content, as well, to one that displays graphs of all 3 axes for animation work). Then there is metaform from WierdJuice, which does faux metaball creation and animation. I'm still pecking at the edges of that one, but people have produced fire effects, running water, etc, and within Poser (P5 gives the best results with this, as you have the shader system to get the effects looking right). There is still a paucity of dynamic cloth props, but things seem to be starting to pick up there. Same with the hair.

I can have poser 4 and 5 open on my mac computer at the same time. I just use poser 4 for converting the bumps. poser 5 doesn't need to convert the bumps but a lot of mat files look for the bumps. Love esther

estharu you don't need to do that at all, grab a copy of CorrectReference from freestuff, run it over you runtime & poser5 will never ask for another bum file again. You'll save a lot of HD space too cause them bum files can be pretty big.

I use Poser 4 and Poser 5 on a dual monitor system with out any problem.

I doubt you can actually run P4 and P5 at the same time, but you can load either one of the other without difficulties. With SR4.1 applied I definately find Poser 5 more reliable for rendering animaitons than I've found Poser 4. Where Poser 4 will crash on me after X frames Poser 5 doesn't (Don't know it if will EVENTUALLY, but it ran for a couple of days doing a 156-frame render with reflection and transparency and stuff). Poser 5's renderer is more "tweakable" - you have more opportunity to trade between speed and quality. Cloth room has potential, but I personally haven't had huge luck with hair or face rooms. The new Materials capability of Poser 5 is astounding. It truly makes Poser 4 look like a cheap toy. I have to agree that Python (with free Ockham - and others!) is a major plus for animating outside of the Poser 4 "box" (doing things that are so tricky in Poser 4 that you'd probably never bother - like a walk path that goes up and down a hill as well as side to side and along... or controlling a herd of rampaging mice without having to hand-animate the path of each, or...) You do get SOME new models, props, clothing but I wouldn't say "lots" or "cool" with regard to Poser 5... bit of a bone of contention there actually, with some people... However you don't lose any old models :) Poser 5 is a bit more fussy about the design of models. Poser 4's renderer obscured/ignored/whitewashed certain "modleling faults" that are much more obvious in Poser 5, to the point wher einitially most content producers whose models were affected seemingly blamed Poser 5 for being "faulty". Fortunatley MOST models don't have these problems, and I haven't heard anyone blame Poser 5 for showing up model flaws in quite a while now :) You don't LOSE compatibility with other software, but some features of Poser 5 are not compatible with other 3D packages. For example, hair does not export in any really useful way for 3D Studio etc. etc. Cheers, Cliff PS if in the USA, check amazon.com for upgrade or even full pricing - IIRC they were supposedly almost chucking the thing away at one time. but not to anyone in the UK :(

Poser 5 is much more powerful than Poser 4, but also much more tricky. It's still a very buggy program. If you have the patience to work around it's problems, Poser 5 is great. One under appreciated feature of Poser 5 is Polygon smoothing which can make an older model like Victoria 2 look as smooth in a close up as Victoria 3 without significantly hampering render time! The material room is one of the best material setups I've ever seen in a 3d program. But when bugs happen they can be a big prob. I had to render a scene in my animation in 4 seperate layers and composite them because I was getting bizarre behaviour with raytraced shadows apperaring and dissapearing at random. :(

Oh, another little tidbit if you are an animator. E-on software has released Mover 5 for their Vue d'Esprit 4 and Vue4 Pro environment creation programs. This extends the native animation system in Vue, and allows import of Poser pz3 animation files en toto, including the dynamic cloth and hair. At the moment, Vue and I believe the latest version of Carrera are the only apps that accurately handle the dynamic props. But there are now animation alternatives now to just doing it in Poser (and Vue has a nifty distributed networking ability for up to 5 nodes out of the box).

Poser 5 is a great program but if you are doing proffessional animations then you will find the firefly render engine much slower than P4. However the improved end results are worth the wait particularly when using procedural shaders. Have you looked at the possibility of exporting BVH files from Poser into another program. I assume you could bone and joint Poser figures in other high end software and end up with faster rendered animations and higher quality too. I've never managed to get P4 and P5 running at the same time and I can't really see any reason for doing so.

"You don't LOSE compatibility with other software" I disagree, one of the complaints about Poser 5 was the loss of some import/export capabilities with some of the high end packages, which is why we now have to buy Body Studio. "but some features of Poser 5 are not compatible with other 3D packages." Off course, but then again, it could be said that some features of other 3D packages are not compatible with Poser 5. But that is true of all 3D packages, they will all have some propriety format that makes them unique and precludes total compatibility with others, which is why people have to develop plug-ins.

Wow! Thanks for all the great info! I will chew on all of it.

(1) Oh, regarding dual monitors, what I meant is that P4 does not remember the dual monitor workspace that I set up and I have to re-set it up each time I open the program. Does P5 remember dual monitor workspaces?

(2) Where can I find a tutorial or more extensive info re: multiple run times?

(3) Where can I get more info re: Python scripts?

Thanks.
LR

1. Don't know 2) Don't need a tutorial, very easy and you could figure out how to do it in three minutes. 3) http://www.ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/

numanoid "You don't LOSE compatibility with other software" I disagree, one of the complaints about Poser 5 was the loss of some import/export capabilities with some of the high end packages, which is why we now have to buy Body Studio. ==================== Even if you mean the missinf Poser Pro plugins that aren't in P5, those still aren't lost from your Poser Pro installation that you're upgrading from. Ditto Poser 4 - nothing is lost by upgrading, Poser 4 is right there on your hard drive.

Sorry, you are right. I don't own Poser 4 so I keep forgetting that you would still have that compatibility when you upgrade, which I don't have seeing as I started with Poser 5.