Hello everybody !

I am a happy user of Poser 4 and I am considering buying Poser 5. But I read some bad article on this software and I heard that some buyers of P5 have given it up to go back to P4. So, I was wondering if I shouldn't buy Pro-Pack instead. What do experienced users think about it ?

Sorry if this question has already been asked a thousand times before !

best. app. ever. Don't listen to the barbs. Since SP-4 it's very stable. Many people who were reluctant are starting to explore the new features, make products, and open up the market for it. Sure, there are still problems, but the biggest issue I've encountered is certain people and companies refusal (for whatever reasons) to support it.

Flawed but still well worth the money I splashed out on it :)

Windows 7 64Bit
Poser Pro 2010 SR1

Based on a survey that I'm running on my site Poser 5 users outnumber Poser 4 users 3 to 1. When Poser 5 came out a couple of years back there were issues. Probably caused by trying to get the software out of the door too quickly. The majority of bugs were fixed in timely manner shortly after. Since then Curious Labs has continued to stand by their product and fine tune as required. I am extremely happy with the way my Poser 5 runs. I highly recommend it.

PhilC: How many respondants is that based on, out of curiosity?

I would like to buy Poser 5, but I'll wait to Poser 6.

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adh3d website

I would recommend poser 5 as phil c said most of the major problems are gone with service release 4.

I recommend Poser 5 for several reasons:

1. It's a good solid app now with all the service releases.
2. It's much more powerful and can produce better results than P4.
3. If you have any interest in 3D outside of creating just still images, P5 is a good introduction software to animation that can translate to other apps as well (ie., dynamic hair, cloth, and animation-capable node materials).

The only drawback is that it doesn't have network rendering or point lights, but neither does P4 for that matter. ;-)

Message edited on: 09/07/2004 14:45

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

There could be some reasons NOT to buy it, if you don't use it's specific strengths. If you render pics in Vue or Shade or Bryce, always use DAZ characters, don't do animations, prefer to postwork on conformed clothes rather than waiting for the system to calculate a simulation, then you can stick with Poser 4. Otherwise, I highly recomend Poser 5 too, for all of the reasons above.

stay with P4.. the only real feature that's hard to live with out is the librararies in p5...as far as dynamic clothes, hair room,face room,.. well they where fun for a week or so... they work.. but don't add any value to the project.. the only problem i find with p5 is the speed.. if you do alot of global illumination renders 10+ light calculating shadows.. be prepared for twice the render time.. with no incraase in render quality..(i'm not talking firefly. p4 render in p5) that's my 2 cents.

If you're determined to spend more money, go with Poser 5. I would never consider buying Poser Pro Pack. Heck, most of the Poser Pro Pack features are found in Poser 5. I still have both Poser 4 & Poser 5 installed, yet use Poser 5 most of the time.

Once I learned to use P5 there was no going back. I only have Poser 4 installed because I have to make sure MAT Pose Edit is compatible with it.

Right now most of my projects use P5 features so heavily that it would be almost impossible to create the same for the old limited Poser 4. My modified P4 Man for example (attached image, still a WIP) uses displacement mapping for the geometry details, which means fast rendering, and no need for high-poly models. I couldn't get the same result with morph targets.

If you're animating characters with clothes on (yeah right, like anyone would do that!), you'll love dynamic clothing. You can convert most conforming clothes into dynamic ones, and new clothes are easy to create because no frustrating poserizing is needed... and you can make most pieces of clothing fit many different characters. I don't have "Vicky clothing", "Judy clothing", "Mayadoll clothing", etc. in my library, just clothing.

You know, I really dont' think people understand what they're getting with P5's material room. As in the example above, micro-poly displacement like that found in P5 is a very "high end" and powerful feature! Heck, you won't find it in any of the other apps within Poser's pricerange, and even the most expensive 3D apps charge you EXTRA for plugins to support it. Micropoly displacement is a feature that used to only be available to users of PRman, and is still used in high end VFX production a lot. It's full potential hasn't been realized yet by the Poser community I'm affraid.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

And, for those inclined to manga and anime like me, the toon shader rendering is invaluable !

Oh, these are exciting times. Poser, Shade, Daz|Studio, ZBrush, Silo, TrueSpace, Vue, Carrara, Bryce, ParticleIllusion and so many more, all within the price range of the home hobbyist. And all capable of producing the most amazing work. Forget the occasional bug that comes with most packages .. isn't it better to be near the cutting edge, than following 'safe', well trodden paths? The marketing guys at CL might have screwed up a bit (hey, who hasn't?), but one can only imagine the pain the programmers felt when the initial problems surfaced with P5. I only have P4, and actually worry that I'm getting left behind by not having and learning P5 (can't afford it at the mo). I envy you .. go for it. Enjoy.

I still use Poser Pro most of the time. I have dabbled a little bit more into Poser 5, since I purchased a new computer, but I still find that even with the latest patches installed, it still tends to crash. I wished it was more stable, just for the file handling and relfections it's a great step up from Poser Pro. Doug PS: New machine Dell Dimension 8300 P4, 3.2 gHz, 1.5 megs or Ram. old machine was a AMD 1100 with 768 megs or Ram, Poser 5 would crash every time.

I came, I rendered, I'm still broke.

One thing, anyone knows when Poser 6 will be made...

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adh3d website

Poser 6 wil be out sometime next year. Sturkwork -- have you tried the 5 things to do tutorial for setting Poser? Notably the virtual memory allocations?

These are exactly the same scene, one rendered in P5 with procedural materials and the other in P4 with the material settings as close as I could get them. This pretty much sums it up for me. Basically if you plan to render in Poser, you want P5. If you plan to render in some other app, such as Vue or Bryce, or you plan to use your render as a rough guide over which you'll paint lots of postwork, then you want P4. BTW, the materials used in this pic are available in freestuff if anybody wants them. Just look for my P5 shader pack.

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With the advent of the latest update to Vue 4, you can import Poser 5 files, which means that you have the advantage of dynamic cloth and hair simulations. So, if those aspects are potential enhancements to your Vue animations and renders, Poser 5 still comes out the winner.

I love Poser 5. I love the Material Room, the Cloth Room, and the Hair Room, and use them more and more as time goes by. And multiple runtimes is terrific, too!

I am agree with almost all others.I still have Poser4 installed but i always use Poser5 now.Since i have upgrade my Ram,i have no problem with Poser5 with service release installed.Go for it!

Does everybody elses Poser 5 still do this?... When you roll your mouse over the libraries, down by camera, you can get the material library to appear. Doug

I came, I rendered, I'm still broke.

"Sturkwork -- have you tried the 5 things to do tutorial for setting Poser? Notably the virtual memory allocations?" SturkWurk: yep sure did, I just tried Poser 5 again, and suffered another crash, besides the trying to cancel a render crash.

I came, I rendered, I'm still broke.

It's a wonderful toy! Amusing, easy to use and gives good results for the low price. Firefly renderer (P5) alone is worth the money of the software. Raytraced reflections and refractions, volumetric light, depth of field, motion blur, depth cue... if you get to learn to use those well, you can get amazing results without needing any postwork. The material room has enormous potential. The drawbacks are: 1- definitely scarce manuals and documentation (but there are tons of good free tutorials around) and 2- possible crashes if the scene contains some improper geometry (most products sold around are good, but there are some hair packages that have many errors like intersecting polygons, stray vertexes and so on... those can cause most of the renderer's crashes). Buying P4 now is like buying a car produced ten years ago. If you have it and it still works, keep it. If you go for something new... definitely get P5.

I just got Poser 5 not long ago and I have to admit that I really like it. I don't seem to have the slow renders that some people do and nor any of the past problems either. Knock on Wood. Poser 5 is great.

When you get P5, you get nearly all of the features of ProPack (I believe the only things you don't get are the Hi end app export plugins). Plus the material room (which as others have said is very underrated and underutilized at the moment), dynamic cloth (based on the Stitch plugin for Max), which, while adding draping and rendering time to animations, also lets you avoid many of the problems that conforming clothing can have...and it is also just now being delved into by many. The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated (can't think of which one ATM), has a few collision issues, but is starting to show its promise as people experiment, and find out what it can really do. The library enhancements, and the ability to create multiple runtimes to link to P5 are worth it in and of themselves. Then you have the integrated Python scripting; a couple of apps like Metaform exist, and then there are the scripts that Ockham and others have written, that automate or expand Poser functionality. Poser itself does lack goodies like network rendering and several types of lights. However, Bryce 5, Vue4 and VuePro with Mover 5, Carrara Studio, Shade Pro, do have it in some form, as well as more flexible lighting and the ability to import most of P5's content animated (with Vue and VuePro, as long as you have the Mover 5 add-on you can fully import Poser animations with dynamics; the only thing it doesn't recognize is most of the shader nodes; and that may be changing. I -think- that Carrara also recognizes all the goodies in a P5 pz3, but I'm not sure). P5 is the way to go. And as there is no known timetable on P6, you would probably be better off getting P5, learning it, and then taking advantage of the reduced upgrade price when P6 comes out.

It works for me... i'm on a Mac OSX G5,, make great animation!!!

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated (can't think of which one ATM), has a few collision issues, but is starting to show its promise as people experiment, and find out what it can really do." You might be thinking of the plugin formerly known as "Shag:Hair" for 3dsMax. P5's hair room is very similar to the way that plugin functioned. I think it's now called "HairFX" or some such name. ;-)

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

P5, without a doubt.

I've never understood limiting oneself to P4. I've never understood it for individuals......and I really don't understand it for companies.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 

Once I installed Poser5 it was no looking back. A month later I sold P4.

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Jeff

Renderosity Senior Moderator

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It seems there are some items, such as complex hair, that just won't work well with Poser 5 & maybe the Firefly, vs Poser renderer. In fact, I pretty much gave up on Firefly. Maybe it's my puny computer?

I never had P4 or PP. I've only owned P5, so I can't really compare. Like many, I struggled with a lot of issues and it does have a bit of learning curve. In fact....I still haven't mastered it. The material room is great and many merchants are beginning to take advantage of the material room capabilities (RDNA, Sixus to name two). Multiple runtimes....something you can't do as I understand it, in P4. Multiple folders....three or four deep....in your poses, props and other main folders. The ability to finally import P5 .pz3's into Vue d'Esprit 4, makes P5 hard to pass up. Did I mention the material room? Get it, but be prepared to get frustrated and to spend some time learning all the nuances. BTW, I found it stable after SP-3 and never did update to 4 :) I pretty much know what I can and can't do and rarely have problems with it anymore.

"It seems there are some items, such as complex hair, that just won't work well with Poser 5 & maybe the Firefly, vs Poser renderer." This is actually pretty true. And for good reason. These hairs (developed by 3rd party content providers) are created using one of a few variations of method that takes advantage of flaws within the Poser 4 rendering engine to produce better results. In a very real sense, they are created specifically for Poser 4, using what is, in essence, a hack. Construction of hair in that same method for most other rendering engines today will produce similar issues in high end rendering engines. So, to not put too fine a point on it, yeah, you are absolutely correct: There is some hair that is not going to work well with firefly as is. It's not your puny computer. It's not Poser. It's not the maker of the hair. It is the eternal march of progress, squishing us all. Oh but for the days of carriages with horses! Hey, that gives me an idea for a pic. On the other hand, the Poser 4 renderer doesn't give you the precision of control over shading rates, alternative shading systems, light gels, and displacement, all of which can be used to create hair which is much lighter in resources (in other words, instead of a 1.3MB obj, you can use a 130KB obj, with the resulting difference in size for the cr2, as well), looks better (hey -- you can see the layers of the strands beneath strands -- and they cast shadows!), and renders faster with smaller texture maps. I'm fully in support of P5 -- well known fact, there. However, it is different -- not just from the standpoint of the user, but from the standpoint of the maker. Poser 6 will be out next year. I'm certain of that. When, no idea. But I am absolutely convinced that it will be out within the next 15 months. It won't offer significant new stuff, either, so Poser 5 and Poser 6 will co-exist fairly well, and there won't be much in the way of things which are different. So as folks become more comfy with this new program, you'll see the same sort of development for Poser 5 as we have seen for Poser 4/PP -- that is, hacks, which take advantage of the specific features of the software. The question isn't going to be P5 or P4 for new users. The question is going to be P5 now or P6 later for old users...

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

Given the radical advances in Poser 5 it was hardly surprising that the initial release of the software was going to be bug-ridden. Fair play... even Microsoft don't expect to get things right first time, and a period of user involvement is necessary for sublimation. Kudos to Curious Labs for responding. I personally would rather see similar radical advances in future versions of Poser, but I'd certainly not expect them to be stable from day 1. Ajax Thanks for the materials pack. I downloaded it some time ago, and remember being fascinated when I loaded the included pz3. Also I'm very impressed with your background materials, which I'm using more and more. I'm surprised that I've never seen mention of any other background materials similar to your skies. I think they're great.

The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?

All of the propack features are in poser 5 so you get propack AND all the new p5 features by buying poser 5 instead of propack. This is similar to bobbie boucher`s earlier post but I was just wanting to point out that poser 5 has all the propack stuff, even the cartoon figures.

Message edited on: 09/08/2004 02:53

Stewer, it was members of the PIASA group, carefully cultivated over a period of seven years to coincide with their upcoming release of UrPoser, with which they will destroy all other apps combined -- D|S, Poser, and all those plugins that do the same thing. I have been systematically hunting them down, one by one, and dragging them into creations by stonemason for proper treatment. PIASA: Poser Is A Sucky App. It has subchapters with better acronyms, I hear, but I haven't found any representatives thus far willing to fess up to what they are...

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

Contrary to compiler, I would say that for rendering in Bryce, P4 is better (P5 SP4 introduced a new bug that makes trouble for Bryce), but for rendering in Vue, P5 is better. The improved material editor and library system make a Poser-Vue combination work a lot better.

Poser 5 procedural materials don't import into Vue d'Esprit 4, nor Vue 4 Pro. So what is the benefit of Poser 5 over Poser 4 for rendering in Vue, material wise ? (I'd be very interested to know, cause I like Vue rendering style a lot).

Personally I'm hanging out to see whether Vue 5 offers some kind of support for P5 materials. For Vue, really the only advantages I see to P5 are the dynamic cloth and hair and even those are only properly supported if you get Mover 5 as well.

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Wait Bryce 6 give to us, because if it can import poser animations, I think I'll update from Bryce 4 to 6. I think as oposite of bryce version 5 and 4 , poser 5 gives the user many more things that poser 4 does.Anyway, I'll wait to Poser 6 if poser 5 doesn't go the price down.

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adh3d website

Bryce 6 ? I thought DAZ studio was going to get released first ?

Well, I didn't expect such a (near) unanimity for Poser 5 ! Thank you all for these valuable comments. You have convinced me.

The advantage of Poser 5 for Vue is this - while Vue doesn't fully read procedural materials, it does at least read colour correctly and makes a stab at bumps and reflectivity (but not reflection maps). So it is possible to set up textures in Poser that need little or no tweaking in Vue; of course, Vue reads in texture maps complete with masking colour as well. Now, setting up any sort of materials in Poser 4 is so unpleasant as not to be borne. And once you have one material zone done, there's no way in P4 to copy that material to the next one. You can use MAT files, but (a) they stunt your creativity because you get to rely on them, and (b) they overburden the crappy P4 library system which was not designed to hold hundreds of files. P5 provides you with an environment in which basic texturing (ignoring complex procedurals) is reasonably painless, and MAT files can be managed sensibly in the P5 library. I have two big projects on the go at the moment, one in Bryce and one in Vue. For the Bryce one I'm forced to use P4, but actually it's OK anyway. The Vue one I really could not manage without P5.

I came to the party late (upgraded to OS X P5 2 months ago). That said, it's a whole new world full of rich nougaty goodness. As far as Bryce import capability is concerned, please remember that Bryce is owned by DAZ and DAZ's record on P5 support is dismal. This position was understandable when CL was foundering and P5 was a bug-ridden joke, but Dan Farr & Co. are still betting the farm on DAZ|Studio as the new hotness and waiting for CL to blink. Time to grow up and face the facts, guys. P5 is here and it's here to stay. Either release a Poser 5-killer this year or start supporting what the majority of your customer base owns. As your ex-girlfriend says, "I've moved on; why can't you?"

duanemoody said: ".....As your ex-girlfriend says, "I've moved on; why can't you?" I like the analogy duanemoody :)

As far as Bryce import capability is concerned, please remember that Bryce is owned by DAZ and DAZ's record on P5 support is dismal. This position was understandable when CL was foundering and P5 was a bug-ridden joke, but Dan Farr & Co. are still betting the farm on DAZ|Studio as the new hotness and waiting for CL to blink. I'm new to the community, and I'm not aware of the whole back story, but my opinion is that DAZ really has nothing to lose by supporting P5 AND D|S. Not everyone wants P5, so having DAZ Studio around so that people can buy their stuff and have a renderer is a smart idea... but... By not supporting P5, and not using P5, they're losing any edge they have in the content market. Sooner or later someone will jump into the ring, and then DAZ will have to seriously re-evaluate it's thinking. Unfortunately, by that time, DAZ will be behind in R&D, will have to make up for all the know how they didn't take the opportunity to gain... It just seems like, if my income were tied to the content market, I'd be doing everything possible to keep on top of my game in case Michael Jordan showed up and wanted to play.

Poser 5 is well worth buying. It is a much more powerful app than P4, and demands a bit more technical savvy as a result. The Material room and renderer are the best parts. Hair and cloth can be great but require a LOT of patience. As for the way P5 renders transmapped hair... Adjust the Shading rate and you can get good results from the troublesome wigs. Keep P4 installed though, to work around the occasional surviving bug.

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?" Stewer, what -I- remember is this tidbit surfacing during one of the earlier Feature threads that both Kupa and Larry got into. If that's incorrect, please correct me.

"The dynamic hair is also a high end plugin that was integrated Who started that rumor?" Stewer, what -I- remember is this tidbit surfacing during one of the earlier Feature threads that both Kupa and Larry got into. If that's incorrect, please correct me. I don't find this hard to believe. After using hair for only a short time, I can say without reservation that it's a very powerful tool. The only thing that makes me doubt the validity of that statement is the actual toolset created for using the hair room, which is adequate, but in some ways lacking. I hope for some new tools in P6. Besides, who cares what is "high-end" or "low-end", anyway? I use softimage|XSI for school, and consistently get better results with Poser 5, because P5 streamlines a lot of activities that take days in a non-linear animation suite. Add in the wide availability of commercially useful content, and I can think of several areas that I might choose Poser above Maya or Lightwave. Of course, I don't think the future is going to be found in continuously improved crystal clarity or multi-million production values. The only reason that Poser 5 lacks the potential to be implemented in a production environment is its lack of network rendering capability. Even so, with the proper dedication and a skilled post-production editor, even that restriction could be worked around. ;)

I still use P4, and am very happy with that! I render in Vue also! May wait for Poser 6. :D

MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 12.0GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 7770

PoserPro 2012 (SR1) - Units: Metres , Corel PSP X4 and PSE 9

"The only reason that Poser 5 lacks the potential to be implemented in a production environment is its lack of network rendering capability. Even so, with the proper dedication and a skilled post-production editor, even that restriction could be worked around. ;)" I wouldn't go THAT far. LOL. Poser lacks a few other things that could make it far more usable in production... starting with multiple undos (who wants to risk a very important project to Poser when you can only undo an operation once or twice, and some things not at all?), and object instancing. I'd like to see more workflow functionality too, like the ability to duplicate or copy characters in a scene more efficiently right in the viewport. Better light control from the viewport (lights are often hard to find once placed in a scene, and that damn "light orb" control icon it has used since version 1 isn't really helpful when spotlights are involved (which is 100% of the time for me). There's lots of other things on the render-end that would assist in production too... like the ability to render elements of the scene in seperate passes (diffuse, spec, shadows, ambient, etc.) for post-production compositing and image editing/color correciton in programs like Combustion, AfterEffects, and Photoshop. It has a matte material (by Stewer) for rendering the figure with it's shadows (for compositing against photo or video backgrounds), but that's just the start of the kind control you really need in post. I think those are just a few of the features it could/should continue to improve on in future versions before someone can actually TRUST the app to do crucial, time-limited production work all on it's own. ;-) WHen you're talkin about projects where lots of money is at risk, and the timeframe is limited, I don't think I'm trusting that 100% to Poser. LOL. Not yet anyway.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

"It has a matte material (by Stewer) for rendering the figure with it's shadows (for compositing against photo or video backgrounds), but that's just the start of the kind control you really need in post." Whoa whoa whoa... Where can I get this material, as I do a LOT of compositing.

maxxx - Agreed on all points in a standard work environment, and if we're talking about right now, today. Give P5 as much support as P4 has gotten in terms of community development, and there's no way to tell what things will look like tomorrow. With the addition of Shade's rendering and modeling to the Poser toolset, and with Python scripting starting to move thanks to people like Ockam, this application is only at the beginning of it's life cycle. ;) As for undo, I've been talking to a few friends of mine that work with game engines, and they think it might be possible to write an instruction shell that would allow for far more than multiple undo's. It's all just a matter of time and resources, I think. I will concede, btw, that I am known by my friends to be hopelessly optimistic (but not stupid), so please take my thoughts with a grain of salt. ;)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1710497

***"Whoa whoa whoa... Where can I get this material, as I do a LOT of compositing."*** Yep, me too. ;-) The matte material doesn't come standard with the app, it was created in the material room using nodes by Stewer some time ago, and I think you can find settings for it in the thread attached to this message. It comes in handy, although in some lighting instances, it does not work exactly as desired, and may require some tweaking on the material or lighting end if possible. But it's the closest thing Poser has to a true matte material like you can find in higher end apps. Scroll down to post #18 by Stewer in that link, and you'll see the material setup for a make-shift matte material.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.

Thanks... wow that's great. So simple, so elegant! Stewer is my idol. :D Seriously I've been wanting something like this since I saw Terrence walker use something similar in Lightwave, on the "Understanding Chaos" extras. Again, The Mat room is absolutely the best reason to get Poser 5.

I'm middle-aged, and often forgetful. So I finally checked the Curious Labs web site, and saw their original press release announcing Poser 5. I was shocked to see Poser 5 has been around for over 2 years. Now it's even more shocking that so many people or companies in the "Poser business" (DAZ3D for one), still refuse to really support Poser 5. I also remember how many people said they would ignore Poser 5 and look forward to the release of DAZ|Studio. It's been 2 years since DAZ|Studio was first announced, and it is still in a rough beta stage. Come on, let's get with the program.

I love Poser5. I think anyone who frequently uses P4 should give it serious consideration. While others are trying to get their Poser objects into other programs like Bryce, I'm more often trying to get objects into Poser5 from programs like nendo. I just love the interface and the material room and firefly renderer. I still don't understand why underlying objects stick through conforming clothes (couldn't the clothes be made to always render over the body based on surface orientation?!) and I do wish there were a proper omni- or area light. There are a few other hitches to get over but nevertheless P5 is a huge improvement over P4 and I recommend it to anyone already considering it.

The reason to get the poser objects in Bryce is that Bryce(or vue) is wonderfull to create naturals worlds, and poser not.

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adh3d website

Bryce is two things. A ray-tracer renderer and a terrain generator. Both of which were unusual and cool when the product still said "Metacreations" on the box.

Expecting Poser to generate landscapes is ludicrous. Moogal: When I asked Larry three years ago why collision detection couldn't be the basis of conforming clothing, he pointed out that the original legacy P4 clothing were solid, closed objects, and I think where he was going was dropping the entire conforming clothing model (hinged bodysuits scripted to mimic parent motion) altogether. Also remember that the Macs and PCs of the P3/early P4 era would have taken ages to calculate collisions -- the algorithms were always out there, but the computing power was not ubiquitous yet.

Message edited on: 09/09/2004 18:17

Poser 5 can do most of the things that bryce can.

"...and I think where he was going was dropping the entire conforming clothing model" totally off topic, but, um, yeah. And that's still the direction it's going in.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

I like the conforming clothing and anyway, what size of memory and computer speed would you need to calculate seven or eight pieces of dynamic clothing all at the same time?

You don't do them at the same time. You do your setups, then drape and run the sim on each piece of cloth and hair. And yes, it can eat up time doing so. But for animation, it is incredible. As for system resources, 512megs is useable, if slow (hits the swap file a lot); 1 gig is better, and seems to be the first sweet spot when dealing with dynamics. I've done them with and Athlon XP-1700, XP-2500+, and currently with an Athlon 64-3000+. Faster is better, but the older 1700 was able to handle the load quite well.

Dale B I was answering previous posts about conforming clothing being replaced by dynamic clothing, that would probably only work if all the clothes could be calculated at the same time.

They can all be calculated at the same time after they are made (assuming they are made dynamic -- and the therefore the base calculations are already in the cr2 -- initially) on a system that meets the basic specs for P5. That's what the "re-calculate dynamics" option in the menu is for. Conforming clothing isn't bad. It is simply an alternative. The most efficient and best overall clothing will be a combination of conforming and dynamic cloth harnessing the strengths of each.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

"Poser 5 can do most of the things that bryce can." But not 10% as effectively. Try lassooing a bunch of objects, duplicating them, and dragging the duplicates in the X direction only (for example, in creating a colonnade). When it comes to setting up scenes, Poser with its "one figure must be selected at all times and only one figure" model is hopeless compared to Bryce or Vue. Poser was not INTENDED as an independent renderer until P5, and remains saddled with a system that betrays its ancestry as an adjunct to other 3D apps.

I don't see Poser like a render application and I think CL must not go this way. I think poser is a waonderfull tool to make characters and its accesories and animate them.

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adh3d website

I agree, poser is not supposed to be a 3d editor, it actually started as a program for adding figures to other 3d programs which is why, up to version 4, the renderer is not so great. Bryce and vue use an inefficient rendering system where the screen is rendered low resolution, then a bit higher and so on, which is one of the things I don`t like about these programs.

Poser is, for better or worse, a studio app. My definition of 'studio app' is a media development tool which is not reliant on other software to produce final results. SoundForge or Photoshop or Flash MX or Dreamweaver MX would be good examples of other studio apps. Yes, they can work in concert with other applications but for their intended purpose it isn't critical. How efficiently the tools inside the application work is sadly not a valid test for evaluating whether an app is a studio app or not. Poser 1-5 retains the GUI and paradigm of Kai Krause and friends, which was as organic and non-programmatical as possible. As an efficient production tool, Poser suffers compared to the real-world composition needs answered in modeler/renderers like Vue which behave more like OOP (instancing, for example). Poser does need to reevaluate parts of the UI paradigm it inherited. But I've seen enough professional uses of its renderer and animator (USA Today, the Wal-Mart self-check kiosk) to know it has its place in production environments. Is it the best possible renderer for production purposes? No. Is it an adequate tool for producing something original without making additional investments in supporting software? Yes. It was necessary to implement shaders and collision detection to keep up with reasonable expectations, and for the price you can't complain. Something better than Phong shading should have been in 4, but 1998-era desktop boxes weren't really up to the task for results you'd see in a reasonable amount of time. Desktop computers have changed, and the resources pro grade animation requires are a lot closer to the average user's machine. It's realistic for software to keep up. Adding vector editing to Photoshop is feature-itis because it's beyond the needs the application addresses. Not to bash DAZ|Studio, but it is a poser/renderer for which you will have to purchase the animation suite and other features piecemeal. This is NOT a studio app unless you consider still renders an acceptable limit to an application WHICH ALREADY INCLUDES the mechanics of organic form animation in it and DAZ knows this.