Does Poser 6 allow for using two monitors, and have tools or windows or "rooms" or whatever that can be dragged to the second monitor? When I got the dual monitor thing going, I was highly disappointed to see that Pro Pack didn't allow this. Not very "pro", if you ask me. Sure, you can stretch it to cover both monitors, but that's not the same thing, by far. I'm still using Poser 4/ Pro Pack, and I guess it's time for an upgrade. I saw Poser 5 in Comp USA not long ago, but decided against it at the time. Can you still export .obj from Poser 6 for rendering in other apps and "as morph target"? How good and how much faster is the new Open GL functionality? I read the e-frontier promo for P6, and the review here, but does anyone know of a link for a good, comprehensive, all-encompassing, no-holds-barred synopsis of the program, it's plusses and minuses? And whatever happened to Curious Labs? Every link I follow takes me to some "e-frontier" thingy. I take it they now own Poser? But I've found press releases from CL announcing Poser 6, just like Curious Labs decided to escape the internet. Thanks much.

There was a thread about this a few weeks ago, a bunch of people posted their desktop/monitor layouts. I think most were stretching across both. A search for 'dual monitors' should turn it up. On the obj export: yes. OGL preview is pretty good, particularly with transparent stuff like hair. It actually looks like hair in preview now. Dunno about a single review but you can find dozens of user impressions here, there's a new P6 thread started about every 2 days. Generally the people who are most critical of P6 are the ones who haven't bought it yet.

That's what I use. I have the preview panel filling the left screen and all the tools on the right screen. < Generally the people who are most critical of P6 are the ones who haven't bought it yet.> LOL, obm, that sounds like a lot of movie critics both on the left and the right in regards to movies they haven't even seen.

Maybe I should have titled this thread, Enormous Boob Morphs Available Free Now! ;) But, seriously, I do appreciate the time all two of you took answering my questions. I did a search for Poser 6 Reviews, and found a PC Magazine article which proceeded to tell me precious little, though it was pretty diligent in loading doubleclick spyware. Imagine that. Generally the people who are most critical of P6 are the ones who haven't bought it yet. Not a surprise; people fear the unknown. Me, I just want to know what to expect. Even if the program totally sucks in , like half of what it's billed to do, it's still worth its seriously comparitively low price tag, IMO.

The OpenGL functionality depends very much on the graphics card. In previous versions of Poser, the graphics card was not an issue - any decent card worked just fine (even an old RivaTNT2 was good enough for Poser 5). With OpenGL, you want a graphics card with good OpenGL support. I'd recommend nVidia - never had OpenGL problems with those cards, while an ATI Radeon9600Pro regularly screwed up. OpenGL preview definitely is a great speedup on my GF6800LE - a complex scene with multiple Millenium3 figures still reacts almost instantly to camera changes. The lighting and rendering options are vastly improved. Ambient occlusion works very well straight out of the box. Soft raytraced shadows. Point lights!! Image based lighting. Subsurface scattering. While it was extremely difficult to get a really good render straight out of the P4 render engine, the P6 Firefly engine can produce some pretty amazing results. Search for Mec4D if you want to get an impression. The export functionality hasn't changed AFAIK. It works for me - I can export as .obj with whatever options I want and it all works fine. The morph loading function has been improved. Some modelers have the nasty tendency to mess up the vertex order, P6 can attempt to reorder the vertices on import. When P4 or P5 ran out of memory during a render, they simply hung. P6 will detect a memory overrun and stop the render. It won't crash, allowing you to save the scene. This functionality doesn't always work - I've had a few renders crash in the traditional way. Poser 6, even after SR1, still has some memory leaks. Sometimes it's not possible to render after a lot of scene adjustments. If I save the scene, quit Poser, restart the OS, and then reload the scene, chances are that Poser will render it fine. Dynamic hair still takes a lot of time to calculate, and it still takes up way too many resources. Rendering two figures with dynamic hair is almost impossible, even on a high powered system with loads of memory and disk space. Dynamic cloth works fine. I've seen no improvements over Poser 5 SR4, but in P5 it also works fine. There is a differnce though, Vue 5 Infinite can't import a P6 dynamic cloth simulation, while it perfectly imports a P5 simulation. Materials are vastly improved. The material room takes some time getting used to, but the effects you can create are truly amazing. Very realistic water, with reflections and refractions, for instance. Realistic glass and metal are two things I haven't accomplished yet. The raytracing engine is still not as good as the Vue engine. I haven't played with the face room and the setup room yet. I upgraded from Poser 5. And I do not regret it.

Thanks, svdl, for the info. The Vid card, no problem- I have a 256 nvidia Geforce FX 5700...good stuff. as for the morphs, I don't know if I like the idea of Poser trying to "fix" anything I do, becuae I use LightWave for that, and, believe me, the vertex alignment is nothing short of perfect., and requires no "fixing". I'm intrigued with Poser 6's rendering engine...looking forward to trying it out. Again, thanks for the info. :)

About the fixing of the vertex order: it's optional. When importing an .OBJ as a morph target, you can check the option to fix vertex order. The option is off by default.