I really don't mind paying for Poser 7 if it delivers. But I am fed up with reading about slicker rendering and "features will be revealed in the next bulletin". Why don't E-Frontier wake up and look around a little.

Poser has always been marketed as a 3d Character and ANIMATION programme. But the latter has always been a complete joke. I have yet to see a single walk Animation which comes anywhere near an emulation of believable walking.

I think we all get sucked into acceptance of current capabilities and kind of forgive the ineptitude. I accept that the user has to tweak and work at it, but Poser makes the simplest task ridiculously difficult and it really is time the designers of Poser actually delivered what they claim they are delivering.

Let's get back to basics here: Poser 7 needs at the very least:

1. User-Sizeable interface so when you are working in either 800-600 or 1900-1200 the entire screen isn't festooned with oversized camera icons etc.

2. Infinite UNDO's. Yes I know they are promising mutliple undo's but is this really news? Multiple undo's have been around since the stone-age in simple apps costing 10 quid.

3. Why do I have to INDIVIDUALLY set IK. Where is a global menu for this and a thousand other niggling things that take hours of button pressing when you add them all up. Yes I know there are Python Scripts but at Poser's price I think it reasonable to ask for this out of the box.

4. Forgive me but DAZ characters have been going since almost the begnining of time yet Poser still presents us with pathetic characters having completely unbelievable bodies, knocked-kneed extremities, bony, joke faces and a complete absence of any link to a human structure with FLESH on it. Why does E-frontier leave it to others to get their house in order. I think it is reasonable to ask for half-decent characters that do not look like terminally-starved concentration camp victims at the point of sale.

5. An Animation implementation that is a solar system apart from the current one which would be a personal emnarrassment if I was the author of this software. How cluncky, clumsy and wholly unusable does an "animation" have to be before we own up and admit it is bloody awful.

6. Just ONE decent walk animation would do. Is it THAT difficult?

7. We are promised a 4x render speed compared with Poser 6. BIG DEAL! Of course this is with multi core processing and I very much doubt this is anything but a dream. So that means I will now have to sleep for two days instead of eight to get a decent quality render, but only if I have a perfectly optimised system costing several thousands of pounds. Has E-Frontier not seen what's going on around them.....many many video and other apps which render in a twentieth of the time with better results?

8. Clothes which fit better than a sack over a barrel would be nice. Could give the phrase "conform" a new meaning.

9. Shadows. Poser recommends NON raytraced shadows, and quite right because they are jagged, So we use mapped shadows which NEVER line up with feet or ground contact points in Poser rendering. You have to use Firefly (what a description for a render process which takes almost a millenium to work)!. Please wake up e-frontier....this is embarrassingly slow, steam driven and belongs to the dark ages.

I know this sounds a bit rantish, and I apologise. I hope there might be some others here who feel the same but perhaps are too polite to mention it.  But I think we are all getting drawn into accepting limitations which simply are there through some kind of complacency. This is 2006. Concorde was retired over a year ago, and we (apparently) put a man on the moon decades ago. But I still cannot get Poser to make a character walk without non-poser junkies laughing at it.

Good Wishes to All,

Leonardis