I just got my Poser 7 for Mac in the mail today and installed it on my Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon with 4 GB of RAM. All I can say is WOW! WOW!!!! Does this baby smoke with the renders! I tried mostly scenes and figures that I had developed using Poser 6, and I would say that P7 is easily 5+ times faster than P6 with rendering of various quality levels, and perhaps even greater at mid-to-low quality renders. My only concern is that the renders seem a bit darker than they were in P6. Of course, my P6 ran on a Mac Pro (Intel) in Rosetta emulation, which was somewhat slower than it ran on my 2.0 GHz G5 Dual. But with P7's ability to take advantage of multiple processors and more RAM, the difference now in simply astonishing. Yes, yes, I've noticed a few of the things that other threads have raised about P7, but not crashing -- hasn't happened once. Yet. Maybe it's the Mac OS and how it works with P7. That said, the initial figures and scenes are a bit slow to load, at least the first figures in a scene. I'll have stronger opinions once I've fooled around with some animations, but for now HOW 'BOUT THEM RENDERS! SS

I second that, skeet. Just installed P7 on my new iMAC 2.16 Ghz Dual Core after running P4 on a PowerMac 8600 all these years, and it's a wonderland. Smooth, fast, stable. Gorgeous.Tiger loves it. Me too.

This changes everything for animation --again, I don't like Poser's animation interface in P7 much better than P6 -- but the much faster renders make it possible to generate much faster the individual frames that I can combine in Final Cut Pro to make smooth-flowing, relatively-high-resolution 3D video. Before P7 it was just this side of unattainable in any reasonable amount of time. SS

o.k., thx fr the good news. don't forget to post some renders showing us how well it works. I haven't bought P7X yet.

I find scenes save really fast in P7 on my intel mac too. Love esther

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Miss Nancy, I'll need to put a timer on the renders to compare more precisely the speed gain. As for samples, not sure the render QUALITY is any different (other than, as I noted earlier, a bit darker). That said, sometime in the next few weeks I'll post a few sample clips of the animations I've been working on for a while, and should be able to finish in P7 -- a Star Wars-type space battle and a superhero flick (the story lines in both are inside jokes, but they should be understandable). I confess I'm intimidated by the high standard set by Tvining with his Star Trek Aurora animation-in-progress, but I don't have his time or patience, so when the time comes just have a look and recognize that you're dealing with an ADHD 3D amateur here with more planning and aspiration than patience. Hmmm. Maybe I'll post an individual figure still, anyway. SS

Here's a quick still from one of my ongoing projects rendered in Poser 7. Again, pardon the obvious light and shadow imperfections, among others, as it is a still from an animation that is still a work in progress. This took about 5 minutes at full quality setting and is roughly an 1000 x 800 image. It takes about 4,000 of these to produce a 5 minute cartoon. That's V3, The Freak and James modified to look like (facewise) friends of mine, with off-the-shelf clothing. SS

That is good news as my copy should arrive tomorrow, and I too have a Mac Pro with 4 Gigs ram and am itching to work with it. David :)

I just hope they aren't telling ya to render with no shadows to speed things up. I actually saw somebody say to turn off shadows and anti-aliasing in the last few days, but that is just sad IMVHO. if it's worth rendering, it's worth doing right, even if it means a few more minutes per render.

Miss Nancy, I did, in fact, have the shadows turned off because I didn't want to mess with them at the draft/animatics stage -- lighting is one of my (many) Poser weak points. I want to have consistent lighting/mood in my finished product, so it will be one of the latter things that I'll mess with. SS