And boy, I want to like it. I've owned every version of Poser except for the Pro Pack, and none of them have given me as much trouble as Poser 5 has in just a few hours. Installation went smoothly last night, and the much-dreaded registration process completed without a hitch.

Then I ran the program.

The very first time I ran it, it advanced through the attractive banner screen (they get nicer looking with every release), and promptly proceeded to hang. I waited one or two minutes before I decided it wasn't going to come up, and killed the program from the task manager.

I did that a lot last night. I think that I've only exited P5 normally twice so far.

Before anybody starts pointing fingers at my system specifications: Athlon XP 1700+, 1 GB of RAM, 100 GB of hard disk space, Windows XP Professional.

The second time I ran P5, it came up successfully. I could do test renders with Don and Judy and Penny... I could add new hair props and render those, too. If I start from scratch, stuff seems to work. But I have tons of old assets, and almost none of the stuff I've tried so far seems to work in P5.

I chose a simple scene with a Vicky 2 figure, conforming clothes, and a couple of props. The first time I tried to load it, I got some messages from P5 that it couldn't find various files. Aha! I realised, I need to add my old P4 directory as a library, which I did, quite easily. With my P4 library set as the current one, I attempted to load the file again. P5 hung.

I restarted P5 and tried again; this time, P5 finished the load, but it became immediately obvious that something was Very Wrong, for now the figure was almost totally obscured by a fan-like cover of long thin polygons, radiating from a central point in front of the figure to various parts of its body. It's either new geometry that has been added somehow, or vertices in the existing geometry that have been moved, pulling these long triangles out of arms, feet, what-have-you... all meeting at one point. I wish I had a picture handy; I'll try to post one tonight.

Anyway, I tried to render this mess, with the predictable result that P5 hung again.

OK... maybe it's my scene file. So I restarted P5 and added a stock vanilla Vicky 2 figure to the default scene. I got the exact same fan-of-crud in front of it. Aieeeeee!

I don't deny that the P5 team has put a lot of work into this product already. There are a ton of new features and I can't wait to dig into them and learn to make them dance and sing. However, I'm not very encouraged by the initial stability of the product in even simple usage scenarios, as least as far as I've seen. I'm sure that Poser 5 will receive some patches; I just hope that the known problems are resolved quickly so I can get the full benefit of the CAD 300.00 I've spent on it.

-- M