First let me start by saying that I've been using Poser since version 2 and I'm a huge fan of application. I use it almost everyday. I purchased the pro pack the day it was released and fell in love with it right away. I use it with Lightwave and Cinema 4D. I just want to say that I'm not here to bash C-Labs. I just want to inform those of you that may be thinking about this upgrade. - Buyer's Beware!!!!

The good part...

I pre-ordered Poser 5 with great anticipation and checked the website almost daily asking myself "Is it out yet? Is it out yet?" - Well long story short it finally WAS released, and I eagerly awaited this little bundle of joy to arrive on my doorstep. One day it finally did arrive. As fast and carefully as I could I unpackaged the contents of the box (my eyes filled with passion as I looked over the contents of the box) and I finally began to install P5 onto my Win XP Pro box.

This is where the story turns bad... :(

Since installing "P5" I've had nothing but trouble. I knew within 15 minutes after I fired it up that there was trouble. It's buggy, locks up frequently, textures from my poser 4 scenes don't load properly, clicking on the "Content Paradise" area only brings up a message saying "Coming Soon" and today I had a major XP problem and had to reinstall XP via the system repair option by booting with the XP cd-rom and running setup again. (I should also mention that I've had this XP box since March without any problems until loading Poser 5)

A few other things about Poser 5 that I throughly disliked is the fact that even simple scenes take a LONNNNNG time to render with the new render engine. (You can disable this and use the "P4 style render" but even this takes twice as long as it does in P4) Want to hear more???

There is bad content on the Bonus CD that can't be found when you click on the links to install them. Not to mention that the ones that DO work are all in ZIP format and I spent hours unzipping and copying a variety of files to different locations. A simple setup.exe that copied the bonus content onto the Hard Drive would have been great and saved a ton of time.

To top it all off. I decided to do a uninstall and something really strange occurred. Most of the content is gone (poses, geometries, etc...) but the "poser.exe" and many other program files still exist on my HD. - Weird. And now when I go back to add/remove programs in control panel "POSER 5" is still listed there but clicking on it again just returns an error saying it can't find the uninstall information. Looks like the uninstall needs some work also guys.

Oh let's not forget the new "unlocking" registration process..... (This part of the program actually worked pretty well) - it's just one of those annoying inconviences for those of us that actually purchase our software.

I'm going back to Poser Pro until they fix this product.

(it's probably worth mentioning that I'm running Win XP Pro on a GigaByte Mother Board w/ an Athalon 1200, 786 megs of RAM and have a 128 Meg Nvidia G3 card)- Well above the minimum requirements suggested by C-Labs.

If you're thinking about upgrading I'd wait a little while on this one!!! Stick with Poser Pro for now. It's rock solid and renders MUCH faster!!!

Those of you that have already ordered and installed Poser 5, I would like to hear your experiences with it so far. Maybe it's just something quirky with my system but I doubt it because I also use Lightwave 7.5, Cinema 4D XL 7, and Studio Max - all of which work perfectly fine on my system.

Bottom line: Great Ideas, but Bad Code!!! Just thought I'd share this information with you all. "Buyer's Beware"!!!!

Hmm, another P5 user having major problems on system runing a CPU by AMD. I seen at least 6 gripes about P5's misbehavior on such systems, maybe there's something going on here? any other people using CPU's made by AMD and having big trouble with P5 want to comment?

Me, Well I didn't have the problems many had installing, but whats killing me are the bugs inside the actual program. Like missing polys during render, the neck line problem, and so on. I bought P5 cause were using it to provide the graphics for our software product that we were working on (3d isometric game) (pre-rendered 3d) And so far, I get nice results (at times) but the render time is horrible and this neck line bug is making my renders look ugly. I haven't even tried to load scenery yet (Too scared :) CL is a great company, but with this release, Im beginning to wonder why and who tested this program. Cause they have clear in your face bugs that I KNOW they had to see, and yet they released it. WHY? Cedric

No bugs here with an AMD on W2K, 1.5Gram. Chipset problem? Q

I have also had major problems so far. I currently use Bryce, Vue d Esprit, PS, PSP and many high end audio and video editing products which I have not had any problems with. In fact, I quite enjoy my experience with all of the above mentioned software. Enter Poser 5! Upon loading this much anticipated software, the program itself was very
frustrating. Unable to load figures and clothes simultaneously, crashes(lots of crashes) and very difficult to load new content(tedious and drawn out). All in all my initiation to the poser world has been one of extreeme frustration due to a very buggie program. Please, please, please, staff and management at Curious Labs read these posts and respond accordingly. I don't understand why this product was released before it was ready. To make matters worse, installing this program on my Athalon XP 2000 with 512 Megs of ram, has created problems for my entire system. It used to run flawlessly.
So it is with regret that, based on my personal experience with this product, I would also not recommend purchasing Poser 5 until the programmers are paid to come back and fix all the problems with their program. I feel I must join in here and honestly share my experience because I would hope others would do the same for me.

Good Luck
Happy Posing

I'm a new Poser user and I don't know about the hassles people are complaining of. Yes it does seem slow to render but that is not the biggest hassle for me. (Just assumed my p3 800 was starting to show its age! - 2 yrs next month.) I am having trouble importing objects - most attempts end up as black holes. They just become solid black silhouettes. To get them into Poser I have to send them via an intermediary piece of software and save them as 3ds files. Then I need to set them up in Poser which is where the next hassle occurs. With the grouping editor it would have been nice to have a lasso tool instead of just a drag box. Drag boxes are like trying to write with a brick. Polygon selection could be way better this. As someone who is new to Poser not just Poser 5 I have to say I was fairly surprised at the limited amount of tutorials included in the whole package. The fact that the advertised online tutorials were not made ready for the release of the program is also kinda annoying. Burnart

Running an AMD here and had no problems, WIN2K Pro. I used P5 for about 8 hours yesterday and had no crashes or other problems. I doubt its a cpu problem. More likely an os related issue and perhaps even other programs working in the background. Several so called bugs people have reported are not bugs at all just users not understanding how to use the program. If you look at all post closely you will see the people complaining most have XP but not all XP users are having problems. No doubt there are problems that need to be addressed. Ron

It's very possible it is a chipset problem. I have a Dragon Plus MB, AMD XP 1900+ CPU, XP Pro OS, 512 MB RAM, and have no stability problems with Poser 5.

I'm on an Intel box and I'm having tons of problems with the Materials Room in P5. (That happens to be the area I'm most concerned about. I haven't tried other rooms yet - I'm scared to, at this point.) No other program is being a crashmeister like P5. 1.7Ghz P4, 512MB RAM, XP Pro, NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra.

"Like missing polys during render, the neck line problem,and so on." There are no missing polys just uncheck those in the Render options. The neckline is user error. If you want to keep the original texture "apply shape only" from the face room. If you are applying a new one adjust the coloring in the face room.

I'm using almost the identical system as JohnnyRay, and while I've had problems, it doesn't seem to be AMD or XP related. Most of them have been reported here by users with other types of machines. P5 is processor and memory intensive. I think there may be problems with the program itself on how it uses and releases memory. However, that said, I get more out of P5 than I ever did out of P4 or P2 (I skipped P3). I love the hair and setup rooms. Sure, hair is slow, but it can look really good when you finally get it right. Setup gives me the ability to use all those static models I've downloaded or wanted to download, and make pretty darn good characters. I've found enough of the bugs now to know what to avoid, and how to do my own work arounds, so my freezing/crashing problems have mostly gone away. I AM looking forward to the first bug fix update. I sort of hope that CL is doing them in parts, so we don't have to wait for everything we've reported a problem on to get a fix for what they've already finished.

Has anyone come across the constant rendering bug yet? I have saved scenes from P5. When I reload them in either p5 or p4 (no special things used in the scene that are p5 specific), the scenes auto render constantly everytime I try to moven the camera, change a menu item etc. Plus the Render Options menu item is check marked.

I have only saved a few pz3 files and did not have that happen when reloading. Some others have experienced this. Ron

A question-- those who have Athlon and XP and are relatively bug-free, do you have an NVidia card? That has seemed to be the other element that shows up in reported crashes. Those who are crashing with Pentium and XP, do you have NVidia? Just trying to check some rumors. This does seem to be a random situation, but there might be some similarities. And, one of my machines has NVidia and the other doesn't-- haven't loaded P5 yet. I have very bad luck with new software and am already insane, don't need more to push me over the edge. Emily

A question-- those who have Athlon and XP and are relatively bug-free, do you have an NVidia card? That has seemed to be the other element that shows up in reported crashes. Those who are crashing with Pentium and XP, do you have NVidia? Just trying to check some rumors. This does seem to be a random situation, but there might be some similarities. And, one of my machines has NVidia and the other doesn't-- haven't loaded P5 yet. I have very bad luck with new software and am already insane, don't need more to push me over the edge. Emily

Well, lessee... Win2k Pro, AMD XP1700, 512 DDR, and an EVGA GeForce 4 TI4400 video card. And no trouble (aside from the missing content files that everyone has to deal with). The latest detonator drivers from Invidia did fubar my Vue 4 install, until I disabled the OpenGL support. Of course I make a habit of cleaning up Windows regularly with Windoctor out of Norton Utilities, and I run Cacheman to keep the physical memory clear of unneeded dll's and data.

AMD 2000xp, 512 mb ,Nvidia gvorce mx200, win xp and no problems. Only think i did about 6 month ago,defragged my hd and set the swapfile size to 600 mb fix. p5 is running very smooth and not one single crash

1.3 GHz Athlon Processor, Win XP Pro, 512 MB RAM, with Nvidia GeForce video card with latest Detonator drivers. No crashes. I did increase the swapfile size based on a thread I read here.

The only other thing I can think of that I've installed recently is the Windows XP Service Pack 1 update. I'm curious if those of you that are NOT having problems with P5 have installed SP1 for XP yet? It copuld be a Win XP SP1 issue???? Hmmmm..... I'm not so sure though because everything else on my system is working fine. Just had problem after problem with P5. Also I noticed one of you posted a reply asking if anyone encountered the render problem where loading a scene put you into a "rendering loop" - yes I had that one also. That happened with 3 out of the 4 scenes I created. Also had a problem with the materials room where after clicking back onto another room - the screan would frezze and leave behin garbage. This sounds like video to me but I already have the latest Nvidia drivers.

Running AMD win2k no probs. Only real complaint with P5 so far, aside from not caring for the reg process, is the user manual. I also read the manuals and have always been able to teach myself. Poser 4 manual was not the best, but I could figure it out. I am really disappointed with the P5 manual. I don't need pages and pages and pages of sketchy definition of terms, I need instructions on what to do and how to do it. Duh! Like you know, when you buy something that requires assembly but you don't have any instructions on how to put together, you tend to get a little annoyed!!! Well, consider me annoyed!

I have an Intel Chip and as far as saving every five minutes with this thing, that would be nice, If I could get five minutes worth of work in at a time on this obviously under tested piece of dreck. My machine specs pentium 4 2.5 MHz 1 gig ram 80 gig drive C 120 gig drive D. I've heard of people setting the swapfile size and that helping. Nowhere in the manual or on their website is any statement as to that effect. Even the people here who say they tweak the swapfile size never make any mention as to what they set it at. In the interim, one year, I have bought no new software at all unless it came out of the $!0 bin at Best Buy or someplace, or better yet downloaded it for free, because by the time it gets there at least I'm sure some website, and most likely not the original publisher's, will have all the patches.

To change the swapfile in WinXP (which is what I have), right-click on MyComputer and bring up the properties. Click on the Advanced tab, then on the Performance button, then on the Advanced tab again. Click on Change. Select the C drive and click on Custom Size and set the minimum and maximum size. I have my min at 1300 and my max at 1500, Since I have 1.25 GB RAM. Click on OK. You may have to reboot.

I did find in another forum that one user sent his swapfile completely to his D Drive with the min and max setting at 4096 I'm going to give that a try, and if that doesn't work, which is as well as poser 5 works now, I'll try those settings.