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"!!!!