YES....YES

Yes, with qualifications... good points: (1) material room-although complex, I love the reflection properties so far. The various options here reminds me a bit of 3ds MAX's. (2) hair room--the ability to grow decent hair (finally!) (3) face room--I like the ability to use pictures to easily (sort of?!) create facial textures. (4) FF renderer--finally a ray-tracing option that I can understand. The raytracer apps for P4 never worked for me. bad points: (1) FF renderer--although much faster with the patch than before, still rather slow. (2) face room--control points are still difficult to manipulate and still need more morphs. (3) hair room--the inability to export hair as obj. files. (4) the incompatibility of P5 with: (a) DAZ figures in face room (although I have heard of the feud...alas politics!) (b) ProPack export features in LW, MAX, et al. Why can't I use the features I purchased the PPP for? Hurry up CL, please. All in all, however, after the patch, P5 has been much better than before. It hasn't crashed as much, but remains a huge memory hog. I hope many of these negatives will be addressed over time. A rocky start, but things are beginning to improve. my $.02, --lb

Happy: yes. Delirious: no.

NO. But I'm hopeful for the future!

Yes! :)

Wow! As a Mac user who's also been keeping track what's been going on, I must admit I'm impressed. Obviously there have been those who've had problems but I'm pleased to see this many "yes" answers - even with qualifications.

I count 34 yeses and 12 noes. I didn't count ones that were unclear (like the "yas and no" one), but if I errored it wasn't by much and it was on the side of the yesses. That means more than a forth of the users said no. That isn't all that great considering a lot of the people here (not just in this thread) would have been happy even if they opened the box and found a pile of dog crap. I also believe the results would be much different had there not been the huge stink generated by P5. This isn't impressive at all. I watched the Carrara forum when 2 came out, the Painter forum when 7 came out, Bryce when 5 came out, Photoshop when 7 came out, and Vue when 4 came out. NONE of them even come close to the negativity generated when P5 came out. And that is respective of the individual forums' populations.

Jackson exnay on the dog crapay. There's still one of our members in detention over that one. According to some, the no numbers would be even less if we could just configure our pc's correctly!

YES by a long shot!!

NO

Yes

About 80% Yes - CL needs to get some more of those bugs knocked on the head tho. I'm hoping they will release an SP2 but it worries me that they will lose interest and move on to Poser 6 (take for example the cross-talk bug in Poser 4 that was never fixed - among others). If they stick with it and sort out all the problems and don't just abandon it P5 will be far and away an excellent piece of software.

Yes!

YES FROM ME TOO!...I like it and am getting used to it so I think it is really better than p4 ...it takes some getting used to but YES YES YES

Jackson, I understand your point completely. Without pointing fingers in any direction (!!!) I've seen a lot of justified frustration around here lately. I've seen a lot of learning curve as well. (How's that for being diplomatic - grin) I'm impressed because, based on what I've been reading, I kind of expected the No's would far outnumber the yes's. This gives me hope. It may take a while for things to smooth out. Even then, the Mac's are a completely different platform so they may have completely different issues (at least as far as possible bugs). On the bright side, there are far fewer configurations that have to be troubleshot on the Mac side so I'd imagine whatever betatesting goes on would be easier. Regardless, I have hope. BTW, I'm glad to see your finger is still working [grin]!

yes

Bobasaur, Ah, the finger! Yes, it works quite well, thank you. Good point about the Mac; I sure hope they do better with your version (they certainly couldn't do much worse). I'm interested to hear what you have to say about animation in P5.

I've only had three hours to play with it so I'm reserving judgement, but it's behaved perfectly so far. -- Mark

As far as animation, the best I can tell is that not much has changed as far as the process itself. I've seen a few incredible animations (one was called "Dress" and can be found at billy-factory.com) that have come out using the features - particularly the cloth / collision stuff. I'm excited about that.

I've watched people here trying to understand the materials - the "nodes." I hadn't heard that terminology before but I've found that they're like the shaders I have in Lightwave. Quite impressive, tremendous potential, but a bit of a learning curve. That explains to me why some have had questions or issues with them. They can be quite complicated.

I don't think I'll use the hair much for a while. I'm not a good hair stylist and I dounbt I'd be willing to deal with the added render time. I'm using Poser and Lightwave right now and I don't even add the hair in Lightwave (which I could).

I've seen some people complaining with frustration about the face room but I've seen some people (not just Pokeydot) put out some really neat character variations using the face room. I'm very excited about that.

I wish they'd have included Bezier spline curves in the graph editor, the ability to add markers in the timeline, and some other basic features found in other animation packages. However, those are "wants." Sooner or later Poser will evolve to have them. Bryce doesn't have 'em and Flash doesn't have 'em, so I can't say they're "standard" but they are quite common. Maybe P5.5.

These are simply my observations from reading the trials and tribulations around here. I haven't read the manual yet. I will when the time comes!

No. This is the poorest release of software I've ever bought. It was 2 service releases before I could even install it, then another one before I could run it at all. Then after all that I'm told I can't export the hair. Unless I want a planet populated by bald people, what is the point? This was rushed out the door long before it was ready. It's getting better slowly, but that export issue really should be fixed. Cheers, Bonzai Gopher

Being very unsure about P5 in the first place, I went over to a friend's house who had it and played with it for a few hours....

There are a few nice features, but overall I was very dissapointed...

• Several crashes (and this is on a 2.66 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM running winXP Pro)
• Longer render times for the same figure than I had with the same figure in Pro Pack on a slower machine with less virtual memory (1.8 GHz P4 w/ 512 MB RAM)
• Unimpressive Face room
• Horrible (IMO) default characters (Posette and Dork looked better, even if their functionality was far less)

The list goes on and on, honestly... I was VERY displeased with the software and the only thing useful in it was the material room, IMO.

And hey... If I'm going to be using shaders, etc., I'll just render my image in a serious app, anyway.

No. So unhappy that I removed it completely from my system, put it back in the box and shoved it to the back of the closet shelf where I hope I'll never see it again as long as I live.

Yes The textures and raytracing are worth having. No problems with functionality. I do not use the face room, or the p5 figures.