I'm sure a lot of people have been doing the same thing I have for the last month - following the poser 5 threads and trying to figure out what the hell's going on. And now it seems to me that, slowly but surely, I'm beginning to see less complaints and more real results. Obviously some people have patched, which has resolved a lot of problems. Other people didn't have problems to begin with and have been experimenting all the while, and now we're seeing some of the things p5 can do. Plus, the people who do have it working are posting tips to avoid the most glaring user errors. But what really puzzles me more than anything else is this. There seems to be NO RHYME OR REASON WHATSOEVER to poser's array of problems. It doesn't seem to matter a hoot whether you have the best or the worst (within reason) machine on the planet. AMD vs Intel? Win 2k vs Win XP? Patched vs Non-patched? None of these things seem to guarantee a working app. For every person who can run it with one system, there's another with a similar system who can't. Bizarre? That's putting it mildly! Didn't CL test it on a wide range of machines and OSs? If they didn't.... why not? If they did... why weren't they aware of some of these issues? I'm not trying to slam CL. I just wonder about these things. Anyway, I'm one of the poor 'saps' :) who ordered p5, but I ain't got it yet, so I can indulge in the luxury of the voyeur - watching with envy and horror as other people create with it or tear their hair out in despair. My copy arrived in Scotland last week and is currently wending it's way up to the Italian Alps, so I should have it in a few days. But I've already decided one thing. I will NOT install it on my current machine. I'm having a new one built right now. I'm going to install win 2000 and nothing else, then Poser, and IF it works.... I'll fill up the machine with my other apps and go for it. And if it doesn't work? That's a tricky one. I'll probably get that machine going and try p5 on my old one. Worst case scenario, I bite the bullet and forget it, but I hope it won't come to that. I really feel for all the people (like dave-so), who have had horrible problems with poser 5. All I can say is, your threads have at least made the rest of us aware of some of the issues. Small comfort if you've just shelled out bucks for a useless app, I know, but what else can I say? So, in the end, I suppose I'm a bit more hopeful about p5 than I was 2 weeks ago. Things seem to be settling down a bit. I know plenty of people will indignantly claim the opposite, but I think objectively, it's true. Now, if it all goes pear-shaped when I do install, maybe I'll tip the balance back again. I hope not. mac

I'm one of those people that was not interested in upgrading to Poser5.Poser is not my main app.that I use,and all the new features that Poser5 offered are very nice, but not vital to me.However if I did see a need to upgrade,I would never have been the first in line to purchase it(as so many that are now having problems were).When large companies like Microsoft,Adobe.etc.release a new or upgraded softwear product, they are far from being problem and bug free.Those big boys have huge resources,funding,and manpower devoted to research&development...and they still can't get it right the first time around.Curious Labs is a small guy and lacks their resoures,so the fixes will be slower to come,and they need our understanding and our support.Yes I'm seeing more people that seem to be able to use Poser5...it just takes time.You must remember that Poser has always been a very odd,quirky,buggy program......BUT IT'S COOL...IT'S NEAT....AND IT'S ALOT OF FUN!

I'm guessing that probably 80% (or so) of the problems people are having (after the patch) is lack of sufficient memory. Regardless of whatever the recommended specs are, the program is just danged memory intensive - and not always happy (robust) when it runs out. I'm still running Win98 on a 933mhz P3 system, so I'm stuck with a 512mb limit for the time-being... I can pretty much track my success or failures, depending on how many objects/textures are in the scene and what the rendering options are set to. The program seems pretty stable if I'm just rendering one character in a simple scene, but starts crashing badly (exceptions, etc.) when I get more ambitious. I don't think the program is particularly robust about memory usage at all. My latest render (firefly, production, with one character an apartment prop and a few others, including some reflection and refraction) created a 2 GIGABYTE swap file and took 4-5 hours to render my 800x800 image (it was the only app running at the time). So my suggestion? stuff as much memory in that new machine as you can - while we wait for future patches. Aside from that, the current patch seems to have fixed a majority of the problems I (and others) were having.

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The probs seem to be settling down. Seems to me the remaining probs-- other than some faulty gui that is maybe not gonna be patched [the dials that get in the way??]-- involve small prog incompatibilities, the CD Recorder incompat, for instance, and some drivers that work better with earlier versions. I don't see how CL could have caught any of these. Do wish they had warned people better about the memory probs. I figured it was gonna eat memory like a chocoholic and got a machine with 2Gs and am waiting on its separate firewire drive-- do I want 120Gs or 160g??-- but I got more money than sense, and it just happened to be the right time for a puter upgrade. I haven't loaded it yet, but I will with the next patch. I like the material room and I hope I like the renderer. Don and Judy do Not ring my chimes and neither does the hair. The cloth looks complicated and barely worth the agony, but maybe I'll like it. I'll try to learn the Material room first. I've looked at everything else out there, and can't see paying $1500 for Cinema 4D. So I guess it's waiting forever for the Firefly. And I render a lot before the final. I'd better stock up on New Age music to keep me from killing the computer. Just tell me, is it slower than Bryce, cause I would give up the will to live with Bryce. Emily

Patch definitely improved things. I got an interseting opportunity to try the "no problem" installation of a work colleague last night. I broke it two minutes after starting :-0 I did that by loading one of his existing (P4) pz3s. Just to prove that it wasn't a file incompatibility issue we managed to recreate the same problem by rebuilding the scene from scratch in P5. The difference between myself and him is that from the outset I started trying to build on existing P4 projects. On the other hand, my colleague took a "learning curve" approach, starting with individual figures and simple scenes and learning the new features one by one. In short he simply hadn't got to the point where he was encountering problems in the few weeks since he had got the program. This is why I suspect a lot of people are seeing problems. Even with P4, many people, particularly those who prefer portraiture and/or figure studies, seemed to work with a purely 'studio' approach with everyhing in the scene pushed well forward in front of the camera and a lot of use being made of backdrops or background images. P5 seems to work well under these circumstances. Other people use more 'encompassing' environments (sometimes a necessity for animators), or larger and more complex compositions, and it is these people who, I suspect, are encountering or will encounter (after they passed the "learning curve") the greatest problems. Bill

Ok, I seldom start with pz3 files-- unless the prop comes in that like MnD's sets-- because they don't work for me in P4. I'll work a scene until it or I am dead and if I have to save anything it'll be the character, because too many pz3's have shown up unreadable. All this in P4. So, first question, anybody able to load MnD Patio from pz3 in poser 5?? Any other set will do as long as it's a pz3. I also like to cram a scene with stuff, shoot through a window, that sort of thing. The last thing I did for the gallery, a pretty simple pinup, jammed a set, a vase and a tree into the picture. Do you think this is gonna mean trouble? I'll find out soon, I have a downloader that supports resumption of downloads and am going to download SR1 this weekend, I don't know if I'll actually load it till SR2 is here. I finally want to as there is a hair object at Rdna that I can use on a project-- P5 only, might know shopping would make me cave in.:)) Emily