Attached Link: SR-2 Beta Page

Curious Labs is pleased to announce the beta release of Service Release 2 (SR-2) for Poser 5.

The Poser community has a vast amount of resources and many diverse systems running Poser 5. Because of this, we feel that a public beta program will provide far better results than an internally controlled testing program. Poser 5 was tested by both our internal QA department and over 80 beta testers, and we found and eliminated many critical bugs. However, despite this testing, the community found some issues not found during our testing. Curious Labs stands behind our testing methods, however no internal testing program can possibly replicate the diverse hardware and use cases offered by the community.

Curious Labs is partnering with Renderosity to offer a new Poser 5 forum that will go live when we release Service Release 2. This new Renderosity forum is called the Poser 5 SR-2 beta forum and will be a great location for posting bug reports and findings. As always, we will be paying very close attention to the threads in this forum and will address issues in future Service Releases and other updates. Service Release 2 will be formally released once the community has had a chance to thoroughly test it. Until its formal release, Curious Labs plans to release SR-2 updates weekly or as circumstances warrant. We believe that SR-2 beta 1 already contains a significant improvement over SR-1 thanks to added stability and bug fixes.

We welcome everyone comfortable working with a beta updater to participate in this program, thus helping us create a better Service Release and, ultimately, a more stable and productive Poser 5. Service Release 2 will work whether or not you have Service Release 1. Please refer to our Web site for full instructions. If you requested a copy of Service Release 1 on CD, we will include the beta version of Service Release 2 on that CD for your use if desired. We will be mailing CDs within a week.

Curious Labs remains committed to continually improving and supporting our products through extensive testing and releasing updaters as issues arise. We are absolutely dedicated to all of our customers and want their experience with all of our products to be both positive and productive. We value the community and everyone's comments, feedback, bug reports, and patience.

Also: Check out the Material room's OBJECT menu for a new atmospheric/volumetric root node (documented in the SR-2 readme)!

The following excerpt from the Service Release 2 readme lists the fixes included in this version:

• Fixed forced power of 2 texture scaling and improved other texture scaling functions for improved image quality when rendering.
• Fixed several large memory allocations during rendering and when looking for missing textures.
• Updated default Face room textures to better match the figure texture.
• Ray traced shadows now properly appear in reflections.
• Objects set to not cast shadows no longer cast shadows in ray tracing.
• Activated Depth Cue and Atmospheric rendering capabilities as a new object selection in the material room.
• Speeded up checking for possibility of transparency in ray traced shadows.
• Further speed improvements when rendering.
• 0 length hairs are no longer generated into the rendering engine, eliminating a crash.
• Poser will no longer incorrectly detect an insufficient disk space situation.
• Resizing the render window while rendering no longer causes application/window errors.
• Fixed crashes with textures larger than 4K by automatically scaling them down to 4K.
• Importing 3DS models with 0 length polygons no longer causes a crash.
• Vertex groups now display correctly in orthogonal cameras.
• Fixed possible divide by zero error (renderer)
• Fixed crashes when reading empty shader trees in material libraries.
• Fixed an XML problem in the Render Options dialog where the Render Now button wasn't the right size.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when users reduced the number of frames in an animation using the Render Options dialog.
• The Render To New Window option now appears at either its set size or slightly smaller than the user's screen space (whichever is smaller) instead
  of defaulting to the Document window size.
• Fixed a render crash caused by improper data culling and added extra data checks.
• Improved ear morphs in the Face room.
• Improved zoom handling in the Face room (vertical mouse motion now supported).
• Renderer default no longer culls back-facing polygons.
• Clicking the CLOSE (X) button in the render window no longer causes a false crash report.
• Deactivated menus while simulating cloth & hair.
• Fixed Library window height problem.
• Text visibility issue in the Hierarchy editor is fixed.

Steve Cooper
Curious Labs