Software Store: Poser 5 Software

Average Rating:

I've been very skeptical about my decision to purchase Poser, I've heard many mixed messages of people loving it or hating it. I recently decided to take the chance with Poser 5 (buying it from Amazon of course). This isn't part of the product review - but because I almost let the poor user reviews I've read stop me from getting one the best tools I've had in a LONG time, hopefully I can help to encourage others. Any of us using software in the past 15 years has had a number of different experiences of frustration from initial bugs shipping in a new release. Some from very large manufacturers or from really wonderful product all in all and some even with data loss issue's. It sounds like there were some bugs within the initial launch of Poser 5 that caused the negative feedback. But in downloading and using the Service Release 2.1 (from Curious Labs site) with my initial Poser 5 installation, I am happy to say I missed experiencing that whole problem. Believe me, I took the time to test out features and the reported bugs (previous to the patch) on a system set up with very similar spec's to those reporting bugs and have not experienced one. I also am no novice user, and not new to the 3D world. I trust in my ability to say I'm using Poser 5 on a high level capacity. Of course, no software is perfect - no software at all. And I'm sure many will find those "I wish it had" features missing, but for a product that does not cost me even close to a professional high-end application, yet with capabilities that takes me into the professional creation level, I could NOT recommend this product to anyone more!!!!

I fooled around with the material room which is like nothing out there, so that's a big plus. I tried the hair room, but I was unable to get it to work even after several attempts. The cloth room also failed to produce any clothes so I guess I'll have to stick with my old collection for now. I wanted to try the face room but I didn't have any photo available.

During the course (I was using XP pro) Poser 5 crashed several times and I lost all my good efforts... so remember to save often. At one time, XP crashed and my XP has never crashed (so far that was).

As for models, there are a lot of free stuff, but I notice that most of it comes from Poser 4 and the Pro Pak - so if you have these products, your not getting much new.

Also, I found it very difficult to work with more than one model (people) in the same window - as they often interfered with each other or got selected in error or got posed in the wrong way. There is no undo history as in photoshop, so if you make mistakes, don't expect you can go back and fix them. Poser 5 doesn't allow you to open more windows - so I have to work with one model at a time which is time consuming. I expected much better than this.

My best option was to hide models. But not only do you have to hide the model, but also the clothes, shoes, etc which is time consuming, especially if you have more than one people in a scene.
Sometimes I try to hide one model and when I unhide it, parts of the model are missing (invisible). I unselect the Invisible Property for the model, but nothing happens. I have to start the model again from scratch.

I also have tons of 3d models which I accumulated over the years, which gets to be a mess (missing, wrong textures, etc). Poser 5 did nothing to auto install these or fine tune (manage) my massive inventory. The auto install feature is only if you use their content service. I was really upset about this because I feel they falsely advertised Poser 5's ability to automatically install 3d objects. This was one of the main reason I purchased Poser 5 - so it could clean up the thousands of poser files on my hard drive. No such luck.

Overall, I like Poser, but maybe not at a price ... So here are my Cons:
Poser 5 crashes at times or freezes.
Only one window is available - I found it difficult to work with more than one model per window.
Poser 5 doesn't find and install your models - you must buy models through their service.
The render system is very, very slow - No multi-tasking is available.
No network or batch rendering is available.
The hair room doesn't work
The cloth room didn't work.

Here are my pros:
Render system is fantasic.
I like the material room much.
And everything works pretty much as it does with Poser 4 pro.

I understand there are two updates available to fix problems associated with Poser 5 and that some files were missing, so I will check these out at a later time.
I would highly recommend Poser 5 but ONLY IF they improved it; however, we may have to wait on Poser 8.

Poser 5 finally adds some realistic pose sets, and quite a few at that, and approaches the flexibility needed to make uniquely different faces. I say approaches because the Face Room always starts out with the same male face and the random face selector makes faces that would do for comics and games, but not for real people.

The hair and clothing rooms, however, are a godsend, as now you can make strand based hair and flexible cloth. I haven't run into the bugs some people have, but compared to my previous Poser version (Poser 3) this is a massive upgrade with a much steeper learning curve, but well worth it. (Just remember to download the service pack to get rid of the activation.)

In the realm of 3D Poser is still the poor man's Character Studio, but rapidly becoming a program to contend with.