Tuesday, August 20th
7:00 PM

Preordered Poser 5 from Curious Labs.
Cheap SOD that I am, I went with ground shipping.

Friday, September 6th
5:30 PM

Received confirmation of shipment.
Nine days ahead of schedule.

Sunday, September 8th
4:00PM

My package is trapped somewhere in the wilds of Wilmington, Ohio.
Apparently, this is the center of the Airborne universe.

Tuesday, September 10th
11:00 AM

Package delivered.
Driver permitted to leave unharmed.
Poser 5 placed on shelf, out of reach of cats, in place of honour beside Sam and Max Hit the Road and Curse of Monkey Island.

Friday, September 13th
4:25 AM

Finished what will hopefully be my final P4 render.
Installation day.

6:30 PM

Begin transferring/deleting/uninstalling unnecessary files from hard drive to make room for the newcomer.

9:45 PM

Freed up an additional 2.4GB. Will make more room later.
Begin defragmenting hard drive.

10:30 PM

Still defragmenting hard drive.
Take nap.

10:45 PM

Now recall why I rarely defrag my hard drive.

11:30 PM

Read P5 printed manual, cover to cover, for the first time.
Admiring glances at colour plates in center of book.

1:00 AM

Drive still churning.
Drink Mountain Dew, read manual again

2:30 AM

Explained to cats why you should never defrag your hard drive.
I don't think they listened.

3:03 AM

Drive finally finishes defragmenting. I decide to let it cool down first.
Take nap, chase down some breakfast.

Returned home and installed Poser 5.
Went with full installation in default directory.
Restarted Windows.

7:00 AM

Launched Poser 5 for the first time.
Entered serial number, opted for automatic registration over the 'Net.
The challenge and response codes remind me of freeform poetry. Very strange.
Registration went flawlessly.

7:15 AM

Played with some of Poser's basic functions; started rearranging everything to match my old workspace.
Set up P5 to recognize my P4 Runtime directory (thanks for the tutorial, Jelisa!)
Couldn't find the parameter dials. Set monitor to 1024x768, found them hiding on the right.
Noticed that the parameter dials are always on top; they obscure the Library. Moved them to the left side of the screen.
Confirmed a couple of bugs reported by others.
Pleased by performance; user interface seems to run about as smoothly as P4.

8:05 AM

First crash.
Loaded a Poser 4 scene file. Everything seemed fine until I attempted to render.
P5 reported "texture not found or can't be read", then crashed to the desktop several seconds later.
Relaunched P5 and repeated the process, with identical results.
Relaunched P5 and repeated the process with a different scene file, with identical results.
Decide not to try old scene files until the problem is resolved.

9:00 AM

Apparently, the floating parameter dials are not part of the UI; they don't remain where I left them on subsequent launches, and the UI dots don't affect their position. Not a life-threatening quirk, but still irritating.
Experimenting with materials.
Confirmed that we can now tile our maps in the renderer, without having to remap the prop (see above). No more tiling with UVMapper. Just like trueSpace!
Tried out a few shader nodes, including the Toon shader and Movie shader.
You can indeed create animated textures, transparencies, and bump maps. The possibilities are near-endless.
The new FireFly renderer is nothing like the P4 renderer. I expect a long learning curve ahead.

lol! good one, please continue :) (and show us some pics please...)

Ditto! This will be a good read!

Somethings wrong here, though, Little Dragon. Admit it. You left a few things out. No Chez-Its? Little cheesy goldfish? Gin? Exorcist? C'mon... ;-) casamerica

Took some gin. Defragged his cat and gave milk to his drive. Third crash. Swore he'd never do it again.

No, that's pretty much it, so far. Since then, I've noticed one additional glitch in the Material Room; one of the shader node preview windows wasn't refreshing properly. No additional crashes. No other new bugs to report. Of course, I haven't spent much time in the Cloth and Hair rooms, yet. I intend to learn the renderer and shaders first, before I try to master those.

"Set monitor to 1024x768, found them hiding on the right." ROTFLOL. Same here!

It's good to see I'm not the only one who noticed the Zen poetry of the response code. ;-)

I have to report that my challenge code would have made an excellent title for a triple X-rated video. The moment I received my response code Poser unlocked and I got Windows the blue screen of death. Then my system lit up a cigarette. chrisf.