Best Buy

  • Price: 145 . 77

  • Company: E Frontier

  • Pros: Powerful new rendering options, expanded content base, enhanced figure articulation, Wacro scripts in the Material Room, OpenGL Hardware rendering for scene previews.

  • Cons: Interface and processes still not the most intuitive, limited undo level, Mac version not yet fully integrated with Content Paradise.

  • Our Rating: We rate this 9 out of 10 We rate this 9 out of 10

Most 3D artists have experienced Poser at some time in their career. The character tool for animation and graphic design applications was originally based on the pose-able wooden mannequin used by artists for many years.

Poser’s figure library has grown in scope and sophistication to make it the alternative modelling tool for artists who need to quickly add characters to 2D and 3D scenes. Recent updates to the tool have introduced refined Morph Targets and the Face Room for wrapping bitmap photos onto Poser figures (both enhanced in this version), while dynamic clothing, hair, and props have become more integrated parts of the Poser wardrobe too.

border=0 />With this increased sophistication has come an increase in complexity, but the program does boast one of the easiest lighting setups in 3D. If you’re after a solution to add realistic figures fast, version 6 continues to be the best tool in town. There’s online help at hand – when you enter any one of the several tabbed ‘rooms’ (including Pose, Material, Hair, Face, <BR> and Setup) in the restyled interface, a new dialog box pops up to explain where you are and offers links to tutorials (there’s also a tutorial manual included). More help is available in the form of Wacros, which are Python scripts that are supplied to help build complex effects in the Material Room. </p> <p> A host of new male, female, and child figures ship with Poser 6, some photorealistic, others cartoon in nature. The <BR> new figures all come with fully articulated hands, allowing greater posing and animation options. </p> <p> <b>Creatures great and small</b> </p> <p> There are animals, accessories, dynamic clothing, and new hairstyles, and poses, along with some characters created <BR> by third-party artists. All this allows you to get up and running with scene creation much faster than before. </p> <p> As in previous versions, the pre-rigged models (both human and otherwise) are posed using a plethora of parameter dials (one for every brow lift and finger flex in the more sophisticated models), or if you’re well-practised, by using the translation/ rotation tools in the main window to manipulate the body parts directly. There’s still only one level of undo in version 6 so you need to be careful you don’t go too far. </p> <p> While not on the scale of the major 3D applications, Poser features a fair selection of character creation tools to adjust <BR> skin shaders, manipulate expressions by directly sculpting morph targets, and build non-human characters from props. The Setup room features bones tools to create or modify skeletons as well as add IK chains. As Curious Labs has taken over the distribution of Shade, there is also now tight integration between that tool and Poser for creating new characters and accessories. Further integration is promised for other 3D applications. </p> <p> Most of the new features in Poser 6 are concerned with rendering, especially lighting tools such as the new omnidirectional Point Lights, as well as refinements to output. Preview rendering times in Poser have always verged on the painful, but now you can speed things up by switching between SreeD Software rendering and OpenGL Hardware rendering for scene previews and figure posing. </p> <p> <img src= Print

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