Product Reviews

It may have started life as a 'figure reference tool for artists', but each new release has taken Poser far beyond that basic remit. The latest version brings a wealth of new features, including lip syncing, transferrable poses, multiple undo, multi-threaded rendering and many other tweaks. The biggest news of all, however, is that Poser 7 is now fully Intel native and runs smoothly on new Macs.

No new version of Poser would be complete without a new set of figures, and the male, female and child models in Poser 7 don't disappoint. More realistic than ever, largely due to good polygon smoothing and high-quality photographic textures, the figures are endlessly customisable to produce a huge variety of forms. The male figure now has his genitals in a separate folder, as it were, to prevent them accidentally bursting through his clothing; they're not unloaded by default.

Also included is a variety of additional figures such as cartoon and manga characters, a realistic skeleton complete with optional muscle map, and a range of animals, including a T Rex skeleton for all those who want to recreate Night at the Museum.

As with the previous version, Poser 7 links directly with its companion website, Content Paradise (contentparadise.com), for the easy purchase of additional models. Poser now allows users to choose content from any library on their hard drive, which means accessing figures installed in earlier versions of the application is now a far easier process.

Where Poser 6 introduced the Morphing Tool, which enables you to sculpt expressions directly onto a figure, version 7 extends this with a new Create tab in the Morphing palette. This lets you manipulate the underlying bone structure, and while the

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controls are comprehensive, they're perhaps too powerful by default: fine for building your own Elephant Man, but tricky to fine tune.

Where previous versions of Poser tended towards a set of poses for each figure, version 7 introduces Universal Poses, which can be applied to any human figure. Motion, always a tricky animation element trick to get right, is eased by the new ability to copy and loop frames within an animation - and to save them to the library for reuse.

Lip syncing was previously available for Poser as a third-party product, and it's good to see this much-needed feature incorporated into the main application. Once a sound file is imported, the current Poser figure will move its mouth in time with the speech: the mouth shapes make a good stab at reproducing the sound of the phonemes. Users can drag a slider to control the strength of the enunciation - the degree to which the mouth opens and closes for each sound - as well as the rate of eye blinking. Automatic eye, eyebrow and head motion synchronised to the speech adds to the effect; and sliders for anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise allow each speech to be further customised.

Each addition to the Poser arsenal brings more power and more user control, but the interface remains as arcane and obscure as ever: it's impossible to make any sense of the Cloth or Hair rooms, for instance, without a thorough read of the manual. Ease of use has never been fully factored into the Poser equation, and the impenetrable nature of the interface manifests itself in almost every dialog. The new Talk controls, for instance, require that a 'Viseme' XML map be loaded for each figure, but there's no indication of where to find this file, and an exhaustive trawl through the file structure is needed in order to locate it. The file should, of course, be loaded automatically with the figure.

The same applies to content downloaded through Content Paradise. With a new free figure available to registered users each week, it should be a joy to download and try them, but each figure comes in up to a dozen separate folders, and the elements have to be moved from each to the corresponding Poser folder by hand.

The new features are welcome, but what's really needed is a radical overhaul of the user experience. Until this happens, Poser remains a powerful but frequently baffling application.