Product ReviewsMultimedia software
Creating believable 3D scenes is a major challenge, but to bring them fully to life you need people to populate them. Unfortunately, modelling and animating human figures is one of the hardest tasks of all. Poser has a long heritage of simplifying just this, and has also managed to do it in an affordable way. The Poser interface provides tabbed access to dedicated "rooms", where you can customise your figure's hair, face, clothes, materials and underlying rigging. However, most of the hard work is done in the main Pose room, where you drag on your figure's hands, feet and head to create natural-looking poses. For finer control, Poser provides morph targets controlled by parameter dials. To animate figures, simply move the Timeline slider to another frame before making changes. Clearly, the success of the system depends largely on the models Poser provides, and each new release usually sees higher-quality male and female models. However, there seems to be a problem with the new Simon figure, where bending his arm deforms his elbow, and the Sydney model doesn't even come with clothes. Thankfully, the earlier models are still included. In fact, Poser 7 now comes with over 1GB of content including skeletons, animal figures and third-party samplers. It also offers a new collection system to gather together items from multiple categories and even runtimes. New posing power starts with the ability to right-click to select any body part under the current mouse position and, finally, multiple undo levels. Poser 7 also introduces "universal poses", which are no longer tied to a particular figure and can be applied consistently to any biped model, regardless of joints and rigging. The Library panel includes lots of poses to help get good results quickly. Poser 7 also offers greater morph-based control, including "dependent
Greater animation control is also provided, beginning with the new Layers tab in Poser 7's Animation palette. This lets you add a new layer whenever you want to work on a particular element of an animation. You can then choose whether to include the layer in the final playback, when it should start and finish, and whether it should be phased in and out. Then there's the new Talk Designer, which attempts to automatically sync facial morph targets to an audio file. You can even add eye blinks and emotional tweaks, but the results are an approximation at best. Once you get to the rendering stage, Poser 7 offers four engines, including the artistic Sketch renderer and fast Preview renderer, which take advantage of new support for larger texture maps and the onscreen display of procedural textures. For maximum quality, the Firefly option has been overhauled with numerous features, such as irradiance caching, occlusion culling, depth-of-field acceleration and improved texture handling, all designed to reduce memory requirements and boost speed. Most importantly, the Firefly engine now supports multithreaded rendering on multiple-processor and multicore PCs. Despite these changes, Poser 7's Firefly rendering remains ponderously slow on single CPU systems. Moreover, while the end results can be striking, they're still clearly computer generated. Most disappointingly, Poser's lack of any serious scene-handling capabilities cuts down on its usefulness: while 3D scenes are diminished without figures, the same is true of figures without scenes. The end result is that existing users may well want to put their upgrade money towards buying a program such as e-on's Vue 6 Esprit to host and render their Poser figures. But, if you don't have the budget or time to get to grips with a more complex character-rigging solution, Poser remains the best way to give your 3D work a human dimension. And bearing in mind the features it has built up over the years and the lack of any real competition, Poser 7 remains good value. You shouldn't encounter major problems, but just note the current lack of official Vista support. By Tom Arah
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