Product Reviews

Animating the human body isn't easy. The rigid relationship of joints to limbs, the complex skeletal structure, and the many subtleties of movement in a motion as simple as walking put it beyond the skills of most animators, even those with expensive packages like 3D Studio Max and Character Studio at their feet. Poser 4 is a unique application that attempts to automate the process as much as possible, making it logical, friendly, and easy to achieve - without skimping on power.

The design process is simple. A basic figure stands in a central work window. Viewed in either wireframe, flat-shaded or textured forms, each body is a hierarchy of parts (head, neck, shoulders, legs, arms and so on) all connected and jointed by an invisible skeleton. If you rotate the neck then the head moves with it, twist the hips and the legs shift to accommodate the motion. Joints and individual parts can be twisted, rotated, and tapered to achieve even the most impossible stances.

An unlimited number of lights can be placed to dramatise your scene. Either spot or infinite, they can be any colour, cast shadows, and can be positioned anywhere in the 3D workspace. The same applies to cameras, as up to nine positions can be stored for easy access.

Despite the presence of skeletons, infants, animals and robots in the libraries, the key figures are man and woman - in business, casual, or nude varieties. These can be run through a range of pre-modelled posing categories such as sport, dance, fighting and gymnastic, each with between four and 12 stances.

For the adventurous there are pre-arranged animations, which range from walking through dancing, to martial arts and leaping. You can use these in sequence (a run into a leap followed by a crouch for example), or animate body parts individually using a simple keyframe system. Most impressive, however, is the Walk Designer, which allows balancing of factors such as shuffle, strut, and sneaking with tweaks like hip swing, leg lift, and arm swing to effortlessly create individual or even silly walks.

For even more detail, sets of basic facial expressions are on hand (upset, happy, angry) as well as key phonemes (eff, gee, hay) for lip-sync. A variety of hand shapes

There's a raft of new features for users upgrading from earlier versions. The interface is now a hotch-potch of the classic graphic-designed MetaCreations front end as seen in Bryce 4 (reviewed issue 58, p196), and the original Poser interface with its floating palettes and spinable controls. Importantly, clothing is far more flexible in this release. A wardrobe of footwear and clothes can be plundered for each model, with specific controls to deal with how the material moves during an animation. Deformation is now included, allowing you to stretch and pull body parts, which is useful for caricatures and comic effects without breaking the models. Morph Targets have also been added, which enable you to gradually reshape and resize geometry over time. It can be used to add ethnicity to a model, or to show subtle body changes like pregnancy realistically.

We also have the long-awaited appearance of genitalia on Poser models, a feature which, for prudery or polygon counts, early versions lacked. For greater realism, Poser 4 allows models to be less than perfect - they can succumb to age or obesity, while breasts, for example, have a new 'droop' control. There's also more detail of control in various other body parts. In the face for instance, spinners for smile, frown, eyebrows and worry lines can construct more convincing and flexible facial expressions. Individual controls for each hand or finger joint allow for very precise hand gestures and grasping.

In terms of output, the figures are far more detailed and less inclined to tear or shear under extreme contortion. A new lighting system has subtly enhanced the realism of the end product and a new feature, the Sketch Designer, utilises drawing algorithms from Painter to allow you to render in a variety of pastel, pen and ink, and painting styles.

Poser still remains a powerful but niche illustration tool, and while it's all very interesting to play with, it's really only worth the investment if you have a serious job that you need it for. Since its emergence, it has been used too regularly and somewhat unimaginatively in illustration, and as Poser models have always had the same basic look (the model's faces in particular are disturbingly similar), the end results have been looking tired. But now, with some tweaking and experimentation, especially with new features like the Sketch Designer, the results of still images can be exceptional.

If, however, you delve into animation, don't expect your attempts to rival the presets. Animating the human body convincingly is an art, and one that isn't easily mastered, no matter how good the creative application. That doesn't change the fact that if you need figures in your work, this is the program to get.