Others say...

"How can anyone find this book useful?"
If you know how pull-down menus, tabs, and buttons work, and you can figure out all on your own that clicking on the tabs marked "Face", "Hair", "Material", etc. will lead you to the places where you can edit the character's face, hair, and materials/textures, you are far smarter that the person this author had in mind when he wrote this book.

Maybe I can explain best using an example. For each "room" - hair, face, material - he uses a similar structure. In the Material Room chapter, he spends pages 122 to 126 describing what you see when you open the Materials room interface. This is one of MANY lessons on "using the interface", which takes up all of chapter one (45 pages on how the interface works) but is ALSO repeated throughout the book.

In this case, what you see - what he will describe - is the Shader window, which has some pretty obvious stuff: a help button, two pull-down menus labelled Object and Material, and two tabs labelled Simple and Advanced. Then there's some less obvious stuff: a texture map, a variety of controls with names like "diffuse color", "ambient", "reflection" across the top and "add subsurface scattering", "set ambient occlusion", "IBL", etc. down one side.

The author completely ignores all that stuff about ambient occlusion and diffuse color. He spends page after page explaining what the "object list" (a pull-down by which you can select which object is being edited), "material list", etc., and how the "simple" tab and the "advanced" tab offer the user a selection between simplified controls vs. more advanced ones.

Then, when you do finally graduate to a real tutorial, it turns out to be pretty simple stuff. Lesson Two in my above example (the materials room chapter) is how to load and save textures. There are two sidebars on pages 129-130 that summarize the entire process of loading (p. 129) and saving (130). Really they aren't all that advanced: loading involves opening a library and double-clicking, while saving involves pressing the save button. However, he still has to spend an entire lesson on this, because he's got to talk about all the things you'll find along the way - for instance, he mentions in the text (but not the sidebar) that when you press the Save To Library button, you'll get a dialog box allowing you to name your new texture. (Because we all know how overwhelming it is to be confronted with a box demanding that you name something.)

In this - and all - lessons, it's at a VERY basic level.

"not a very good book"
To sum it up, this book wasn't much helpful. I'm new to Poser and would like to get started on Poser. The author *plods* through Poser at a snail's pace! I gave it up and am waiting for a better Poser book to come out.

"Reference manual rehash."
I bought this book just after buying Poser 6. I am a new user of Poser, and I still found it quite useless. This book is just a rehash of almost exactly what is in the reference manual that comes with the software. In fact I think there are sections where some of the information is practically "verbatim" from the reference manual. That said, it actually covers the material from the reference manual in "less" detail rather than more. :(

This book is largely a waste of money, it's only redeeming qualities are a few "somewhat" useful sidebars that have some specific instructions to 'test' certain functionality out. This is not enough to justify the cost of this book in my mind.

I'm very disappointed, and very surprised there are such "glowing" reviews for this book. I expect these glowing reviews are from people who either: expect way too little, are friends of the author or publishers, are the author or publishers themselves, or are people who are completely uninformed of what a good book is.

The only reason to purchase this book is if you don't have a copy of the reference manual because you downloaded the software or bought it second hand.

P.S. This is the first review I've ever posted on Amazon.com. Typically I don't post my opinion anywhere but I was so disappointed with this book I felt it necessary to inform people so they hopefully don't make the same mistake I did in purchasing it.

"A Must For Beginners and Those With No Poser 5 Experience"
This introduciton to Poser 6 is well written and more lucid than the manual that actually ships with the Poser 6 software. I reccomend it for anyone who has never used Poser before and anyone upgrading from Poser 4 with or without ProPack and Poser Artist. The reason I advise the upgraders to read it is that so much has changed in poser since version 4 that it can be confusing. Familiar tools have been moved and those that haven't may not work the same way as it did in prior version. The rendering engine and dialogue has been completely redone, while the material, cloth and hair rooms are complex--especially for those who haen't seen them before. I like this book because it is easy to understand and doesn't predispose that a person has had any 3D experience.

"A basic guide to both artistic and technical concepts"
If you regularly surf the image section of the web you'll undoubtedly notice many original creations stemming from the use of the Poser 6 program. Conversely, there are relatively few handbooks on Poser on the market. Kelly L. Murdock remedies this problem with his Poster 5 Revealed: The Official Guide: owners of the Poser 6 program receive a basic guide to both artistic and technical concepts, covering basic introduction through intermediate skills and presenting example projects for posing figures, creating hair styles, and more. Murdock's background in computer graphics and engineering lends to a series of lessons which provides plenty of examples and hands-on applications, with black and white images and screen shots throughout.