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"A powerful tool", I am a hobby illustrator who runs the gamut over many types of art, traditional and digital. Originally, I got Poser 3 free in a magazine.

I bought a discount copy of Poser 5 from here, and had no problems. Within a half hour I'd installed the software and downloaded a bunch of free props from Daz3d, renderotica, etc.

Now, for all purpose 3D, you need a more versatile tool. Like Caligari TrueSpace, one I'll vouch for. Or Maya, Lightwave, if you have a few thousand to trash or know a Pir8.

Generally, I like to draw by hand, then color with Painter or make a Vector image. For 3D, I use lots of time with TrueSpace setting up detailed mini-worlds. Right now, I'm building a figure from scratch for one of those projects.

So, why do I get Poser? For 'figure base' experiments. Good fast tool for getting all the poses/perspective right. I'm going to do an 80 panel project soon, and I'll use it for the figures, but draw over them with my Wacom.

I'll highly reccomend Poser 5+ for artists, specificly Illustrators. BTW-That was its original design, Poser1 was advertized in comics fan magazines to aspiring artists, a "Wooden manequin" that you could position any way you want. This is a good 'base' to help with perspective and get a start.

Other uses are for animators. Ever hear of the "Rotoscope"? With this software, and another good graphics utility, (Toon Boom, Flash) you could make another "Fire and Ice". Just have a good character design / storyboard, then have the poser characters act out the scenes. Then split the AVI and trace over the frames.

[...]Check out Renderotica.

"fun software to play with", I have used this software and have created a lot of computer generated photos with it. It was easy and fun.

"Poser 5 is an incredible piece of software!", Ever since I bought and started using Poser 5, I have been impressed with it, and after over a year of messing around with it, I still am. I have been creating my own characters with it, designing my own morphs (that is, modifications to parts of the figure either for effect or to enhance it), and I am now fully poised to start creating my own figures from scratch.

Poser 5 is an older piece of software from Curious Labs. I think it is now owned by DAZ Productions which also owns Carrara, a full blown 3d modeler and animator (I also have this product, and have reviewed it in this forum.) If some of you are familiar with Carrara (any version -- I have version 3), you will doubtless recognize the style of interface and that is no coincidence. Poser 5 uses the same basic interface and the same layout for doing various actions.

What I mean is that everything you do is done in various "rooms". You have a posing room, where you pose figures and props and arrange them, etc. You have a shader or the materials room, for applying textures, colors, etc., to figures and props. You have a setup room, where you can work with "bones" a tool for moving and manipulating organic creatures to make them move in a manner like real organisms by creating virtual skeletons for them. You can even create skeletons for new figures. There is the face room where you can create custom faces for existing Poser 5 figures. You can even take couple of photographs of a real person, front and profile views, and use them to create a custom head and apply the photograph as a texture map to a custom head and create a virtual character based on that real person, or you can use the morph dials to modify the default head to create custom characters' heads and faces. There is the hair room where you can create strand based hair simulating real hair, creating hair for your human characters, fur for animals, grass for fields, etc. There is also a cloth room where you can take modeled clothing for your characters, and "clothify" them, and the software will then calculate simulations for them so that they will behave in a manner like real cloth, responding to gravity, folding and draping, etc. That element is simply amazing. I have only started working with this aspect of Poser.

Poser 5 includes for your use, an array of Poser 5 figures, which include both clothed and nude male and female figures (complete with genitalia, which can be made visible or invisible), clothed and nude boy and girl, and hi resolution versions of the male and female characters, Poser 4 figures, and Poser 3 and 2 as well which also include male and female characters, some anatomically correct, children figures. There are also animal figures (including dog, cat, dolphin, fish, wolf) and cartoon figures and a basic array of clothing for all the Poser figures. Included are conforming clothing, which is basically tight form fitting clothing designed to move with the figure, these include swimwear, jeans, body suits, shorts, etc., and dynamic clothing which are meant to be "clothified" in the cloth room and are meant to be able to flow, drape, and so on. There are also modeled hair pieces, dynamic hair pieces (created in the hair room and saved to the library.) A small number of props also come with the set such as blocks, spheres, canes. For a little extra money, you can go to the content room, also in the Poser interface and download other props such as furniture, appliances, tools, weapons, and other articles, or if you are cheap and resourceful like me, you can model your own props in another 3D application such as TrueSpace 4, Carrara 3, or Amapi 5 (all of which I have reviewed in this forum), and import them into Poser 5 yourself and save your money. Poser natively supports *.obj files and works with these files intimately, but Poser can also import from other popular 3D formats including *.3ds, *.dxf, and a few others. Poser can also import movies in *.avi format, JPEG, and *.bmp (bitmap pictues) for use as still and animated textures and background pictures.

Now I have often heard and read that Poser 5 and other 3D modeler interfaces and so forth are "intuitive". I am not sure what they mean. Neither Poser 5 nor any 3D modeling application is "intuitive." In fact, 3D modeling in general is quite counter intuitive. Think about it, you are using a mouse and a monitor to model objects in a virtual three dimensional space. Is that intuitive? Poser like any other 3D application has to be learned.

Poser is not fully a 3D modeling environment, but it does support Python scripting in which you can create custom objects, if you are familiar with computer programming and have a bit of a mathematical background. Poser does however incorporate many 3D modeling principles, and it is a fully interactive 3D application. And you can do limited modeling operations using special deformers that come with Poser, but you cannot create objects from scratch in Poser 5, you have to create them in another 3D modeling application or use the Python scripting method.

Poser 5 can be a challenge when first starting out. Just learning to pose figures in Poser can be a challenge. The natural tendency (intuitive?) is to pose a figure like a mannequin or toy doll, that is, bend the arm here, and bend the leg there to achieve the pose you want. Not in Poser. That technique will lead to disaster. Your figure will very quickly end up in some bizarre contortion that you only thought possible in your worst nightmares.

Poser 5 figures are based on kinematics and inverse kinematics, that is, when you move a part of the body, all the other part in the chain move with it. For example, if you raise your arm from the shoulder, your hand and forearm will be affected by the motion and change position too. The extremity is affected by the actions closer to the center of the body, called the "parent", that is, the shoulder is the parent of the forearm and the hand and they both have to follow whatever the parent does. This is kinematics. Inverse kinematics works in the opposite direction. If someone for example is pulling you by the hand, your hand affects all the parents, your forearm, your upper arm, your shoulder, your torso, and eventually your entire body, especially if they are pulling your hand hard enough. Martial arts such as Jiu Jitsu and Judo very much use this principle. Thus perhaps there is a kind of "intuitive" sense here, but I don't think the majority of people grasp it right away. It certainly makes sense in animating a figure.

Thus, in order to be able to pose a figure in Poser 5, you have to ask yourself, "What part of the body do I move to make the figure do what I want?" If you want to make a figure sit or kneel down, you have to pull down the hips. When you pull down the hips, the legs bend automatically and logically at the knees. If you want a figure to do a ballet kick or karate kick, you have to raise the foot to raise the entire leg, and so on.

Posing figures requires practice and patience. Basically what I do is use mouse moves to create the general pose and then use the dials to fine tune the pose. There are so many body parts, so the task often can become daunting. But there are in the library preset poses you can use too, which can help save time.

And then there are the morphs which allow you to modify any body part, to make a person fat, thin, short, tall, etc. These provide interest in creating your own characters in Poser. Once you create your custom face in the face room, you can then customize the figure by using the morph dials to create the look you want, (and as you get more advanced you can then go on to create your own special morph targets not included in the default figure set and use them), texture the figure in the materials room (maybe the character has purple scaly skin !) and then you can save the modified figure to the figure library.

This is a complete character modeling and creating system. All the stock figures including Poser 5 figures, Poser 4, 3 and 2 can be modified, some more than others, to create unique characters, and if that were not enough, you can actually use a modeling application such as Carrara to model your own character there and then import it into Poser, enter the setup room, give it a skeleton, using the bones tool, and create a character from scratch! And it doesn't even have to be human or humanoid. It can be any kind of creature, animal, plant, monster, extraterrestrial. Of course, this is very advanced stuff, and there are whole books, manuals, and websites devoted to this. For creating characters from scratch, modifying existing figures, and so on, the book by B.L. Render, "The Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5" is one such guide (I have reviewed this book in this forum).

Poser 5 is not only a character creating application, you can also animate with it. It has a good solid key frame editor, which will allow you to animate anything in Poser, including textures, morph targets (making a muscle bulge, for example), of course any kind of dynamic movement, twisting, and bending, dynamic cloth and hair. Deformations using deformers such as "magnets" which, I have recently learned how to use can also be animated. Lights and cameras can also be animated, so for example, while the figures are moving, you can have a camera fly around them.

Poser also has a fairly decent renderer. It supports ray tracing, reflections, animated textures, volumetric lighting, and it is capable of producing quite realistic looking renders. The FireFly renderer is the best that it has, although for some basic draft renders there is also included the old Poser 4 renderer. And of interest to artists, there is also a non photorealistic renderer that can simulate drawings, paintings, etc. The shaders in Poser 5 and the renderer also supports a displacement mapping technique, which is like a bump map, but instead of merely giving the illusion of bumps on a surface, actually calculates bump displacement on a surface without actually modifying the polygon mesh. This is in addition to regular bump mapping.

There are some drawbacks and problems in Poser 5 however.

I have already mentioned that Poser is not really intuitive. You really have to take time and it requires lots of patience to learn it and get the most out of it. Poser 5 is not automatic, although Poser is certainly capable of producing realistic work, you have to work at it and work with it. It takes a kind of craftsmanship to make realistic works out of Poser 5. You don't just set a few parameters and Poser 5 does the rest for you and you can have realistic figures and realistic animations instantly.

There are a few bugs in Poser that can cause the system to crash. Sometimes when working with Poser 4 figures, the system would actually freeze completely forcing you to have to restart the system. There are also a few minor bugs in the hair room and texture room that can be annoying but are relatively harmless.

Strand based hair on figures is wonderful. But strand based hair generates a lot of polygons which can slow your system to a crawl when using the interface -- and we are not even talking about rendering the result -- if you are using ray tracing, it could take hours to render a single frame. My recommendation, use modeled hair on your figures and use strand based hair only in extreme close ups or in cases where you need dynamics, such as hair blowing in the wind or something.

The renderer is kind of slow. If you are producing an animation, I would recommend using the draft render settings rather than production render settings. Use the production renderer for producing good quality stills or if you have an extremely fast computer. I have a 3.3 GHz computer and to produce a single image using production settings still takes about 15 to 20 minutes especially if you use ray tracing (which you need to produce realistic results in most cases.)

There are only a limited selection of types of lights in Poser 5. Although you can animate lights, change colors of lights, intensity, etc. You have only infinite lights and spotlights in Poser. Furthermore, the renderer does not support lens flares or other ways to make the lights appear in the scene, if you wish to make them visible.

The renderer supports image input to 1152 x 864 maximum for using as a background image. Larger files are distorted when used in the background. The maximum document window size setting is also this 1152 x 864.



"Poser - A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET...", I never had any luck with Poser 5. I made one human and it was not too great. The program should work like Bryce 5 which is very easy to use. So I do not know how I am going to make human figures for my Artwork. I wish I knew of another 3D modeling program. Well you can try it for yourself but like the other reviews say it is very hard to use. I don't understand why they made it so hard to use. I spent $350 on it when I first bought it a long time ago. Sold it on Ebay for $150 last year. I did not get very far with the program so I cannot tell you all the problems. Hope this helps...Scott

"Would have 5 stars except for the instruction book.", I am in agreement with many reviews here. Book that comes with program.. completely useless and a very dry read at that. I got this program and out of the box was very intimidated... but a year later and my renders are simply stunning. I have only just started working with the cloth room and making my own animations. Renderosity.com and DAZ3D.com have great tutorials done by people who have worked with the program and are basically all the help you need. They also have fanstatic FREE STUFF sections which increase your library without hurting your wallet. Now that DAZ has made Michael3 and Victoria3 and Steph Petite and David FREE..(not to mention Kozaburo's fantastic Free realistic hair!!!) you no longer have to be forced to work with the base models that come with this program. Overall I highly recommend this program and do not despair... the help is out there you just need to ask the community of poser users.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"A very odd software package", Poser...hummm...where to begin? Poser 5 is a program with immense, immense potential. There is so much that one could do with this program, if one only knew how. But then, that's exactly the problem. The interface is really awful, the manual is totally worthless, and there are no good books on the basics of how to use the program. So you are basically flying blind. I have been (trying) to use Poser 3 and now 5 for about 2 years with limited success. In some ways, I prefer Poser 3. At least I can kinda use that version, and the manual that came with it was really rather good. But Poser 5 has so many cool new features that I would love to use it, if only I could find some information on how to do so. But there isn't any good basic information out there. So it is like chasing a rainbow - you just can't get there. Unless you're really clever (or cleverer than me, at least :-) . So...good luck. Maybe if you can master Posers mysteries, you can write a book for the rest of us!

"Poser 5 experiences", Poser is a difficult program to learn, partly because so many of the meshes/objects are out on the web in the user community. You should check Renderosity.com to see what Poser can do. It is an incredible program. Poser 5 seems pretty solid now 09-04 - when earlier released I stopped using it, going back to Poser 4, but the file management and morph controls are much better in 5 than in 4. However, this is not a crack the case and start using the software program.

"Fun software", Poser 5 is a lot of fun. It's well supported and you can find loads of content for it from renderosity or DAZ3d. Victoria 3 and the Angel skin from the daz3d site are totally awesome. Renders look great and it's easy to work with. It is a little slow at rendering and the interface could be a lot more streamlined.

"If You Have a Mac you NEED this program!!!", Hi I just purchased Poser 5 one week ago, I already have learned how to make simple animations and use thos in my Video editing programs, with the quick Render to quicktime it makes it easy. I also have Animation Master I bought this a couple of years ago, I have never even got off first base with that program yes both program are nice but you talk about a simple easy to get started program POSER 5 is good for you, I have an imac G4 768 Ram 800 Proccesor, and I'm not having any problems at all. So Check this program out!!! it's a good deal for the money

"Prepare to go back to school", As many people have noted you can do amazing things with Poser, however be prepared because learning to do those amazing things is an education in itself.

Downloading updates to your software is very important because the finished Poser 5 product was not really finished when it went on the market. You will find yourself surfing the web to find tutorials which are available in abundance simply because the supplied manual was no where near to being satisfactory.

Within the shipped software package you have the ability to change textures, add custom created hair, change or alter created clothing, and even add animation to your figures but again its not easy and requires hours of surfing the web and following tutorials that you must find yourself.

A very good site to see some fine finished Poser art is www.renderosity.com I have some of my own completed art work there search for zman1 in the author section. Why you're at renderosity visit the tutorial section and check out a few of them because this is what you're going to have to learn to do what you want to do. Learning to use this software package is very much like learning AutoCAD with the right education you can create things that are actually worth something monetarily however be prepared to invest large amounts of your time before you ever get close to being there.

Lastly and as before mentioned your going to either want additional clothing, characters, hair, props, etc.. you can buy some really nice ones and you can find allot of them free at places like the site listed above, you can also go one step farther and create them yourself with other expensive programs I use Zbrush however many others are out there. Environment rendering software makes a nice complement to this package such as Vue 4 or Bryce 5 (Bryce is available at www.daz3d.com now they bought all the rights and its very inexpensive compared to other packages).

Good luck and I hope you have lots of time to burn because your going to need it.