efrontier Poser 7 (PC)

Poser 7 is a unique tool for posing and rendering human figures. It's supported by a vast catalogue of commercial and free types of hair, outfits, poses and props, and a vigorous user community. And it's been used commercially in advertisements, graphic novels, book illustrations -- even clinical literature. It can be used for simple animations, or for DV quality video.

On the other hand, it has a quirky interface, can be frustrating to use (though this is true of any 3d software), and can take a very, very long time to render at the highest quality levels, and even more so if you have decided to use it to make video clips.

So is this a tool or a toy? The answer is both, or whichever you want it to be.

If you are a professional designer or illustrator, then you will need to put a few hours into learning this application in order to get out of it what you need. You'll probably have a fairly focussed idea of what you want to achieve, and, once you have it, Poser will stay in your tool box of things to use on particular occasions.

If you are a hobbyist, you will find in this application a world of possibilities to explore. How far you take it depends on how much time you are willing to put into it. But be warned: Poser can take over your life.

If you are a visual artist, ten minutes with Poser will probably give you loads of ideas for subverting the medium and generally playing mayhem with whatever the application's developers originally had in mind.

Just a couple of health warnings. Poser is a great tool for producing very fast cartoon quality renderings, or producing very high quality final renderings. But it won't turn you into an artist if you aren't already one, and it won't open the door to a career in design or illustration if you don't have the other qualities necessary.

The other is that, despite some ambitious attempts, this is not professional figure animation software. You can make some fairly exciting short clips if you have the patience, but professional animators have vastly more powerful tools at their disposal. That's not to stop you trying, of course, but the power of Poser is really in still images, and low-res animation.

If you are still wondering what Poser actually is, think of it as a photo studio where the models are infinitely patient, but also infinitely untalented. You can get them to adopt completely unrealistic poses, so it's up to you, before you press the shutter, to make sure that they look absolutely right. At max resolution and quality, you could be waiting half an hour before the picture finally appears.

Anyway, I love Poser, and I've used it both professionally and for pure fun. It's a very, very powerful product for the money.

As a user of Poser for many many years now i can't let the last reviewer put people off this software package with so many blatant mistakes and inacuracies i really don't know why he bothered. Poser 7 and Poser Pro are both excellent packages and will import into many highend 3d packages like Maya, Lightwave, Vue 6 Infinite, Cararra, Cinema 4d and 3DStudio Max. I get very tired of people not doing their homework and just complaining when they can't be bothered to even try the software properly there are many good examples and tutorials online.

I cant recommend the software highly enough it sure as hell beats modelling from scratch but if you want to model then it will even help you rig your model if you want.

Firstly, I use this exclusively for making animations which I import into SecondLife, so I cannot comment on it's 'normal/intended use' (or it's latest character/prop content, which works a heck of a lot better than the SL models). My intention here is to review this software exclusively from the point of view of someone who intends creating animations for SecondLife.

For posing and animating figures (using somewhat dated SL avatar models):

1)The Inverse Kinematics are next to useless, they are either on, or off - you can't blend in and out of IK/FK, and you get some curious effects by enabling then disabling the IKs... it's somewhat unpredictable.

2) Control over the f-curves is really limited (there are no bezier options, it's either spline or linear interpolation - or no interpolation, but you can mix the different types on different key-frames) so you end-up putting in endless corrective key frames which makes editing the animation slow and clumsy.

Animation layers are, in principle a good thing, but the manual doesn't go into detail or give practical examples of how to implement them. Also, every time I've tried using them Poser crashed :o(

Making a convincing walk cycle (without using the walk designer) for example, is an exercise in patience that most saints would give-up on... You *can* get results, but is normally in spite of the software rather than aided by it.

The user interface is not particularly intuitive, the graphics are often glitchy and there are some stability issues (although the latest service pack helps in this respect). Python scripting is useful, but it's not really documented (so you'll need a copy of PhilC's excellent 'Python for Poser manual').

In summary, for animating characters for SL, using Poser can be like pushing an elephant up the stairs. For posing Poser 7 figures for use in other 3D applications, its much better.