Software Review - Poser 7 From e frontier

Creating 3D images has become easier throughout the years because of the increase in the number of products out there made specifically for creating 3D scenes. There are  difficulties and challenges. To really bring these scenes to life, you need people to populate the image and that is where the real problem is. Not only to populate, but to animate the human figure, and make it look real is the toughest challenge of all.

That is where Poser comes in. Poser is a tool for creating, and animating human, and animal figures. Poser 7 is the latest version of e frontier's 3D figure design and animation solution. It is capable of customizing figures and scenes by mapping facial photos to create realistic 3D portraits. It can create both stills, and animations, create output movies, and images for use in web, print, and video projects. You can also export your creations for use in other applications.

Poser runs on Windows (2000 or greater), or Mac (OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4) with 700 MHz (1 GHz or faster recommended), 512 MB RAM (768 or more recommended), OpenGL enabled graphics card (Recent NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon preferred), and 1 GB free hard-disk space (4 GB recommended). Version 7 now offers native Intel Macintosh Support as well.

So, what's new with Poser 7? A lot! Along with an extensive array of figures that were included with previous versions of Poser, you now get high-resolution figures that can be used in scenes, and animations. Some of these are so realistic that you won't be able to tell if they are designed, or real.

• 3D Figures Ready for Posing – First there are high-resolution, fully rigged male, female, boy, and girl figures. There are still, and animated poses for these figures, which gives you a much broader range of options.
• Universal Poses – You can now apply any pose to any biped figure within Poser regardless of the figures joints. This means that you can take a dog pose; say sitting, and apply it to a human figure. You can take poses from earlier versions and re-save them which will convert them to Universal poses.
• Rich Libraries of Included Content – This allows you to organize content from any runtime library, or category in to a single collection. This means that you can create collections without having to change your content structure. You can also save body transformation information which makes it easy to reuse body transformations without having to recreate them. There is also new dynamic and conforming clothing, as well as new strand based, and prop based hair design.
• Content Paradise – Is a gateway to the leading Poser market place that provides both free, and for sale Poser content.
• Create Personalized Heads and Textures- Poser 7 now allows you to create personalized heads, and textures in the Face room by using just two photographs. This will allow you to emulate actual individuals. You can then apply texture maps to add age, ethnicity, or even create alien beings.
• Realistic Lighting - Poser 7 now supports High Dynamic Range Images which will allow you to render lighting similar to analog photo film. You can also add, or replace lights in your scene, as well as using unlimited light sources.
• 3D Character Animation – will allow you to bring your scenes to life by animating figures, props, cameras, lights, and materials. By using the Animation palette, and Keyframe controls, it makes it easy to animate your scenes. With the new Visibility Animation, you can animate the visibility of individual objects making them appear, and disappear at will.
• Real-Time Preview – allows you to make realistic pre-render previews of materials allowing you to make your working preview closer to your final output. It even supports texture resolutions up to 4096 x 4096.
• Create Images and Animations with FireFly – With the FireFly rendering engine, you can create both photorealistic, non-photorealistic, and animations. FireFly now offers Multi- Threaded Rendering which takes advantage of multi-core, and multi-processor systems

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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