Customer Reviews

Curious Labs Poser 5

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Poser does one thing very well: it renders stock poses of stock characters with amazing realism. Here is the rub: the library of stock poses and stock characters is so tiny that you will quickly outgrow them. You will soon want to do more: add hair to a figure; change the color of clothing, or even add new and different clothes. But any change beyond the stock inventory will lead to innumerable headaches: a user interface designed to thwart your every effort; system crashes; poses that look unnatural; even body parts that poke through the clothing. Forget the undo: at best it will take you back one step; often you can't even undo the last action you took. Don't bother with the user manual: as others have noted, it does little more than identify the controls mysteriously placed around the user interface. Don't even bother with books such as "Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5" or "The Poser 5 Handbook." You may find a helpful clue in a tutorial somewhere on the web, but then again, it may not apply to the version of the program that you have.

So why does anyone bother with Poser? Under the proper circumstances, Poser can do amazing things. Unlike most 3-D software applications, Poser is designed to work with human and animal forms. Within a narrow window, it works very well. Poser has even spawned a cottage industry of people who make additional figures, clothing, and props for Poser. Without organizations like the Digital Art Zone and Renderosity, Poser would not be worth the money.

Yet even these organizations, which often provide very high quality materials for Poser, can't prevent its flaws from showing through. Digital Art Zone (DAZ) has created characters like Michael that are stunning in Poser. Clothing for normal Poser characters cannot easily be used on Michael, and vice versa. Even when Michael is "morphed" to a different form, his clothing will no longer fit. Once again you will be struggling with all those joint parameter dials, trying to get things right.

Having used versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 of Poser, it is clear that Poser 5 is the best of the lot, especially if you are working with multiple characters in a scene. Poser 5 also has the best support for hair of any version of the software. But it's still not very good. Some simple advice for anyone using Poser:

1) Create and clothe your character before attempting to pose him/her/it.
2) Plan out your animation carefully. If you make a mistake, you probably can't go back.
3) Save your work often
4) After everything else is done, then add hair. Once a realistic amount of hair has been added, even simple things like moving the camera will bring your system to its knees.
5) Plan to spend quite a bit extra on new figures and clothing. These will easily double the cost of owning Poser in no time at all.

Or, you could spend your money buying a Barbie and Ken doll, a digital camera, and a bunch of outfits. You would save time, money, and quite a few headaches this way...

Poser 5 really is better than version 4. There are new features such as cloth, face and hair editing windows. You can now import photographs straight into the program to apply to faces. The only problem with moving up to version 5 is that everything you had downloaded into your older version does not move into the five program and in fact this is not a seamless upgrade, you will have a Poser 4 and 5 on your computer after the install, this is the major reason I give it a 4 stars as opposed to a 5. However if I were rating the rendering time of this program alone, I would give it a 5 Stars. Poser renders super fast at 1200 res as opposed to Bryce which takes all day to do the same. If you want a character model that you don't have to build from scratch this is what you need. You can save your models as different files to import them into other programs. If you need a quick and easy person in your landscapes this is a nice way to get it. I still haven't figured out all of the functions of this program, the textures and materials applications that really manipulate the standard models they provide, but I look forward to learning more when I find the time. Works fine with XP operating system.

I've worked with Poser ever since Poser 2 came out. Initially, all you could do with the program was pose 3D dummies for use as references in traditional art. It's amazing to see how far Poser has come today. The latest version of the program has a lot of incredible features, including strand based dynamic hair, dynamic cloth, even the ability to create a character with your own face or anybody else's. If you've been using Poser 4, you'll be amazed at how much the program has been upgraded. Tasks that artists used to have to do using work arounds and other 3D programs (like creating morph targets) have now become become regular features of Poser 5. One of the best changes is the addition of a node-based materials editor. You can finally create realistic materials for all kinds of objects and characters without having to paint a texture map in some other program like Photoshop or Photopaint (but if you want, you can still use the traditional texture maps for your characters). My only complaint is this. The program is so new and powerful, and has so many additional features, it's still a bit buggy. It's not unusual for Poser 5 to lock up my computer (other 3D programs don't cause me nearly as many problems). As soon as you get this program, make sure you check Curious Labs' website for the latest service releases. They improve the performance of the program by a hundred-fold. Even then, though, save your work often. You can and will crash the program. One final note, if you've never worked with Poser or any other 3D program before, make sure you get a good book on how to use the program. The manual for this program isn't bad, but it isn't written for beginners. Also check the internet for tutorials on Poser 5 ...There's a lot of info out there, and you won't have to go far to find it.

Yes, the interface looks cute - more like a video game than a 3d graphics workspace, really. And then you try to use it and soon enough you start to wonder whether you're running some freebie test version of a new piece of software rather than a fairly expensive high profile application, complete with flashy marketing and predatory lawyers. Crashes are random and frequent. Compatibility problems abound, both with third-party content as with previous versions of Poser itself. Don't be surprised if you import a figure from Poser's own standard library and the program starts issuing warnings as soon as you attempt to edit it. No, your eyes are not deceiving you: models from earlier Poser versions are not fully compatible with Poser 5; and other applications that work well with Poser 4 or Pro may fail to work with 5 too. Soon enough the cute interface itself becomes irritating. Why is so much valuable space (and memory!) wasted on a handful of controls? Of course, you can resize the tiny document window, but then it will cover up several tools, or tools will shift and overlap each other, giving that cute interface a very amateurish look all of a sudden. The library browser is a monster, especially after you start adding content. You will be scrolling along unnecessarily large thumbnails forever to find what you want. What's wrong with a simple Windows style browser window?
Unlike most 3d-applications there is no way to maneuver objects directly in 3d space. You have to fiddle with controls, and if you want to exactly reposition figures in a scene the only way to do so is by typing in values on the x-, y- and z- position axes. That means building up a scene with interacting figures is a trial and error process. Nearly all functions are performed by typing numbers (the dials provided are horrible for mouse use), and as there is no clue as to what these numbers refer to, you will just have to try and see what happens. Figures are morphed per muscle group, and as these are indicated by abbreviations of their Latin names, you will just have to try your luck, unless you're a doctor or a physiotherapist... Here, thumbnails would have come in handy! To enhance suspense, no preview is available, and your document window offers only a very basic impression of the actual scene.
Also unlike many 3d-applications in this price bracket and aiming for this segment of the market (hobbyists), Poser is anything but fun to work with. It offers the most surprising sources of frustration, and I came close to hating it, but as there are few alternatives for what it does (apart from modeling your own humans, which is fairly complicated) I'll just have to put up with it. Unlike many 3d applications, you will not learn it by playing around; little room for play anyway with only one undo. Also, most functions don't work intuitively or by themselves; rather, you have to fiddle a control in palette A, then do something in palette B, and then have to access yet something else in an old-fashioned drop-down list to make it all work. One wrong step and voila, there's your next crash: your system will freeze and even with Ctrl/Alt/Del you'll have to wait ages for things to lock down. That's another typical Poser feature: slowness (for your information, I'm running it under XP Home, on a Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz PC with a 60 Gb hard drive, 1 Gb of RAM and a nVidia Geforce fx5950 256 Mb video card).
Don't expect the manual to be of any help. It's basically a very expansive feature listing, which will not tell you how to go about doing things, or will leave out so much basic information that the instructions are meaningless to the uninitiated. Prepare instead to spend many hours on user forums, and after a while Poser may actually begin to make some sense to you. At some point you might even muster enough courage to venture into the Hair, Material, Cloth and Setup "rooms", where new, undreamt of horrors await you. Just try to create a working "hair group", and experience how a simple action (selecting and grouping parts of an object) can be made difficult. At times the reactions of the program seem completely random. The material room uses a peculiar system of plugs and sockets to interconnect several material modifications which is again very cute, if anything but obvious. Many other apps perform that very same function in a single clearly laid out panel. Avoid the Content room at all times. If you succeed in entering it at all, it will simply redirect you to an internet market place for 3d accessories, with download links that do not work.
So isn't there any good news? Well, in fairness, once you have succeeded to complete a scene, the final render can look quite good. Don't expect anything remotely photorealistic though: generating convincing humans on a PC is far too complex for that. Rather, you will get the digital equivalent of excellent window dummies, inevitably plastic-like and somewhat wooden, but very useful for populating 3d scenes generated in other applications, as long as you avoid extreme close-ups. Meanwhile one can only hope that CuriousLabs can be persuaded to abandon its obsession with uniqueness and make Poser 6 a bit less curious than the current version; a move towards the mainstream would greatly benefit this undeniably useful software. They might, for instance, want to learn a lesson or two from their friends at e-on Software, who created the exemplary Vue-programs.

First off, I do wanna say that there are things about this version that are far better, but not much. My first complaint is the interface, you would think after a while they would scrap the "Pretty" Interface for something more functional. It is cluttered and sloppy. Second, the system requirements for this are WAY off. I am running a pentium 2.4ghz machine with 1gig of memory, geforce 4 card, and 120gb hard drive, and this program crawls at best. And every now and then, my computer just can't take any more, and shuts it down. With no warning. The character modeling may be better, but it is not for beginners whatsoever. So if you are not familier with Poser or any other 3d modeling programs, you best avoid this and start out easy with something like truespace or Vue D'esprit.

My advice is to anyone wanting to get thier hands on this, wait until Curious Labs decides to let people try out a demo, if I had had the chance to try a demo, I would not have paid money on this.

I have been working in 3d design for years, and am a registered 3d studio max user, I have also used programs such as Maya and Softimage in different studios I have worked for. My advice to Curious labs? Release a different edition of this software, with a less graphical interface and more functionality and optimization.

This program has the potential to be AMAZING, if you have the patience and have never heard the word "Deadline" in your life...

I use Poser 5 in a professional context. We make education videos and sell them to public and private schools. In each project we do, there is about 1/2 to 1 full hour of animation. Basically, Poser 5 saved my a**. I was able to IMMEDIATLY do the character animations needed for our first project. This would have been impossible with any other program. Because our animation needs have become more complex and custom, I am now using Maya. Having used both the greatest 3D animation package on the planet (Maya Unlimited $7000) and Poser 5 ($185 currently), I have a few things to say.

Usefulness as an into to 3D animation -

Poser is the BEST! Hash comes close, but Poser is MUCH better for the novice who wants to focus on animations and not both animations AND modeling. With Poser you get much more access to usable content than HASH. Yes, any attainment of quality will still require work. But the average person will do more in thier first three days of using Poser than in their first three months of using Maya, 3D Max, or any other major 3D modeling/animation application. If you want to learn keyframe animation, you can jump right in and do all you want. In Maya I have to build my own characters, create the rigging (make it movable), and setup my own morph targets and custom animation controls. That is a LOT of WORK! All of this is done for you in Poser! For those of you who say its too difficult, and to many of you who mention specific problems and act like its a bug. Learn to use the program, its worth it! Yes, it takes more effort than using notepad! But its a heck of a lot faster and easier to use than the major 3D animation programs.

Program stability and efficiency -

I have licensed copies of poser on two machines, and have switched off with a total of 6 different computers (including one laptop). I find it to be very useable with regard to stability. I agree that dynamic hair and cloth are problematic to use on even a higher end machine. But I have to tell you, if I set up a scene in Maya with all kinds of cloth effects and volumetric effects, a 5 minute animation could render for days. Yes, Maya does it better and with more stability (it darn well should for $7000). Even without dynamic hair and cloth, POSER TOTALLY ROCKS as an intro to 3D keyframe animation, and with proper learning and practice, you can get professional results.

Some comments sounded like users were surprised that Poser does not work as well on a lower spec machine. No 3D animation app does. Keep in mind that to render a short 3 minute animation of the highest quality can take days. If you add any OS, hardware or application conflicts, you can have serious problems.

The best configuration for Poser is a dedicated machine (2.6 ghz or higher) and a gig of ram. It should be dedicated because rendering animations takes a long, long, long time (on any software) and you need to have a second computer to check your email or whatever. The other reason is that it should ideally not be connected to the internet. This will allow you to eliminate as many background tasks and system services as possible. It makes a difference to the stability of any resource hungry program. However, I have no problems producing a lot of animations, and I MEAN A LOT, (sans hair and dynamic cloth) with off the shelf computers of average specs, the stability is fine. If you have problems on a decent machine, check your OEM configuration, running background apps, etc.

Model content and expense -
for the price, Poser gives more value than any software I have ever used. Yes, you will want many more models than Poser gives. But 3D animation is an expensive prospect no matter what software you use. I bought a fully rigged Poser ghost model off DAZ for $4.95. A Maya rigged ghost was $200.00 (more than the cost of Poser). Poser user have access to tons of great content at the cheapest model prices on the planet. Unless you make your own models, it the least expensive platform to buy content for. Not to mention that MOST content for major 3D applications do not come rigged. That is a serious issue. ALL Poser specific content you find on the net that need to be rigged, comes rigged for animation. (Daz is the first place to look) You can also import any major format and rig it yourself if you want. Creating animation hierarchies in Poser is very twitchy compared to Maya. But you do get what you pay for. That Poser offers the ability to do it at all is a great deal for the money. I have rigged a number of static 3DS models in Poser and used them successfully. It does take some learning, but hey...this is 3D animation, it should take some learning.

Is Poser worth it? -

If you love animation and cant afford the top programs, you will not regret getting Poser. I have created complex scenes in Poser with oceans that have animated waves with great looking monster characters, animated clouds in the sky, have also done all kinds of character animation in scenes, including the use of body motion capture data for more realism. You can do anime (more and more content available for that), and any other style (both cartoon and realistic) supported by available content.

Is Maya better? Oh Heck yeah!!!
But if you want to learn keyframe 3D animation, or need an inexpensive 3D animation solution for video or multimedia, this is an awesome program. I love it and will still use it for some animation work, even though we use Maya (You see, we can easily afford multiple copies of Poser, but cannot afford multiple copies of Maya). So once the Maya network if rendering, we will still dig out Poser to get our animation jobs done.

What Poser needs the most?
1. Network and batch rendering built in.
2. More stability for dynamic hair and cloth.

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.

Some of the writers here may me shocked, but Poser 5 is the reason, why Curious Labs is now a sinking ship! This software is full of bugs and the render times are much too long. Two companies now show a reaction and publish their own software: DAZ Studio and Horus3D. When you look at the website of Horus3D, you'll see that a Vicky3-Figure can be raytraced within 3 Seconds with transparency! Poser? How long do you need to do this? So nobody should tell me, that Poser 5 is that slow, because it isn't possible to be faster! The main-programmers of Curious Labs has left the company after the Poser 5 disaster. The community of Poser is really fed up with this version and all it's patches!

Bought Poser 5, got it, no serial number inside. The area in the CD packet where the serial is suppose to be, is blank. The person responsible for putting in the serial numbers on the assembly line must have been asleep. Sent an email to Curious Labs, no reply yet. Can't even look at the program without providing a serial number. Can't return the item either as the CD packet is open now because that's where the Serial Number is suppose to be at. Money down the drain so far and not very happy at the moment.

I've always loved artwork and doing artwork and over the years I've become more and more interested in digital art and 3D art and programs of that nature. I would have given this product a better rating if it had not been for the poor quality in user manuals, lack of any really good tutorials, missing documentation (that by they way are NOT all supplied by download at curiouslabs.com download site), the fact that I had to download a patch from the very beginning (after all this time that the product has been out you would think that they would have patched the program discs and content discs so that you didn't have to wonder if previous patches were accounted for in the latest patch or not)

The program seems to hold a lot of potentential but if your just beginning to learn to use 3D programs, trust me this one is not at all easy to learn to use and not only that it appears to require the use of other expensive 3D and paint programs in order to get any satisfaction out of it.

The referance manual that comes with the program is poor at best. It comes across as being nothing more than an introduction to the features of the program but offers little to nothing in help in learning how to use the features to produce even the most basic creation. I've scoured the web for tutorials and keep running across the same problem. The best tutorials all require other very expensive programs for prework and post work.
This is not good news for someone on a limited buget to spend on 3D software. Unless you already have or can afford programming like Lightwave, Deep UV, Maya, 3D stuido Max, corel painter 6 or 8, Vue, other plug-in programs for poser and more likely than not a combination of more than one, You are most likely to be disappointed in this programming.

I was especially disappointed in the lack of control in the hair and cloth rooms. Sure they have lots of dials and settings to be set, and you will be working with vectors. But lets say you want to create a finger wave on your model. It certainly wont work in the hair room no mater how much you bend, move or curl the hair. why? because you only have control over the end of the hair not the middle section. This makes doing hair work in the hair room very tedious. There are ofcourse other ways to make hair but if you don't know of these other ways you'r going to spend hours searching for a tutorial just like I am and still have yet to find one that will work with the other programming I acually could afford and have available to me.

The cloth room is yet another confusing area for me at least. mind you that if your familar with these rooms and know how to use them you probably will have little problems but if not... It's a hair pulling experiance. I've read various tutorials including the user manual and still have no clue how the heck I'm supposed to produce even the simplest no frills dress, gown, shirt or what ever. I read one Tutorial that said you may want to pre Drape your cloth before heading to the cloth room but they failed to explain how you would go about doing this.

The setup room on the other hand was nice in that you could add flexability to object files that you export/import so that you can turn them into figures/models clothing items made in the program or with third party programming that is rigid and unflexable can be made flexable in this room and then conformed to your model in the pose room. I still have some difficulties with this though because if you do not group them just right you will end up with broken cloth items that come appart when you bend and pose them. But if you have a clothing item already made the cloth room does help in frame by frame posing to help the cloth move in a more flexable appearing way.

Content that was supposed to appear on the content CD is missing even after all this time also. There is a download from the curiouslabs.com download site however who wants to pay this and still have to download what you were supposed to have gotten with it. Not to mention that but even after downloading this content not all of it is there either.

Online manual available at curiouslabs is the same one word for word image for image as the one that comes with the program.

The Tutorials that are currently available online at curiouslabs provide little insite.

And the product recommended system requirments seem to be a little less than what the program truely needs to run effectively but it will run on the recommended. I just dont understand why rendering uses 100% of a 1.8G processor if it isn't supposed to need that much.

others who have experiance with other poser products or other 3D programs may find this product useful, but beginners will most likely like myself find this to be a hair pulling experiance.