Curious Labs Poser 5 for Mac OSX

by Curious Labs, Inc.

Product Features

• 3D-character design and animation tool for artists and animators
• Over 70 ready-to-use, high-resolution 3D figures
• Fully poseable and photo-realistic textured models
• Libraries with hundreds of poses, expressions, clothes, props, and more
• Create 3D character art, scenes, and animations

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000D94BT
• Item model number: 814956004230
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 3, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,816 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #78 in Software > Graphics > 3-D

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Just some of Poser 5 for Mac OSX key new benefits include:

• All-new, highly accurate, 3D human figures with fully articulated hands and feet, featuring photorealistic texture maps and facial morphs
• Render breathtaking images or movies with FireFly, Poser 5's powerful new renderer. FireFly is a hybrid micro-polygon and Ray Trace render engine, which gives you control over the rendering process. Use Ray Traced refraction and reflection, powerful node-based shaders, render-time polygon smoothing, 3D motion blur, and much more to output realistic final renders.
• Grow strand-based hair on figures and props in your Poser 5 scene using the new Hair Room! Growth controls allow you to control aspects such as length and thickness. Styling controls allow you to shape your hair--make it thick or thin, straight or curly. Apply dynamics such as gravity to your hair to create realistic effects during animation.
• Clothify your prop to transform it into realistic dynamic cloth complete with physics. Assign collision objects to make the cloth flow and drape around any object in your scene. Add the new Wind Force prop to create realistic wind effects for your animations.
• Want to create a virtual you? Import facial-photos to easily model new characters and create texture maps. Poser 5’s new Face Room allows you to create lifelike results by mapping any face onto a 3D head.
• Poser 5’s new Material Room lets you create amazing materials using powerful node-based shaders. Build a shader tree using one or more shader nodes. Combine procedurals, image maps, animations, fractal, and math nodes to create virtually any material texture you can imagine.

Product Description

Poser 5 uses a diverse collection of ready-to-use 3D character models for superior art and animation. It's an 3D character design tool for making posing and animating fast and easy. Map facial photos, grow and style dynamic hair, and create dynamic cloth to add extraordinary realism to your figure. Access new content, such as figures, poses, faces, and expressions Fully customizable interface with collapsible palette, plus new sound files, props, textures, templates, samples, and demos

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars amazing modeling program, October 13, 2004

By 

Kaleberg "one_kaleberg" (Port Angeles, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Curious Labs Poser 5 for Mac OSX (CD-ROM)

I've barely scratched the surface with Poser 5.

I've been using Poser since the first version, and each new release is more full of features than the last. The models and posing abilities of versions 1, 2 and 3 had a variety of flaws, but starting with version 4, Poser has turned into an extremely useful program for anyone who wants to do rendering with the human figure.

I gather that some people use Poser to produce final products. I can swear that some of those airline seat information cards use Poser models. I tend to use Poser the way one uses a figure reference guide, to figure out how the bodies are structured, and how perspective works with them.

Poser 5 has a nice set of human models, male and female. It also has a few animals. The latest version is so chock full of features that it is hard to figure out where to begin. Let's see. There are the new models, the split screen multi-way posing window, the face and body morphing features, a bigger than ever pose library with full body, hand, face and lip poses. These libraries can save a lot of work.

The morphing features let you start with their "standard" model and change the body type or facial features by sort of blending the base model with an exagerated model in three dimensions. The lip poses let you do lip synching movies based on phonemes.

Two new features I have started exploring include dynamic cloth and dynamic hair. Poser 5 actually solves the differential equations for draping cloth and moving hair. Apparently, you can dump in any 3D model to use as a clothing model. You "clothify" it and constrain it with respect to the body where you wish, for example, at the waist. Then you can turn on the air currents and set the figure in motion. Play back the animation, and the clothing swoops and drapes.

The hair is similar. You set up hair growth models and the hair interacts with the body, with air currents, with gravity and with itself. The model can run like a pig when you set up a complicated model with cloth and hair going every which way, but in a few minutes, you get something surprisingly similar to real world hair. No more buzz cuts; Rapunzel lives. (I haven't actually tried to model someone climbing up someone else's hair, but I wouldn't be shocked to learn it could be done).

I'm a total amateur, and just wanted Poser to move some limbs around, but I've been blown away by the package. For $170, it's a whole lot of software and models for the money.

So, why haven't I given Poser a five star rating? Well, it is rather clunky to use. It's hard to do fine adjustments without going to the awkward dial based interface. There are no constraint planes. It takes over your entire screen. You can move the various controls around, but you can't make the window smaller so you can look at a reference picture in iPhoto. Their interferes with the Dock when working with animation.

That's enough whining.

Poser 5 is a great program, and a real value for the money. I gather they can't make it more Macintosh window system friendly because PC users tend to look at only one window at a time. I'm just grateful that they've done a Macintosh port, and a good one at that.