Poser Figure Artist [OLD VERSION]

by eFrontier

Product Features

• Quick Start onscreen step-by-step Project Guides interactively help users to create projects
• Extensive hierarchical content Library, with integrated web link to the Content Paradise website
• Reference documentation, including Les Pardew's book Figure Drawing with Virtual Models, eleven classic reference paintings by famous artists, and the Poser Figure Artist Tutorial Manual
• Shadow rendering options with Ambient Occlusion and Soft Raytraced Shadows
• Configurable render styles using the FireFly render engine or the Sketch Designer for a multitude of photorealistic or non-photorealistic artistic designs

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000JGF40G
• Item model number: PSA-W10-DE-R
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 9, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,509 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com

Poser Figure Artist is a virtual studio providing highly realistic human models to help artists create human figure art for canvas, sculpture or digital artwork. Poser Figure Artist is perfect for artists who want to use the human form in their artwork or studies, and would prefer an option to wooden mannequins and costly, live models.

Download PDF Datasheet

Poser Figure Artist takes Poser’s diverse feature set and focuses it for the generation of images featuring human models.

Easily Design and Pose 3D Figures
Poser Figure Artist is the premier 3D virtual model tool for artists. Create 3D models using a diverse collection of ready-to-use 3D human figures, props and accessories. Place those models into any scene using Poser Figure Artist's powerful and intuitive posing tools. Poser Figure Artist's innovative interface makes figure design and posing fast and easy.

• Select from included Content as a great starting point for unique figure design.
• OpenGL hardware accelerated preview offers improved performance with figure Posing and Preview renders.
• AutoBalancing helps to realistically pose figures.
• Interactive Click and Drag figure posing makes figure design completely intuitive--artists can focus on the scene, rather than the dials and numbers.
• The Direct Manipulation tool allows you to interactively rotate, translate and scale objects directly in the Document window.
• Inverse Kinematics (IK) delivers natural character motion by modeling the hierarchical interactions of bones and joints, so that when you move a hand, the arm naturally follows.
• Multiple Document Display Styles, including the configurable Cartoon Shading preview style, allow you to approximate the final render results as you work.
• The Editing Tools, with functions such as Twist and Rotate, facilitate figure posing by putting common tasks at your fingertips.
• Deformers, including Magnets and Waves, deform your object’s geometry to create different effects.

Interactive Click and Drag figure posing makes figure design completely intuitive.

Rich Libraries of Included Content
Poser Figure Artist ships with an extensive Content Library, with eight categories including a wide variety of figures in various preset poses, as well as props, lights, cameras, and accessories. All of this content is easily accessed via the Library room, which offers a hierarchical organization and thumbnail previews to help you find and select content quickly and easily.

• With Clothing designed specifically for each included figure, Poser Figure Artist enhances your artistic endeavors by providing yet more options for customizing your figures.
• Prop-based Hair designs make the creation of diverse characters even easier.
• Accessories enable you to supplement your figures with distinctive extras to make them truly individual.
• Props include anything from balls to furniture to walls. Whatever you need to complete your Poser scene!
• Low-resolution Figures are available for populating simple to complex scenes while conserving resources.

Poser Figure Artist Tutorial Manual.

Quick Start Guide
The Quick Start guide is an onscreen step-by-step interactive guide that takes users through the necessary steps to quickly create scenes within Poser Figure Artist. The Quick Start guide includes five separate Projects: Get Started, Pose Figure, Add Props, Lighting, and Rendering Styles. Each of these Projects walks you through a different aspect of building a scene within Poser Figure Artist.

• Page by page guide layout allows users to work at their own pace, skip forward or go back. You are in complete control!
• Follow along with the Quick Start guide, or use it as a starting point for your own individual creations.
• The easily accessible Quick Start dialog makes it simple to return to a previous project, or switch to a new one.

Use Content Paradise to Find More 3D Content
The Content Paradise is your gateway to leading marketplaces that provide both free and for-sale Poser content. Poser Figure Artist includes an embedded link to the Content Paradise, with its extensive offerings of content designed by e frontier's partners including Zygote, Jolly, Renderosity, Cubed, Sixus1Media, RuntimeDNA, Shader's Cafe, and The Forge. For Windows users, Poser's Download Manager can auto-install most downloaded content and add it to the Library room.

Follow along with the Quick Start guide, or use it as a starting point for your own individual creations.

Realistic Lighting, Shadows and Ambient Occlusion
Lighting is an essential component of any 3D image. Lights add colors, cast shadows, create specific effects, and set the tone for your scene. Poser Figure Artist’s Light controls allow you to add and individually configure different types of light sources in your Poser scene. When these light configuration options are combined with Poser Figure Artist’s powerful rendering tools, the lighting possibilities are unlimited!

• Unlimited light sources provide all-important shadowing and light effects, to make your characters and scenes look like the real world.
• Image Based Lighting (IBL) allows you to use any image map as a comprehensive 360 degree light source, providing realistic lighting based on complete light data for a given space.
• Point Lights add omnidirectional lighting effects to your scenes, enabling you to place your light source directly into your scene to cast shadows and generate other lighting effects from a specific source point.
• Infinite and Spotlights provide powerful options for illuminating your outdoor and indoor scenes, whether you want general ambient lighting for all objects, or select lighting effects focused on specific parts of your scene.
• Point At control enables you to aim directional lights automatically by targeting them towards specific figures or objects.

The quality and placement of shadows in a rendered scene are critical to the believability of the image being presented. Poser Figure Artist includes several features to support artists in rendering more true to life shadow effects, giving your scenes a whole new level of added realism.

• Ambient Occlusion makes figures seem as though they are in the natural lighting environment of the real world. (See below for more information.)
• Soft Raytraced Shadows gives you the power of raytraced rendering, plus the realism of soft shadow edges. (See the Rendering section for more information.)

Ambient Occlusion makes figures and objects appear as though they are in a natural lighting environment, thus providing a new degree of realism. Ambient Occlusion darkens surfaces within a scene whose exposure to light is blocked by other objects. This effect uses raytracing to calculate the degree to which other objects within a scene occlude the ambient light of a surface at a given point. Surfaces with more occlusion will be rendered as darker than surfaces with little or no occlusion.

Use the Camera to Enhance Your Vision
The Camera represents your window into the Poser Workspace. You can use the Camera as a director would, to set up your ideal camera shots for each individual image. Or, you can take advantage of the benefit that comes with 3D work, of being able to render a scene from multiple angles.

• Interactive Camera controls allow you to quickly navigate around your scene, without having to interrupt your creative flow to change your point of view.
• Configurable Camera parameters allow you to rotate, zoom, or orbit the camera along any of the three 3D axes independently.
• The Cameras Library allows you to used saved camera positions to quickly jump between viewpoints, such as for doing detailed posing work and then checking the results from the final perspective.

FireFly contains many controls that let you define exactly how you want your rendered images to appear.

Create and Render Powerful Images with FireFly
Create both photoreasitic and non-photorealistic images with the FireFly render engine. FireFly contains many controls that let you define exactly how you want your rendered images to appear. FireFly is a hybrid micro-polygon and Raytrace renderer that uses subdivision surface polygon rendering to generate truly breathtaking results. Poser Figure Artist includes many powerful options for the FireFly renderer, giving artists the ability to create incredibly lifelike and stunningly beautiful renders.

• New Image Based Lighting (IBL) allows you to use any image map as a comprehensive 360 degree light source, providing realistic lighting based on complete light data for a given space.
• Ambient Occlusion is available on every light to create accurate soft shadow effects, giving scenes a true sense of naturally realistic lighting.
• Cartoon Outlines for cartoon renderings add definition to cartoon characters.
• Configurable Smooth Shading through crease angle support renders crease edges between polygons as smooth, continuous surfaces rather than hard edges.
• Simple and fast access to Render Presets, from draft to high-end production options, allow you to save and reuse your preferred render settings, thus saving your time for other creative endeavors.
• Render-time Polygon Smoothing (Surface Subdivision) smoothes visible rough edges resulting from sparse polygon mesh division, resulting in truly continuous smooth shading effects.

Use Sketch Designer for Artistic Effects.

Use the Sketch Designer for Non-PhotoRealistic Renders
The Sketch Designer render engine provides support for non-photorealistic (NPR) stylized renders, such as pencil drawings or watercolors. Sketch Designer provides customizable simulation of black-and-white or colored brush strokes, allowing you to create images that look like they were done using fine art tools rather than the computer. And Sketch Designer’s straightforward interface and preview render window make it simple to experiment and create beautiful artwork, even if you’ve never had a single art class!

• Create Artisitic Images using customizable brush settings, to simulate pen, pencil, pastel, and charcoal drawing styles, as well as watercolors and paintings.
• Works on objects, backgrounds and edges, so you can transform your entire 3D scene into a work of fine art.
• Many controls, such as line length and angle, allow you to customize the appearance of your sketch render for truly unique results.

Further Your Figure Studies
Poser Figure Artist includes the following documentation:

• Figure Drawing with Virtual Models: Les Pardew’s book, Figure Drawing with Virtual Models, is included with this version of Poser Figure Artist. This book can be accessed directly from the Tutorial room within Poser Figure Artist.
• Reference Picture Library: The Reference Picture Library is a collection of eleven classic paintings by Rubens, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and van Eyck, all depicting human figures in various scenes. The Reference Picture Library can be accessed directly from the Tutorial room within Poser Figure Artist.
• Poser Figure Artist Reference Manual: This Reference Manual is included in both hard copy and in electronic PDF format on the Poser Figure Artist CD. The Poser Figure Artist Reference Manual can also be accessed directly from the Tutorial room within Poser Figure Artist.
• Poser Figure Artist Tutorial Manual: The Poser Figure Artist Tutorial Manual provides step-by-step tutorials to assist you in mastering different aspects of Poser Figure Artist, including figure posing, adding props, rendering tips, and more. This manual is available in PDF format on the Poser Figure Artist CD. The Poser Figure Artist Tutorial Manual can also be accessed directly from the Tutorial room within Poser Figure Artist.

Product Description

Poser Figure Artist software provides virtual 3D models allowing artists and graphic designers to draw, learn and explore the human figure and poses of the human body in 3D. Poser Figure Artist includes models with hundreds of poses and facial expressions, hair, clothing and lighting, plus is integrated with an instructional figure drawing guide to provide a powerful learning environment, with all the tools artists need to draw right out of the box.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference tool for figure drawing, December 21, 2006

By 

Steven McPeak (Nashville, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poser Figure Artist [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I purchased Poser Artist after first downloading the demo offered at e-frontier website. Here's a review of some of the features. The program is loaded with LOTS of goodies too many to really get into so consider this an overview of the most outstanding items.

After startup, the program is like an open book on the screen. There is a figure, `James' on the left hand side, which is the default that can be changed to something else. Below the figure are the controls for lighting, movement of the figure and camera. On the right hand side are tabs and choices for different figures, poses, clothes, props, etc. Even at the basic level you pick a figure, pick a pose, render the scene and start drawing. The figure `renders' in a beautiful photographic style. The rendered scene even on my laptop looks very realistic. I was amazed the first time I rendered a scene at the amount of detail and shading seemed life-like. I usually save the render to a jpg and open it up with the pc's photo viewer. I can then zoom in or out and see all the details.

There are several figures that come with the program, James, the male, Jessie, the female, a young girl and a young boy. James and Jessie both come with different ages, 30, 50, 75 as well as a `heroic' James and a thin Jessie. Also, which I like a lot are the skeleton and `stick figures'. I still do stick figure drawings to see the basic body movement, even after 30 years of sketching. There are various props included for the figures to stand on or by. As well as clothes and clothing items. As for the figures be all the same color, I don't find that to be that to be limiting since I know what other races look like I can easily change a skin tone or specific race feature.

I like the way multiple figures can be added to a scene. And the figures are in perspective. With the moveable camera angles and lengths you can setup scenes to show foreshortening and correct perspective. The figures can be placed so that they look like there is interaction between them. You can place figures in conversations, walking past or with each other. There is a movable horizon line and perspective lines which you can turn on or off.

One of the great features is the Poses. Several types are included from the classic poses, to common activities as brushing teeth. There are even comic book action hero poses which I found to be really fun to work with. It's an easy thing to freeze to figures in the middle of a fist fight and then sketch out the action. You have the ability to change a pose to suit what you're looking for. All the figures are easily moveable and move in a realistic manner. They have a center of gravity, if you move a leg, the hip moves to balance it self as real person would. This makes for much more realistic looking drawing. You can rotate the figure, move in or out. Move the camera around to various angles just like on a movie set.

There is tool where you can change body form. All the include figures are in excellent condition. With the `Magnet' tool you can make a figure add on the weight. This does take some practice to understand how it works, but I've created figures and saved them for later use. The poses will work with self created figures, but you have to adjust the pose for the new figure. All poses and figures can be saved for later. There an online manual and tutorials. I read the manual after working with the program some to learn more about how to do something. But basically once I started the program I found it easy to use.

The software has replaced my mannequins and photo references I've collected over the years. I can even print out a pose, but I usually just work from the screen since I can zoom in and get a better view. It's saved me money on finding a model or joining a class. I don't have to worry about finishing a drawing before time runs out. I can set down and do a quick sketches or a finished painting at my leisure.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A digital tool for the traditional artist., June 26, 2007

By 

C. D. ADAMS "Artist" (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poser Figure Artist [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Poser Figure Artist is for the artist who draws, paints, sculpts, or uses a stylus and needs a model. It's not a useful 3D art creation tool. Do you ever flip through the pages of your figure drawing book looking for the desired pose, the correct hand position, the angle you want? Poser Figure Artist allows you to position the human body in any way imaginable.

Upside:
The most obvious benefits of Poser Figure Artist is that it gives you a model that is more lifelike than a wooden model, more visual and adaptive than a drawing book, and Figure Artist allows you to work with implausible poses a live model would never agree to.

There are aspects of the software that are very useful, such as the basic packaged poses that include running, throwing, etc. and you can adjust them to exaggerate the motion.

You can also pose as many figures in one scene as you like. The camera angle is fully adjustable in free space.

Lighting color, and position can be adjusted.

Fortunately each model has variations that make them more muscular or thin, and changes their proportions.

The downside:
Of course you can't design anything, including clothing.

The package does not include a wide variety of models. You only receive four models a man, woman, boy, and girl.

The boy and girl models, Ben and Kate apparently don't have hair, their hair is not included on the installation CD, so they're oddly bald. It must have been a mistake. Their clothing options are also very limited.

Poser Figure Artist also claims to provide multiple ethnicities but sadly they have to be purchased separately through the content website. Additionally you won't find any diverse selection of faces to draw.

While Figure Artist comes with various facial expressions, they can't be adjusted.

Limits to the motion of the figures are wacky, even when at their strictest a body can be twisted to unrealistic limits,...which brings me to my next qualm.

Multiple undos or a history pallet is an option that is missing and is needed when you over manipulate a figure and can't go back.

Summary:
Poser is suited for the traditional artist. I use Poser Figure Artist only for getting the Pose I want, and that's what it excels at and was designed for.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CHECK IT OUT..., December 20, 2006

By 

L. Hellfritsch (La Selva Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poser Figure Artist [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I am not sure what is up with those other reviews, but I had no problems with this product. I am a fine artist, an oil painter working on her BFA, and even though I am not a "computer person" it was very easy to install this program on my computer and use it. I only paint from live models so at first I was really skeptical about using a virtual one but it turned out to be really great! The model is 3D so it totally works to paint from, and you can move all the way around it, zoom in, everything. And I didn't have to worry about taping and all that to get the pose back after the model takes a break. I use my knowledge of anatomy to help me while I am painting and I can make adjustments as I work. The company has all sorts of other things you can get to go with this too, like more clothes, furniture, different models (of different ethnicities), tons of stuff. It really is pretty cool, and it costs a lot less than paying a live model to pose for a painting!