Poser 7 3D Figure Design and Animation [OLD VERSION]

by eFrontier

Product Features

• Render more effectively with multi-threaded rendering and tiled texture loading
• Easily create 3D human art for web, print media and fine illustrations, film pre-visualization, populating architectural scenes,Flash animations, games
• Includes gigibytes of additional content to quickly start and learn to work in 3D
• New version includes lip synching, character morphing tools, multiple undo's, non-linear animation support (NLA),
• Output human figure art in many styles, and export to other 3D programs
• New version includes high dynamic range imaging support (HDRI), smart Quickguide plus many other enhancements

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000KK4330
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 26, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,762 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #23 in Software > Graphics > 3-D
  • #29 in Software > Graphics > Animation

Product Description

Amazon.com

Poser 7, the Premiere 3D Figure Design and Animation Software Brings Life to Any Digital Project with 3D Imagery and Animation. Poser is the standard for depicting the human form in 3D. Poser is used for figure design and animation by hobbyists professional graphic artists. Using Poser, digital artists can easily create traditional art, comics, education and training materials, film and television productions, game development projects, illustration and print media, product package design and Web and online media. Anything from Sci-Fi art to storyboards, illustrations to fantasy movies, artists can master the human form and 3D characters to bring "life" to art.

Loaded With Content
Poser has always been jam packed with valuable, ready to use 3D content, and Poser 7 is loaded to the brim! Leading the way are Simon and Sydney, the new male and female figures. Sydney and Simon are complete with animated poses, still poses, full body morphs, facial expressions and morphs, hair, clothing, light sets, and more.

Jam-Packed With Content

Poser 7 also features:

• Exclusive 3rd party content from RuntimeDNA, Meshbox Designs, Netherworks, Vanishing Point and more;
• New wildlife including an eagle, wolf and others
• Extensive updates to the Poser Child figures with new morphs, textures and rigging
• New Motion Capture Data, Light Sets, Poses and Materials
• G2 Male, Female figures
• Forest and Plants by RuntimeDNA
• RoboShark by VanishingPoint

Lip Syncing Functionality

New Lip Syncing Features
Add incredible realism to your animations with new lip syncing functionality in Poser 7! Talking is one of the most challenging tasks in character animation, and using the new Talk Designer in Poser 7, even beginning animators can easily make figures talk with facial movements that match real human behavior! With Talk Designer, you have the power to control the type and level of emotion, enunciation, and head and eye movement including the figure's blink rate. Import a sound file and Poser 7 will automatically animate your figure's lip, eye and head movements to match!

Whether you are a seasoned professional or are just learning how to animate, now you can create movies or flash animations with characters that speak to add a whole new dimension of realism to your art. Talk Designer will work with many e frontier figures, including Sydney and Simon, the new Poser 7 figures, as well as James, Jessi, and the Generation 2 Koji and Kelvin figures. Third party content creators will be able to provide configuration files that make any viseme-equipped* figures Talk Designer compatible!

* Visemes are the visual representations of phonemes.

Multiple Undo and Redo

The Power of Multiple Undos
Give your creativity and productivity a boost with Multiple Undo and Redo in Poser 7 ! Freely explore poses, morph target changes, and body transformations without worrying about making mistakes or having to save multiple versions of your project at every new turn. In Poser 7, you can return to earlier poses and designs, and can step back and forth through up to 100 recent changes within your scene! Even steps you couldn't previously back out are now undoable. Multiple Undo and Redo is an incredible timesaver that can be applied on a wide range of your document changes, including all actions from the Poser library, applying poses, or deleting figures and props from your scenes.

Faster Rendering and HDRI Support
Render up to four times faster with Multi-threaded Rendering on machines with multiple CPUs. FireFly takes advantage of the processing power of the multi-core and multi-processor systems available on the market by rendering on up to four threads simultaneously. This optimization results in much shorter render times for most scenes.

Render more complex scenes than ever with new Tiled Texture Loading. Texture memory needs at render time are reduced to less than 10% (compared to previous versions for texture-heavy scenes)! Hard disk caching results in greatly reduced memory requirements. FireFly's tiled texture loading system also takes advantage of a new Texture Filtering approach, which uses a fraction of the memory of its predecessor. Create even more realistic images with HDRI! Poser now supports High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) for Image Based Lighting and textures, giving you rendered lighting quality comparable to analog photo film!

Poser 7 Delivers More Render Performance

• Render in a Separate Process: FireFly now has the option to run in a separate process from the application, which can yield performance advantages when rendering highly complex scenes. FireFly also lets your system manage memory more efficiently and provides better system stability due to the separation of rendering tasks.
• Speed up Ambient Occlusion calculations with virtually no compromise on quality using the new Irradiance Caching feature. You can configure Irradiance Caching for draft (optimized for speed) versus final (optimized for quality) renders.
• Save more rendering time with Occlusion Culling, which enables FireFly to improve render performance by ignoring invisible scene elements at render time.
• Benefit from faster Raytracing with FireFly's new kd-tree Ray Accelerator, which improves raytracing performance in densely populated scenes.
• Take advantage of Poser 7's improved Depth of Field calculation to generate superior results in less time.

Animation Layers

Non-Linear Animation and Animation Layers
Create superior movies using Poser 7's new Non-Linear Animation! Now you can use Animation Layers to separate the various parts of an animation into independent pieces that can be individually moved, edited, hidden, or even phased gradually in and out! At playback Poser seamlessly compiles all the separate layers into a single, cohesive animation! Animation layers are supported by a variety of Poser's animation tools, such as the Walk Designer and Talk Designer, as well as the content Library, making it simple to organize and even reuse various portions of your animations.

Make your characters walk and talk, and even chew gum at the same time while keeping every strand of animation flexible! Using layers to combine animations makes it all easy and intuitive - since you are blending different layers of animation, you can combine different actions. Click and drag layers horizontally to have your animation building blocks start earlier or later in time. To help you organize your animations, Include in Playback allows you to hide or include layers when viewing the entire animation. Your creativity is the only limit to what you can create with layered, non-linear animation!

Poser 7 Delivers More Animation Strength

• Manipulate the visibility of individual objects within your scene, making them appear or disappear gradually or in an instant, all by simply adjusting a parameter dial with Poser 7's new Visibility Channel.
• Accomplish more with Poser 7's enhanced PoserPython scripting environment:
  • The new folder-driven Scripts menu on main menu bar makes it easy to expand, manage and use your Python script collection.
  • The scripting interface has been enhanced to give you more control.
  • The Python runtime is updated to Python 2.4
  • Poser 7 now supports the Tkinter GUI toolkit for Mac OS X 10.4 (not 10.3).

Powerful Morphing Tools

Morphing Tool
Add a whole new level of detail to your Poser 7 scenes using new brush-like morphing tools! The new Create tab on the Morphing Tool palette provides powerful interactive controls for creating your own custom morph targets. Easily "paint" dimples, moles or creases on your figures with simple strokes, just like you would with any brush tool. Use custom morph targets to create even more dynamic facial expressions; to change the appearance of bodies; to pull conforming clothing out past protruding body parts; to improve cloth simulation results; and for a wide variety of other uses as well.

Using the new morphing tools, selected areas or single points of the mesh can be pushed or pulled, smoothed or restored. Start by selecting the size of the area that you want to modify using the Radius control - small for detail work and large for broader changes. Choose from five brush styles that vary in falloff (how the change blends toward the edge of the selected area), from a very soft brush that blends gradually toward the edge to a crisp brush that affects the entire area the same way.

You can also define the magnitude of your changes, whether they accumulate or cap at a certain size, and if they act on a specific point or stroke like a brush tool. Make your changes either in surface mode, which will modify the mesh along the direction of surface normals, or in screen mode, which will allow deformations in any direction you wish.

When you are done, save your morphed Poser 7 figures into the library for later use. You don't have to be an expert to take your scenes to a whole new level, using Poser's intuitive morph target creation tools!

Universal Poses

Universal Poses
Now you can apply any pose to any biped figure within Poser, regardless of that figure's joints or rigging, and see consistent, high quality results! To save time, you can even take legacy poses from earlier versions of Poser and resave them to the Poser 7 Library, which will automatically convert them to Universal Poses!

Poser 7 Delivers More Control
Flexibly increase or reduce the value of any parameter in your scene with Dependent Parameters. Using Dependent Parameters in your files allows you to modify multiple morph targets, deformers or any other parameter using a single, master parameter dial. Now with Poser 7, you have much greater control in defining the ways that your parameters interact as your figure is adjusted.

Organize your content better using Content Collections. Poser 7's new Content Collections allow you to easily organize your Poser content from any Runtime Library or category into a single collection, giving you instant access to your favorite content without having to change Library categories.

The new Runtime Selection pop-up menu allows you to easily switch between different Runtime Libraries, without having to navigate through the Library folder hierarchy. Poser's Library palette now also displays your current Runtime Library name so you always know where you are.

Replacing light sets is a mouse click away. Now you can add or replace a light set within your scene with a single click.

Z-Buffer Actor Selection allows you to select obscured body parts without even having to move your mouse. This is particularly helpful when posing hands, in other instances where body parts are grouped closely together, or when two figures are within proximity.

Poser 7 Delivers More

View PoserMotion Demo View PoserUI Demo

• Enjoy much more realistic scene previews. Improved preview texture resolution leverages the power of your graphics hardware to give you up to 4096x4096 pixel texture previews that show amazing detail - that's up to 16 times more detailed than Poser 6!
• Focus on creativity, not repetition, with new workflow improvements:
  • Easily populate your scene with identical, yet independent figures. Now you can duplicate selected objects (with animation) and save time without the tedious process of having to individually configure each object in your scene.
  • Save animated poses with walk paths or full body morphs directly into your library. In Poser 7, you can now store figure transformation and/or full body morph target settings in a pose
• If you are new to Poser, new training resources provided in Poser 7 will get you started quickly. In addition to the Poser 7 Reference and Tutorial Manuals, on-screen step-by-step interactive tutorials will guide you through many Poser basics. The new Quick Start dialog gives you access to a number of different projects that can be viewed through the Project Guide palette. Learning at your own pace, you will be led through each step in your project, and have access to "watch-me" videos with detailed visual explanations of individual tasks.
• More workflow improvements are included in Poser 7 too:
  • Design or animate from any combination of angles with custom cameras. Now you can create new cameras in addition to the default set, choose whether they are revolving or dolly style, and view your scene any way you choose.
  • Work on the details in your design with precision and ease. Poser's orthographic cameras (top, front, right, etc.) are now easier to use and more exact.
  • Save time, directly create and add all light types to your scene with just two mouse clicks
• Get a real sense of what your final result will look like as you work, without having to render your scene! Poser 7's Procedural Shader Preview can display the results of most procedural shader effects in the Preview window. Enable Hardware Shading on systems with high-performance graphics hardware.
• Import your textures and images in modern formats. Poser 7 now supports HDR and EXR formats for import of high dynamic range bitmap images, as well as many other modern formats.
• Choose how you want to locate an object's associated files. Poser 7's Configurable File Search includes three levels of depth, Deep (for most extensive), Shallow or None, to give you the results you want -- fast or comprehensive.

Product Description

Poser 7, the Premiere 3D Figure Design and Animation Software Brings Life to Any Digital Project with 3D Imagery and Animation. Poser is the standard for depicting the human form in 3D. Poser is used for figure design and animation by hobbyists professi

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Crash baby crash, March 23, 2007

By 

Misty Lara Prendville "Misty Maiden" (Long Island, Milky Way) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Poser 7 3D Figure Design and Animation [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I've been working with Poser 6 for a while, I finally decided to make the leap to Poser 7.

Intalled it. Started the program. And CRASH! I don't mean an application "not responding" message. I mean a total system crash. My PC needed a hard reboot (cut the power reboot). I found the service pack 1 on the efrontiers website. Installed it. Opened the program again. CRASH.

After spending $180 for the program, I decided it was worth one more try. Started the program. This time I figured out the system seizure happened when I moved the mouse cursor over the document window. Reboot again. Avoiding the document, I ran my mouse cursor over the top menu, Deleted Figure. The default loaded Simon. Once Simon was gone, I was able to work for a little while.

Addendum 4/18/2007

Other disappointments with the program:

One of Poser's Features is the Face Room.
The kids' figures are not compatible with the face room, which is a total shame.

The Cloth room is very complicated to learn how to use. Using the program's documentation, plus buying two User Guides, I haven't been able to make cloth. But I could be exceptionally dense.

Head paramater dials don't include ears. Only Judy, carried forward from Poser 5, lets you shape elf ears.

Action poses and their back geometries. I loaded James into my project, and posed him with one of his action presets. Something really unnatural looking happens to his back.


Addendum May 25, 2007:
I worked for several hours without crashing. The new feature in Poser7 is the Undo option. By default, the software sets the Undo level to 100. After changing the Undo level preference to 3, so far so good!


Addendum June 26, 2007:
Service Pack 2 is now available for the program. I've been able to work without a PC crash, I'm feeling better about having spent the money for the software.

The community supporting this software is surprisingly friendly, and global. I've posted numerous questions on the Content Paradise Forum website, and almost always received an answer, if not a friendly bit of encouragement.

It's like playing with paperdolls. You can buy shoes, dress, lingerie, sets, and scenery, props, etc.

To achieve commercial grade results, you'll need to read the Poser Manual from cover to cover. Plus, Poser doesn't include a modeller or UV Mapper, you'll need extra software if you want to tailor results to your needs.

Cheers,
Lara

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poser 7 is fantastic, February 2, 2007

By 

L. Michelli - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poser 7 3D Figure Design and Animation [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Poser 7 leapfrogs earlier versions of the product. If you are a seasoned
Poser user, you will appreciate great new features such as multiple undo (a
request that was begged for by the community, and e-Frontier delivered,)
multithreaded rendering support (for those with multiple core processors,)
the introduction of HDRI support for more realism, and the new Universal
Poses feature (which allows you to save and use poses designed for one
figure in a totally different figure!)

The Morphing Tool is perhaps the single best new feature. For all of Poser's
history, it has suffered from strange bending issues, and "poke through"
(where a figure's skin would pop out from underneath clothing.) This great
tool allows you to smooth out the bends, and pull clothing off of skin in
seconds.

For those users who know some programming, the increased functionality of
Python within the application is a boon.

Animators will love the new improvements for their work, such as lip
synching, and animation layers.

While all of these features are great for seasoned Poser pros, Poser 7 also
has some features to help new users, right out of the box. Loads of content
assure that you can get up and running (and creating art) in no time. The
many introductory resources, including tutorials, will make jumping right in
a cinch.

Of course, the feature set already available in previous versions is
available as well. The material room is fantastic for putting your own
special touches on your models. You can achieve photo realistic renders with
some tweaking in this room. The Face Room allows you to customize the facial
appearance of figures, leading to infinite possibilities. The Hair Room is
great for that perfect look on your character's head. The Cloth Room allows
you to make clothing act like true cloth would in the real world, for
extreme realism! The great integration with Content Paradise allows you to
expand your collection of figures and accessories when you are ready to move
"outside the box."

Overall, I give Poser 7 5 stars! A wonderful product, with its humble
beginnings being left in the dust, and a feature set quickly rivaling
packages many times the cost.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poser 7 - A little better then Poser 6, January 20, 2007

By 

Douglas Sturk "3d Illustrator" (Kentucky, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poser 7 3D Figure Design and Animation [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Well here we are with the next Poser version. I just can't help to think why didnt e-frontier just make a PRO version for 6? Poser 7 adds better memory handling and finally takes advantage of duel processors and hyperthreading, but at this stage, I'd think Poser 6 should have done that already. The new supplied characters are lackluster next to the Daz family of characters, but they do offer a great variance for any crowd images and background characters you want to render. I just still can't help but feel that Poser 6 should have had the new base features already in it, or that Poser 7 should be a bigger leap forward. - if you're a die hard poser user, then by all means take the step up, but if your satisfied with Poser 6, then step back and just watch. I personally have gotten a huge gain from the duel core usage, but if you're on a single processor, you would not see much if any gain from it.