Poser 7 Revealed: The efrontier Official Guide [Paperback]

Kelly L Murdock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1598632965 | ISBN-13: 978-1598632965 | Edition: 1

Now you can conquer each essential feature of Poser 7! Poser 7 Revealed helps you develop the skills you need to create, render, and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. This hands-on guide provides you with step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow you to use each new skill on your own. Examine each feature room of Poser, including working with materials, cloth, hair, cameras, and bones. Put the power of Poser 7 to work for you as you learn how to simulate dynamic hair and cloth with collision detection, create realistic lighting with the image-based lighting feature, build custom morph targets with the new deformation brushes, use the new Talk Designer to automatically sync facial animations to an audio track, combine the power of Poser 7 with other software packages, create new motions using the new animation layers feature, and import externally created 3D models to enhance the scene.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kelly has over 15 years experience in the computer graphics arena, especially in the area of 3D graphics. Included in the experience is a variety of tasks from high-end CAD product design and architectural pre-visualization to virtual reality and games. Kelly is best known for his international best-selling books on graphics including the 3ds max Bible, Illustrator Bible and Naked Maya. He also is the author to Poser 6 and 7 as well as Edgeloop Character Modeling for 3D Professionals. Kelly currently works as a freelance designer for Logical Paradox Design, a company that he founded with his brother.

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (December 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598632965
• ISBN-13: 978-1598632965
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 9.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,098,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect handy reference for the Poser 7 software, February 1, 2007

By 

Diane Cipollo (Editor at BellaOnline.com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poser 7 Revealed: The efrontier Official Guide (Paperback)

My first reaction to this book was that it wouldn't be very helpful in learning Poser because it did not contain any project-based tutorials. However as this book found a permanent place on my reference shelf, I quickly realized that I was wrong. As I worked through several project-based Poser tutorials from the web, I found myself frequently referencing back to this Poser 7 Revealed book to better understand how to use a specific tool or technique needed for the tutorial. The basic concept behind the Revealed book series is to supply simple explanations for each feature of a software and also give supporting exercises to reinforce what you have just learned. Although you will not create a finished project from this book, Kelly L. Murdock has written the perfect handy reference for the Poser 7 software by e frontier, Inc.

Murdock begins with an overview of the Poser 7 interface and introduces each major set of tools found in the Poser Rooms. He covers the Poser Libraries and then moves on to the basics such as posing figures, working with props, cameras, lighting, materials and building a Poser scene. With that background covered, he then discusses more advanced topics such as adding dynamic hair and clothes to your figure and creating facial expressions.

Posing your figure is only part of what can be accomplished with the Poser software. Murdock covers morphing and rigging your Poser figures for animation and shows how lip syncing is made easy with the Poser Talk Designer Interface. Lastly, he discusses rendering Poser scenes, using Poser with other software and writing Python scripts.

Although the book does not contain a CD, you can download from the publisher's website the supporting Poser files needed for demonstrating the more complex Poser techniques. Throughout the book, Murdock has added helpful comments and tips.

Kelly L Murdock has worked in the area of computer graphics for many years and has authored several books including 3ds max Bible, Illustrator Bible, Adobe Creative Suite Bible, Maya 7 Revealed, LightWave 3D 8 Revealed and Poser 6 Revealed.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Content . . . Poorly Published, November 29, 2009

By 

Dr. Jerry (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Poser 8 Revealed: The Official Guide (Paperback)

When I received my copy of the book the binding had come apart as someone else mentioned. I ignored this and pressed the glued edges back together. While looking the book over I discovered that Chapter 5 was in the book twice and there was no Chapter 6 to be found! I am not sure if there are other mistakes like this as I don't have time to check. I am shipping it back and getting a replacement. Hopefully all of the pages will be there.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to find my answers in it, August 15, 2008

By 

Linse - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poser 7 Revealed: The efrontier Official Guide (Paperback)

I'm a programmer and industrial guy who enjoys writing fiction shorts in my spare time and thought it might be fun to start cobbling simple 'illustrations' together to help set the mood for the stories. Really 2D stuff but I figured a 3D tool like Poser 3D would help create a series of modified images for different chapters. I'm of average competence in tools like Corel and PaintShopPro, which I use to illustrate tech articles and web pages. Poser's interface and paradigm is pretty tough to grasp - in part because I already know "other things" I guess and thus have incorrect expectations of how to do it.

I bought this book hoping to get myself up to speed; it isn't doing that. I think the author tried to mix in too much advanced material. Each chapter starts with a horrible "intro" which doesn't summarize where we're going - just bowls a lot of jargon at the reader. While the books seems to have nice "we did this - you learned this" like any good educational book, they seem to be "we pulled down the menu" etc (what our mouse did - not what we as brains did).

I'm sure I'll get more use from it once I know the basics, but for now it's not helping. The author should have gotten feedback from some absolute beginner trying to use the book to make a simple Poser image.