Poser 6/Shade LE: 3D Figure Design and Animation Solution

by Curious Labs, Inc.

Product Features

• New Shadow Catcher feature enables you to separate shadows from their underlying surface, and put them virtually anywhere
• Expand your cartoon universe with Toon Outline -- it draws an outline around the edges of cartoon images
• Ambient occlusion brings your figures to life with a natural lighting environment
• Design and pose pre-rigged figures, or create original figures to suit your needs -- the large library of content and photorealistic textures help you create professional-quality imagery and movies
• Use the Camera controls like a film director would -- set up your ideal camera shots for each image or animation frame

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B0009ZHG44
• Item model number: PSR-W60-DE-DR
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 14, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,243 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #64 in Software > Graphics > Animation
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com

Poser 6 brings the art of figure design and posing right to your desktop, with an innovative UI to make working with the human form easily accessible. Included human and animal models come ready for you to start designing and posing immediately. You can click-and-drag to interactively sculpt faces, pose body parts, or create various ethnic varieties. For those who require finer control, full body morphs, facial expression morphs, and bone rigging are easily accessible for any figure. All features and models are provided in a natural 3D environment for realistic depth, lighting and shadowing on any figure in any pose. You can pose any figure by clicking and dragging a body part. With Document Display Styles you can view and design your figure in silhouette, outline, wireframe, textured, and more. The program lets you manipulate individual body parts, including the full body, facial expressions and fully articulated hands, and interactively sculpt and design figures in real time, including the body and facial expressions. Object-level Collision Detection helps with posing and avoids collisions when animating.

What's New in Poser 6?

New Figures Poser 6 introduces James and Jessi, new figures with amazing realism to bring a new level of photorealstic content to your artwork. Both figures accurately depict the human form, have lifelike skin textures, and full morph target sets to design your own custom figures with facial expressions. Also included are new boy and girl children figures, Ben and Kate, who complete the new Poser family. The new Poser figures come with photorealistic texture maps, full body morphs, facial expression morphs, and are fully rigged for posing. More Content Poser's Content Paradise now includes a host of top content providers, to bring you a diverse range of Poser 6 models, textures, poses, character packs, utilities and free stuff. A redesigned interface makes finding Poser content faster and easier than ever before. Enhanced UI Poser's innovative UI is centered on a productive room-based environment. Individual Pose, Setup, Materials, Hair and Cloth rooms provide easy feature access for each step in the creative process. In addition to rooms, Poser uses floating palettes and windows. You can customize your Poser workspace by hiding/displaying and relocating controls anywhere you like. You can even save up to nine different screen configurations for the entire Poser workspace. Shadow Catching Poser 6 introduces several new features to support artists in rendering more true to life shadow effects. For example the NEW Shadow Catcher feature enables you to separate shadows from their underlying surface, and put them virtually anywhere. These new features make image composition and integrating 3D figures into graphic design easier. New Toon Outlines The New Toon Outline feature uses post-processing during rendering to draw an outline around the edges of cartoon images. Poser 6 offers customizable outline styles, enabling you to further personalize your cartoon shading look. Add a distinctive style to any cartoon imagery for comics. Now you have the choice to add outlines to any cartoon imagery you create with Poser. This feature's effect is most dramatic when combined with a cartoon shader node. Configurable Cartoon Shading preview styles allow you to approximate the final render results as you work. OpenGL OpenGL delivers accelerated performance when previewing anything from cartoon to photorealistic 3D figures. Now you can display vivid textures and lighting in real-time when designing figures. You can even render high resolution images using the OpenGL Preview renderer. There are accelerated previews for your 3D scenes, so you can see vivid textures and lighting in real-time. This feature works with all Document Display Styles, including wireframe, cartoon, and more. You can render out your 3D scene display with the OpenGL Preview renderer, and easily switch between SreeD Software and OpenGL Hardware for scene previews--which means you can maximize your system’s resources and spend your time creating rather than waiting. New Ambient Occlusion Ambient Occlusion makes figures seem as though they are in the natural lighting environment of the real world. Ambient Occlusion is available on every light to create accurate soft shadow effects, thus giving scenes a new degree of realism. The new Ambient Occlusion shader node makes figures and objects appear as though they are in a natural lighting environment. 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. You can set Ambient Occlusion lighting for all objects, or select lighting effects focused on specific parts of your scene.	Meet James and Jessi
	Expand your cartoon universe with Toon Outline
	Ambient occlusion brings your figures to life

More About Poser

• Photorealism
  Poser 6 allows you to quickly design and pose pre-rigged figures, or create original figures to suit your needs. With professional lighting effects and shading materials, a large library of content and photorealistic textures, you can create professional-quality imagery and movies. You can also integrate with other 3D applications, or composite photorealistic imagery into your favorite image editing or motion graphics programs. Just some of the features in Poser 6 include: accurate human male, female and children 3D models; large libraries of content included; quick design/pose pre-rigged figures with full morph target sets; realistic perspective in 3D space; and professional lighting effects and procedural shader material trees
• Camera Controls
  Cameras represent your window into the Poser workspace. You can use them as a director would, to set up your ideal camera shots for each image or animation frame. Or, you can take advantage of the benefit that comes with 3D work, of being able to render a scene from multiple angles. In either case, Poser 6 offers multiple configurable cameras to facilitate your creative workflow. Poser includes a variety of independent cameras for viewing your scene, and a four-pane camera view. All are easily controlled with an innovative Trackball control for intuitive scene setup.
• Realistic Lighting
  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 6'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 6's powerful rendering tools, the lighting possibilities are unlimited.
• Bone Rigging
  Create new, fully poseable Poser figures from any 3D object in a few easy steps. Import 3D geometry, break it into body parts and generate new Poser figures. You can even create Inverse Kinematics (IK) chains. 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.
• OpenGL Preview
  New OpenGL hardware acceleration offers improved performance with figure Posing and Preview renders. Easily switch between SreeD Software and OpenGL. Hardware rendering for scene previews means you can maximize your system's resources and spend your time creating rather than waiting.
• Photo-based Facial Mapping
  Want to create a virtual you? Friend? Import facial photos to easily model new characters and create texture maps. Poser's Face Room allows you to create lifelike results by mapping any face onto a 3D head. You can also generate new faces with a button click, or create caricatures for wild characters. Ethnicity, age, and gender parameter controls round out this powerful set of facial tools.

Product Description

Poser 6 brings the art of figure design and posing right to your desktop. Start designing and posing immediately, with new high-resolution, fully rigged male, female, boy and girl 3D figures. The rich content libraries have 9 categories, including a wide variety of figures in various preset poses, as well as props, lights, cameras, accessories and materials. Create personalized heads and textures in the Face Room, by using just two photographs. Bring your scenes to life by animating figures, props, cameras, lights, and even material, and eliminate much of the repetitive work by designing and applying motion cycles. Realistic Lighting - Add colors, cast shadows, create specific effects, and set the tone for your scene Bone Rigging creates fully poseable Poser figures from any 3D object in a few easy steps Inverse Kinematics (IK) delivers natural character motion by modeling the hierarchical interactions of bones and joints New OpenGL hardware acceleration for scene previews, letting you maximize your rendering time Photo-based facial mapping for lifelike facial modeling and texture maps

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the casual hobbiest, September 10, 2005

By 

amsterdamaged - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poser 6/Shade LE: 3D Figure Design and Animation Solution (CD-ROM)

Poser is hard. Extremely hard. The manual that comes with the software is poorly written and virtually useless. I recommend the VHS "POSER 5 Demystified", which is relevant to Poser 6 as well. This will help get you started.

But even with this, Poser, like all 3D animation programs, is going to require quite a commitment from you. Its VERY TIME CONSUMING. There's just no way around it. Even after you've figured out how to use the software (it took me 6 months of trial and error...and I'm certainly no expert), it can easily take you 8-10 hours to produce a 5 second animation.

The problem is that no one can show you "how" to make an animation with Poser. They can only show you how the various tools work (which, as I stated before, the manual fails miserably at). You're going to have to decide what you want to see on the screen, and figure out how to use the software to make that a reality. Example: there are 3 different methods you can use to animate, which give you wildly different results. While the manual tells you what these are and identifies the controls for each, it doesn't tell you which to use and under what circumstances to use them. You're going to have to figure it out on your own. I literally thought the software was broken for the 1st 6 months, because the figures kept moving in unexpected ways. Actually, the software was behaving exactly the way it was supposed to. I understand now that its an asset rather than a liability, because once you learn what you're doing, Poser can add a level of realism that is sorely lacking from a lot of other 3d animation programs.

So what do I think of Poser 6? Its amazing. Simply amazing. I would give it 5 stars, except for the crappy manual that comes with it. Curious Labs should design a manual like "The Art of Animation Master", which was brilliantly tailored for the beginner.

The downside: content. If you plan on making a contemporary film, this is not a problem. But if you plan on making any kind of period film, or a Sci-Fi or Fantasy film, be prepared to shell out at least $200.00 for extra content. You're first stop should be to DAZ. Get version 3 of both Michael and Victoria, because 99% of the clothing and morphs on Content Paradise is geared to fit these two models. You're going to find virtually no content geared towards the models that come with the Poser software (James, Jessi, Don, Judy). Its a rip-off...pure and simple...but if you want to use Poser, there's really nothing you can do about it, unless you're a talented enough modeller to design your own clothes. Before you go spending all that money though, take the time out to learn the software. See if you're willing to make the commitment or not. I would recommend a short 3-5 minute film using the content that comes with the software. Allow yourself 6 months to a year to complete it. I'm not kidding.

Lip Synching: You're also going to need "Mimic" from Daz, if you plan for your film to contain any dialogue. That's going to cost you at least another $200.00, unless you can find a free version of the software. Check out the magazine 3d world. Every month it features free software for all sorts of 3d platforms. I was lucky enough to obtain a free version of Mimic for the price of the magazine. You can probably obtain the back issue from their website.

Other than that, study the masters (Harrihausen, etc.). Computer animation is really not that different from Claymation. Its just done in a virtual environment, and you don't have to animate each and every frame. Also, its relatively simple to check your progress and to make changes, once you know what you're doing.

If you read the review section of Poser 5, many of the reviews are extremely negative. While some of the complaints are justified, in my opinion a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that the people reviewing it haven't spent a sufficient amount of time to know what they're doing. They think the software is "broken" because its not giving them the results they expect, or their computer lacks sufficient RAM and a fast enough processor to handle it. The requirements on the side of the box is the MINIMUM required to run the software. If you want it to run smoothly, I would recommend at least a gigabyte of RAM. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.

What about Shade? Its a piece of crap (see my review). That's why their giving it away with the purchase of Poser 6.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poser 6 is slow and Curiouslabs is not responsive, October 18, 2005

By 

bunnyrabbit4 (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Poser 6/Shade LE: 3D Figure Design and Animation Solution (CD-ROM)

This review refers to the PC version
Pros:
1. Great fun to work with Poser.
2. Nice renderings.
3. Neat new features including taking advantage of your graphics card.

Cons:
1. Animations take much longer than Poser 5. They take so long that you really can't consider making a film with this program unless you have a super computer.
2. New company name and attitude, Curiouslabs is longer the company that supports Poser. EFRONTIERS no longer has a phone number that you can reach them at except for sales.
3. They have refused to fix a problem with Poser 5 that prevents it from running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
4. They had a lag time of over a week responding to an email.
5. Poser 6 feels like it was designed by 6 different people. What I mean by that is each area of the program requires a different approach to master it.
6. Since they finally wrote back to me I'd give them 3 stars but this program won't let me.
7. Also watch out for their "Content Paradise". The site doesn't work more than it does. I was recently charged twice for an $15 item. I wrote to them over two weeks ago and still haven't heard a thing.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great product for the price you pay!, March 17, 2006

By 

Cassandra Strand "cassandra_s" (Roseville, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Poser 6/Shade LE: 3D Figure Design and Animation Solution (CD-ROM)

I see a lot of bad reviews for Poser 6 but that didn't stop me from buying it. It seems to me that everyone is hung up on the fact that it's hard to use or doesn't compare to their idolized ideals of what they were hoping for. Of course Poser is hard! You don't paint your first painting and expect it to come out like a Picasso do you? You don't buy a skateboard and expect to skate like Tony Hawk as soon as you get it home right? So why expect to be able to fully comprehend a new piecse of sophisitcated software in just a few quick clicks. No matter what you do you have to learn (and I'd like to stress the word LEARN) all the basics and then move on to the tricks of the trade. I love Poser 6 it's not that hard to use if you take some time and work through some tutorials and read some hints from the online community. I also baought the book Poser 6 Revealed: The official guide and that helped as well. I bought Poser 6 about 5 months ago and work with it maybe 2 hours a week. All in all I've put in about one full-time work week over the past 5 months and I've gotten to the point where I'm able to create some decent beginners work. I started with no knowledge of digital art at all and now have a good basic understanding. If I can do it so can you. If you want to create digital art look at the other programs of similar type, most cost well over the price you pay for poser and have their own problems and user interfaces that you will spend about as much time learning as you will with Poser.