Secrets of Poser Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities: The e-frontier Official Guide [Paperback]

Daryl Wise (Author), Jesse DeRooy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 14, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1598632639 | ISBN-13: 978-1598632637 | Edition: 1

Take an in-depth look into the creative minds of top Poser artists! Secrets of Poser Experts presents a unique opportunity to examine the creative process utilized by industry experts as they create their digital art using Poser. With individual chapters written by each artist, this book offers an amazing look at the artists' professional background, techniques, insights, and resources as they showcase their stunning Poser masterpieces. Each section within the book focuses on a specific area of Poser expertise, including illustration, content creation, comic, Web,motion graphics, photo-realism, and sci-fi/fantasy. It includes an amazingly robust DVD, full of incredible Poser content, including art galleries for each artist featured in the book as well as Poser movies, animations, desktop wallpaper, and tutorials. It also includes free Poser content and a 30-day, limited functionality demo version of the Poser 6 software.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (November 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598632639
• ISBN-13: 978-1598632637
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 9.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

For over 15 years, Daryl Wise has worked as owner/operator of StreetWise PR (www.StreetWisePR.com), a public relations and marketing firm near Silicon Valley. Some clients include or have included: Macworld Expos, the artist Peter Max, HP, Ambient Design, Adesso, Pixelmator, Gluon and e frontier. He was director of the Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival for three years and is a member of Cabrillo College's Digital Arts Advisory Committee. He is the author of Secrets of Poser Experts and Secrets of Corel Painter Experts and Secrets of ZBrush Experts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For us Poser fans, A TRUE GODSEND!!!!, January 8, 2007

By 

Derry Sexton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secrets of Poser Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities: The e-frontier Official Guide (Paperback)

I don't write reviews much but every once and a while, something interests me right off the bat to the point where I have to write. This book is one of them.

Poser is not well received by the "High End" 3D industry at large. To many, it is still considered a "fast food" type application because it offers pre-rigged models and props and all you do is assembly them in a pretty picture.

Heck, a friend of mine even liken use of it to assemblying "paper dolls", however she also quickly admitted that she had no idea what it took to use the program.

Let me assure you, Poser is anything but a "fast food" application and the artists in this book demonstrate that to the hilt. Talk about inspiration to learn the ends and outs of an application and having it work in concert with others! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in 3D art, especially those snooty people who only feel you can produce amazing works of art with only Max, Maya, and any of the other so-called "industry heavyweights". The section about Daniel Murphy, creator of Ghost, alone was worth the price of the book and the software. I hope my art will appear in something like this some day and I will gladly hold the Poser banner high.

Highly recommended!

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Getting over the postwork stigma in one easy step, February 17, 2007

By 

Ian Plumb (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secrets of Poser Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities: The e-frontier Official Guide (Paperback)

I've been slowly getting into CGI through the use of Poser and Vue since Christmas '05. I have found that many websites/forums cast postwork as being a way to correct mistakes -- like you don't really know how to use the software properly if you need to do postwork. This book blows that misconception away.

This book is a showcase for sixteen artists that utilise Poser somewhere in their workflow. They are all exceptionally talented in different ways. Each artist receives a chapter of the book and each chapter is in the form of a brief artist bio, a Poser technique/tutorial, Insights into each artist's use of Poser, a Q&A covering some set questions posed by the authors, and a Gallery of the artist's work.

What's good about the book:

Each artist gives a brief summary of their Creative Process. I found it very interesting to read about how different people work and where Poser fits into their workflow. In a similar vein the Insights section wherein each artist describes the features of Poser that they find most useful was very helpful to me -- there were features I don't even use that the artists were describing as their favourite feature.

The main plus for me though is in each artist describing their workflow for a particular piece, in the form of the Techniques/Tutorials sections. Its not so much the How as the Why -- the specific tutorials may or may not be that useful to you, but why the artist does *this* in Poser and *that* in Photoshop is quite eye-opening.

What's bad about the book:

The DVD that comes with the book. The blurb on the back of the book devotes a large section to espousing the DVD's content. I found the interface to the content to be gimicky, clunky, and flawed. The content itself is unexceptional.

Some of the techniques/tutorials are a little scarce on detail if you really want to replicate a particular image. Occasionally Photoshop is a bit of a magic box -- here's the Poser image that went in to Photoshop (standard Poser image) and here's the image afterwards (fabulous CGI image).

Favourites:

The chapters on Fabrice Delage, Brian Jon Haberlin, Daniel Scott Gabriel Murray, Gabriel Sabloff, As Shanim and Siliphiel, and Thomas Weiss. Quite inspiring and definitely informative.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is familiar with Poser and Photoshop.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poser artists discuss their personal styles and techniques, December 17, 2006

By 

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

This review is from: Secrets of Poser Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities: The e-frontier Official Guide (Paperback)

One of the best ways to develop a personal artistic style and to grow as an artist is to study other artists' work. This book, by Daryl Wise and Jesse DeRooy, will show you how the experts use the 3D graphic software Poser from e frontier, Inc. Each of the sixteen Poser artists featured in the book discuss their personal styles and give you a peak into the techniques that they use in Poser to develop their art. At the end of each chapter, each artist shares a gallery of their artwork and answers questions about their creative process.

One of the things I like about this book is that some of the featured artists use Poser in interesting ways. For example, Kevin Airgid uses Poser when creating Flash games and Brian Jon Haberlin has an interesting technique for including traditional gouache and oil in his Poser graphics. He also gives a nice post production tip for creating an old Hollywood style render.

Have you ever wondered who makes all that Poser content? You are introduced to a few of these content creators and they share some of the techniques they use. Phil Cooke discusses Poser's UV mapping and creating an hierarchy file for posing his characters. As Shanim and Siliphiel discuss posing characters and using the Poser Material Room.

Photo-realism is a very popular style and several artists discuss the important aspects of achieving photo-realistic Poser scenes. Catharina Harders uses image based lighting (IBL) to achieve realism and Fabrice Delage discusses creating realistic skin textures from photos.

Many of these artists use Poser along with other graphic software. For example, Tony Luke uses Adobe After Effects to create his motion graphics and Scott Thigpen turns Poser scenes into a stylized illustration in Adobe Illustrator.

The book's DVD contains a gallery of the artist's work, movies, and tutorials. It also has a demo version of Poser 6 and Poser content. Daryl Wise is an independent public relations and marketing contractor and is the author of Secrets of Award-Winning Digital Artists. Jesse DeRooy is a radio editor and independent filmmaker.