Poser 8 [OLD VERSION]

by Smith Micro Software Inc.

Product Features

• Poser 8 is an affordable, powerful, yet easy to use 3D character animation solution
• Includes 3D character tools and over 2.5GB of ready to use scene content and figures; no need to model 3D characters from scratch
• Includes 8 brand new, ready-to-pose, fully textured human figures with over 400 morphs and body controls to fully customize each character
• Renders photorealistic or stylized images and videos for print, web or animation projects
• With included Wardrobe Wizard, fit your Poser clothing assets to the new Poser 8 figures

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• 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: B002KMQ8WU
• Item model number: PSR8HBX2
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,067 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #4 in Software > Graphics > 3-D

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Poser 8 is the world's most complete solution for creating art and animation with 3D characters. With Poser, it's easy to make 3D art. Poser includes over 2.5 gigabytes of ready-to-pose human and animal figures, textures, props and 3D scene elements. Generate new characters from your facial photographs. Add hair and clothing. Dress Poser's virtual stage with props, lights and cameras to build 3D scenes. Animate and render your scene into photorealistic images and video for web, print, and film projects. Export 3D figures to add characters to other 3D applications. Artists, hobbyists, illustrators and animators--get creative with Poser!

Poser 8's easy to use interface makes it easy to create 3D character images and animation. Click to enlarge.

Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation

Poser 8 is better than ever
Along with 8 brand new 3D humans, Poser 8 includes an improved user interface to maximize your workspace while providing better workflow, a new search-enabled library so you can find, organize and use your content easier, a dependant parameter tool that lets you teach objects in the scene to interact with each other, cross body morph brushes to smoothly sculpt a figure across every body part, new photorealistic rendering features that more accurately reproduce light and shadows, and improved character rigging for even better character bending. To save time, Poser 8 has been performance optimized so you can pose your characters and render them faster on today's multiple processor systems.

Poser 8 includes:

All Poser's included figures and 3D content are fully textured using our powerful node-based shader system. Click to enlarge.

Turn your 3D scene into an artistic sketch using Poser 8's sketch designer. Click to enlarge.

Automatically generate animated figures that can walk or run through your 3D scene. Click to enlarge.

Poser 8's powerful cloth engine lets you transform any object or clothing prop into dynamic cloth that stretches, drapes and flows naturally, even over an animated figure. Click to enlarge.

With Poser you can produce photorealistic images and animations, or render in styles including cartoon tones, sketch renderings, silhouettes, wireframes and even Flash. Click to enlarge.

Import a spoken word sound file, and with the included Talk Designer, your Poser 8 figures will speak in sync with the sound. Click to enlarge.

8 new figures
The new set of eight 3D humans included with Poser 8 are the most advanced figures ever included with the application, and are a showcase for new Poser 8 features. Built from scratch, the figures are performance optimized for the polygon count and have custom photorealistic textures. Rigged using Poser 8's new multiple sphere and capsule fall off zone technology, problematic joints such as hips and shoulders now bend with more realism than any figure on the market. By using the new Dependent Parameter tool to link deformers to specific joint positions, areas such as knees, elbows, chest and collar joints have smoother folds, less stretching and more realism. The new Poser 8 figures are offered in four pairs of male/female couples with European features, African features, Asian features and Hispanic features. The Poser 8 new figures are fully compliant with the Face Room, the Walk Designer and Talk Designer, and via the use of Wardrobe Wizard, much of the included legacy clothing content has been converted to work directly on the figures.

~1.5GB of new Poser 8 Content
In addition to the new set of figures, Poser 8 includes an array of new content supplied by third party partners as well content created by the Smith Micro team of 3D artists. A new art-school inspired default manikin opens each new scene, and will serve as a remarkable reference figure for artists. Fully articulated human skeletons that match the male and female figures body topology are included. Various new poses, animations, light sets, props, and accessories to help new users get started are included in the Poser 8 content installer. Poser 8 also includes an additional 1.5GB of legacy Poser 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 content.

New User Interface
Poser 8 offers a new evolved user interface, preserving the elements that Poser users are accustomed to, while presenting them in a more concise layout that takes better advantage of various screen resolutions. The new layout produces a cleaner work environment so artists can focus on the project. All controls are presented in floating palettes that can be docked for consistency, session to session, or floated to free up space.

Dependent Parameters
Poser 8 unlocks an advanced user secret with the new Dependent Parameter palette. Poser 8 lets the artist create new Master Parameters or turn any existing Parameter into a Master Parameter that can drive any other editable parameters in the scene. Complex interactions can be created such as Full Body Morphs, Partial Body Morphs, Advanced Body Controls, Joint Controlled Morph Targets, Joint Controlled Deformers and Parameter Controlled Scene Assets.

Indirect Lighting
By bouncing light and color from object to adjacent object in a scene, Poser 8's Global Illumination system can render images that appear so realistic they can fool the untrained eye into thinking the images are photos rather than 3D renderings.

OpenGL Preview Improvements
Preview now displays up to 8 lights and their accumulated values, sorted by intensity. The light properties controller allows you to select each light you wish to illuminate in the scene preview.

Content Management System / Library
The new library presents content by category, but with a tighter list view with expanding previews and additional data for each content item. Content items can be loaded into the scene using the traditional Poser UI controls or can now be dragged directly from the Library into the scene. The Poser 8 Library also supports keyword search. Type in a keyword to find exactly what you looking for. Add any selected items to your favorites.

Cross Body Part Morph Creation
With Poser 8 comes a significant improvement to the current Morphing Tool. Now you can dial in a Morph Brush and paint morphs across body parts. Easily create effects such as muscle bulges, scales, bumps, horns, veins or wounds; it's only limited by your imagination.

Improved Rigging System
Poser 8 has improved upon the existing joint Falloff Zone rigging system by adding any number of new zones to a joint, while adding a new capsule shape to the existing sphere, and allowing the rigger to either multiply or add the Falloff Zone values. This system will permit figure creators to rig challenging areas such as hips and shoulders with more precision, yielding better bending figures.

Tone Mapping and Exposure
Tone Mapping helps control very bright and dark areas in an image to produce better, less blown out final renderings with deeper contrast. The feature is very useful, helping to bring the brightest areas back into a reproducible range. Two modes of Tone Mapping are available for differing effects: Exponential Tone Mapping and HSV Tone Mapping. Exposure values are editable when either Exponential or HSV Tone Mapping is selected.

Physically Correct Light Falloff
For Spot and Point lights, Poser 8 lets users attenuate (control) falloff to more closely reproduce real-world light behaviors. Constant falloff replicates the previous Poser behavior, and Inverse Linear and Inverse Square add two new methods for getting light to appear more realistic.

Normal Mapping
Normal Mapping is a resource-efficient technique to add the appearance of complexity and surface detail to 3D objects. It can transform object surfaces, making them appear more intricate than they actually are, without the added overhead of polygonal detail. This saves designers valuable time and offers increased creative flexibility by allowing faster and more light-weight computation of rendered results.

Performance Optimizations

• Figure/Actor pre-lighting and picking
• Bending on multi-core/multi-processor hardware
• Improved multi-processor support for better scalability when rendering
• Cloth simulation multithreaded/optimized
• Increased performance for opening/handling complex scenes

Poser 8 Uses:

• Professional 3D graphics professionals
• 3D Hobby/Enthusiast Market
• Comic book / graphic novel creators
• General Purpose 3D Users
• Upgrade Poser Users
• Art Students
• Traditional Artists/Sculptors

Poser provides a number of professional users with a fast, easy to access resource for 3D humans, animals, and other scene assets. Professional users include: Architectural illustrators, industrial designers, medical illustrators, graphic designers, editorial illustrators, book illustrators, informational graphics, advertising illustration, web illustration, interactive content, story boarding, lighting and theatrical set designers, film/video production

3D hobbyists and enthusiasts who dabble in 3D for personal satisfaction, experiment with Poser to gain 3D experience, and may use Poser to expand into new careers, or create a graphic novel, sci-fi art, fantasy art, or develop a screen play.

Comic book creators and graphic novelists use Poser render images and animations to create their own titles. Single images, multiple page comics and graphic novels delivered via print and digital media are a great use of Poser.

If you work with other 3D applications such as Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Modo, Lightwave, Truespace, Bruce, or Vue; Poser is a perfect way to include 3D character content you're your projects.

Art students looking to gain practical 3D animation experience hone their skills working with Poser characters as part of course work, in art school classes or for extra-curricular experience.

Product Description

Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

115 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as easy to use as it could be, September 26, 2009

By 

Personne (Rocky Mountain West) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Poser 8 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

(What's this?)

After spending every free hour for the last week with this program, I have mixed feelings about it. I don't make my living from making films, but I have made a few industrial videos with compositing, green-screen live action and various special effects. I'm a serious amateur photographer and musician. So I'm pretty familiar with complex software. My regular 'kit' includes titles like Photoshop, Logic, Final Cut, Digital Performer and so on. But I'm a novice when it comes to 3D and animation in general. I approached Poser 8 with eagerness, and looked forward to learning new things.

Poser 8 is cross-platform. I tested it on my Mac: 8-cores, dual monitors, Wacom tablet. The installation was long but uneventful. I found an update on the website and applied it with no difficulty. Normally, I'm a plunge-in and get going type, but I decided to follow the tutorials. This is where the first problems arose. It doesn't look like anyone did any serious proofreading. Many of the tutorials appear to have been written for earlier versions of the program, and have not been fully updated. There are frequent references to objects in the user interface that have changed--often significantly. There are also references to tools and palettes that have not been described. This is a cardinal sin for writers of tutorials: never use a term you haven't described. I found the tutorials helpful and frustrating in equal measure.

My first experiments with posing the stock figures were done with no one looking over my shoulder. That's a good thing. The controls are very sensitive and first efforts tended to look like accident victims. Ouch! But after a little practice, I began to get the hang of it. There are various amounts of articulation in the provided figures, with the Poser8 figures the most capable. The user can basically operate every joint in the human body. Not every position looks natural, but that's why real animation professionals are different from the rest of us. Poser is centered around building 'scenes', with user control over nearly every facet: camera position, lighting, characters and props. Dolly shots that would break the budget in a real film shoot are available in Poser with only a little effort. As in regular animation, the user can create keyframes, with Poser filling in the intermediate moves. If there are problems in those intermediate frames, you can dive in a little deeper and fix things.

It's important to note that there are a number of features in modern animation that are not present in Poser. There is no gravity and there is no wind. Hair stays in place like a TV weatherman's. Fat doesn't bob up and down as a character moves. Poser characters--although well-articulated--are still obviously mannequins.

One of the features I looked forward to was the so-called Face Room. In this window, the user can import photographs and apply them to characters. The principle is to take an image and apply it to an existing form, reshaping the form to match the imported face. I took a couple of head shots (front and side) of myself and set to work. This was a disaster. The user interface is virtually incomprehensible. I've used both morphing and panorama software in which points must be matched between two shots. Generally, this is simple to use: you set a point on a feature in one shot and then set a matching point on the other shot. You set as many points as you need. In Poser 8, you have only limited points (3 for the nose, 4 for each eye, 4 for the mouth), with none for hairline, earhole, nostrils, bridge of nose or other important features. I spend a few hours with this, following instructions carefully, and never came up with anything better than horrible. My first effort looked like the monster from 'Predator'. My second looked like Gollum. I have my good days and my bad days, but I look better than that!

I've been aware of Poser for a long time. It's been available for well over a decade. But I get the feeling that the developers have spent that decade in a cave, never glancing at other software. To call the user interface 'challenging' would be too kind. There are many types of common controls (like pan and zoom) that you find in all sorts of software. Usually you can figure them out immediately, since there's a real advantage in software behaving similarly. Not in Poser. In the aforementioned Face Room you pan around a picture by dragging on the Pan tool. In every other program, you pan by dragging the image. Poser abounds with peculiarities like this. Features that should be easy to use become arcane. Another feature that demonstrates how to do a good thing badly is the ability to undock windows and tools. Most programs of any complexity allow you to work in an integrated window with the ability to undock sub-windows for use on another monitor. This is generally a good thing. But in Poser, you find that an errant mouse click is all you need to undock a window. After that, it's almost impossible to put it back. And some features like window close buttons are so small as to be nearly impossible to click.

There are also some instabilities in the program. There is a tablet mode for devices such as my Wacom pad. Unfortunately it's buggy in multiple-monitor systems. Perhaps some of my other complaints are simple bugs waiting to be fixed. I emailed customer support to report the tablet problem. I sent the email early on Saturday morning and received a reply within a couple of hours. This was impressive.

I believe that there are many useful things I can do with Poser, but I find the program puts too much unnecessary struggle in the way. There's much hidden potential that is likely to remain hidden.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great program, but it ain't easy folks., October 3, 2009

By 

Bookenator - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Poser 8 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

(What's this?)

This is a very powerful and cool program. The results of a well lit render at the best resolution settings is truly stunning, verging on the photorealistic if you have a hi resolution skin on your model. But the manual is horrid, and the tutorial not much better. The good people at Poser either think everyone was born doing 3d modeling or they assume you're going to buy a "Poser for Dummies" type book. Personally, I did a lot of banging my head against the monitor and searching the internet for tutorials I could wrap my brain around.

That said, the program is fantastic. Within about a week of mucking about I finally started to "get it". I'm able to imagine something, and then create more or less what I want on the screen after much work and tweaking.

In summary, don't buy this thinking it's like playing with paper dolls. It's not. It takes a lot of time and patience. If you're short on either, it's going to be a huge frustration. But if you're willing to put in the work, you will get professional looking results that you're very happy with.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wait a bit until the first service pack release, September 15, 2009

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Poser 8 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

I updated to Poser 8 from Poser 7 and all I can say is that I have mixed reactions. I like Poser 8 a LOT more than 7, but the Library is a personal disappointment, and the fact that the program is extremely unstable in its current condition, makes it very frustrating to use right now.
I currently have this product rated as 3-stars, but it could easily jump up to a 4.5 if stability problems are successfully correctly within the next 2 months or so.

Compared to Poser 7, Poser 8 has better rendering abilities and a much better workspace that allows you to easily access all your windows without any problems. However, I personally find the new Library, which now uses a tree menu rather than a folder-based system, to be quite difficult to navigate through; especially if you have hundreds of content to navigate through. You can live with it, but I hope that future updates will add the option to revert to the Poser 7 Library system. The Library does include a new search feature which makes things nice when you want to locate a particular piece of clothing, figure, or pose that you seem to have misplaced or just too lazy to navigate to it manually.

The biggest problem with Poser 8 is that it is VERY unstable right now and likes to randomly crash on you (A LOT!!!!!), causing you to lose all the work you had done since your last save! I have some programming experience myself, and it seems to me that Smith Micro almost completely rebuilt Poser 8 from scratch, which would cause there to be many bugs in the programming. The good news is that Smith Micro WILL be releasing patches, fixes, and service packs to correct issues, so all these stability problems should be fixed soon.

My recommendation to anyone who is looking at buying Poser 8 is that if you absolutely MUST have a Poser program NOW, then get Poser 7, but if you can wait a little while, then purchase Poser 8 once first service pack is released, which should correct many of the major problems that has. Or, you could just buy Poser 8 now, but be prepared for some serious frustration with the user interface crashing... also save frequently.