Poser 8

Other products 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

• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B002KMQ8WU
• Item model number: PSR8HBX2
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 1, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #699 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #1 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

9 of 10 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

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing results, September 25, 2009

By	Z~ - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Wow this software is incredible. I have never owned an animated software program before so I cannot compare this to the previous version. With that being said, I am hooked with animated software now.

Imagine being able to digitally create humans, animals or even background scenes in 3D. Being able to replicate bodily moves and even facial expressions smoothly. Create animated look so realistic that you almost feel like you reach out and touch it. Poser 8 allows you to do that and more. Figures that are included can be easily morphed to meet your needs. For example, you can increase muscle mass, add texture or even remove an eyeball if you wanted to. There are 4 female and 4 male figures to choose from with Poser 8. You can also obtain other figures from third-party suppliers. The more effort you put into making your figure realistic the more realistic they become. You can even modify your creation to have ethnic traits. Facial expressions can easily be applied, and there are so many to choose from, even the hair is very realistic. We even experimented and made come creations that I will have nightmares about! :-)

I am hooked on the Face Room. You able to upload your own personal images of a front and side view. Those images will then be applied after clicking on certain parts of the image to line it up with the avatar. Simply click "apply to figure" and you will instantly see the face image via 3D animation. There some tweaking you will have to do to line everything up correctly, but after some practice you will get the hang of it. This is a great feature to share and email your friends and family animated avatars of themselves to use.


I really enjoy using the search feature. Just type in the item you watch and choose from the list of results. The library includes a variety of motions, expressions clothing and other applications for the novice (like me) to the expert. You can just drag and drop the items. There are hundreds of ready to use features that can quickly and easily be tweaked and individualized, you can even download more than 1GB of content. The respond time can take a bit, but I guess with a program that can do so much I understand why. In order to use this program to its fullest capacity you must have an abundant amount of RAM. Working with individual figures seems to have better processing time than trying to work with more than 2 figures, which can cause issues. I installed with software on a Windows XP Operating System. There will be several options on where and how you want your content to be installed. Word of advice, make sure you do not have anything else running in the background such anti-virus, firewall or programs. My anti-virus was doing a scan during the installation of Poser 8 and when I tried opening the program it gave me an error message and to reinstall. Once I reinstalled the software with nothing running in the background, things went smoothly and the program is up and running with no issues.

One very cool feature is the Indirect Lighting (IDL). Your images will look like a real photo. The IDL allows for correct lighting and illumination giving you more of a natural result. This feature works the best on outdoor images since you can make the shadows and sunlight/moonlight look more natural without actually darkening the image.

The audio lip-syncing tool is pretty easy to use but I can see where it can be improved. The mouth does not move as the words are actually spoken.

This program is amazing. My daughter and I have enjoyed trying new things out and experimenting with pictures and figures. Animate and represent your images into photo-realistic 3D art for web videos, print or movies. Export 3D figures to add characters to other 3D applications. All you need is just a little imagination.

Since this software can be used for medical presentations as well as "x-rated" purposes, be aware that this software includes EVERYTHING to make your own figure creations. That includes breasts and a variety of genital areas. You may want to be careful when small children are playing around the software.

Besides finding tons of information on the internet to help you, here is a list recommended books you can find on Amazon:
How'd You Do That?: Poser Character Creation For Beginners
The Art of Poser and Photoshop: The Official e-frontier Guide
Secrets of Poser Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities: The e-frontier Official Guide

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Takes some getting used to but a nice, if specific, "fun" tool, October 12, 2009

By	Grieger (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Full disclosure: I'm not a professional 3D artist though I have used 3D tools before, albeit more than a decade ago.

I consider myself a pure amateur here and part of the appeal for trying this out was to actually help out on a project I'm working on that focuses on character models and animations. So, you could say this was a nice (potential) fit.

I used an early version of Poser (I think it might have even been the first one ages ago...Fractal Design so it was almost 15 years ago). The controls back then were okay but nothing special but then Bryce (yes, KPTBryce was the original I worked with) came along and the interface was overhauled. A lot of that overhaul is still in place to some extent which is nice but is also a bit of a problem.

Before we dive into that, a quick overview (and to keep things clear): Poser is a character manipulation and animation tool. There are tools for manipulating character models, adjusting hair, textures, and cloth, and creating/applying animations. It's not a 3D modeling tool (i.e. you're not really creating character models from scratch here) and it's not really about building elaborate scenes and the like. You'll use other tools like Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, etc. to build your models. Then, you can use Poser to take those models, light them, cloth them, manipulate them and animate them before exporting the finished product to the next stage in your art pipeline.

Despite where it belongs in your pipeline, Smith Micro includes a handful of content to get you going right away. So, even if you don't have a 3D tool to work with or any models you pulled off the net, you can get started playing around with Poser immediately. NOTE: As I understand it, the models included in Poser 8 are not licensed for you to just use in commercial work. I believe Poser Pro (another $250 more than this) includes licenses for some or all of the models included in the package. Check this yourself before you decide to rely on what they included in the package for your own projects.

Digging into the main pose tool will take a little getting used to. The app likes to use a variety of cameras that you can switch between (though the keyboard shortcuts are ridiculously non-intuitive in places like command-= being the face camera shortcut) rather than just giving you a free form camera that you can manipulate (or drag controls to move your camera around the model). There's a Dolly camera that you can move but using the controls moves the camera, not the perspective. So, let's say you drag right. Instead of you locking on the model you're working on and wrapping around the model, you're turning the camera to the right into empty space. I'd understand this idea if I was working in a 3D modeling app and was adjusting the camera for the view. But, this is a program dedicated to a subject (or two) in front of you. It's like telling an artist working on a small statue to pick up his chair and move it rather than simply turning the model so he can work on the other side.

This combined with overly sensitive controls (you need to click-and-drag in short bursts or you'll end up with a camera looking who-knows-where...this goes for light controls as well). And forget about using the view magnifier tool. It only magnifies (which I guess fits the description of the tool) but there's no way to back up and widen the field of view. At one point, I didn't realize I had the tool still active and clicked and dragged to rotate a part of the model. I ended up zooming int to a foot so that all I saw was the simple shaded "skin". It took a little looking around (about 10 minutes) before I found the Restore Camera keyboard short cut (there is no menu item or button in the UI to do this).

It seems strange after all these iterations (version 8!) to have a UI that just seems clunky. There are plenty of good things in the UI, don't get me wrong, but this is a fundamental task--moving around your model's camera--that just seems like something that should be hammered out by now. The camera issues become more of a problem because there are so many but only one view port to look from. If you've used a traditional 3D package, you'll usually end up with one or more view ports/windows with one or more perspectives of the "target" area you're working on. So, you can look at the top and left view at the same time without having to do a think...just move your eyes. Here, you've got to right-click (I used a two-button mouse on a Mac so I was lucky), learn the short cuts (again, not intuitively assigned), or cycle through them every time with the UI controls (one click moves to the next view).

Other things like the steps required to delete a figure are stupid. You have to select the figure via a small drop-down on the Preview tab's pane then go to the Figure menu and select Delete Figure. Why can't I just highlight the figure in the hierarchy (that's right there already) and just hit the delete button or click an interface button that let's me delete it? Better yet, how about a right-click menu with a delete option? Nope. Right-click edits the name of the object (with the editing field way on the other side of the screen). The delete key does nothing. It's really frustrating. It's almost like the intuitive part of the UI is about creating and when it comes time to delete/remove or otherwise do something other than create or manipulate, everything falls apart. Of course, to make things silly, you CAN click on individual body parts or clothing and hit the delete button to remove them just fine. Go figure.

The rest of the UI and the app generally work well together. You've got a library and a hierarchy on the right that you can use to quickly (PhotoShop-style) hide, show or highlight a model or body part. There are also a number of included poses (as you'd expect) to quickly take your model and pose it like it's running or jumping, hair styles to quickly coif your model, and even cloth them. The consistency between the various tools (they appear as tabs in the main interface window) is great from a learning curve perspective.

Poser supports all the major 3D software packages so import/export will generally be without incident (I did not test this against a 3D package, I tested the imports against a game engine that supported those packages for imports). One thing to note for aspiring game artists: poser's included models are very high poly count models. You'll have to pass them through something to scale them down.

Despite the UI issues, it's still a really interesting tool that does a lot to make SOME aspects of animation and character modeling easier. And, technically, you could use this tool exclusively if all you needed was a way to essentially animate a mannequin for a short vid or some other project. Still...I said "Despite". You have to get past those UI issues to use this package so you'll spend some time getting used to odd controls and working past that hurdle.

With that in mind, if you're an aspiring 3D artist and you want to get a reasonably priced (compared to most professional 3D packages out there) tool to work with human models and figures, this is probably the thing for you (assuming you've got $200 to spare).

If you're looking for a 3D character animation solution to work into a 3D pipeline for a game or for some sort of commercial project, I suggest starting with your 3D modeling environment first and finding the best animation tool for that environment. There are usually solid picks that work best for each package. This is more of a "fun" tool than a "pro" tool even though you CAN get some decent mileage out of it.

And, if you're going the indie route and trying to save money, you're likely better off just downloading Blender ([...]) for free. It includes animation tools (though I can't vouch for them as I haven't used them yet).