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Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)LOOP 2009EVA 2009ICIDS 2009 Interactive Storytelling
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Jump to: Graphics and Animation Software All product reviews |
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Introduction
Poser is one of those niche products that has been passed around between different companies, but it happens to be cool and unique enough that it hasn't been put to rest. The latest company to acquire Poser is Smith Micro.
Smith Micro doesn't focus on any particular kind of software, but rather has a hodgepodge in its offerings including StuffIt for compressing files, CheckIt for cleaning the system registry, TuneRanger for iTunes management and Turbo Project, a project management system. This raises the question of what these software products have in common with a package that allows users to quickly pose, animate and render human figures? I'm not sure of the answer to this question.
The good news is that when Smith Micro acquired Poser, they kept the entire Poser team intact, so the team that is dedicated to the success of this product is still around guiding its future. Let's just hope the company doesn't make them add a compressing, cleaning, iTunes and project management features to the product.
The latest version of Poser is Poser 8. It includes a wealth of improvements, a whole new set of content and some nice rendering enhancements.
The Poser Interface
The first big change that you'll notice in Poser 8 is that the interface has been subtly altered. Instead of the free roaming sets of controls that were sprinkled around the interface in previous versions, all controls are rigidly forced into rectangular palettes. These palettes make it easier to optimize the interface and to keep the interface tight, but they still allow the user to customize the interface to their liking.
Every palette, including the main view window, can be made into a floating palette making it easy to litter palettes across the desktop. All palettes also have a consistent set of options in the upper right corner for docking and floating the palettes. One drawback to this new palette approach is that every interface room can have its own configuration. It would be nice to have a way to sync the interface layouts between the various rooms.
New Figures and Content
Although custom human figures can be loaded and used in Poser, many users rely on the library of figures that ship with Poser and Poser 8 includes eight new fully-compliant hi-resolution figures. The main two figures are named Alyson and Ryan (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Poser 8 includes over 1GB of ready-to-pose content including the new Ryan and Alyson figures (click for a full-size image).
The other figures are based on these two main figures are their African, Asian and Hispanic counterparts named Alisha, Izumi, Maria, Diego, Marcus and Tomo. Each figure also has a complete set of preset poses, facial expressions, hairstyles, clothes, and hand poses. You can also use the Talk Designer and the Walk Designer on these characters to make them talk and walk.
In addition to the standard figures, the library also includes male and female mannequins, a dog figure, and a matching anatomically-correct skeletons for each of the main human figures. These skeletons can be easily overlaid with a semi-transparent skin for quickly creating medical illustrations showing both the skin and bones.
The library also includes a set of props that are used to enhance the scene. These library props include several complete sets of clothes for both figures including jewelry, dynamic hair, undergarments and shoes. The props library also includes a collection of random items including utensils, office items, tools, and furniture. For glamour shots, there is even a hi-res convertible car (Figure 2). There is also a set of primitive objects that can be modified and used as background objects.
Figure 2: Hi-res props like this convertible are easy to drop into a scene.
If the default library of content isn't enough, you can quickly jump over to Content Paradise, which is an online marketplace of figures, materials, props and scripts that work with Poser. Contained within this marketplace is practically any item you could possibly want. All items are sold for a fee and can be quickly downloaded and installed directly to the Poser library. The default installation ships with a sampling of third-party figures including monsters, snakes, cartoon characters, and even an alien.
The Library palette also includes a new Search panel that allows you to search by keyword through all available libraries. There is also a Favorites panel for saving specific items so you can easily find them again.
Welcome to the Wardrobe Wizard
Each version of Poser ships with a new set of figures and content, but the clothes and items with each version is only designed to only work with the figures for that version. Clothing items can be modified using the standard Poser editing tools to fit different figures, but it can be time consuming and even after a lot of work, the clothes don't fit just right.
The new Wardrobe Wizard utility (Figure 3) was created to address this problem. With the Wardrobe Wizard, you can select any clothing item made for one figure and convert it to fit on another figure. For example, you could take the blouse that was made for the Sydney character in Poser 7 and convert it to fit perfectly on the latest Alyson character that is found in Poser 8. This utility allows any default figure to have access to all the clothes available within Poser. It's like having unrestricted access to the closets of all your friends.
Figure 3: The Wardrobe Wizard utility lets you convert clothes and props made for one Poser figure to another figure from another version.
The utility also has features that let you inflate, deflate, smooth or fix any skin poking through the clothing quickly. The Wardrobe Wizard runs as a script within Poser and is a great example of how Poser can be extended using the Python scripting language. The Wardrobe Wizard wasn't even created by the Poser development team. It was created by PhilC, a long-time Poser user and expert.
Indirect Lighting and Attenuation
The big new rendering addition is Indirect Lighting, which provides global illumination to the Poser scenes. This lighting solution computes the effect of lighting that bounces off all the scene surfaces. It also correctly reflects light and color onto adjacent surfaces creating a realistic lighting effect.
Poser lights have been endowed with a new attenuation parameter that defines how the light gradually diminishes as the distance from the light is increased, as shown in Figure 4. Poser lets you select from several different attenuation solutions including Constant, Inverse Linear and Inverse Square. Using attenuating lights will make the scenes much more realistic.
Figure 4: Adding lights with true attenuation make your scene more realistic.
Other Rendering Improvements
In addition to indirect lighting and light attenuation, the Poser rendering engine, called Firefly, gives users more control over the render image than ever. The engine now support the rendering of normal maps. It cannot be used to create normal maps, but it supports applying and viewing objects that have a normal maps applied to them.
Another huge improvement is support for Tone Mapping and Exposure Control. These controls give the user power to set the image's brightness and saturation without having to post-process the images in Photoshop after rendering.
Better Rigging and Morphing
The posing of the default Poser figures works like a dream. It is easy to select a body part and move it into position. However, loading and rigging your own custom figures has always been complicated and tricky. The process is still tricky, but Poser 8 includes several new enhancements that make it much easier.
The first new rigging improvement is the inclusion of a new capsule-shaped falloff zone that more closely follows the length of the bones found in the arms and legs. Another improvement is that you can now apply and blend multiple falloff areas to a single joint. This allows for better skinning potential problem areas like the hips, shoulders and neck.
Building custom morphs has also been improved allowing the morph targets to include changes across multiple body parts. Morph targets can be saved as full-body morphs accessible via a single parameter dial.
Dependent Parameters
For several versions now, Poser has included the ability to add new parameters to a figure. These parameters can control a new morph or the movement of a body part, but new with Poser 8 is the ability to create new dependent parameters, so a single master parameter can control several existing parameters to accomplish a specific task.
Summary
In many ways, Poser 8 has been optimized to improve its performance. Performance improvements are hard to quantify, but the program runs with less problems and overall is faster. A lot of the performance improvements were done to take advantage of systems running multiple processors.
None of the new features in Poser 8 are ground shaking, but collectively they represent a solid new version with many very helpful improvements. The performance, lighting and rendering improvements all enable users to create images that are even closer to realistic than ever.
For more information on Poser 8, visit the Smith Micro web site located at www.smithmicro.com.
Kelly L. Murdock is the president of Tulip Multimedia, a design firm specializing in 3d graphics. He recently authored Poser 8 Revealed, the Official Guide.
