My one real gripe with the program is the selection method that is forced upon users when working with content. I’d mentioned earlier that there are thousands of objects, poses, models and more that you can use in Poser Pro. These are things that all have their own directories and simply must be seen to confirm what it is you are selecting. The Categories/Content browser needs a serious overhaul for the pro user that actually has a significant amount of content. Poser Pro lets users resize the windows, but doesn’t allow you to change preview sizes or load in multiple Runtime folders (Runtime folders are where all of the 3D content is kept). Smith Micro has improved this area by allowing a text-only navigation that functions like a mouse-click contextual menu. This improvement does accelerate directory navigation. However, I’ll admit it, I’ve been thoroughly spoiled by Adobe’s Bridge application and it’s ease of use while spanning multiple formats. If Poser allowed for preview icon scaling and loading of multiple Runtimes folders, it would be outstanding. Call me an anarchist (or, more appropriately, a non-Communist) but I don’t want every piece of Poser 3D content in the same runtime folders for a bunch of reasons, including paranoia and organization.
Depth of Options
In short, the depth of options is excellent. For most indie film makers, we usually fall somewhere between the range of total geek to total newbie when it comes to 3D applications. Poser Pro obliges both ends of the spectrum with elemental functionality all the way to those that want to use Python scripting to control scene and content behaviors. In fact, there are even some independent Python scripts available for sale that simulate muscle mass and body mass movement during animation.
I’ll break some of the more robust options into categories that coincide with the various rooms you work in while using Poser Pro:
Pose Room - Making gross body movements is pretty easy. It’s when you get down to individual finger joints that you can end up spending a ton of time. Poser Pro ships with many pose presets including individual hand positions which shaves significant time off of the posing routine. Another great timesaver is being able to simply key frame between pose presets and have Poser Pro figure out what goes in between.
Layered animation is also a huge plus. You can make separate little animations and save them for use later. Then you can overlap and blend multiple saved animation sets.
Also, the ability to use Motion Capture files (MoCap) in BVH formats is most excellent. You can download various free BVH files, you can buy some and you can contract some MoCap if your budget allows. This is a major time saver for creating believable figure animation.
Material Room - While the program ships with some presets and all content has its own textures already built, the water is more than neck deep here. The materials editor is extremely deep and capable allowing the sophisticated user the ability to create remarkable procedural and texture based materials. The node based structure of this room makes editing highly intuitive - once you know what all of the nodes do! Additionally, you have gamma control over your textures, which is nice when bringing the finished render into your editing application.
A very nice new addition is Normal Map support. I won’t explain normal map details, but suffice it to say that you can now add extreme texture detail to characters, hiding the fact that you may be working on a low res poly model. This feature can significantly accelerate your renders by eliminating the need for high polygons in models. (This is really most useful for folks that build content in another program and then bring it into Poser to texture, rig and animate)
Face Room - This is too cool. You can wrap real photos to the existing figures and then intuitively morph the figure to match the photo.
