Microfilmmaker Magazine - Reviews - Software Review: Poser Pro, Pg. 4 of 5


	Software Review: **Poser Pro, Pg. 4**

Cool Extras - At this point, let's bring up a couple of outstanding features of Poser Pro: the Walk Designer and the Talk Designer. The Walk Designer can save countless hours of tweaking by creating looping animated walk cycles that you can vary gait, bounce and a list of other options for to create believable motion. The Talk Designer gives you the ability to lip sync spoken audio to your character. It’s not super-perfect, but you may not need that for your production.

Hair Room - You’ll get tired of me saying cool. But this feature is cool. Flexible, realistic hair is yours to style and blow in the virtual wind. Many Poser characters us geometry based (mesh based) hair with transparency maps. Great for stills but for animation, not so much. The hair room will do everything from fur to curly to long flowing locks.

Cloth Room - Modeling cloth and then animating realistic cloth behavior is darn near impossible without a cloth simulation program to do the thinking for you. The Poser Pro Cloth Room does just that, making believable drapes and cloth flowing in breezes or matching the movement of your character do-able.

Set-up Room - So, by now you know that Poser is a content manipulation program and not a content creation program, but what if you are good at mesh modeling, have another application and want to rig your own character? Bring it into Poser Pro’s Set-up Room and create the skeleton (bones/rig) that will be used to animate it. This is also used to create animatable parts for inorganic objects, too (ie car doors).

Lighting - Like most 3D applications, you can set lights to illuminate your scene. However, if you’re going for photo realistic work, HDRI or Image Based Lighting (IBL) as Poser calls it, is just the ticket. This capability lets you easily create believable indirect light and natural lighting for a scene - without using a single “real” light unless you want to.

Rendering - Poser Pro has a tasty little feature called Sketch Designer. This rendering “extra” lets you create very un-photorealistic animations which have a delightful impressionistic feel. The IBL options give you just the opposite capability - photorealistic renderings that match given environments.

Category browser of the stock expressions for the
Simon G2 character.

Performance
Are the depth of options too good to be true? They come at a cost of calculation and render time. Poser Pro is the first real forayinto the “real” world of production 3D software where render speed is a close second to render fidelity.

In this area, Smith Micro has made some strides with both the network and background rendering features. If it didn’t have these features, it would be problematic to use in film making or production environments. While the PoserPro Firefly rendering engine is very good it’s also a bit on the poky side compared to other software I run that handles figure animation. Coupling that with using multiple figures plus using IBL lighting and Poser Pro will sometimes leave tears streaming from your eyes while you beg for mercy as the clock ticks. Get fast computers and lots of them.

If you’re using one of the PoserFusion plug-ins for integration into another 3D production software, this rendering issue is mitigated. However, calculation issues for Hair and Cloth features are not. Poser Pro has to do its thing for those elements. The cloth simulator is particularly frustrating if you haven’t learned the fine art of tweaking your cloth settings. It's terribly easy to “over set” your fidelity which will leave you wondering if taking a short vacation is in order while the cloth simulation calculates. The elements of hair and cloth demand some user education prior to engaging them.

There is also another limitation that might bite you. If you plan on doing post render special effects and are only using the built in Poser Firefly render engine, Poser Pro doesn’t support multi-channel export. That means no alpha channels, no depth-of-field channels, no vector channels, you get the idea.