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 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 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 it’s own textures already built, the water is more than neck deep here. The materials editor is extremely deep and capable of 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 can gamma control 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 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 - You can create digital stunt doubles! You can wrap real photos to the existing figures and then intuitively morph the figure to match the photo. (This is also very helpful for folks who want to create ultra realistic storyboards using Poser.)
Believable Motion - Believable motion takes some time to craft. However, there is a tidy little tool to accelerate the processes: 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 believable motion. The Talk Designer gives you the ability to lip sync spoken audio to your character. It’s not super real perfection, but you may not need that for your production.
It is possible to import .bvh motion capture files to Poser 8 but those are typically set up for gross movements leaving hand and facial expressions to be done separately.
Hair Room - Make your own good and bad hair days. Flexible, realistic hair is yours to style and blow in the virtual wind. Many Poser characters use 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 8 Cloth Room does just that making believable drapes and cloth flowing in breezes or matching the movement of your character do-able.
Cloth simulation time is not particularly speedy; this process takes some trial and error if working with more filmy and sheer types of cloth. The default settings behave much like tent canvas.
It is important to note, while not directly related to the cloth room, that there is a new feature in Poser called Wardrobe Wizard which allows easy usage of legacy clothing content to the new Poser figures – fantastic.
