Set-up Room - This has received an update in Poser 8. You can import new 3D character meshes and rig them for use in Poser and control the bending deformations much more efficiently. Bring it into Poser’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 - think 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. To further aid you in this pursuit, they've included a new Indirect Light (IDL) for global illumination feature and they've also created new fall-off models to more closely replicate real world light falloff.
Rendering - Is non-photorealistic presentation something you might be interested in? Poser 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.
As with all Computer Graphics, bigger, better and faster is always the best choice of systems. Although kind to 32 bit legacy systems and multi-processor equipment, Poser is really engineered for 64 bit, multi-processor systems (the mac option is still 32 bit only as of this writing). This comes with a caveat though, one of our testers experienced a complete failure of the flash based Library tools in the Windows XP x64 system. (Of course, Windows XP x64 is a somewhat obsolete OS, which didn't get nearly as much wide-spread support amongst software developers due its earliness in the x64 exploration. Users of all the new x64 systems such as Vista x64, Windows 7 x64, or the new Mac OS will likely have no issues.)
Poser really has two flavors of operation: Low Resolution and High Resolution. Working in high res with both high density polygon models and high resolution texture maps will exact a toll from any computer system. Adding multiple characters to any one file will compound this issue. In fact, if you are attempting photorealistic animations with multiple high res characters, the animations won’t be done in your lifetime. This one of the reasons why Poser Pro was created since Poser 8 doesn’t accommodate multi-machine rendering, whereas Poser Pro does, specifically for CG character integration into additional CG software. However, if your goal is high res stills for storyboards or modest and/or low res animations to create extras for blending into your action in AE or FCP, you'll find Poser 8 is up to the task.
Poser is definitely snappier and more responsive now. Load times of characters is faster - but never fast enough. Scenes with multiple characters do display and handle much more easily now.
The Firefly render system is faster than previous editions, but will never be confused with the speed of others integrated render engines. There are no methods for “instancing” characters to rapidly create small groups or large crowds.
While Poser 8 can deliver pro level results, it’s price-point and feature set does keep it squarely in the hobbyist bandwidth. With intelligent crowd behavior and crowd motion capabilities becoming more ubiquitous, it would be outstanding if Poser could continue to make the lives of their users easier by engaging a little of that - even if it’s having Walk Cycles that avoid objects in the scene.
