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Shoot Review: E frontier Poser 7

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Reviewer: S.D. Katz

Character program and content community holds promise for previz and animation.

Poser is the 3D figure manipulation program originally designed as a digital mannequin for illustrators and artists when it debuted in the mid-'90s. At the time, Poser was a very simple, artist-friendly tool that made 3D accessible to artists overwhelmed by NewTek LightWave 3D, Autodesk 3ds Max, and other high-end 3D software. Poser models came textured, rigged, and ready to be posed out of the box, and the program slowly caught on with illustrators. But things have changed. Poser 7 (P7) now has many of the capabilities of high-end 3D software, but at the cost of some of its former simplicity. This is not a problem because Poser's cult-like target audience has evolved with the software.

The Poser community is an online phenomenon, a community of artists who not only create illustrations, but also build, share, and sell Poser-ready models, props, and accessories for fantasy- and sci-fi-themed use. The professional features and vast supply of ready-made models have made Poser a favorite tool of storyboard artists and previz designers.

Every version of the program has improved the default character models. In Poser 6, James and Judy were introduced; Poser 7 has added Simon and Sydney, even higher-quality male and female characters. There is also a great deal of new content from RuntimeDNA, Meshbox Design, and other leading third-party Poser developers.

Poser 7 builds on the major changes introduced in Poser 5, which marked the biggest change in the direction of the product since version 1.0 of the software. This included the introduction of “rooms” for various 3D tasks, including Pose, Face, Setup, Material, Hair, Cloth, Material, and Content. Rooms are task-based interfaces accessed through a tab bar at the top of the screen. The Pose room is actually the original stage for models where you use parameter dials (or direct interaction) to position and render the models.

Overview

The Setup room is where models are rigged. This is based on a fairly easy-to-use template style approach that does not provide the kind of control serious animators need for full-on character animation, but it is just fine for posing figures. To be fair, the models' blend areas (at a figure's joints) and the rigging have improved over the years to the point that they are quite sophisticated compared with higher-end solutions in Autodesk Maya or Softimage XSI. The Setup room allows you to achieve dependable results quickly without being a master rigger.

The Hair and Cloth rooms provide similar pre-fab, parameter-driven control for realistic hair and cloth simulation. Hair also provides controls for creating hair styles that react to wind forces. The quality of the rendered results and overall look of the hair is fairly good, and illustrators can retouch Poser images in Adobe Photoshop.

The Cloth room is similarly complex — but it's easier than similar tools in LightWave or 3ds Max. Still, producing good results takes time. You begin with pre-made assets (shawls, dresses, capes, etc.) and apply the dynamics within a parameter-driven interface. This gets you started quickly, but making subtle adjustments is still the same process all CG artists go through — many test renders and minute corrections. There are no silver bullets in realistic simulations.

The Material room is one of the biggest improvements in Poser. This is where you create shaders and surface materials. More sophisticated rendering tools was probably the most frequently requested feature in the early days, and there is no question that the addition of the FireFly render engine in version 5 took the program to a new level. The Material room has two tabs: Simple and Advanced. Simple provides basic and familiar shading controls over Specular, Ambient, Transparency, Reflection, and Bump parameters. To get under the hood, you can access the Advanced controls, which opens a complete node-based procedural shading system.

What's new in P7

Talk Designer is an automatic lip-sync tool useful to web designers, but less so to serious animators because Poser's animation tools are not one of the strong points of the product. This would be a problem if Poser's main user base were animators, not illustrators. However, in typical Poser fashion, the Talk Designer makes facial performance easy for non-animators or anyone in need of fast, refined results. There is even a blink-rate feature that adds random eye blinks. Here's how it works: You record a voice and import the soundtrack. Talk Designer analyzes the voice and takes a best guess at the correct phonemes to use with the character's mouth. Talk Designer works with any of the newest Poser figures including James, Judy, Sydney, Simon, and several Generation 2 characters.

The increase in texture detail in OpenGL is quite impressive. In the past, OpenGL in Poser was limited to maps of about 1000×1000 pixels. Because Poser excels at facial close-ups, this provided only adequate previews. In P7, 4096×4096 pixel maps are supported. Of course, your model will have to have a map of that resolution, and the performance will depend on your graphics card.

Dual-core and multiprocessor support

Poser was initially a Mac product, and it maintains support for OS X with code newly optimized for Intel Macs. In the past, Poser did not take advantage of dual-processor computers. P7 now supports most dual-proc systems — for instance, Mac G4s and dual-core P4 Dell systems. There are also a number of enhancements to the memory management, both for OpenGL and FireFly procedural renders using raytracing. Typically, the most speed gains are experienced with complex scenes and rendering setups.

More speed enhancements

Poser continues to refine the program, and this once-simple artist tool emulates the high-end features found in professional animation products. With the release of version 6, Poser became a professional illustration tool and a prosumer animation tool. Poser 7 continues to blur the lines with the addition of several “under the hood” improvements such as Occlusion Culling, which cuts rendering times by not rendering objects that are hidden from view in the scene. P7 also adds the FireFly renderer's kd-tree Ray Accelerator, which speeds up rendering on scenes with lots of objects. To put this in perspective, most high-end Poser artists texture, light, and pose models in Poser and import the model into E-on Vue, 3ds Max, LightWave 3D, or Maya. This workflow has been developed over several years and works quite well. This is great if you use those other programs, but P7 begins to address the need for doing more complex scenes for artists who only use Poser.

Another useful upgrade is the addition of high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) support. As you may know, image-based lighting (IBL) and HDRI go hand-in-hand. Support for IBL was already in Poser. It's a technique for using image maps (usually photographs) as the basis for lighting a scene. IBL emulates realistic lighting, including indirect (bounced) lighting effects. It's also much faster than Poser's Ambient Occlusion, which approximates the physics of light in a scene with time-intensive calculations. IBL is likely to grow in importance as more “stock” IBL images are made available at E frontier's contentparadise.com.

Fewer clicks

P7 addresses some of the inefficient data-access problems of past versions. It offers hundreds of models that can be mixed and matched, and access to that content is now easier, so setting up scenes is quicker. For example, P7 has added the ability to move between Runtime directories, the main folders for all models and textures. Poser ships with one Runtime directory, but many longtime Poser users have huge legacy directories. Previously, if you wanted to access a wardrobe element (a hat, perhaps) that was five folders below Runtime 1, you had to navigate up five levels and back down to the new item you were looking for. P7 now has tabs for Runtime directors, cutting your clicks in half.

Another new feature is character duplication. In the past, each time you wanted to add a character or object, you had to load it from the library. This could take 20 seconds to a minute depending on your computer. This was very inefficient when loading characters for a crowd scene or cars in a parking lot. Now, characters can be duplicated almost instantly.

Another asset-management improvement is the ability to swap out or merge lighting setups. Previously, Poser limited you to adding lights, but not replacing an entire lighting pre-set. Lighting setups are also library items and sold as products at community sites, so there's a real benefit to trying different setups on a single scene — potentially, you can save them to the library to sell them.

Layered animation

Poser is not a high-end animation tool; however, it has some reasonably robust animation tools including mo-cap support and an f-curve editor. It has some high-end tools, but just not enough of a professional workflow for anyone doing serious animation. Having said that, P7 has shrewdly added Non Linear Animation (NLA), which greatly improves the overall value of Poser's existing animation tools. NLA allows you to separate body parts into layers that can be animated and repositioned relative to other animation layers. You could have faked some of this functionality in the past by copying an entire keyframe track for any body part, but this was essentially a destructive process, and nowhere near as flexible or as easy to organize as animation layers. While this is a significant improvement, animation layers help correct only some of the missteps possible because of the f-curve editor, which lacks the ability to show multiple curves simultaneously on the same graph. Similarly, common tools such as onion skinning are missing — but, then again, Poser does not present itself as a professional character animation tool. With extra effort, Poser can be used to create reasonably sophisticated animation, and layers provide a partial workaround to the program's limited animation capabilities.

Questions, please

One of the best new features is the effort to build training into the program, an idea I have pitched to virtually every major 3D-software developer since 1994. Most graphic arts programs now have online manuals accessed from within the program, and P7 adds to that idea with Quick Start projects accessed from the Project Guide palette. This includes videos and accompanying explanations of key aspects of the program, all available from within the program itself.

Conclusion

Most of the new features in Poser 7 are productivity enhancements and rendering speedups to existing tools. Improvements such as the new Multiple Undo and Redo are long overdue, but it's still great to have them. P7 is about refining workflow while adding enough completely new features that make the reasonable upgrade an easy decision. Highly recommended.

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bottomline

Company: E frontier
Scotts Valley, Calif., (831) 480-2001
www.e-frontier.com

Product: Poser 7

Assets: Easy setup, great content, excellent shader-tree rendering tool, support for OpenGL hardware rendering.

Caveats: Slow rendering, basic animation tools, needs direct camera and light control.

Demographic: CG artists, hobbyists, and previz professionals.

PRICE: $249.99 (FULL); $129.99 (UPGRADE)

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S.D. Katz is a New York-based writer/director and author of the best-selling books Shot by Shot and Cinematic Motion.

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© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.