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efrontier Poser 6 | 
| From: Curious Labs, Inc. Category: Software
List Price: $269.99 Buy Used: $55.00 You Save: $214.99 (80%)
Rating: 12 reviews Sales Rank: 1991
Format: Cd-rom Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Xp Media: CD-ROM Edition: PC Operating System: Windows XP Shipping Weight (lbs): 1 Dimensions (in): 9.9 x 7.9 x 2.6
MPN: psr-w60-de-r UPC: 814956011061 EAN: 0814956011061 ASIN: B00083SCCM
Release Date: March 26, 2005 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| ⋅ | New Animation palette and Keyframe controls animate figures, props, cameras, lights, and even materials | | ⋅ | Render out for any medium of your choice - many styles available - Photorealism, cartoon, sketch, Flash, wireframe, silhouette and more | | ⋅ | Add dynamic hair and cloth to your figure - they're dynamic and will move with your figure, even reacting to wind in animations | | ⋅ | High-resolution, fully rigged Male, Female, Boy and Girl figures in preset poses -- along with props, lights, cameras, accessories and materials | | ⋅ | Also features new OpenGL previews, enhanced cartoon imagery rendering and improved Flash support |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description Poser 6 delivers the power of interactive 3D figure design, offering infinite opportunities to portray human diversity, form and expression. Whether you create for print, animation or the web, there's always a need to integrate the human form -- with this powerful tool you can design any figure you can imagine. An intuitive 3D toolset allows you to scale and manipulate individual body parts, design facial expressions, and pose figures. Design with the human form for art, illustration, animation, comics, web, print, education, medical visualization, games, storyboarding and more!
Poser 6 brings the art of figure design and posing right to your desktop, with an innovative UI to make working with the human form easily accessible. Included human and animal models come ready for you to start designing and posing immediately. You can click-and-drag to interactively sculpt faces, pose body parts, or create various ethnic varieties. For those who require finer control, full body morphs, facial expression morphs, and bone rigging are easily accessible for any figure. All features and models are provided in a natural 3D environment for realistic depth, lighting and shadowing on any figure in any pose. You can pose any figure by clicking and dragging a body part. With Document Display Styles you can view and design your figure in silhouette, outline, wireframe, textured, and more. The program lets you manipulate individual body parts, including the full body, facial expressions and fully articulated hands, and interactively sculpt and design figures in real time, including the body and facial expressions. Object-level Collision Detection helps with posing and avoids collisions when animating. What's New in Poser 6? - New Figures
Poser 6 introduces James and Jessi, new figures with amazing realism to bring a new level of photorealstic content to your artwork. Both figures accurately depict the human form, have lifelike skin textures, and full morph target sets to design your own custom figures with facial expressions. Also included are new boy and girl children figures, Ben and Kate, who complete the new Poser family. The new Poser figures come with photorealistic texture maps, full body morphs, facial expression morphs, and are fully rigged for posing. - More Content
Poser's Content Paradise now includes a host of top content providers, to bring you a diverse range of Poser 6 models, textures, poses, character packs, utilities and free stuff. A redesigned interface makes finding Poser content faster and easier than ever before. - Enhanced UI
Poser's innovative UI is centered on a productive room-based environment. Individual Pose, Setup, Materials, Hair and Cloth rooms provide easy feature access for each step in the creative process. In addition to rooms, Poser uses floating palettes and windows. You can customize your Poser workspace by hiding/displaying and relocating controls anywhere you like. You can even save up to nine different screen configurations for the entire Poser workspace. - Shadow Catching
Poser 6 introduces several new features to support artists in rendering more true to life shadow effects. For example the NEW Shadow Catcher feature enables you to separate shadows from their underlying surface, and put them virtually anywhere. These new features make image composition and integrating 3D figures into graphic design easier. - New Toon Outlines
The New Toon Outline feature uses post-processing during rendering to draw an outline around the edges of cartoon images. Poser 6 offers customizable outline styles, enabling you to further personalize your cartoon shading look. Add a distinctive style to any cartoon imagery for comics. Now you have the choice to add outlines to any cartoon imagery you create with Poser. This feature's effect is most dramatic when combined with a cartoon shader node. Configurable Cartoon Shading preview styles allow you to approximate the final render results as you work. - OpenGL
OpenGL delivers accelerated performance when previewing anything from cartoon to photorealistic 3D figures. Now you can display vivid textures and lighting in real-time when designing figures. You can even render high resolution images using the OpenGL Preview renderer. There are accelerated previews for your 3D scenes, so you can see vivid textures and lighting in real-time. This feature works with all Document Display Styles, including wireframe, cartoon, and more. You can render out your 3D scene display with the OpenGL Preview renderer, and easily switch between SreeD Software and OpenGL Hardware for scene previews--which means you can maximize your system's resources and spend your time creating rather than waiting. - New Ambient Occlusion
Ambient Occlusion makes figures seem as though they are in the natural lighting environment of the real world. Ambient Occlusion is available on every light to create accurate soft shadow effects, thus giving scenes a new degree of realism. The new Ambient Occlusion shader node makes figures and objects appear as though they are in a natural lighting environment. Ambient Occlusion darkens surfaces within a scene whose exposure to light is blocked by other objects. This effect uses raytracing to calculate the degree to which other objects within a scene occlude the ambient light of a surface at a given point. Surfaces with more occlusion will be rendered as darker than surfaces with little or no occlusion. You can set Ambient Occlusion lighting for all objects, or select lighting effects focused on specific parts of your scene. | | | Meet James and Jessi | | | | Expand your cartoon universe with Toon Outline | | | Ambient occlusion brings your figures to life | | More About Poser - Photorealism
Poser 6 allows you to quickly design and pose pre-rigged figures, or create original figures to suit your needs. With professional lighting effects and shading materials, a large library of content and photorealistic textures, you can create professional-quality imagery and movies. You can also integrate with other 3D applications, or composite photorealistic imagery into your favorite image editing or motion graphics programs. Just some of the features in Poser 6 include: accurate human male, female and children 3D models; large libraries of content included; quick design/pose pre-rigged figures with full morph target sets; realistic perspective in 3D space; and professional lighting effects and procedural shader material trees - Camera Controls
Cameras represent your window into the Poser workspace. You can use them as a director would, to set up your ideal camera shots for each image or animation frame. Or, you can take advantage of the benefit that comes with 3D work, of being able to render a scene from multiple angles. In either case, Poser 6 offers multiple configurable cameras to facilitate your creative workflow. Poser includes a variety of independent cameras for viewing your scene, and a four-pane camera view. All are easily controlled with an innovative Trackball control for intuitive scene setup. - Realistic Lighting
Lighting is an essential component of any 3D image. Lights add colors, cast shadows, create specific effects, and set the tone for your scene. Poser 6's light controls allow you to add and individually configure different types of light sources in your Poser scene. When these light configuration options are combined with Poser 6's powerful rendering tools, the lighting possibilities are unlimited. - Bone Rigging
Create new, fully poseable Poser figures from any 3D object in a few easy steps. Import 3D geometry, break it into body parts and generate new Poser figures. You can even create Inverse Kinematics (IK) chains. Inverse Kinematics (IK) delivers natural character motion by modeling the hierarchical interactions of bones and joints, so that when you move a hand, the arm naturally follows. - OpenGL Preview
New OpenGL hardware acceleration offers improved performance with figure Posing and Preview renders. Easily switch between SreeD Software and OpenGL. Hardware rendering for scene previews means you can maximize your system's resources and spend your time creating rather than waiting. - Photo-based Facial Mapping
Want to create a virtual you? Friend? Import facial photos to easily model new characters and create texture maps. Poser's Face Room allows you to create lifelike results by mapping any face onto a 3D head. You can also generate new faces with a button click, or create caricatures for wild characters. Ethnicity, age, and gender parameter controls round out this powerful set of facial tools.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
When you need life-like humans, toons ,or animals fast without hours or weeks of 3d modeling June 7, 2006 3D ANIMATOR (MISSISSIPPI ,USA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I started with POSER 5 and instantly loved it so I got version 6. My main interest was toon 3d characters to add to funny video shorts I create to put as intro and skits in wedding and other videos. I have been hobbying with 3d software for a while and most pacages have a bit of a learning curve. If you want human-like characters you must make them yourself which is called modeling. Then you must give the model a bone structure which is called rigging. Then you must add textures or skin color to the model. Then you must add lights and cameras and etc.Its a lot like sculpting with clay except its done from your computer screen. All this requires that you learn the tools in the software that allows you to do these things which all adds up to a big learning curve. Poser allows you to skip the time consuming modeling, rigging, and texturing part by providing ready made models with the software or you can buy them from various places. All you have to do is animate them. Animating the model realistically is a challenge. This is the part the software does not do for you. It requires some foundation Knowledge of the principles of animation. As you move the model using the rigged controls the software tries to interpret what you are doing. It does not always make the model move the way you intend. This is when you must use the tools in the software to make adjustments so that the models behave the way you want. That is the hard part that takes practice and learning what tool does what. The manual that comes with Poser shows you the tools but doesn't really help in understanding how or when to use them. It helps to see videos such as one by Jeff Lew which does not use Poser but explains the fundamental tools used in most 3d software to animate characters. Poser 6 could also use some improvents in the speed of its render engine and an easier way to create custom characters.(Check the demo of "SPORE" from the creator of "THE SIMS") Over all I love it and have no crash problems on my six year old computer running Windows XP with 798mb RAM. Whats really sweet is transporting Poser 6 characters into Vue 5 Infinite software environments. But thats another review.
For Patient Computer Savvy people. (Read Warning) December 8, 2005 Hitsuji Kinno (USA) 4 out of 4 found this review helpful
___WARNING TO MAC OSX TIGER USERS___: Do these steps after installation. It will enable you to _SAVE_. (especially if you have the DIVX codec) 1. Open and Register your product (on the website too). Shut it down. 2. Go to http://www.e-frontier.com/filemanager/list/updates/130/131/133/?sbss= 3. Choose "Poser 6 English Service Release 2 for Mac OS X". 4. Enter your serial number and open the dmg, follow the instructions on the release from there. While you are there, you can download the rest of the stuff. For those who can't access that link for whatever reason: http://www.e-frontier.com-->downloads (second blue tab at top)-->Updates and Documentation-->(Choose the info... Poser 6, Macintosh, English) Also to update your DIVX codec go to: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/codec.php (the download link is on the righthand side, yellow link red box.) Do both of those things and you should be set to save you Poser programs. If you don't have Divx and aren't planning to do download it... well, do these steps anyway, it might just be a good idea. __END WARNING___ The review now... Poser is really great program, and though it takes a while to learn, it's pretty good. I know that a lot of the computer unsaavy will have trouble. The UI in the Mac doesn't take advantage of what Mac OSX offers. It does more than humans, it does animals and objects too. (For those willing to Download for a price, beds, scenery, buildings, etc). There was a person that complained it doesn't work on Mac OSX, I had no trouble with it beyond what I mentioned above. The reason I'm giving it 4 stars is because the figures in Poser6 suck. Go to DAZ and download those. I particularly like the Millenium Horse, Victoria, Michael, and Aiko (for those anime fans). Also because of the bug, and not taking advantage of the Mac OSX UI. I would have liked the stage parts to be in separate windows, like the Photoshop User Interface. So I could individually dock the windows, and kill them. The book isn't a tutorial manual at all, just a basics manual. (But Adobe Photoshop is like that too, so I'm not griping). To augment that go online, DAZ has some really great turotials, also doing a google search. (Also buying that book that previous reviewer mentioned below me probably will help, but I haven't bought it yet) The renders can be retouched in Photoshop... look for those tutorials if you happen to have Photoshop. [...]. Though there are others. I was lucky, I downloaded Aiko, Michael and Victoria for free off of the Daz website. (James is pathetic, as mentioned) (currently as of this writing they still are free.) [...] Download them now if you are intending or thinking about buying the program. (If they are no longer free, download the first two after you buy the program, it is worth it.) As for how long it takes to learn, to make your own figures it will take lots, and lots of learning, patience and work, but it took just as long for me to learn Photoshop, Mojoworld, and other high end graphics programs. (I'm still learning Photoshop, though it's been about 5 years on and off). Don't expect a miracle with powerful and complex programs such as this. Depending on your learning curve, you may get upset and throw it out the window, or you may try over and over again until you get it right. If you want to use this for reference work (because you suck at imagining poses--like me), this program might be more work than you are willing to go for. (Just use magazines and those wooden mannequins--much cheaper). I bought this program for Mojoworld, mainly. And because I got some requests for anime characters in 3D. I secondarily bought it for posing figures into various positions for reference, but it takes a lot more work than I thought. Overall, Poser 6 is a great program for those of us who are bad at drawing humans, want to interface it with programs like Bryce, Mojoworld, and for doing Photoshop humans. It will take about just as long to learn as Photoshop, Mojoworld, and other high end graphical programs, but I think it's worth it. (Especially when you buy the educational pack). It's a lot easier to use than building a human figure in say... Maya. So don't expect overnight success, and have lots of patience and computer knowledge before buying this program.
Not for the casual hobbiest September 7, 2005 amsterdamaged 9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Poser is hard. Extremely hard. The manual that comes with the software is poorly written and virtually useless. I recommend the VHS "POSER 5 Demystified", which is relevant to Poser 6 as well. This will help get you started. But even with this, Poser, like all 3D animation programs, is going to require quite a commitment from you. Its VERY TIME CONSUMING. There's just no way around it. Even after you've figured out how to use the software (it took me 6 months of trial and error...and I'm certainly no expert), it can easily take you 8-10 hours to produce a 5 second animation. The problem is that no one can show you "how" to make an animation with Poser. They can only show you how the various tools work (which, as I stated before, the manual fails miserably at). You're going to have to decide what you want to see on the screen, and figure out how to use the software to make that a reality. Example: there are 3 different methods you can use to animate, which give you wildly different results. While the manual tells you what these are and identifies the controls for each, it doesn't tell you which to use and under what circumstances to use them. You're going to have to figure it out on your own. I literally thought the software was broken for the 1st 6 months, because the figures kept moving in unexpected ways. Actually, the software was behaving exactly the way it was supposed to. I understand now that its an asset rather than a liability, because once you learn what you're doing, Poser can add a level of realism that is sorely lacking from a lot of other 3d animation programs. So what do I think of Poser 6? Its amazing. Simply amazing. I would give it 5 stars, except for the crappy manual that comes with it. Curious Labs should design a manual like "The Art of Animation Master", which was brilliantly tailored for the beginner. The downside: content. If you plan on making a contemporary film, this is not a problem. But if you plan on making any kind of period film, or a Sci-Fi or Fantasy film, be prepared to shell out at least $200.00 for extra content. You're first stop should be to DAZ. Get version 3 of both Michael and Victoria, because 99% of the clothing and morphs on Content Paradise is geared to fit these two models. You're going to find virtually no content geared towards the models that come with the Poser software (James, Jessi, Don, Judy). Its a rip-off...pure and simple...but if you want to use Poser, there's really nothing you can do about it, unless you're a talented enough modeller to design your own clothes. Before you go spending all that money though, take the time out to learn the software. See if you're willing to make the commitment or not. I would recommend a short 3-5 minute film using the content that comes with the software. Allow yourself 6 months to a year to complete it. I'm not kidding. Lip Synching: You're also going to need "Mimic" from Daz, if you plan for your film to contain any dialogue. That's going to cost you at least another $200.00, unless you can find a free version of the software. Check out the magazine 3d world. Every month it features free software for all sorts of 3d platforms. I was lucky enough to obtain a free version of Mimic for the price of the magazine. You can probably obtain the back issue from their website. Other than that, study the masters (Harrihausen, etc.). Computer animation is really not that different from Claymation. Its just done in a virtual environment, and you don't have to animate each and every frame. Also, its relatively simple to check your progress and to make changes, once you know what you're doing. If you read the review section of Poser 5, many of the reviews are extremely negative. While some of the complaints are justified, in my opinion a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that the people reviewing it haven't spent a sufficient amount of time to know what they're doing. They think the software is "broken" because its not giving them the results they expect, or their computer lacks sufficient RAM and a fast enough processor to handle it. The requirements on the side of the box is the MINIMUM required to run the software. If you want it to run smoothly, I would recommend at least a gigabyte of RAM. You'll save yourselff a lot of headaches.
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