Poser 5 from Curious Labs

BY EDEN MAXWELL

President’s PDA

Computer
Connections

Melody’s
Media Mix

Poser 5

Poser 5, The Hand
& Maxell

How I Did it:
A Mac Showcase

DotPhoto.com

Qaptain Qwerty’s
Qorner

Photo Page

From My Keyboard

Volunteer for
Express!

A Body of Work

Stellar Articulation
Using the human form in art to convey a story has been done for thousands of years. Using the computer to generate the human form has been with us for decades. In recent years, improvements in software and computer processing speed have contributed to striking results. Impressive human replicas, to one degree or another, are becoming standard issue in the media, including movies that rely on CG effects. Films such as The Matrix feature digital characters doing stunts impossible for real actors; Simone showcased a virtual star that ruled; and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (a computer-generated spin-off of its computer game namesake) held our attention with an all-digital cast that is remarkably life-like.

High Tech Gepetto
Poser was initially introduced nearly ten years ago to provide 2D artists with 3D reference figures that could be posed onscreen. A model could also be drawn digitally or traditionally. Having such tireless and willing virtual models on call was extremely handy. Even a master artist uses models for life drawings and paintings. Perspective, lighting, and shading do not happen by accident. It’s one thing to draw a convincing tree; it’s another matter entirely to draw a credible human.

Millions of years of evolution have given us eye detectors that can immediately spot an imposter. The human face is complex, with many subtle nuances, irregularities, color modulations, and intricate muscle movements, i.e., expressions. There’s a lot more to creating a simulation of a human than scale, perspective, and geometry.

I’ve often used Poser 4 to create, pose, and light a model for a drawing on paper. In a retro-Luddite sort of way, drawing the likeness of a computer-generated model with low-tech pencil and paper has a tinge of irony in a postmodern world. Despite the miracle of the computer, the pencil still reigns for ease of use and immediacy.

Poser, like most actors, was not content to be a simple mannequin, nor an understudy. It had ambition to be an indispensable, working, character actor in any situation; an aspiration achieved with this powerful and complex release.

About Poser 5
Poser 5 from Curious Labs is the application’s most significant version-to-version release. It’s a 3D-character design and animation tool. Users can create figures using a diverse collection of ready-to-use, 3D human and animal models. Its innovative interface is straightforward, well organized, and consumes the entire screen. Poser 5 employs a hierarchical, file-structure scheme throughout that makes figure design, posing and animating easier than with previous versions. To add extraordinary realism, users can map facial photos, grow and style dynamic hair, and create dynamic cloth that flows naturally.

Movies and images from posed figures can be output for Web, print, and video projects. By exporting posed figures, a unique dimension of excitement is possible in 3D. There are a variety of presets available in Poser’s Library. They include: figures, poses, expressions, hair, props, backgrounds, and so on. One can also pose and fine-tune the model manually, right down to individual finger joints by using the array of editing tools. To get you going quickly, Poser ships with a second content CD that includes hundreds of extra presets.

Previous versions of Poser restricted using the Library contained under Poser’s installation Runtime folder. Poser 5 now contains two libraries: Runtime (contains the content that shipped with your copy of Poser 5) and Download (default folder for added third-party content). You may add as many Libraries as you wish. This welcome feature allows you to store Poser content that you download or create in different folders and/or different drives, making content management easier and more powerful.

Many of the new features are built around the core function, which is bringing any project to life using virtual actors. In addition, the fresh content in this release enhances the power of the Figure Design tool set, which includes highly accurate, anatomically correct, 3D, human figures with photo-realistic texture maps. These maps are key for attaining realism with computer-generated images. Clicking and dragging with the new Morph Putty tool interactively customizes characters in astonishing detail. Photo-based facial mapping enables the creation of new, more realistic actors. Powerful enhancements add the realism users might expect to see. Strand-based hair can be grown, styled and animated; dynamic cloth can drape and flow around, or collide with any element in a Poser scene.

After the actor is completed, Poser’s new FireFly renderer creates photorealistic stills and animations by making use of a hybrid micro-polygon and Ray Trace render-engine with subdivision, surface rendering of polygons. Remember, your computer doesn’t see a human figure; it computes coordinates. Every created effect relies on precise and ordered geometric formations. FireFly provides full control over the rendering process, including the ability to create powerful, node-based shaders to generate realistic or imaginative textures and surfaces. Nodes are a collection of modifiable, interactive connections, each one of which is comprised of many, adjustable parameters. These parameters then affect other nodes, and so on. If this sounds complex, it is. But, the results are worth the extra effort.

Fortunately, all connected nodes and their respective jacks are represented graphically, along with the step-by-step creation of the material, or surface, in a handy preview window. After the image has been rendered, it can be exported to your favorite 2D or 3D application, QuickTime, including Macromedia Flash and Viewpoint for the Web.

You can save production time of test renderings by selecting FireFly’s Draft or Production modes without sacrificing final output quality. For flexibility and backward compatibility, Poser 5 includes the Poser 4 and Sketch Designer rendering engines. Rendering in Sketch Designer produces sketch-like drawings by simulating pencil, pen, pastel, watercolors, and paint.

Poser 5 also includes many new productivity tools; the View Magnifier zooms without having to move the camera, and the Direct Manipulation tool moves body parts according to the inherent logic of Kinematics. Direct Manipulation also controls rotation, scale, real world units (inches, feet, millimeters, centimeters, and meters), and, along with Poser grid units, permits more accurate positioning of characters and props. The latter is a must for animation.

Multiple pane camera views (maximum four at a time) show all dimensions of a scene. Python Scripting facilitates creating and running Python scripts using any Python method. There are also several dozen, custom PoserPython methods, also created by Curious Labs, for use specifically with Poser 5 (a PoserPython PDF help file is included). Python scripts provide access to Poser’s internal data, and enable the manipulation of objects. It’s useful for automating repetitive tasks such as: rendering scenes, exporting files, and sharing information between Poser and other applications.

The Metaphor: It’s Really You, Dahling
Poser 5 is set up like a salon of the future (think The Stepford Wives) where you move the virtual actor through the creation process. Six rooms are accessed through convenient tabs at the top of the main one, Pose, where the model is prepared. The six rooms are: Material, Face, Hair, Cloth, Setup, and Content. (Downloading content from Content Paradise requires an Internet connection). Basically, users pose actors, create desired expressions, coif the naked pate, choose preset clothing or create it, and import a background scene. Sophisticated lighting and camera controls are available for enhancing realism. Camera controls include: 3D motion blur with adjustable open and close times, depth of field, F-stop, and focal distance.

Pose
The Pose Room is the focal point for much of Poser’s activity. This is where figures and props are added to the scene, posed and animated. You use the Hair, Cloth, Material, and Face rooms to set up and animate these items. The retractable Library palette contains all available content and is accessible from the Pose Room. Clicking on a body part opens the corresponding properties and parameters palettes.

The Pose room is central control for most Poser activity. This is where you add figures, props, clothing, preset hairdos, etc., and pose the model.

Material
Poser 5’s new Material room is for creating materials using shader nodes that can be added and connected in an infinite variety of ways for custom results. Connecting nodes allows the output of one to affect others, be it one or many. Fortunately, users can visually link and organize these nodes as the material undergoes changes in a preview window. This all sounds confusing until you are working with them. The Material room is powerful, but not particularly intuitive. In addition, Poser 5’s Library palette has been updated to include a Materials category, allowing you to save your shaders to the new *.MT5 format. This category includes 100 pre-built materials including: brick, image maps, glass, metal, stone, wood, and more.

The Material room allows you to create a nearly infinite array of static and animated materials using shaders. In this case, the special shader Hair node is plugged into the Alternative Diffuse jack. By tweaking the Hair controls, you can get the right color and luster for the model’s hair.

Face
Want to create a virtual you?

Poser 5 realistically maps a face onto a 3D head in the Face room. It does this with two photographs (front and side) that you provide of the face you want to map and a pre-existing head object that can be modified to fit the photographs. Approximating the face from the photographs is not completely automatic; the image will need fine-tuning to portray a reasonable resemblance.

You can also create/modify faces using the Face Shaping tool and/or Face Shaping parameters. A wide assortment of ethnic, age, and gender morphs and textures create almost any imaginable face and texture. It’s truly remarkable. Artists can modify faces, then apply them to a figure, create a morph target, and/or load and save custom head textures. While in the Face room, Visual Morph Sculpting with the new Morph Putty tool can be done. This tool sculpts morph targets and the results are visible in real time. Give someone a nose job and see how crucial the shape of the nose is to the face. Or, as the plastic surgeon partners in the FX cable show Nip and Tuck ask each prospective patient: “What don’t you like about yourself?” You can select which of the available morph targets to include or exclude from the sculpting process and can “pin” object vertices once you’ve got them where you want them to avoid making accidental changes later. Face room heads work on standard Poser 5 figures; you can create and endless array of unique faces to suit your needs.

Poser, like most actors,

was not content to

be a simple mannequin,

nor an understudy.

It had ambition to be an

indispensable, working,

character actor in any

situation; an aspiration

achieved with this

powerful and complex

release.

“Poser marionettes are 3D virtual actors that you direct on a virtual 3D soundstage that is complete with lighting, cameras, props, and access to a community of craftsmen that can supply nearly every element of nearly any era, whether modern, historic, or fantasy. The virtual actors are costumed to match those periods, composed into scenes on stages dressed with appropriate details, then rendered into the images and animations that form the visual reference points for any story.”

Steve Cooper, Curious Labs

From digital mannequin
to a sophisticate

“All I wanted was a simple visualization tool, one that would be easy to pose with and quick to use for any artist. I wasn’t yet thinking about high quality rendering, shadows, animation, textures, or anything else. But Poser, old John Henry, had a mind of its own. Poser 1 was released in 1995, and grew quickly. I knew Poser could be a useful tool but the response was overwhelming and the art it helped create was mind blowing.”

Larry Weinberg, Original Poser creator

(A: European face in the Face Room)

(B: Easily morphed into an ethnic face from Asia)

Face Room: Here is the Face Shaping Tool. Rotating the South East Asian parameter dial a bit transformed the default European (A) face into (B) as shown. Poser 5 has floating palette tools like these for specific job in every room.

Hair
The key to creating a convincing 3D model (or pencil drawing or painting) is realistic-looking hair. It cannot be an afterthought. There is no simple way to draw or grow digital hair. In previous versions of Poser, selecting a hairstyle meant adding a prop, such as a cap or wig-like hairdo (good, but not photorealistic). Poser 5 has improved hair “raising” with Real Strand-based Hair. From the new Hair room, 3D hair can be grown and saved for figures and props (animals). Once this is done, there are styling tools for creating salon results. To further enhance hair behavior in animations, applying dynamics such as gravity and wind force fields adds realism. Working with the Hair room requires experimentation, lots of patience, and finesse. Realistic hair is so important that a cottage industry of third-party developers for Poser has grown up around hair (models, body parts, etc., too). For examples of hairdos that go beyond growing strand-based hair, plus additional models and props, click the Content room tab to access Content Paradise, or visit the online sites for digital artists listed in the resources section below.

Poser 5 has a dedicated Hair room that introduces dynamic strand-based 3D hair. Artist can grow hair anywhere they like on the model. As you can see, my first attempt wasn’t quite successful, but still better than hair propped on a model’s head like a helmet.

Cloth
There’s no point in having a great-looking digital model wearing an artificial-looking outfit. Users can now “Clothify” a prop into realistic, dynamic cloth, complete with its natural qualities by assigning collision objects to make it flow and drape. Creating groups within the cloth object provides precise control over its behavior. You can also use the new wind-force field function for realistic, wind effects.

Collision detection is essential for realism. In 3D posing and animation terms, a collision occurs when one object in a scene touches and/or penetrates another. Poser 5 offers three levels of collision detection for each scene. You can specify collision detection settings for each object; you can control which objects touch or pass through each other.

Setup
The Setup room is one Poser 5’s most powerful and daunting features. The Setup room, which debuted with the release of the Pro Pack addition for Poser 4, room allowed you to modify or even create new Poser figures in a completely graphical environment that dramatically reduced figure creation time.

A figure’s appearance has no effect on its functions within this application. As in reality, articulation and animation depend on two things: (1) the underlying skeleton (bone structure), which determines the hierarchy and location of joints, and (2) the manner in which its polygons (the rough equivalent of skin and muscles) are grouped (attached) to the bones.

A lot of detail work is involved in setting up a body to move naturally. You can work from existing figures, or create outside models. Once a new one is produced, it’s imported back into Poser where it’s given bone structure.

Even though this room is not for beginners, try your hand at constructing models that you can share (or sell) to other Poser users. If nothing else, ten minutes here will have you appreciating Poser’s model presets all the more.

On The Menu
In addition to rooms and the handy menu bar, much of Poser’s functionality is available within floating palettes and windows within each room. Most Poser 5 rooms (including the Pose room) allow you to customize your workspace by hiding or displaying or relocating controls anywhere you like. You can save up to nine different configurations for the entire Poser workspace. Being able to customize your workspace wouldn’t be all that useful if you had no way of saving your preferences. Poser 5 includes memory dots that allow you to save poses, camera locations, and user interface preferences and to switch between saved items with a single mouse click.

Mystic Warrior: here’s a fine example of Poser art from artist Harvey Mann who re-shaped the model preset head and then worked from there. To augment the head and background, Mann also used Carrera, UV Mapper, and Painter. No Photoshop was used in the making of this image. Mann also markets add-on products (mostly hair, clothes, and world backgrounds for Poser at both the renderosity and daz3d websites. You can also view examples of his awesome digital art at the renderosity gallery.

Final Cut
Remember to save your work often. This is especially important since Poser currently offers only one level [command]+[z] of undo. You cannot undo some operations, such as certain commands in the Material, Face, Hair, and Cloth rooms. For best results with models and props, users must make subtle adjustments, small increments in the various parameter controls.

On my G4 733MHz (768MB), Poser worked marginally. At first, I thought the program had been locking up, as the spinning beach ball seemed to appear forever. Not so. Poser is processor intensive and it was doing its best on my machine. Despite the waiting time for it to compute various tasks, it worked smoothly and didn’t crash once (knock on virtual wood and thanks to Poser’s Service Release 4 updater). Serious users will definitely need a G5 with plenty of RAM.

Many artists are encouraged to bring fantasy worlds to life because they can pose, dress, and drop models into any context. But Poser is not limited to science fiction or fantasy and has been used to stage scenes from real-world modern and historic eras. Its user-base includes: digital and traditional media artists, researchers, scientists, illustrators, filmmakers, set designers, criminologists, animators, comic book artists, industrial designers, architects, and hobbyists.

Poser 5 is a competitively priced, cutting-edge marvel of software engineering that offers a lot, as it demands a lot. It is well supported by Curious Labs and a dedicated community of users, which is critical for getting the most from this application. All great art is but an experiment and Poser is yet another wondrous medium to explore in the digital age.

Resources: Learning Poser
Of course, this article is a brief overview of a highly complex program that takes time to learn, let alone master. In addition to producing still images, Poser also has rich animation and animation editing tools to explore. (See the QuickTime movie in the related article: Poser 5, The Hand & Maxell.)

As many of Poser’s features are neither intuitive nor immediately apparent, here are a few resources to get you up and running.

Previous versions of Poser offered a selection of hairstyles, but they looked artificial, like wigs or caps.

Over the years, Poser

has evolved into a truly

awesome piece of

software engineering,

winning a loyal

and steadily growing

community of users

and third party

developers around

the world.

Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5 by BL Render from Focal Press: Although aimed for the intermediate to advanced Poser software user, beginners will find this richly illustrated, well-written, and accessible book invaluable. The author provides many insights, examples, tutorials, and each chapter (morphing, joint parameters, library files, figure creation, etc.) is introduced by the theory that explains why those things work the way they do in Poser. The book includes a CD-ROM containing all the files you need to try each tutorial for yourself. If you’re serious about using Poser professionally, then this book is a must have for your library. ($44.99)

Poser 5 Demystified from 3-Axis is an entertaining, self-paced training video, and CD, presented in short, easy to digest lessons. Demystified reinforces mastery of each new skill through relevant and carefully structured activities and leans heavily on how and when to use Poser's new tools.

Anyone who wants to learn or improve his Poser 5 skills will find Poser 5 Demystified a great investment. In fact, order Demystified when you buy Poser 5. This training package will open your eyes to all sorts of possibilities. Demystified is appropriate for anyone – whether you’re working on professional or personal projects – wanting to get up-to-speed quickly with Poser 5. The Poser Demystified package includes: over 2-1/2 hours of in-depth and well-produced video-based instruction, a CD with over 100MB of custom content and animation files, plus a 60-page PDF Study Guide with detailed lessons and industry insights.

The video-based instruction is easy-to-follow and it covers the sophisticated new features in Poser 5 including: Face Mapping, Bone Creation, Wind Force, Motion Blur, Dynamic Hair, Dynamic & Static Friction, Dynamic Cloth, Morph Putty, and Collision Detection. When following along on the video, Mac users need only substitute Ctrl and Alt (Windows) with Command and Option (Mac).

MSRP: $79.95, Intro price: $59.95 (includes one free model-a $39.95 value).

Visit these Digital Art Websites and read the active-user forums to find out what’s going on with Poser, review tutorials by experts, and learn about related apps used by this growing community of artists.

DAZ 3D Productions

PoserWorld

Renderosity

Runtime DNA

Poser Package
Poser 5 from Curious Labs

Poser 5 includes the Poser 5 Reference Manual in both hard copy and in Adobe PDF format. A Quick Reference Card that briefly describes key Poser features and includes a comprehensive list of Poser 5 keyboard shortcuts is included. The Poser package contains two discs: an install CD, plus a Content CD full of extra props, textures, sound files, templates, and more.

System Requirements:
Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.2 or later 500MHz G3 processor; (700MHz G4 processor or greater recommended) 256MB system RAM (512MB recommended) 24-bit color display, 1024x768 resolution 500MB free hard disk space Internet connection required for using Content Paradise

MSRP: $349.00
Street Price: $199.95

Curious Labs has a clearly

defined vision: Poser’s

reason for being is to let its

artists tell their story using

the human form.

About the author: Eden Maxwell is a fine artist and published book author. He has contributed to many publications, including Popular Science, Art Calendar Magazine, Drachen Foundation Journal, Popular Mechanics, MacStreet Journal Online, Omni, MacUser, MacDigest, and Computer Gaming World. His art has been exhibited on both the West and East Coasts and his work has appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eden is currently writing a book for artists to be published in 2004. Visit Eden’s Atelier and Gallery website. You may also reach him via .