| efrontier Poser 7 (PC) |  | From: e frontier, Inc.
Category: Software
List Price: £169.99
Buy New: £89.95
You Save: £80.04 (47%)
New (2) from £89.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1979
Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Xp
Media: CD-ROM
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 2.4
MPN: PSR-W70-DE-R
UPC: 814956026140
EAN: 0814956026140
ASIN: B000KK4330
Release Date: March 3, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BOX WAS OPENED, BUT THE CD IT SEALED... GREAT BUY
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| Customer Reviews:
 Identity Crisis - an impractical and practically useless package March 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
poser is - to all intents and purposes - redundant. The character generation "revolution" it started when it came out has long since overtaken the developers ability to capitalise on its strengths and address its weaknesses. Their refusal to "play nicely" with the professional packages makes it simply not worth the money, however inexpensive it is.
On the one hand poser is only a couple of hundred bucks and you get some impressive tools for that money. However, since you can't really make good use of these tools because poser figures aren't useable in most professional 3d animation packages (such as 3ds Max), poser could be 10 bucks and it would still be wasted time and money.
What is the point of developing a character creation system that produces such nice results if you can't use them anywhere except within poser? they might be nice, but they're not nice enough to drag anyone away from using proper tools. Their approach is totally wrong. They should be making it easy for people to get poser content into Max, not more difficult.
Posers animation system is just dreadful so it would be absurd to suggest that you do your animation inside the application.
Furthermore, the only effort made by the developers to make poser content available to the big boys (users of 3ds Max and Maya) is this stupid Poser Fusion plugin.
Let me just take a moment to describe Poser Fusion. Instead of just being able to import Poser figures into Max, you have to "host" the poser file inside of max, going backwards and forwards between poser and 3ds max, making changes to your figure in Poser with the changes "reflected" in 3ds max. In other words, you can't directly animate your figure in 3ds max. In fact you can't even adjust it's pose. So what should be a minor tweak to re-adjust the position of a hand to bring it into line with a prop for example, becomes a royal pain in the butt. And they expect you to pay 150 bucks for the ability to not do what you need to do, thereby proving that - at least in some circles - extremely daft software design is still alive and kicking.
One of the most bizarre "features" of poser though is that you can't even save to posers own native character format: the dratted .cr2 file. You have to ask yourself what was going through the minds of people to create software that you can't even save to its own native format?! Yes, I understand that they have a need to protect the geometry that people create, but not at the expense of usability. After all, if you don't have any customers then there's nothing to protect is there?
Another of posers failings is the pathetic library. Poser has made absolutely certain that your content directories are always going to be organised the way the developers think is right, rather than anything you might want to do for the benefit of your own sanity. You're restricted to installing 3d content into a strict directory structure which demonstrates a total lack of forward thinking and a complete disregard for the needs of their users.
Consequently, anyone who has more than a few characters and props will find the library a real chore to use. You cant simply click on file-> open and grab a character. You have to have previously loaded that character and saved it out again as a poser scene to do that.
Furthermore, previewing characters take ages because you are at the mercy of the library window. Even on a high-spec workstation I found this to be an irritating and very frustrating process. I actually found myself using 3rd party poser content library applications just to speed up this process and help organise things better. When a software vendor overlooks something this basic, you know you're dealing with amateurs.
Most of the functionality in poser will go unused by most animators. If not because you can't get the data out and into something more professional then because the functionality itself is - frankly - rubbish. The Walk-Designer for example produces very weird results most of the time and most people with an ounce of sense will simply go into max and use existing libraries of motion capture files (bvh, bip etc).
The only things that poser has in its favour is its skinning system (most of the credit for which belongs firmly at the feet of the artists who create original geometry) and the talk designer which is adequate but not great.
All in all, I will put my money where my mouth is and say that I don't think Poser has a future. Poser 7 was supposed to address a number of the things that users find irritating but instead of fixing those things, simply introduced a few superfluous gadgets.
The Poser people (E-Frontier / Smith micro) had an ideal opportunity in poser 7 to create the means whereby users of serious applications could simply import rigged poser figures, ready for animating. Instead they came up with this really, really stupid Poser Fusion thing that is apparently going to be their way of handling this problem in the future (its planned to be included in poser pro) and this will kill any realistic possibility of the rest of us using poser content for serious animation. Basically, if - as a 3ds Max user - I want to use poser content, then I don't need to have poser installed to use it. Given that Poser doesn't do anything for me in terms of making it easier to get poser content into max, I have no reason to buy the next version. IF poser made it easier to use poser content in 3ds Max then I would of course be able to make use of the hair, talk designer etc in Poser and it would be worth the money.
However, since that is never going to happen, my advice to anyone who wants to use poser content is: don't buy poser, just get whatever content you need, import the geometry into Max and use Max's own bones and Skin. It might take a bit longer but there's no other practical way and a little time and elbow grease will produce great results. At the very least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you've gotten what you wanted despite Posers "creators" not wanting you to.
 Unique tool - decide on your own use July 3, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Poser 7 is a unique tool for posing and rendering human figures. It's supported by a vast catalogue of commercial and free types of hair, outfits, poses and props, and a vigorous user community. And it's been used commercially in advertisements, graphic novels, book illustrations -- even clinical literature. It can be used for simple animations, or for DV quality video.
On the other hand, it has a quirky interface, can be frustrating to use (though this is true of any 3d software), and can take a very, very long time to render at the highest quality levels, and even more so if you have decided to use it to make video clips.
So is this a tool or a toy? The answer is both, or whichever you want it to be.
If you are a professional designer or illustrator, then you will need to put a few hours into learning this application in order to get out of it what you need. You'll probably have a fairly focussed idea of what you want to achieve, and, once you have it, Poser will stay in your tool box of things to use on particular occasions.
If you are a hobbyist, you will find in this application a world of possibilities to explore. How far you take it depends on how much time you are willing to put into it. But be warned: Poser can take over your life.
If you are a visual artist, ten minutes with Poser will probably give you loads of ideas for subverting the medium and generally playing mayhem with whatever the application's developers originally had in mind.
Just a couple of health warnings. Poser is a great tool for producing very fast cartoon quality renderings, or producing very high quality final renderings. But it won't turn you into an artist if you aren't already one, and it won't open the door to a career in design or illustration if you don't have the other qualities necessary.
The other is that, despite some ambitious attempts, this is not professional figure animation software. You can make some fairly exciting short clips if you have the patience, but professional animators have vastly more powerful tools at their disposal. That's not to stop you trying, of course, but the power of Poser is really in still images, and low-res animation.
If you are still wondering what Poser actually is, think of it as a photo studio where the models are infinitely patient, but also infinitely untalented. You can get them to adopt completely unrealistic poses, so it's up to you, before you press the shutter, to make sure that they look absolutely right. At max resolution and quality, you could be waiting half an hour before the picture finally appears.
Anyway, I love Poser, and I've used it both professionally and for pure fun. It's a very, very powerful product for the money.
 Powerful but harsh on processor May 16, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Poser 7 has some excellent features - the cloth room adds realism, and the figures themselves are excellent.
Do be cautious though - if you don't have a powerful system this is going to eat your computer for breakfast. 3D rendering is notoriously hard on computers, so I'd go for at least 1GB (still going to be slow) of RAM and a modern processor.
The software can also take advantage of hardware acceleration, so a good Graphics card will also pay dividends.
Not quite perfect, but really useful for those of us who need this sort of thing.
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