VERDICT: New posing, animation and lip sync capabilities, but Poser 7’s main strengths remain its bundled content and low price.

Creating believable 3D scenes is a major challenge, but to bring them fully to life you really need people to populate them...

Unfortunately modeling and animating human figures is perhaps the hardest 3D task of all. That’s where Poser comes in, promising to make the whole process simple and enjoyable – and affordable too.
The Poser interface provides tabbed access to dedicated “rooms” where you can customize your figure’s hair, face, clothes, materials and underlying rigging. However most work is done in the main Pose room where, thanks to the magic of Inverse Kinematics, you can simply drag on your figure’s hands, feet, head and so on to create natural-looking body poses. For finer control, for example to create a blink or scowl, Poser provides morph targets that are controlled by parameter dials. To animate your figures you can simply move the Timeline slider at the bottom of the Pose window to a different frame before making your changes.
Clearly the success of the system depends largely on the models that Poser provides and, as always, a new release sees the introduction of new, higher quality male and female models. However, while previous improvements were always appreciable, with this pair, the difference is less striking. Moreover there seems to be a problem with Simon where simply bending his arm deforms his elbow and Sydney doesn’t come with clothes! At least you can always return to the earlier models which are still included. In fact Poser 7 now comes with over 1GB of content including skeletons, animal figures and a number of third-party samplers. It also offers a new collection system which you can use to collect together items from multiple categories and even runtimes.

Poser 7 offers new universal poses and brush-style morphs

New posing power starts with the ability to right-click to select any body part under the current mouse position and - undoubtedly the most eagerly awaited feature - multiple undo levels. Poser 7 also introduces new “universal poses” which are no longer tied to a particular figure but can be applied consistently to any biped regardless of joints and rigging. The Library panel includes dozens of poses to choose from and, as each is applied with a simple double-click, this is an excellent way to get good results quickly.