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.

Poser 7 also offers greater morph-based control starting with the introduction of “dependent parameters”. These allow multiple morphs to be controlled with a single dial so that, for example, you could smoothly vary a figure’s stomach from six-pack to beer belly. Most powerfully, the Morphing tool’s new Create tab lets you interactively create new morphs to push, pull, smooth and restore the underlying mesh. Typical uses would be to create more dynamic facial expressions and to add extra detail such as dimples and creases.
Greater animation control is provided beginning with the new Layers tab in Poser 7’s dedicated Animation palette. This lets you add a new layer whenever you want to work on a particular element of an animation. You can then choose whether to include the layer in the final playback, when it should start and finish and whether it should be phased in and out. More power comes in the form of the new Talk Designer which lets you load an audio file and then automatically syncs facial morph targets to make it look as if your character is speaking. You can even add eye blinks and emotional tweaks such as anger or disgust, but don’t expect too much - the results are an approximation at best.

New animation capabilities include basic non linear editing and lip sync

When your pose or animation is finished you’re ready to render. Poser 7 offers four engines to choose from including the longstanding artistic Sketch renderer and fast Preview renderer which now takes advantage of Poser 7’s new support for larger texture maps and the onscreen display of procedural textures. For maximum quality, the main FireFly option has been overhauled with numerous features, such as irradiance caching, occlusion culling, depth of field acceleration and improved texture handling, all designed to reduce memory requirements and boost speed. Most importantly, the FireFly engine now supports multi-threaded rendering on multiple-processor and multi-core systems.
Despite these changes, on single CPU systems, Poser 7’s FireFly rendering remains frustratingly slow. Moreover, while the end results can be striking – especially bearing in mind the rapid figure set-up - they are still clearly computer generated. Most disappointingly, Poser’s lack of any serious scene handling capabilities seriously cuts down on its usefulness: while 3D scenes are diminished without figures, the same is true of figures without scenes.
The end result is that existing users may well want to put their upgrade money towards buying a program like e-on’s Vue 6 Esprit to host and render their Poser figures. Having said this, if you don’t have the budget or time to get to grips with a professional character-rigging solution, Poser remains the best way to give your 3D work a human dimension. Moreover, bearing in mind the features, community and content it has built up over the years and the lack of any real competition, Poser 7 is very good value.

EASE OF USE 4/6
FEATURES 4/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 5/6
OVERALL 4/6