Marvel Arts

A great choice for posing, animating and rendering human based 3D figures. Not limited to human figures, it can also work with complete 3D sets including architectures, props and sceneries.

Poser also has advanced material controls for custom shader settings capable of producing real looking results, cartoon styles and more. It does not have 3D polygonal modeling built in, so it is best used with existing 3D meshes and objects. One of it’s shortcomings is efficient control of lights.

Poser 4 is often used as a baseline for file support. Poser Pro Pack, or Poser PP, provided many enhancements for rendering and material options.

Poser 5 and Poser 6 added features to handle more content, removing the restriction of the single subdirectory requirement within Poser’s library folder structure. Poser 6 is well supported and is considered by many as having advantages over the more recent Poser 7 version.

Poser 7 provides more library control and advanced handling of morphs and materials. As other products often use or integrate with Poser, some of Poser 7’s advanced features are not not supported in it’s file format yet.

An annoucement of Poser Pro, Poser 7’s successor, has been made with much anticipated features of even more library control and advanced features. During Poser Pro’s development, e-frontier has been bought by Smith Micro. There is much debate on Poser’s future direction.

Poser’s long time non-standard interface has been met with mixed reviews. There is definitely a learning curve before becoming adept at all the tools. The program should not be looked at as a simple posing and rendering application. It has much to offer and many months or years could be spent getting the most out of all it’s features.

At Marvels Arts, we use Poser as just one of the many tools, relying on it’s particular strengths in cloth, hair and material for human models. Animation control is slightly better and more supported than DAZ Studio. When needing to create a custom texture, mesh or automated scene assembly, we use additional external tools.