metacreations poser 3

Digital human creation has always been a touch-and-go area of 3D. Many believe that in the near future real actors and digital ones will be indistinguishable. Metacreations Poser 3 is the third in a series of tools produced by the company aimed towards making digital human creation easier. With the models created by Zygote, and motion capture data supplied by House of Moves, could Poser 3 be the ultimate tool for digital human creation, or could it be that Poser 3, like many other Metacreations products, will be looked upon as a toy by professionals? Let's take a look...

The Poser 3 interface steers away from both the MAC and Windows 'style' - it is quite unique. Click for a closer look.

The Poser 3 interface is one typical of Metacreations - it steers well away from the typical Windows or Mac interface. You work mainly in the center window, which contains the Poser figure/s. This window is resizable, and is the place where you pose your figure, move it, modify and even render it (although there is an option that allows you to render in another window).

It is vital that a 3D scene is simple to navigate, and most 3D programs accomplish this by placing 4 windows on the screen: left, top, front and perspective. In Poser 3 you can switch between these views using one window. The navigation tools are located to the left of the main window, but like every part of the Poser interface they can be moved to suit your needs. The tools include a rotation trackball, roll, scale, focal length, zoom, and the option to flip from perspective to top, right, left, bottom, front or back view. You can also use the three buttons above the navigation tools to quickly move in to the left hand, right hand or face for quick editing.

Above the camera controls lie the light controls. Although you could change the lighting in Poser 2, Poser 3 makes it much easier to see the results of a change in realtime. There are three lights, each has a color that can be changed and each can be rotated to any point in the 3D scene at will, however, there are only three lights. Although you can turn a light or two off you cannot add lights to the scene. Problems start when you want to adjust the brightness of the light or add a gel to it. If you want to adjust the brightness of a light you cannot; you must adjust the color. If I had a white light that I did not want to make so intense the only way I could dim it would be to change the color to a gray-white. If you want to add a gel to a light (which I did want to do at one point) you need to add it to your Poser 4 wish list.

In Poser 2 problems were often experienced when trying to pose a figure. Often figures legs and arms would be twisted in unnatural ways, joints would slip out of place when adjusting a figure and poses would often look far from what you had imagined. In Poser 3 the IK setup is much better. Joints move more naturally and although they do happen, slip-ups are rare. The editing [pose] tools are more-or-less the same as in Poser 2, rotate, twist, translate/pull, translate in/out, scale and taper, with the addition of a chain break and color tool. In Poser 3 you have the ability to fix an object to another object. For example, I might fix a gun to a hand, so that when the hand moves so does the gun. The chain break tool breaks these links between objects. The color tool allows you to alter the color of the workspace, the figure's skin, and clothes. This is very useful - in Poser 2 you had only a few types of clothing for each figure, and all the figures were white. You can now give someone a suntan, or alter the color of their skin to create an inter-racial population of digital humans.

All of the above features (the lighting, the camera options, and the editing tools used for posing and modifying figures) can be changed numerically. The set of dials (located at the right on the above interface) allow you to change many aspects of areas such as lighting, posing etc., to a precise degree of accuracy. You can either drag the dials left of right, watching your results in realtime until you get the desired effect, or you can double-click on the dial and enter the number for a very precise result. If you wanted to place an object in a figure's hand then these dials can help you guide it into the right place accurately, instead of attempting to drag it into place which would almost certainly result in error.

Facial expressions in Poser 3 can be controled numerically. Click for a closer look.

Something very new to Poser 3 is the ability to pose faces and hands. Just like the joints in the body, the joints in the hands and fingers have their own IK setup. You can bend and twist the fingers and thumb to make a hand point to something, hold something, make a gesture etc.; the possibilities are endless. The face is somewhat more difficult. Because of the obvious difficulties faced when trying to pose a face by dragging features around the screen (difficulty to select them for a start), the face can be posed only numerically. You can pose the lips, tongue, eyelids, eyebrows, and even control expressions like worry. You can also rotate the eyes (in their sockets, of course) to any angle you want, as can you change the color of the pupils. Although difficult to master, the facial tools in Poser 3 are quite powerful, and when used correctly can produce quite realistic results.

By clicking the button to the right of the dials, a library will pop out. The library contains a number of preset figures, poses, objects, and effects. Poser 3 welcomes thumbnails to the library, which helps a great deal in choosing your desired figure or pose. You can easily add a category to the library, allowing you to catalog your own poses, props, effects and figures for future use.

Some cute and cudly creatures take refuge on the Poser 3 CD. Poser 3 - a kind of magic? Maybe not, but it can produce some very nice images and animations.

Poser 3 welcomes a small number of new figures. The same figures we saw in Poser 2 still remain - the business man, the business woman, a casual child, casual man and woman, and a nude man woman and child. All of these models have been given revamps by Zygote, and they are all joined by a series of animals - a dog, cat, dolphin, horse, and a raptor (for those among us who are not paleontologists, a raptor is a small but deadly dinosaur). You can also use Poser 2 figures, and as in Poser 2 you can use skeleton's, a mannequin, and new to Poser 3 are stick people and disembodied hands and heads.

The poses you can choose from are incredible. There must be at least 100 different ranging from the comical to the creative, the strange to the ordinary. The poses are divided into 13 categories - action, animation, classic, comic, creative, dance, fighting, pose, running, sports, standing, tutorial (used for the tutorial which can be found in the manual), and the walk designer (which is not actually the walk designer, but a set of walking poses - this, I assume, is an error). There is also a library section for facial poses, and different hand poses.

Hair is a most welcome addition to Poser 3 - it makes all the difference between a good-looking figure and a bad one. There are 11 different hair styles, 1 for a child, 5 for a woman and 5 for a man. You can alter the color of the hair, and you can alter its dimensions using the dials. There are also 5 hair models from the Poser 2 accessory kit, however these models are very plastic looking.

There are 8 props in the library - a ball, a box, a cane, a cone, a cylinder, a square, some stairs and a torus. All of the props can be altered in color, size, and dimensions using the dials. For those wanting to put props in Poser figures hands you can do this by assigning a parent to an object. In most cases the parent would be a hand, so when you move the figure, the hand moves accordingly and so does the prop.

Lighting styles and camera angles are also in the library. The most useful being the lighting styles which allows you to simulate the effects of winter, or a summer day. Most of these effects have been handed down from Poser 2. The camera styles are basic, to say the least. Almost all have been handed down from Poser 2 and to be honest I never once used a library camera angle. There are a few nice angles though, the birds-eye-view being the nicest.

Animation in Poser 3 is much more versatile than in Poser 2. The controls are located at the bottom of the screen. As in most 3D programs, animation in Poser 3 is keyframe-based. Almost everything in Poser 3 is animatable - figures, the camera, lights, props, etc...

Typically, you would go about your animation using the keyframe tools located at the bottom of the screen first, and then enter the animation palette to refine your animation. The animation palette is divided into three sections - setup controls, the hierarchy list, and the time line. The setup controls allow you to alter the frame rate, duration and display of your animation. The hierarchy list contains a list of all the objects in your 3D scene. The time line area shows all the keyframes stored for each part of the scene. Keyed frames and interpolated frames are show in different colors making it easy to identify and modify your own keys and to add a keyframe in-between a large number of interpolated frames.

The walk designer allows you to design a Poser figures walk. You can edit the run, strut, shuffle, head bounce, arm swing, and stride of a walk. You use a number of sliders to alter the walk, hit 'walk' and a stick figure will preview the type of walk you have created. You can then refine the walk until it looks the way you want, and apply it to a figure and a walk path. The only problems occur when characters seem to walk too slow or fast - it seems the only way to get it right is through trial and error. With time you will learn to judge how many frames you need for a character to complete a certain path at a desired speed.

Lip-synch is one of Poser 3's most exciting new additions. Luckily, Metacreations has not tried to make lip-synch seem like something that is easy to do. They have put in a few helpers (namely a library or phonemes to speed up posing facial expressions), but lip-synch is very difficult to do. You need to key in each expression, each phoneme yourself. Timing is difficult to get right, and the only real way to get the lip-synch to work in any program is to follow these 4 rules:

1. Practice
2. Practice some more
3. Practice until you have mastered it
4. And then practice again

Once you have posed your figure you will undoubtedly want to render the image. You can either render your image in the main window or use another window, which will allow for larger renders. You can alter the texture maps of any part of the figure - from the eyelashes to the shirt material - in the render options palette. You can also use one texture map for the whole figure, and you can apply bump maps to either the whole figure or to a specific part of the figure. The manual contains a nice section on creating your own texture and bump maps for figures. You can also create your own backgrounds as opposed to using a plain background. You could, for example create a landscape in another 3D program and use that background to render your figure against.

Rendering options for animations are disappointing. On the Windows version of Poser 3 you can only render your animation in AVI format, or as a series of TIFF or Bitmap files. In the Macintosh version, however, you can use the popular QuickTime format. Also, animations can only be rendered in three sizes: full, half or quarter. These sizes vary depending on what size your main window has been sized too. Generally, the full render is 640 pixels wide, half is 320, and quarter is 160 pixels wide. If you want an animation any other size you will have to take it into a different program for resizing.

Generally speaking, Poser 3 is quite impressive. In terms of animation, Poser 3 will probably never be used in the professional 3D graphics industry. However, I can see hobbyists having a great time playing with the large number of features in Poser 3, and some semi-professional artists might find Poser 3 useful for aiding in still images, or simple animations that might be used for self-promotional purposes.

supplier	Metacreations
web site	www.metacreations.com
price	US $199
system requirements	Windows IBM PC compatible, Pentium recommended Windows 95, NT 4+, or Windows 98 32 MB system RAM 80 MB hard disk space Color display (true color recommended) CD-ROM drive PowerMac PPC Processor, 603 or above recommended System 7.6.1 or later 16-bit color display (24-bit recommended) 20 MB of application RAM (32 MB recommended) 80 MB hard disk space CD-ROM drive

Paul Younghusband is editor-in-cheif of Visual Magic Magazine. You can contact him by email at paul@visualmagic.awn.com.


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