Smith Micro today announced the availability of Poser 8, the next generation of the popular 3D figure design and animation solution. Poser 8 enables hobbyists, artists, and graphic professionals to create and digitally shape humans, animals and entire scenes in 3D
Poser 8 acts as a virtual stage, offering eight new, ready-to-pose, fully-textured humans of different ethnicities and body types to give artists a starting point in designing their characters. The new Poser content library provides more than 2.5 gigabytes of human and animal figures accompanied by a wide range of accessories including hair, clothing, sets and real-world props and elements such as lights and cameras to produce complete scenes.
“Poser is about access. It provides artists access to everything needed to create virtually any scene imaginable, including access to 3D figures, powerful tools such as a dependent parameter feature that makes working with characters easy, and an entire world of scene assets to build upon,” said Steve Cooper, Senior Product Manager of Graphics Solutions for Smith Micro Software, Inc. “We have built upon the key elements behind Poser’s accessibility and transformed the application into a faster, more efficient product, while preserving the user experience so familiar to existing customers.”
Poser 8 Features and Benefits
- Figures -“ Eight new ready-to-pose 3D human characters, offered in different ethnicities and body types to provide artists with multiple starting points for their creations
- More Than 1GB of New Content -“ Plus 1.5+ gigabytes of previously released, ready-to-use 3D scene assets
- Enhanced User Interface -“ Features a more efficient tool layout and a user configurable work environment
- Dependant Parameters Tool -“ A new tool that allows artists to create, modify and edit parameters within the scene. Complex interactions can be created, such as full-and partial-body morphs, advanced body controls and parameter-controlled scene assets
- Cross-Body Part Morph Tool -“ Enables artists to easily create effects such as muscle bulges, scales, bumps, horns, veins, wounds and surface details across multiple body parts
- Content Management System -“ Allows easier access to content collections with the ability to search a library’s content by category and keyword, providing a hierarchy list view and more detailed pop-up expanding previews
- Indirect Lighting -“ With the ability to combine indirect diffuse illumination with improved irradiance caching and path tracing, Poser 8 renders images with global illumination qualities that create images so realistic that they can fool an untrained eye
- Improved Rigging System -“ With an improved Falloff Zone rigging system, users can rig problem areas – such as hips and shoulders – with more precision, resulting in more realistic bending figures
- OpenGL Preview Improvements -“ Allows users to preview engine improvements to select each light that they wish to illuminate in the scene preview. This feature aids in viewing larger textures and offers more complete scene previewing when setting up lights
- Physically Correct Light Falloff -“ Features control spot and point lights to more closely reproduce realistic light falloff from full bright to dark
- Tone Mapping and Exposure -“ Helps artists control bright or dark areas within an image to produce higher-quality, final renderings with better contrast
- Normal Mapping -“ Allows users to transform object surfaces, making them appear more intricate without the added computational overhead from additional polygonal detail
- Wardrobe Wizard -“ Allows artists to re-use existing clothing assets by fitting them to the new Poser 8 character set
- wxPython Support -“ Enables third-party developers to create more advanced plug-in functionality that can be fully-integrated directly within Poser’s user interface
Pricing and Availability:
The MSRP for Poser 8 is $249.99 with upgrades from previous versions priced at $129.99. Poser 8 is available direct from the Smith Micro online store at http://www.smithmicro.com/poser and from popular resellers, catalogs and distribution partners worldwide.
Existing Poser Pro users upgrading to Poser 8 will be invited to the Poser Pro 2010 beta program in the coming months.
