[ReviewAZON asin="B002KMQ8WU"]Poser 8 is the world's most complete solution for creating art and animation with 3D characters. With Poser, it's easy to make 3D art. Poser includes over 2.5 gigabytes of ready-to-pose human and animal figures, textures, props and 3D scene elements. Generate new characters from your facial photographs. Add hair and clothing. Dress Poser's virtual stage with props, lights and cameras to build 3D scenes. Animate and render your scene into photorealistic images and video for web, print, and film projects. Export 3D figures to add characters to other 3D applications. Artists, hobbyists, illustrators and animators--get creative with Poser!

Poser 8's easy to use interface makes it easy to create 3D character images and animation. Click to enlarge.

Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation

Poser 8 is better than ever
Along with 8 brand new 3D humans, Poser 8 includes an improved user interface to maximize your workspace while providing better workflow, a new search-enabled library so you can find, organize and use your content easier, a dependant parameter tool that lets you teach objects in the scene to interact with each other, cross body morph brushes to smoothly sculpt a figure across every body part, new photorealistic rendering features that more accurately reproduce light and shadows, and improved character rigging for even better character bending. To save time, Poser 8 has been performance optimized so you can pose your characters and render them faster on today's multiple processor systems.

Poser 8 includes:

All Poser's included figures and 3D content are fully textured using our powerful node-based shader system. Click to enlarge.

Turn your 3D scene into an artistic sketch using Poser 8's sketch designer. Click to enlarge.

Automatically generate animated figures that can walk or run through your 3D scene. Click to enlarge.

Poser 8's powerful cloth engine lets you transform any object or clothing prop into dynamic cloth that stretches, drapes and flows naturally, even over an animated figure. Click to enlarge.

With Poser you can produce photorealistic images and animations, or render in styles including cartoon tones, sketch renderings, silhouettes, wireframes and even Flash. Click to enlarge.

Import a spoken word sound file, and with the included Talk Designer, your Poser 8 figures will speak in sync with the sound. Click to enlarge.

8 new figures
The new set of eight 3D humans included with Poser 8 are the most advanced figures ever included with the application, and are a showcase for new Poser 8 features. Built from scratch, the figures are performance optimized for the polygon count and have custom photorealistic textures. Rigged using Poser 8's new multiple sphere and capsule fall off zone technology, problematic joints such as hips and shoulders now bend with more realism than any figure on the market. By using the new Dependent Parameter tool to link deformers to specific joint positions, areas such as knees, elbows, chest and collar joints have smoother folds, less stretching and more realism. The new Poser 8 figures are offered in four pairs of male/female couples with European features, African features, Asian features and Hispanic features. The Poser 8 new figures are fully compliant with the Face Room, the Walk Designer and Talk Designer, and via the use of Wardrobe Wizard, much of the included legacy clothing content has been converted to work directly on the figures.

~1.5GB of new Poser 8 Content
In addition to the new set of figures, Poser 8 includes an array of new content supplied by third party partners as well content created by the Smith Micro team of 3D artists. A new art-school inspired default manikin opens each new scene, and will serve as a remarkable reference figure for artists. Fully articulated human skeletons that match the male and female figures body topology are included. Various new poses, animations, light sets, props, and accessories to help new users get started are included in the Poser 8 content installer. Poser 8 also includes an additional 1.5GB of legacy Poser 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 content.

New User Interface
Poser 8 offers a new evolved user interface, preserving the elements that Poser users are accustomed to, while presenting them in a more concise layout that takes better advantage of various screen resolutions. The new layout produces a cleaner work environment so artists can focus on the project. All controls are presented in floating palettes that can be docked for consistency, session to session, or floated to free up space.

Dependent Parameters
Poser 8 unlocks an advanced user secret with the new Dependent Parameter palette. Poser 8 lets the artist create new Master Parameters or turn any existing Parameter into a Master Parameter that can drive any other editable parameters in the scene. Complex interactions can be created such as Full Body Morphs, Partial Body Morphs, Advanced Body Controls, Joint Controlled Morph Targets, Joint Controlled Deformers and Parameter Controlled Scene Assets.

Indirect Lighting
By bouncing light and color from object to adjacent object in a scene, Poser 8's Global Illumination system can render images that appear so realistic they can fool the untrained eye into thinking the images are photos rather than 3D renderings.

OpenGL Preview Improvements
Preview now displays up to 8 lights and their accumulated values, sorted by intensity. The light properties controller allows you to select each light you wish to illuminate in the scene preview.

Content Management System / Library
The new library presents content by category, but with a tighter list view with expanding previews and additional data for each content item. Content items can be loaded into the scene using the traditional Poser UI controls or can now be dragged directly from the Library into the scene. The Poser 8 Library also supports keyword search. Type in a keyword to find exactly what you looking for. Add any selected items to your favorites.

Cross Body Part Morph Creation
With Poser 8 comes a significant improvement to the current Morphing Tool. Now you can dial in a Morph Brush and paint morphs across body parts. Easily create effects such as muscle bulges, scales, bumps, horns, veins or wounds; it's only limited by your imagination.

Improved Rigging System
Poser 8 has improved upon the existing joint Falloff Zone rigging system by adding any number of new zones to a joint, while adding a new capsule shape to the existing sphere, and allowing the rigger to either multiply or add the Falloff Zone values. This system will permit figure creators to rig challenging areas such as hips and shoulders with more precision, yielding better bending figures.

Tone Mapping and Exposure
Tone Mapping helps control very bright and dark areas in an image to produce better, less blown out final renderings with deeper contrast. The feature is very useful, helping to bring the brightest areas back into a reproducible range. Two modes of Tone Mapping are available for differing effects: Exponential Tone Mapping and HSV Tone Mapping. Exposure values are editable when either Exponential or HSV Tone Mapping is selected.

Physically Correct Light Falloff
For Spot and Point lights, Poser 8 lets users attenuate (control) falloff to more closely reproduce real-world light behaviors. Constant falloff replicates the previous Poser behavior, and Inverse Linear and Inverse Square add two new methods for getting light to appear more realistic.

Normal Mapping
Normal Mapping is a resource-efficient technique to add the appearance of complexity and surface detail to 3D objects. It can transform object surfaces, making them appear more intricate than they actually are, without the added overhead of polygonal detail. This saves designers valuable time and offers increased creative flexibility by allowing faster and more light-weight computation of rendered results.

Performance Optimizations

• Figure/Actor pre-lighting and picking
• Bending on multi-core/multi-processor hardware
• Improved multi-processor support for better scalability when rendering
• Cloth simulation multithreaded/optimized
• Increased performance for opening/handling complex scenes

Poser 8 Uses:

• Professional 3D graphics professionals
• 3D Hobby/Enthusiast Market
• Comic book / graphic novel creators
• General Purpose 3D Users
• Upgrade Poser Users
• Art Students
• Traditional Artists/Sculptors

Poser provides a number of professional users with a fast, easy to access resource for 3D humans, animals, and other scene assets. Professional users include: Architectural illustrators, industrial designers, medical illustrators, graphic designers, editorial illustrators, book illustrators, informational graphics, advertising illustration, web illustration, interactive content, story boarding, lighting and theatrical set designers, film/video production

3D hobbyists and enthusiasts who dabble in 3D for personal satisfaction, experiment with Poser to gain 3D experience, and may use Poser to expand into new careers, or create a graphic novel, sci-fi art, fantasy art, or develop a screen play.

Comic book creators and graphic novelists use Poser render images and animations to create their own titles. Single images, multiple page comics and graphic novels delivered via print and digital media are a great use of Poser.

If you work with other 3D applications such as Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Modo, Lightwave, Truespace, Bruce, or Vue; Poser is a perfect way to include 3D character content you're your projects.

Art students looking to gain practical 3D animation experience hone their skills working with Poser characters as part of course work, in art school classes or for extra-curricular experience.