Poser

Encyclopedia : P : PO : POS : Poser

"Dharma Juggler", by Gunther Berkus, 1997. Early Poser 1 / Bryce composite image. The original Poser wire-frame image has been enhanced using Adobe Photoshop.

Poser is a three-dimensional rendering and animation program optimized for models depicting the human figure.

Overview

Poser is marketed as a human and animal figure posing and animation tool, although other articulate models as well as "props" can be easily animated. Poser comes with libraries of human, animal, and robot figures, poses, hair pieces, props, hand gestures and facial expressions. Facial expressions are implemented through the use of morphs, which are also used in many models to allow customizing of body and other features.

It uses a subset of the Alias object (OBJ) file format natively and a text-based markup for content-files. Poser's customizability has helped draw a large number of people to the program. As Poser does not allow for original modelling of objects except in the simplest of senses, a community of merchants / artists creating, buying, and selling content for the program has sprung into existence.

Poser is available in English, Japanese, German, and French for both Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Community

Poser has a large and avid following at a fairly high number of online community sites, and due to the inability to perform sophisticated high-level 3D modeling inside the application, an ecostructure has grown up around the trade and sales of Poser content. As a minor subculture in its own right, the 'Poserverse,' as this phenomenon is referred to, has spawned a number of individuals known by their works. Among the better known manufacturer independent community sites, there are Renderosity and PoserPro's. See [Poser] at the Open Directory Project for an extensive list of community and individuals sites.

Due to the fact that Poser can be installed with several nude human figures including optional genitals, there is a huge community committed to erotic and pornographic artwork created with Poser figures. The largest community is Renderotica, followed by a lot of other community sites or sites with individal artwork.

Program History

Poser was created by artist and programmer Larry Weinberg, as a software replacement for artist's mannequins. Poser has changed hands several times since first being published by Fractal Design. Fractal Design merged with MetaTools to form MetaCreations which later sold Poser to egi.sys AG.

egi.sys AG formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Curious Labs, from former MetaCreations personnel to develop and publish Poser but sold the subsidiary and software to current owner e frontier in 2003.

Version	Release date	Publisher	Improvements / Notes
1.0	1995	Fractal Design	Initial release
2.0	1996	Fractal Design	Ability to add props Animation High resolution models
3.0	1998	MetaCreations	New user interface Facial posing and animation
4.0	1999	MetaCreations	Natural-media sketch renderer Figure sculpting via deformers
4.0.3	1999	Curious Labs	Markup path names made to use relative paths
Pro Pack	2000	Curious Labs	Add on pack for Poser 4 Implementation of Python scripting, Custom figure rigging Ability to host Poser scenes in 3ds max, Lightwave 3d, and Cinema 4D.
5.0	2003	Curious Labs	FireFly Reyes/ray tracing renderer Dynamic hair and cloth Collision detection
6.0	2005	Curious Labs	OpenGL Hardware acceleration Image based lighting Cartoon outline rendering effects

External links

• [e Frontier America]
• [Content Paradise]: Forums, Free Content, poser Add Ons
• [Poser History Page] by Larry Weinberg, along with vintage Poser artwork
• [Larry Weinberg interview]: Interview with the Poser Creator at Poser's 10th anniversary
• [Poser] at the Open Directory Project

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.