Poser has always been something of a niche product, aimed at designers and animators who need to create realistic human figures.

However, as personal computers become more powerful, Poser has also become more popular and is now widely used in areas such as comics, cartoons and also technical and medical work.

E-Frontier's latest upgrade to Poser gives the program a fairly major overhaul, with some under-the-bonnet technical changes, new animation features and the long-overdue addition of some very basic features.

Starting with the technical stuff, the program’s Firefly rendering engine (which controls the appearance of complex 3D effects, such as lighting and material textures) has been updated to take advantage of the new generation of dual-core processors.

It’s faster when rendering complex 3D scenes, and generally feels snappier and more responsive. Poser likes plenty of memory, though, so 1GB is probably the minimum if you don’t want to sit through some long thumb-twiddling pauses as you work on your models.

Poser 7 also pays attention to some more basic details as well. Previous versions of Poser lacked a multiple-Undo command, which was a huge annoyance given the endless amount of tweaking that you can do while working on your figures and animations. You can now take up to 100 steps backwards or forwards through the editing process using the new Undo and Redo commands.

There’s also a Recent Files menu, and a new Duplicate command that allows you to quickly duplicate any object or body part. These improvements certainly speed things up and make Poser a lot less frustrating to work with.

There’s also quite a lot of new content to help you get started. There are two new human figures to experiment with, as well as new collections of props, such as plants and furniture, and new poses that you can apply to your figures.

We did encounter a few glitches here, though. Sometimes we’d select one pose – such as figure doing a handstand – and we’d end up with a totally different pose applied to our figure, such as kicking a football.

We also had a few problems with one of Poser 7’s key new features, the Talk Designer. This is a feature that attempts to make it easier to animate the mouth, lips and facial expressions of your figures so they can lip-sync to audio files that you import into the program.

There are two options here. The first is simply to import an audio file and just let Poser create the lip-sync animation for you. Unfortunately, the results aren’t all that good and don’t look particularly realistic.

You can improve the animation by also importing a text file containing a transcript of the text that is spoken in the audio file. This does help to produce more realistic lip-sync animations, although you may still need to spend some time fine-tuning some of the rather exaggerated facial expressions that Poser comes up with here.

More worrying was the fact that Poser seemed to be a bit temperamental when it came to importing audio files. We couldn’t get it to import Aif files at all, and it would sometimes reject Wav files that we had successfully imported on previous occasions.

So while the Talk Designer is a nice idea – and will certainly save you some time when creating lip-sync animations – it still has a few rough edges that need to be smoothed out.

Even so, Poser 7 is a strong upgrade. It’s still a niche product, of course, but is definitely worth the cost of the upgrade for existing users.

Also consider:
E-Frontier Anime Studio 5
Budget animation software with some powerful tools

Xara Xtreme Pro
Flash and Pdf creation made simple

E-Frontier Poser Figure Artist
A good-value 3D graphics package

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