Flexible Digital Mannequins Give Both Novices and Pros a Leg Up on Figure Drawing.
Sean J. Safreed
Reviews Graphics & Design/
DRAWING THE HUMAN BODY can be a challenge, even for experienced artists. If you need to use human figures in your designs but you're struggling with figure drawing in 2-D- and 3-D-graphics programs, Fractal Design Poser can help. Poser's simple-to-use tools let you create an infinite supply of malleable lifelike 3-D mannequins.
Masters of Movement
When you first launch Poser, the program displays an outlined male figure standing with its arms outstretched. You can change it into a female or classical mannequin and view it in several modes, including wire-frame, flat-shaded, and silhouette. You can also scale height by physical development, from an infant to a perfectly proportioned adult. Like an artist's mannequin, the Poser figure has only 17 parts, so you can't control individual fingers and toes, although you can choose from five hand positions -- taut, fist, relaxed, pointing, and flat. Thanks to its simple figure-positioning tools, Poser is among the easiest-to-use 3-D-modeling tools you can find. It uses an inverse-kinematics system that re-creates the system of joints in the human body. So when you pull your figure's hand down, using your mouse, the arm follows; if you pull it farther, the torso bends.
You use the selection of body tools in the Tools palette to resize the figure proportionally. With the translation tool, you can turn the drawing so that you can work on it at another angle and make other adjustments.
You position individual body parts by using the Pose tools, in the Tools palette. For instance, you can use the rotation tool to bend the torso to one side and the twist tool to rotate the torso about the center of the figure. You can taper or rescale each body part, so, for example, you can turn the upper arms into body builder's biceps or taper the torso to create a lithe dancer.
You can also use numeric and sliding controls to fine-tune each tool. Any changes you make in one limb can be applied to the other by use of the Symmetry options, on the Figure menu.
Poser's library has a nice selection of premodeled poses as well as settings for body shapes, cameras, and lighting. The poses include jumping and leaping poses as well as the classic model poses you would find in any figure-study book. You can add settings to and delete them from the library.
Let There Be Light
Poser lets you use as many as three light sources in rendering your figure -- you can vary each light source's position, intensity, and color. As you move a light around your figure, its color adjusts in near real time. Poser's renderer smoothes your figure, and there are user-definable texture maps for color and bump. The texture maps adhere to the figure like a bodysuit, which makes it easy to add a superhero costume or a bathing suit to your figure but impossible to give it a good business suit.
Although applying the textures is easy, most artists will probably want to use a simple smooth rendering with a corresponding alpha channel. They can trace or paint over the figure in Adobe Photoshop or Fractal Design Painter. The quality of the renderings is decent in both the Fast and the Clean mode, but Poser renders figures so quickly that you probably won't need to use the Fast mode, especially on a Power Mac.
You can open Poser images in 2-D in any program that supports the PICT format. Poser also exports rendered 3-D figures in DXF or RIB (RenderMan Interface Bitstream) format. The inverse-kinematics and texture information is not exported, so you can't reposition the body parts once you've imported the figure into a 3-D program. Textures also don't carry over. A future version should support Apple's 3DMF format for 3-D data, which will at least preserve the texture information.
As practical as Poser is for artists who want to use the human form in digital art, most artists will use it in conjunction with other programs. You can't do keyframe animation in Poser, and the figures you create are nothing more than artist's mannequins, so you can't create facial expressions or hand gestures. Occasionally, you can see stretching or faceting in the surfaces. In the next release, we'd like to see the ability to create smoother figures with greater surface detailing. It's also difficult to select the body part you want if you position several figures together.
The Bottom Line
If your work calls for human figures but you're all thumbs when it comes to drawing arms and legs, check out Poser. Its simple interface makes it a valuable tool for easily creating virtually any type of figure you need.
Fractal Design Poser 1.0
Rating: (4 out of 5 mice) Very Good
Price: $199 (list).
Pros: Easy-to-use. Figures move like artist's mannequins. Figures can be reshaped. Good lighting and rendering.
Cons: Can't adjust figure details, such as fingers and facial expressions. Awkward with multiple figures.
Company: Fractal Design, Aptos, CA; 800-297-2665 or 408-688-5300.
Reader Service: Circle #404.
Creating complex figures is relatively simple with Fractal Design Poser's elegantly designed positioning tools.
