Rating: 
Summary: disappointly, difficult to learn to use
Review: I've always loved artwork and doing artwork and over the years I've become more and more interested in digital art and 3D art and programs of that nature. I would have given this product a better rating if it had not been for the poor quality in user manuals, lack of any really good tutorials, missing documentation (that by they way are NOT all supplied by download at curiouslabs.com download site), the fact that I had to download a patch from the very beginning (after all this time that the product has been out you would think that they would have patched the program discs and content discs so that you didn't have to wonder if previous patches were accounted for in the latest patch or not)The program seems to hold a lot of potentential but if your just beginning to learn to use 3D programs, trust me this one is not at all easy to learn to use and not only that it appears to require the use of other expensive 3D and paint programs in order to get any satisfaction out of it. The referance manual that comes with the program is poor at best. It comes across as being nothing more than an introduction to the features of the program but offers little to nothing in help in learning how to use the features to produce even the most basic creation. I've scoured the web for tutorials and keep running across the same problem. The best tutorials all require other very expensive programs for prework and post work.
This is not good news for someone on a limited buget to spend on 3D software. Unless you already have or can afford programming like Lightwave, Deep UV, Maya, 3D stuido Max, corel painter 6 or 8, Vue, other plug-in programs for poser and more likely than not a combination of more than one, You are most likely to be disappointed in this programming. I was especially disappointed in the lack of control in the hair and cloth rooms. Sure they have lots of dials and settings to be set, and you will be working with vectors. But lets say you want to create a finger wave on your model. It certainly wont work in the hair room no mater how much you bend, move or curl the hair. why? because you only have control over the end of the hair not the middle section. This makes doing hair work in the hair room very tedious. There are ofcourse other ways to make hair but if you don't know of these other ways you'r going to spend hours searching for a tutorial just like I am and still have yet to find one that will work with the other programming I acually could afford and have available to me. The cloth room is yet another confusing area for me at least. mind you that if your familar with these rooms and know how to use them you probably will have little problems but if not... It's a hair pulling experiance. I've read various tutorials including the user manual and still have no clue how the heck I'm supposed to produce even the simplest no frills dress, gown, shirt or what ever. I read one Tutorial that said you may want to pre Drape your cloth before heading to the cloth room but they failed to explain how you would go about doing this. The setup room on the other hand was nice in that you could add flexability to object files that you export/import so that you can turn them into figures/models clothing items made in the program or with third party programming that is rigid and unflexable can be made flexable in this room and then conformed to your model in the pose room. I still have some difficulties with this though because if you do not group them just right you will end up with broken cloth items that come appart when you bend and pose them. But if you have a clothing item already made the cloth room does help in frame by frame posing to help the cloth move in a more flexable appearing way. Content that was supposed to appear on the content CD is missing even after all this time also. There is a download from the curiouslabs.com download site however who wants to pay this and still have to download what you were supposed to have gotten with it. Not to mention that but even after downloading this content not all of it is there either. Online manual available at curiouslabs is the same one word for word image for image as the one that comes with the program. The Tutorials that are currently available online at curiouslabs provide little insite. And the product recommended system requirments seem to be a little less than what the program truely needs to run effectively but it will run on the recommended. I just dont understand why rendering uses 100% of a 1.8G processor if it isn't supposed to need that much. others who have experiance with other poser products or other 3D programs may find this product useful, but beginners will most likely like myself find this to be a hair pulling experiance.
Rating: 
Summary: Much More Stable Than Before
Review: I noticed some earlier reviews about Poser 5 being unstable. I don't know if the current version (Service Pack 3) is any more stable on the systems of those reviewers, but it's been running very well on mine, a PC clone I built myself. That said, it does run very slow if it's loaded down with detailed dynamic hair and the render quality is turned up high, but that's something I don't think is always needed to produce a quality animation. I usually save it for still images. I'm not sure how the latest upgrade has improved on most machines, but it looks like Curious Labs is trying to improve the reliablity of Poser 5. Now if someone can get it to import to Vue d'Esprit 4 I'll be totally happy.
Rating: 
Summary: Forget MAYA, 3D MAX, Lightwave, everything's right here
Review: This program is the best!
I had wanted to get into 3D artwork as a hobby some time ago, I even went through the trouble of purchasing MAYA 3D and Lightwave 7 3D softwares (Got them on a student Bargain) Anyways learning the simplest basics such as modeling for both of these programs is EXTREMELY difficult!!! I purchased the book that's all over the net "Dan Ablan's Lightwave 7 book" the book has like a billion intimidating pages to read and he ASSUMES you already know the basics of 3D modeling. MAYA is even harder. The books are still here gathering dust...you can now plant corn with the dust that has gathered.
I heard about POSER for modeling people, I figure that's one of the reasons I want to learn 3D so I can model people and eventually get into doing CGI effects for movies, etc.
POSER has all the stuff I need to make a quick model of a human being, a face that I can adjust to my liking in terms of ethnic features, Asian, black, white. Size, skinny, medium build, Hero build, and really BIG! It also enables you to animate your models, import pictures, export the models to Bryce, and 3D max, as well as other 3D programs. And the best thing that this software does for me is help me understand the terms used in industry/major 3D modeling programs; for instance, it has helped me understand what "deformers" are, parent, morph, and so much more, it's actually a BETTER learning program for beginners because it's so simple to understand and the interface is so easy to follow, practically what you see is what you get...it kind of reminds me of how DREAMWEAVER has turned alot of average no background hobbyists into professional web developers..POSER can help you get to that next level in 3D or better prepare you for advanced 3D software. It is what Photoshop LE (Limited Edition) did for first time Photoshop users. POSER is highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Curious indeed...
Review: Yes, the interface looks cute - more like a video game than a 3d graphics workspace, really. And then you try to use it and soon enough you start to wonder whether you're running some freebie test version of a new piece of software rather than a fairly expensive high profile application, complete with flashy marketing and predatory lawyers. Crashes are random and frequent. Compatibility problems abound, both with third-party content as with previous versions of Poser itself. Don't be surprised if you import a figure from Poser's own standard library and the program starts issuing warnings as soon as you attempt to edit it. No, your eyes are not deceiving you: models from earlier Poser versions are not fully compatible with Poser 5; and other applications that work well with Poser 4 or Pro may fail to work with 5 too. Soon enough the cute interface itself becomes irritating. Why is so much valuable space (and memory!) wasted on a handful of controls? Of course, you can resize the tiny document window, but then it will cover up several tools, or tools will shift and overlap each other, giving that cute interface a very amateurish look all of a sudden. The library browser is a monster, especially after you start adding content. You will be scrolling along unnecessarily large thumbnails forever to find what you want. What's wrong with a simple Windows style browser window?
Unlike most 3d-applications there is no way to maneuver objects directly in 3d space. You have to fiddle with controls, and if you want to exactly reposition figures in a scene the only way to do so is by typing in values on the x-, y- and z- position axes. That means building up a scene with interacting figures is a trial and error process. Nearly all functions are performed by typing numbers (the dials provided are horrible for mouse use), and as there is no clue as to what these numbers refer to, you will just have to try and see what happens. Figures are morphed per muscle group, and as these are indicated by abbreviations of their Latin names, you will just have to try your luck, unless you're a doctor or a physiotherapist... Here, thumbnails would have come in handy! To enhance suspense, no preview is available, and your document window offers only a very basic impression of the actual scene.
Also unlike many 3d-applications in this price bracket and aiming for this segment of the market (hobbyists), Poser is anything but fun to work with. It offers the most surprising sources of frustration, and I came close to hating it, but as there are few alternatives for what it does (apart from modeling your own humans, which is fairly complicated) I'll just have to put up with it. Unlike many 3d applications, you will not learn it by playing around; little room for play anyway with only one undo. Also, most functions don't work intuitively or by themselves; rather, you have to fiddle a control in palette A, then do something in palette B, and then have to access yet something else in an old-fashioned drop-down list to make it all work. One wrong step and voila, there's your next crash: your system will freeze and even with Ctrl/Alt/Del you'll have to wait ages for things to lock down. That's another typical Poser feature: slowness (for your information, I'm running it under XP Home, on a Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz PC with a 60 Gb hard drive, 1 Gb of RAM and a nVidia Geforce fx5950 256 Mb video card).
Don't expect the manual to be of any help. It's basically a very expansive feature listing, which will not tell you how to go about doing things, or will leave out so much basic information that the instructions are meaningless to the uninitiated. Prepare instead to spend many hours on user forums, and after a while Poser may actually begin to make some sense to you. At some point you might even muster enough courage to venture into the Hair, Material, Cloth and Setup "rooms", where new, undreamt of horrors await you. Just try to create a working "hair group", and experience how a simple action (selecting and grouping parts of an object) can be made difficult. At times the reactions of the program seem completely random. The material room uses a peculiar system of plugs and sockets to interconnect several material modifications which is again very cute, if anything but obvious. Many other apps perform that very same function in a single clearly laid out panel. Avoid the Content room at all times. If you succeed in entering it at all, it will simply redirect you to an internet market place for 3d accessories, with download links that do not work.
So isn't there any good news? Well, in fairness, once you have succeeded to complete a scene, the final render can look quite good. Don't expect anything remotely photorealistic though: generating convincing humans on a PC is far too complex for that. Rather, you will get the digital equivalent of excellent window dummies, inevitably plastic-like and somewhat wooden, but very useful for populating 3d scenes generated in other applications, as long as you avoid extreme close-ups. Meanwhile one can only hope that CuriousLabs can be persuaded to abandon its obsession with uniqueness and make Poser 6 a bit less curious than the current version; a move towards the mainstream would greatly benefit this undeniably useful software. They might, for instance, want to learn a lesson or two from their friends at e-on Software, who created the exemplary Vue-programs.
Rating:
Summary: Poser or Poseur?
Review: Poser does one thing very well: it renders stock poses of stock characters with amazing realism. Here is the rub: the library of stock poses and stock characters is so tiny that you will quickly outgrow them. You will soon want to do more: add hair to a figure; change the color of clothing, or even add new and different clothes. But any change beyond the stock inventory will lead to innumerable headaches: a user interface designed to thwart your every effort; system crashes; poses that look unnatural; even body parts that poke through the clothing. Forget the undo: at best it will take you back one step; often you can't even undo the last action you took. Don't bother with the user manual: as others have noted, it does little more than identify the controls mysteriously placed around the user interface. Don't even bother with books such as "Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5" or "The Poser 5 Handbook." You may find a helpful clue in a tutorial somewhere on the web, but then again, it may not apply to the version of the program that you have. So why does anyone bother with Poser? Under the proper circumstances, Poser can do amazing things. Unlike most 3-D software applications, Poser is designed to work with human and animal forms. Within a narrow window, it works very well. Poser has even spawned a cottage industry of people who make additional figures, clothing, and props for Poser. Without organizations like the Digital Art Zone and Renderosity, Poser would not be worth the money. Yet even these organizations, which often provide very high quality materials for Poser, can't prevent its flaws from showing through. Digital Art Zone (DAZ) has created characters like Michael that are stunning in Poser. Clothing for normal Poser characters cannot easily be used on Michael, and vice versa. Even when Michael is "morphed" to a different form, his clothing will no longer fit. Once again you will be struggling with all those joint parameter dials, trying to get things right. Having used versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 of Poser, it is clear that Poser 5 is the best of the lot, especially if you are working with multiple characters in a scene. Poser 5 also has the best support for hair of any version of the software. But it's still not very good. Some simple advice for anyone using Poser: 1) Create and clothe your character before attempting to pose him/her/it.
2) Plan out your animation carefully. If you make a mistake, you probably can't go back.
3) Save your work often
4) After everything else is done, then add hair. Once a realistic amount of hair has been added, even simple things like moving the camera will bring your system to its knees.
5) Plan to spend quite a bit extra on new figures and clothing. These will easily double the cost of owning Poser in no time at all. Or, you could spend your money buying a Barbie and Ken doll, a digital camera, and a bunch of outfits. You would save time, money, and quite a few headaches this way...
Rating:
Summary: Incremental improvements continue.
Review: I've used Poser since version 2 and have seen it's interface and functionality improve quite a bit. I think it remains the market leader at what it does: character animation. This latest version continues with incremental improvement in what is already the best-of-breed for this area. A few new features in this version range from very useful (custom faces and dynamic hair, and cloth setup up room) to trivial yet perhaps useful to someone (sketch render option comes to mind).
There are some quibbles:
1. Stability seems to be an issue for other users and not just me. You will need a pretty recent machine to run this software, and even then, you'll get occasional crashes and unexpected behaviour resulting in lost work if you're not careful. The increasing complexity of the software means that startup and model changes are now really quite slow, and something that Curious Labs should be addressing soon. (Make sure you install the service patches as things are more tolerable at SR2 and beyond).
2. The interface is custom and largely 'point n click' which makes it a very intuitive and therefore easy to be up and working in a hurry, although feature creep is making what was once a tidy and minimalist desktop somewhat cluttered. After a while though, you just wish there were more keyboard shortcuts, and there were more ways to input numeric data than clicking and sliding. Only one level of undo makes for exacting work at times as well.
3. The models included are pretty good, and there are a fairly large range of after-market models to satisfy most needs. However, it's not at all trivial to create your own models, and eventually you're going to need to do this. you really will have to create the models in something else (Lightwave, 3DS, etc) and import it. The behaviour of the models once imported is not, shall we say, entirely predictable. This means you may have spent a lot of time and money in something that didn't work, and you're bound to be tearing your hair out over it. There's no real way around this as Poser is, in essence, simply a means of animating models, not creating them, and I'm sure it's a fiddly process getting filters right for importing objects from these pieces of software.
All up, I think this remains the best of it's kind software, and certainly value for money when you consider what it does, and how well it does it. If you value your time, it'll have paid for itself in a week or so of work (I've seen it as cheap as less than US$200 online)
Rating:
Summary: Packed with new cool features!
Review: I've played with several 3D modeling packages through the years, namely early versions of form Z, as well many of the former Metacreation software like Poser, RayDream and Bryce to satisfy my need to create geeky 3D sci-fi models and scenes. I decided to make a stand and 3D Studio Max became my 3D modeling app mainstay because the user interface hadn't really changed from the time it was Kinetics Max 2.0. and it still as close to a CAD program that I learned years back still working in DOS. I owned Max 4 when I made my purchase of Poser 4 and the pro pack found it was a nice compliment to Max and adding figures my .3ds scenes. In particular, setting up bones and joint parameters was by far easier in Poser and animating figures in Poser quick and easy. Naturally, I wanted to have the Poser 5 upgrade but put it off and decided to wait until I had more time away from my ever increasing work load. Now just recently purchased Poser 5 last week I received my upgrade in time for the Christmas holiday. Well, I'm glad I waited and glad I made the Poser 5 upgrade because, quite frankly, Poser now has a lot, a lot of new robust features. From what prior information on Poser 5 I got from the Poser website didn't prepare me for the initial launch of this version. Poser 5 is astonishing at first glance. First off, the user interface is basically the same as in pro pack but to try and go into every new room is overwhelming at first. Any previous version of Poser pales in comparison to this new version. The cloth room is an off-shoot of another dynamic cloth plugin for Max and I'm already familair creating cloth. The dynamic hair room alone is enough to make me glad I made this upgrade. How I wish I can really grow hair on my ever expanding bald spot as easily done in the hair room. The material room and the new rendering technology is a complete change from previous versions of Poser. Nice to see that procedural shaders, displacement maps, raytracing can be used and that's a major improvement. I'm glad to see there is a zoom tool and direct manipulation tool. Played around with the morph tool, simple to use. Haven't played in the face room much but it's interesting and it so easy to change the look of the characters facial features. The new library palette system is also a great improvement. There are some drawbacks. There isn't a plugin for Max yet. I hope it is in the works for Poser 5. I still have pro pack installed and there are so many other Poser 5 features I can delve into. In general, running Poser 5 is slower than Poser 4 I guess with all these new rooms and features that is expected with this new version. The new render is slower than the Poser 4 renderer, but justifibly so because raytracing lights is new in Poser 5. Looks like I'm going to be busy for the few days, nights...weeks...
Rating:
Summary: Powerful but a few flaws
Review: One thing that Curious Labs made a mistake on with Poser 5 was shipping with an arcane activation program that required you to send a "Challenge Code" and get a "Response Code" in return to use the program. With the latest service pack, however, the activation was entirely done way with--something Curious Labs wasn't advertising too much. I think it still retains, however, the notorious scan-your-network for extra copies running feature. Poser 5 finally adds some realistic pose sets, and quite a few at that, and approaches the flexibility needed to make uniquely different faces. I say approaches because the Face Room always starts out with the same male face and the random face selector makes faces that would do for comics and games, but not for real people. The hair and clothing rooms, however, are a godsend, as now you can make strand based hair and flexible cloth. I haven't run into the bugs some people have, but compared to my previous Poser version (Poser 3) this is a massive upgrade with a much steeper learning curve, but well worth it. (Just remember to download the service pack to get rid of the activation.) In the realm of 3D Poser is still the poor man's Character Studio, but rapidly becoming a program to contend with.
Rating:
Summary: I really dig Poser 5
Review: I really dig Poser 5. As a student and freelancer of 3D modeling and graphic design, I'm constantly trying out new tools to see where to concentrate my efforts fine tune my professional skills. I have dabbled with Maya and other high dollar apps as well as Poser 4, Vue and others. Poser 5, compared to the bigger apps is so easy to use and at affordable price, and believe it or not enough I get comparable results. I really like the way the room
interface is setup. The face room especially rocks. I do have a pretty beefy PC and have downloaded the patch from their site, so I haven't really seen the crashing others have reported. No buggier than any other app I've got. Although the patch seriously sped up the render times, depending on the complexity of my file, the render times can take a while. But I have grown to expect this in this field though. There is some heavy math going on. I give it two thumbs for its ease of use, cheap price and pro results. Poser has made its way into my toolbox. Cheers!
Rating:
Summary: AWESOME SOFTWARE!!!
Review: This software is all about patience. If you have patience and a little art knowledge, you can create amazing pieces of work! I was getting sick of Metacreations Poser 4 due to it being basic and all, thanks to Curious Labs for their amazing effort, Poser 5 changed everything! This software is loaded with many different features! You can basically create anyone/anything, you just have to put your mind to it and just like how I mentioned above, it takes a lot of effort and hard work. Give this software a try and you'll see what I mean. Just a few things to remember, this software will run VERY slow on crappy computers, so make sure to upgrade your hardware. Even better, buy a new computer to prevent future problems with upcoming advanced softwares you might need.
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