|
efrontier Poser 7 (PC/Mac) | 
| From: Smith Micro Software
Category: Software
List Price: £179.95
Buy New: £142.92
You Save: £37.03 (21%)
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1193
Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Xp, Mac Os X
Media: CD-ROM
Operating System: Mac OS X
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.3 x 2.4
MPN: psr-c70-dem-r
Model: PSR-C70-DEM-R
UPC: 814956026218
EAN: 0814956026225
ASIN: B000MCIANU
Release Date: March 3, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Chill out man... December 10, 2008
Mr. D. Brown
Well...what do you expect for low end of the market and 250 bucks?? You sound like you already know something of 3D so if i were you i would stick to what you know. Poser does what it says on the tin and some things well enough for it's market...they don't profess themselves to be a top notch 3d app. I think for what is...it's great!!! It has a strange UI to get used to, but apart from that it's fine!
 Impractical, unreliable, redundant and based on a very bad idea. March 19, 2008
E. King
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
There is a fair amount of Poser content available and there are free applications you can use to make use of these resources, without having to punish yourself by using this absolutely dreadful piece of software.
the developers have spent so much time on the eye-candy and made some absolutely, breathtakingly stupid decisions on the functionality it really does defy belief.
Firstly, the library you are forced to use to access your 3d content is unusable. You have to manually click an arrow repeatedly to scroll through your content, which may very well consist of hundreds (if not thousands) of directories because the developers - in their infinite wisdom have chosen to continue to force their users to separate out content into its basic components (texture in 1 directory, geometry in another etc etc).
This huge oversight has - apparently - gone unchanged since the very first version. I would love to know who was responsible for that little gem.
Secondly, although on first glance the skeleton and skinning systems used as the basis for the figures appear impressive, don't be fooled. Much of the appearance of the figure is being "hacked" through the use of morphs (a very inefficient and obsolete animation method) and most of what appears impressive is little more than huge, detailed texture maps.
Big texture maps are good for realistic work but you wouldn't want to use these for games programming or Virtual Reality software.
When it comes down to it, the only bit of the poser skin and bones system that is in any way impressive is the way the skin slides over the joints. This is - unfortunately - also a huge problem because not using weighted vertices means that practically no other serious software can use your "creation" without a serious time-investment, manually rigging and tweaking whatever you eventually manage to import.
Thirdly, after a while, you get to realise that most of the 3d content available for Poser is quite naff. There are some realistic figures and textures around, but most of what is available is quite cheesy. Most of the content can be created very quickly - and free of charge - in a modelling program.
Then we have the biggest problems... The software is very unreliable, the lack of a proper well formatted help system (the pdf file you get with Poser is meandering junk that has you flipping from page to page just to learn the basics), the user interface is designed by people who have a noticeable absence of common sense and the fact that even the few decent bits of 3d content available for this software can't be used in a proper grown up package like 3d Studio Max because the Poser people have done their utmost to inhibit plugin development.
The only concession (if you can call it that) is a poser plugin called "poser Fusion" whereby your Poser creation is "hosted" inside 3ds max. This is - essentially - useless and another large oversight by the developers. It means that the user is unable to make even minor adjustments to the figure in his / her scene in 3d Studio Max, but has to go back to Poser to make the adjustments, presumably guessing where a target object is if the figure is to interact with the rest of the scene....
From a software design standpoint, that has to be this years winner of the daftest and most short-sighted design award.
If these problems weren't enough to put you off, consider this: having spent hours creating a photo-realistic character you then find you are completely unable to animate him / her adequately because the only place you can lyp-sync your character (for example) is the one place that doesn't have even barely adequate tools to do it in; that's right, Poser. Even basic animation tasks are unavailable to the user.
All in all, the Poser people have tried to make more of Poser than it is. The only strength it has is the skin deformation mechanism at the joints and even that has unrealistic limits. If this were a 3ds max plugin, I would pay for it just as a time-saver for getting the odd piece of Daz3d / poser content into a proper application, but it's not worth the money as a desktop application because it fails in almost every single one of it's functional areas.
250 bucks is not a lot of money, but a waste is a waste and this software isn't worth 25 (let alone 250) bucks of anyones money.
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