POSER 4

Review by David Nerlich

Poser began life as an illustration tool giving you a range of rudimentary 3d humans you could push round and pose and render images of. Successive incarnations added body animation, then facial animation, turning Poser into a full blown character animation tool.

You could spend days or weeks setting up something like this in a non-dedicated 3d program. In Poser the boning, inverse kinematics and morph targeting is all done for you and laid out via a nice intuitive interface leaving you to do the keyframing, surfacing and individualising of your characters - though it offers you shortcuts and presets for all of those things too. Its Walk Designer also lets you set your character in motion along user-defined paths.

Version 4 brings more choice of body types, facial types and an extensive gallery of poses and animated sequences. There is a wardrobe of changeable clothing. Props are now easier to attach to your character, will bend with its movements and there are more lighting options, reflection and transparency surfacing and you can do animated deformations of character parts. You can also render with sketch or paint effects.

Poser isn't without weakness. I found some results from the Walk Designer unpredictable and clunky. Also the preset library stores all user-designed facial data in single pose files. What Poser really needs in order to be a serious character animation tool is to be able to save eyes, mouth and face targets separately so they can be applied in combinations on any character - otherwise every possible combination for every character has to be saved as a separate preset file, or else animate everything manually for an entire project. Silly.

Poser4 also gets the author's oink award for memory hogging - it wants 66 megs of ram and a whopping 300-500 meg slice of your hard disk!

Despite these caveats, Poser4 is this months favourite toy. Virtual people.. it's downright spooky.

RRP: $459. More info: www.metacreations.com or Scholastic New Media 02 43283555