Poser had always been a bit of a cult item, extremely popular with hobbyists. It was geared heavily toward preset characters and provided users with the ability to move these characters around in various poses—sort of like playing with 3D paper dolls. But it never really attracted a large customer base in the higher-end professional 3D market.

Now, however, comes the Poser Pro Pack, an expansion module for Poser 4 that promises to find a professional niche for Poser—namely designers who create animations in the Flash format.

The Poser 4 interface. Click image for 1,024 x 768 view.

What it does
The Pro Pack for Poser expands Poser in two very significant areas and also offers a number of important enhancements to the core program. The most significant enhancement for many is the ability to output to the Flash (.SWF) format. As I've said previously, 3D is becoming a critical tool for designers specifically because of the advent of Flash. Whether you're spinning a company logo, adding a little animation to a Web page or creating a full-blown animated presentation, 3D is virtually a prerequisite.

These days, everybody is offering Flash output. But your choices for 3D applications are mostly limited to very expensive 3D suites or applications that aren't terribly powerful or easy to use. The Poser Pro Pack, which is both affordable and easy to use, is a great solution for creating character animation in Flash. Don't get me wrong here. Poser is not a modeler. It comes with a ton of preset characters, ranging from people and props (such as clothing) to animals and robots. But, if you want to build your own models, you'll still need a 3D modeling application, such as Amorphium Pro, which is also targeted toward Flash designers (and also happens to come highly recommended by me).

The two small Flash animations below use two of the characters that come with Poser, along with some preset animations. Applying animations to models can be as simple as clicking on a preset library animation. You can also manually move around body parts (and cameras and lights) to create your own animations rather easily. (For the sake of file size, I've limited the colors in these animations to four. The first animation came out at 56 KB; the second is 92 KB. You can change color settings in the output options when you create your own animations.)

This brings us to the second significant feature of the Pro Pack—the ability to import models and give them a bone structure for posing and animation. If you build a model in, say, Electric Image's Amorphium Pro, you can export your model and bring it into Poser for building up a bone system and animating the model.

The Setup Room in the Poser Pro pack allows you to add bones to a model.
Click image for larger view. (The bones are the white triangles.)

Poser accepts such a wide range of models that it would be almost impossible to work in a 3D modeler that can't output at least one of the formats supported, including LightWave, 3D Studio Max (3ds max), etc. This process is incredibly simple. You simply draw the bones and then select areas of the model that the bones will influence. You can even skip the second step by clicking on a button called "Autogroup," which automatically assigns areas to the bones.

The Pro Pack also gives you more advanced options for inverse kinematics, assigning spherical dropoff zones, etc. But even with the advanced options, the process is fairly straightforward, even for inexperienced users. If you do get tripped up, there's a help window that automatically appears any time you enter the Setup Room, which will guide you through the process step by step.

If you work in LightWave or 3ds max and don't like to export your models into foreign applications, the Pro Pack also includes plugins for these two applications that will let you work with Poser files (including animation) directly within them.

Other enhancements the ship with the Pro Pack include:

Workflow, performance and output
I like the way Poser 4 and the Pro Pack work together. The interface of Poser itself is actually pretty nice to work in. You can drag any interface element around the screen for convenient positioning, and you can resize many elements, including the main view window. One of the Pro Pack interface elements, the Group Editor, has a little trouble redrawing itself, but, on the whole, the workflow is smooth and straightforward.

For the most part, the speed of Poser is also pretty impressive, both in terms of the interface and output. If you import your own models with high polygons, however, you will see some serious slowdown, regardless of the type of display you're using (wireframe, cartoon, shaded, etc.). This is my only gripe about the Pro Pack because one of its big selling points is that you can bring in your own models and add bones to them; but, if you bring in detailed models, the process can become cumbersome. The program can even become bogged down in screen redraw, which can cause bones to be placed in the wrong area.

One of the other major selling points of Poser is its ability to create animations very easily. And in this area the program excels. To create an animation, you can simply move parts of an object around and add a keyframe. Move forward in the timeline, change a position or camera angle, and Poser handles everything in between for you. You can also select animations from a modest library of moves, as well as a couple of libraries for designing walks for your characters.

Poser 4's Sketch Designer allows you to customize the appearance
of your output to resemble hand-drawn sketches.

In terms of output, you couldn't really consider Poser to have a terribly sophisticated render engine. But it compensates for this with a few pretty useful output options. For example, it does a really nice job with cartoon shading, allowing to to select the number of colors for larger or smaller files and even for creating duotone, tritone and quadtone effects. It also has a "Sketch Designer," which allows you to render in one of several preset sketch styles or styles that you've created yourself. The presets include things like soft charcoal, pastel, pencil and even pencil and ink. Unfortunately, you can't render sketches as Flash animations, but you can output them as QuickTime files. The reason for this is that each stroke is drawn individually and differently on every frame, creating a look that suggests hand drawing.

The bottom line
The Pro Pack is an essential expansion set for Poser 4. The functionality it adds to Poser not only enhances the program, but really turns it into a whole new tool—one that will undoubtedly benefit designers who need to create character animations in Flash. Couple it with a competent modeling tool, and you have just that. Personally, I think the combination of Amorphium Pro for modeling and Poser with the Pro Pack for animation would be tough to beat for price and performance for designers looking to make the transition from 2D to 3D for the Web. I give the Poser Pro Pack a strong buy recommendation.

The Poser Pro Pack is available for Macintosh and Windows for $149. It requires Poser 4, which is available for $219. (Upgrades from Poser 1, 2 or 3 cost $99.) For more information, visit http://www.curiouslabs.com.