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.)