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NEWS • JULY 24, 2000
Poser's Back
New parent Curious Labs to ship 4.0.3 by the end of the year

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Curious Labs says it will ship version 4.0.3 of Poser beginning in the fourth quarter. Curious Labs was cofounded by some of the original developers of Poser from Fractal Design and MetaCreations, which began unloading its catalog of software titles earlier this year in favor of pursuing Web technologies.

Members of Curious Labs were unavailable for comment at press time. Features in Poser 4 include:

• Custom Figure Creation Toolsinclude polygonal picking and grouping, as well as hierarchical selection tools. These allow users to import 3D geometry, break it into body parts and generate new Poser figures, including Inverse Kinematics.
• Sketch Designer, a rendering option that creates a scene using a series of brush strokes that define the background, edges of scene elements and individual elements and figures. Customized brush strokes for the Sketch Designer can be saved and loaded from scene to scene, rendered in color or black and white and exported as Painter scripts.
• Conforming Figures, which allows clothing models to snap and conform to base body models and stay conformed, even when the base model is in motion.
• Animated Deformers, including Magnet, which allows poser figures to be sculpted by bending, stretching or pinching; Wave, which animates ripples on surfaces, such as clothing; and Turbulence, which creates special effects like splashes or blasts. All deformers can be animated and can be used to create custom morph targets from within Poser 4.
• Advanced Texture Controls incorporate transparency and reflectivity into Poser textures onto a whole figure or individual body parts. Maps include transparency and reflectivity.
• Lighting Controls now include spotlights, which can be set to track motion. An unlimited number of lights can now be included in a scene.

Poser 4.0.3 will carry a suggested price of $395. Curious Labs says it expects the software to sell for something more like $220. For more information, visit http://www.curiouslabs.com.

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