Valuable Poser Links
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General
The primary link for anyone using Poser is Renderosity. There you will find a community of Poser users, from experts and professionals to amateurs. There is a store where you can buy everything from scenery and costumes and utilities to new Poser models. There is a gallery of inspiring work by professionals, dabblers, and gifted amateurs, and a warehouse loaded with free stuff provided by generous members of the community. Renderosity is a great place to start meeting the Poser community. For another general interest site try 3D Commune. Like Renderosity, they maintain a store and a galley, and offer tutorials, forums, and link lists. A third basic resource is The Poser Forum Online, again with tutorials, galleries, and a huge, sorted link list. PFO even has a section for reviews of software and other items of interest to the 3D community. (For more reviews, check out In Depth.)
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Resources for purchasing models, props and supporting tools should begin with the DAZ3D store. DAZ3D, formerly Zygote, created the standard Poser figures for Poser 3.0 and 4.0. They support Poser with new models of breathtaking detail and beauty, including figures, props, hair, animals, and clothing. Their newsletter features tempting sales and a new free model each week. They broker stuff for such Poser experts as "B. L. Render," who specializes in animals and has a site called 3DMenagerie, Eric Van Dycke ("Traveler", who does a bit of everything), Anton Kisiel (clothing, hair), and Catharina Harders (photorealistic human texture maps).
PoserWorld, the home of Steve Shanks and "renapd," has an interesting approach to providing models. For an annual subscription of $50 (last time I looked), you get access to a year's worth of models and textures plus the archive of everything ever offered by the site (approaching 4 CDs' worth, or more than 2 gigabytes). This amounts to hundreds of items, as near I can tell, from Victoria and Michael clothes to entire interior rooms and buildings exteriors. My $50 subscription easily paid for itself in twenty-four hours of digging through what they have released so far this year. When you consider that a good figure model will set you back about $30, a good clothing set (five or ten items) anywhere from $10-$40, and a set of textures (usually three), useless without the items they "skin," $10-30, one room model, ten of Steve Shanks' clothing items and one set of RenaPD textures for them will pay for the whole year.
Others offer similar deals.
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Discussion groups are a handy way to pick up "word-of-mouth" expertise, and the best of them, in my view, are the forums at PoserPros, a free site that features numerous tutorial chat areas and an all-star lineup of experts. Another good one is In-Depth Discussions. At both these sites, you will find some of the best and most experienced professional Poser folks sharing ideas, answering questions, and asking a few of their own.
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All of the community sites listed above include stores that broker the work of community members. Two other comprehensive market sites are TurboSquid and 3D Cafe; but they cater to the high-end 3d crowd, featuring tools and models for products like 3D Studio Max, Maya, and Lightwave. What little you will find for Poser is more easily accessible at sites like Renderosity. In addition to DAZ3D, another excellent specialized source of add-ons is BBay; their speciality is morph targets to change the appearance of your standard Poser models, everything from a nose job or a tummy tuck to elf ears. The most of the general sites listed above have stores; the Renderosity store brokers a huge variety of products from members, though quality control and value for dollar are understandably diminished by their Farmer's Market approach.
If you are looking for software to add to your 3D toolkits, you should check the Renderosity forums and their invaluable directory of software vendors and products. Finally, for models and the most complete and professional morph target collection on the planet, visit BBay.
Tutorials
Most Poser sites, public or private, will include some training material, ranging from brilliant to useless. And gems appear in odd places and forms. For example, PoseWorks provides a "tutorial" that is essential a quick reference on what the Wave Deformer dials mean and what you might use Wave Deformers for (clothes and hair). No real training offered, but the topic is hardly even broached anywhere else. The most polished and professional tutorials can be found at Poser Arcana. You will also find tutorials at the Help and TechTips pages of Curious Labs site. Here is a selection of training sites to look at:
Name (Link) | Notes |
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| Roy's MAX-Poser Tutorials | Focused primarily on using Poser with high-end tool 3D Studio Max, these are excellent presentations of fairly technical topics, such as obj file editing and working the phi files.
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| Traveler's Tutorials | The legendary "Traveler" (Eric Van Dycke), undisputed king of Poser morphs, maintains a selection of brief but authoritative tutorials on how to use magnets and on other morph-specific tools and techniques.
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| Duane's Toybox | A selection of tutorials, uniformly valuable. His explanation of creating a "squeeze morph" was the first clear lesson I had in using magnet deforms. You will also find some useful basic morphs. For more tutorials on magnets, try Planet-3D.
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| Egypt3D Tutorial List | A site located in Egypt, one assumes, with the most comprehensive tutorial list I've found anywhere. Unfortunately, many of the listings are obsolete, such as a tutorial on using textures with Poser 2.0....
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| Cellar of Comics Poser Page | John Hoagland's site includes some basic, no-nonsense tutorials that extend the manual nicely, covering such topics as textures and transparency maps, morph targets, and animation.
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| 3D Menagerie | In addition to some great freebies in the Goodies area (mainly for animal figures, such as improved morphs for the cats, horses, and dogs), and a store with great stuff, 3D Menagerie offers clear tutorials on some fairly technical Poser topics, like Joint Parameters, Grouping, and Parenting.
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| 3D Cafe Tutorials Portal | The Tutorials page at 3D Cafe gathers together some of the best tutorials, including a brief description of each one.
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| Infinitee Designs | Ralph Hawke Manes has done a very clear, very detailed, and pretty challenging tutorial on building a portrait from model to UV map to rendering and detailing. My only quibble is that the thing uses a black background, which makes it nearly illegible on my PCs. Force your color defaults on the site, and enjoy.
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| Poser Arcana | The premiere tutorial site, in terms of quality and value. Particularly good are Craig Burton's explanations of lighting techniques and Will Kramer's post-production lessons. Kramer is the artist who runs the gallery Earthcurves.
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| Paintshop Pro Tutorial | Garry Lacey's Fantastic Arts site has a good introduction to the budget 2D tool of choice, Paintshop Pro 7.0 (JASC), as well as a tutorial on post-render work. He also provides links to some extraordinary free 3D tools, such as Terragen, and a download area with free models, SiliconCache.
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| About.com's Poser site: NOT! | Not recommended. I for one am tired of portals that don't know how to behave, and About.com is a classic. The last time I went to this former link, I had to deflect about a dozen cookies per page, most of them targeted to expire in, say, 2036. And when I tried to get out, it started playing 52-pickup with new windows until it crashed my browser, interrupting a download and shutting two other windows I was actually getting productive work from. I hope the teen sluts who taught their web "god" that slimeball trick smear him with honey and hand him to some grizzlies. There is nothing compelling to find here, and what good there is, you can find elsewhere. Thank you; I feel a lot better.
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Tools
The essential tool is, of course, Poser 4.0, from Curious Labs. If you have a high-end computer (at least 600 mHz and 256K Ram), consider buying the Poser Pro Pack as well. It offers a number of useful add-ons, including the indispensible ability to see multiple camera views simultaneously.
Name (Link) | Notes |
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| Bryce | My suggestion for the next tool to buy after the Poser Pro Pack would be Bryce, now sold by Corel. The weak link in Poser is the rendering engine, and the Bryce engine is better. Another good investment would be a quick cruise through eBay to look for old copies of Ray Dream Studio, which turns up in the $30-50 range. Versions 5.0 and 5.5 support Poser plug-ins and the product gives you a first-rate renderer and the ability to do near-professional 3D modeling.
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| Paint Shop Pro | You will need a 2D paint program to support any complex Poser work you do. This is where you create or modify textures and touchup the minor glitches (artifacts) in your rendered models. My advise is, buy what you can afford. In other words, if you can afford Photoshop, go for it and get all the bells and whistles. For my purposes, 20% of the cost gets me what I need with JASC's excellent Paint Shop Pro. In fact, I own Photoshop and I don't use it....
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| UV Mapper Pro | If you don't know about UV Mapper, chances are you don't need it yet. But just in case. I lets you extract or build texture map templates for your models. There is a free version which is fine for basic stuff like makeing a texture map of that great dolmen you made out of a box primitive in Poser. If you get serious about stuff like texturing clothes, you will need either a texture template that came with the model or UV Mapper Pro (or a working texture and a steadier hand than I'll ever have...). This is a rarity, a high-end tool that even beginners can get some immediate benefit from.
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| Carrara | When MetaCreations folded, Carrara went to Eovia, who also sell Amapi 3D, a mid-priced modeling program. Carrara was slated to replace Ray Dream Studio in the MetaCreations lineup. At eBay you can pick up RDS itself, version 5.0 or better, occasionally.
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| ZBrush | A product highly recommended in the Poser community, ZBrush is a pricey ($300-$500) but full-featured 3D painting program. A big commitment for the hobbyist. I would look for an old copy of Detailer at eBay instead.
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| LifeForms | From Credo Interactive, an excellent program for Poser animation.
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| Photomodeler Lite | A valuable tool with a price that can't be beat. It's free. Like Canoma, the MetaCreations product that Adobe bought and then apparently scrapped, PhotoModeler Lite will make 3D images from photographs. Don't expect to recreate the Mona Lisa, but it's a handy tool.
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| Anim8or | Another product with that price you can't beat (free), Anim8or is recommended in the Poser community for creating morph targets. It won't put 3D Studio Max out of business, but it's a great introduction to modeling.
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| Nendo | When you are ready to add a generalized modeling tool to your kit, Nendo, from Nichimen Graphics, is an inexpensive and powerful choice. It has some pretty severe hardware requirements, but it only costs $99, and it provides both 3D modeling and 3D painting. It has some fairly strict hardware requirements–not recommended for NT 4.0 systems.
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| Vue d'Esprit | A competitor with Bryce that gets lots of praise in the Poser community. It costs about $200, a fact that you will have to fill out an entire page of shipping information to see. Personally, I generally don't buy from companies that can't figure out how to code a customer-friendly store. |
| For More Free Tools... | Steven Heyse has included at his site a list of free 3D tools available as of March 2002, with links to the necessary locations to get them. He also provides a 135-page review of the products. He is in Belgium, however, and the review is in Dutch.
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Galleries
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Gallery preferences are pretty subjective. To browse a wide variety of artists, try any of the general sites. Again, Renderosity is a standout. The Poser community is international, as you will learn when you struggle through the desperate English of a French, Japanese, or Russian artist describing his or her work. Some of the best artists contributing to the community are non-American. Art crosses language boundaries, fortunately, and the models often have cultural nuances that give them charm and identity. For example, look at the animé-influenced Poser on the right. I have a Russian Poser character who looks, well, very Russian (that's her on the left). Here are a few individual galleries that I have found stimulating and inspiring, with a note on each.
Name (Link) | Notes | |
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| Capsces Digital Ink | A 3D art studio with an interesting twist. They have created a handful of escapees from The Island of Dr. Moreau: fascinating blends of animal and human evocative of John Crowley's Beasts and the popular television show Beauty and the Beast. Good source of free textures and morphs to extend the Poser 4 animal collection, too.
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| Earthcurves | For some extraordinary examples of what can be done with Poser models, take a look at Will Kramer's gallery, Earthcurves. Kramer is the author of an excellent tutorial on blending Poser figures in photographs, at Poser Arcana.
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| Catharina Harders (a.k.a Catharina Przezak) is the reigning queen of photorealistic textures. In fact, her images are so realistic that they may put you off a bit, especially if you were looking for movie stars with the best skin money can buy rather than real people with character and the flaws that create it. Her website, Mecom4D, offers a gallery of images based on her textures, a handful of freebies that more than make up for quantity with the excellent quality, and a store where you can buy a selection of her creations.
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| Erotic Scratchpad | One fascination of Poser is the potential for creating erotica. The Erotic Scratchpad is one of the few such sites that doesn't seem preoccupied with bondage and torture. A mellow friendly atmosphere, clever animations, and some great pictures, including a good deal of humor.
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| Awful Soul | One of the most intriguing Poser sites around is Awful Soul, located in Italy, I think. The owner has a very personal rendering style, impressionistic and fugitive, and he is creating an exotic, alluringly beautiful world, vaguely Antique, slightly kinky, and fascinating. You can obtain clothing and costumes at his site for free, and he lists a few items at Renderosity as well. Worth a visit just to see the images. Be warned, the site has some pretty creative English on it.
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| Digital Babes | Don't be put off by the name. (And don't get it mixed up with CyberBabes3D, X-rated.) This Japanese site offers free hair props that are treasured throughout the Poser community, and a clear if brief tutorial by the master (Kozaburo) on building your own hair props. And the gallery is a garden of animé-inspired visual delights.
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| One of the more beautiful sites is Cake One, which I suspect is French. The owner has done a fascinating tutorial on building a head texture from a photo of a real face. Her images are brilliantly rendered, with texturing that is filled with photorealist details. One black and white picture I was sure was actually a photograph until I spotted a telltale Poser ankle. One picture archly carries the message, "No Sex here," but the frog on the gleaming flank of another will haunt me for days.
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