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SIGGRAPH 2009: Poser 8 Announced

Smith Micro Software, Inc.  Productivity and Graphics Group, today announced the availability of Poser® 8, the next generation of the popular 3D figure design and animation solution. Poser 8 enables hobbyists, artists, and graphic professionals to create and digitally shape humans, animals and entire scenes in 3D. Visit booth #2407 for a quick demo of the new software in action.

Poser 8 allows artists to work with avatars and all types of 3D characters, such as giant ogres and talking chipmunks that proliferate in advertising, video games, television and full-length feature films. Poser 8 acts as a virtual stage, offering eight new, ready-to-pose, fully-textured humans of different ethnicities and body types to give artists a starting point in designing their characters. The new Poser content library provides more than 2.5 gigabytes of human and animal figures accompanied by a wide range of accessories including hair, clothing, sets and real-world props and elements such as lights and cameras to produce complete scenes.

For many years, creating 3D characters was beyond the budget and ability of novice users. Many amateur 3D artists inspired by the stunning images shown in computer-generated films could not afford the expensive and complex software needed to create animations. With Poser 8, new users and hobbyists can create entire, professional-quality scenes in minutes that utilize automatically- generated walking, running or dancing sequences and lifelike speaking capabilities. Once created, users can post their animations to YouTube or any of their favorite social networking sites.

“Poser is about access. It provides artists access to everything needed to create virtually any scene imaginable, including access to 3D figures, powerful tools such as a dependent parameter feature that makes working with characters easy, and an entire world of scene assets to build upon,” said Steve Cooper, Senior Product Manager of Graphics Solutions for Smith Micro Software, Inc. “We have built upon the key elements behind Poser’s accessibility and transformed the application into a faster, more efficient product, while preserving the user experience so familiar to existing customers.”

The new, streamlined interface of Poser 8 maximizes screen real estate and provides an intuitive workflow, plus a new search-enabled library that helps artists easily browse and organize their content. New professional-quality tools and features are included in Poser 8 such as a dependent parameter editor that lets users “teach” objects in a scene to interact with each other, simplifying complex body movement. Other features include cross-body morph brushes that permit a user to smoothly sculpt a figure across every body part, new photorealistic rendering to more accurately reproduce light and shadows, and improved character rigging for better character bending.

Poser 8 Features and Benefits:
NEW –Figures – Eight new ready-to-pose 3D human characters, offered in different ethnicities and body types to provide artists with multiple starting points for their creations
NEW – More Than 1GB of New Content – Plus 1.5+ gigabytes of previously released, ready-to-use 3D scene assets
NEW – Enhanced User Interface – Features a more efficient tool layout and a user configurable work environment
NEW – Dependant Parameters Tool – A new tool that allows artists to create, modify and edit parameters within the scene. Complex interactions can be created, such as full-and partial-body morphs, advanced body controls and parameter-controlled scene assets
NEW – Cross-Body Part Morph Tool – Enables artists to easily create effects such as muscle bulges, scales, bumps, horns, veins, wounds and surface details across multiple body parts
NEW – Content Management System – Allows easier access to content collections with the ability to search a library’s content by category and keyword, providing a hierarchy list view and more detailed pop-up expanding previews
NEW – Indirect Lighting – With the ability to combine indirect diffuse illumination with improved irradiance caching and path tracing, Poser 8 renders images with global illumination qualities that create images so realistic that they can fool an untrained eye
NEW – Improved Rigging System – With an improved Falloff Zone rigging system, users can rig problem areas - such as hips and shoulders - with more precision, resulting in more realistic bending figures
NEW – OpenGL Preview Improvements – Allows users to preview engine improvements to select each light that they wish to illuminate in the scene preview. This feature aids in viewing larger textures and offers more complete scene previewing when setting up lights
NEW – Physically Correct Light Falloff – Features control spot and point lights to more closely reproduce realistic light falloff from full bright to dark
NEW – Tone Mapping and Exposure – Helps artists control bright or dark areas within an image to produce higher-quality, final renderings with better contrast
NEW – Normal Mapping – Allows users to transform object surfaces, making them appear more intricate without the added computational overhead from additional polygonal detail
NEW – Wardrobe Wizard – Allows artists to re-use existing clothing assets by fitting them to the new Poser 8 character set
NEW – wxPython Support – Enables third-party developers to create more advanced plug-in functionality that can be fully-integrated directly within Poser’s user interface

Posted at 11:00PM Aug 04, 2009 by ko maruyama in Events  |  Comments[18]