Better, |
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by Meredith Foster |
Poser 1.0, by Fractal Design, is an easy-to-use tool to improve your drawing accuracy of the human form. With Poser, you can generate a 3D human body in any size and proportion, shape it, and render it to a high resolution image. No prior experience of 3D drawing packages is necessary to use Poser's easy-to-understand interface. Poser provides a life-like figure that has flexible joints in a 3-dimensional workspace called a scene. You can start with a male or female (not particularly anatomically correct) body, skeleton, stick figure or mannequin. By selecting and dragging individual body parts, the figure can be molded into any pose. Poser supports direct figure manipulation, so when you drag a finger away from the torso of the figure, the chest will sway in response. Moving a knee and leg will make a hip move in a natural way. Fingers can be clenched in a fist, relaxed or pointing. It is possible, however, to pose the figure in an unnatural or impossible way. The "use limits" feature tries to keep body parts within a natural range of motion by allowing you to set minimum and maximum limits. This feature can be turned off to allow an unlimited range of motion.
Poser provides eight properly proportioned body sizes - from an infant to superman. Pick one to use as a starting point and then independently adjust or scale each body part. Twist and tilt your figure. Make your figure gain or lose weight - 10, 20 or 50 pounds at a time. Add another figure to your scene. The possibilities are endless. Poser also comes with dozens of pre-defined poses. Choose "walking" and the figure strides into that pose. Choose "thinking" and the figure drops into meditation. You can save your own poses in the poser library.
Multiple light sources provide highlights and shadows. Poser lights are distant lights, which means they act the same as the sun shining on the Earth. If you have multiple figures in your scene, the lights shine equally on each figure. The shading from the light source gives depth and definition to the figure. Lights can be moved and colored to add detail to your scene. Lights can be saved into the lighting library.
Poser provides four cameras: main, front, side, and top. By switching cameras, you can see your mannequin from different viewpoints. The main camera provides a perspective view and can be rotated to view the studio from any angle. The front, top and side cameras do not rotate and display a flat view of the studio.
Props, such as canes, stairs, and boxes, are available to add interest to your scene. Surface materials are available to add more life to your figure. Smooth skin or muscles can contour and add detail to your figure. You can also import custom texture maps created in another paint package.
Models can be exported in .DXF file format and imported into 3D drawing programs. The figure, however, is frozen and cannot be reposed. Your scene can be rendered to a high-resolution .TIF file with alpha mask information or a .BMP file. The alpha mask information allows you to import the .TIF file into Photoshop or Painter with a transparent background. You can then blend your figure into any photograph or over any background.
The User Guide is well done with plenty of pictures to illustrate the instructions. It took me about five minutes to create my first pose, adjust the light source, assign a surface texture, and render the final image.
Poser is a fun way to create abstract human figures...it is also practical. With little effort, you can incorporate life-like human figures into your artwork and save yourself the frustration of starting from scratch.
Animation capabilities, with automatic key-framing, are in Poser 2.0, as well as the ability to import 3D objects into your scene. Constrained realistic movement of the body parts has also been added. NOTE: Poser 2.0 should available by the time this review is published.
System requirements: 486 with math coprocessor, Pentium, or Pentium pro, Win95 or Windows NT, and 16+ MB RAM (20+ MB recommended). Fractal Design Poser 2.0 $249 (upgrade - $149). For more info go to http://www.fractal.com.
Painter 4.0, by Fractal Design, takes the next step in digital painting by offering a range of capabilities that no serious video artist should be without.
Painter pioneered natural media painting in a rasterized (bitmap) environment. Painter 4.0 adds vector graphic capabilities through a new feature called shapes. Shapes, which are vector objects that float above the bitmap canvas, give the user functionality found in programs such as Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. No other drawing package has this ability to combine vector and bitmap elements. Vector graphics use Bezier controls to precisely move points and reshape curves. Shapes remain vector editable until you assign Painter's natural media elements to them. Then they become floating bitmaps and are no longer editable. They can still be moved.
Keeping up with the times, Painter has also added features that make it easy to put images up on the Internet. Create image maps with embedded URLs by using Painter floaters to define the bounding box. Floaters remain as separate layers so editing the map is easy. Graphics can be saved in a .GIF or .JPG format.
Painter has also pioneered real-time collaborative creation of artwork by introducing Net Painter which supports the Internet, local area networks, or any connection that supports TCP/IP. Artists at different locations can team up and work on the same picture at the same time. Through the use of compact scripts, Painter will function over low bandwidth connections.
The image hose, which was introduced in Painter 3.0, has been enhanced. Instead of painting with dabs of paint, the Image Hose paints with mini-images called nozzles. The images can be static or changing. Painter gives you complete control of how the images change. The program comes with a library of images and Fractal Designer has released "Garden Hose", a series of nature nozzles, the first in a series of Nozzlemania CDs.
One of the fun, new features is the mosaic tool which allows you to paint with mosaic tiles. You can control the color, width, and length of the tiles as well as the grout between the tiles. Painter automatically calculates the way individual tiles will conform to each other by adjusting the size and shape of each tile around a curve without allowing the tiles to overlap. This tool is quite unique, but is difficult to master.
Painter has the ability to edit video and create animation. Rotoscoping gives you the ability to apply effects such as lightening to existing movies. Painter also allows you to clone, trace, edit, and composite movies. Any of Painter's brushes, textures, or effects can be used to paint directly onto the video frames. Painter does not support audio.
Scripts allow you to record and play back keystrokes and mouse clicks. Painter scripts are editable on a step-by-step level, giving you control over the recorded sequences. Scripts can be used as an elaborate Undo - by recording as you work, you can play back the script and stop it at any point. Scripts can also be used as macros to make repetitive steps less tedious. Record a script using the pencil tool on plain paper. Play it back using the chalk tool on rice paper, or oil paints on canvas, or.... the possibilities are endless. You can play back a script at a different resolution than it was recorded, so you can record at low resolution, then let your computer reproduce the same picture at high resolution—while you take a coffee break.
Painter can now import Adobe Photoshop (including the conversion of Photoshop layers to Painter floaters), Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand files.
Painter has a steep learning curve, but it also offers a wide range of capabilities. To help the user get up to speed, the Painter user manual is color-coded and very logically laid out. It is 5.5" tall x 8" wide which makes it the perfect size to fit above the keyboard, in front of the monitor. The instructions are precise and there are plenty of full-color pictures to illustrate each tool. Painter is definitely worth the time it takes to learn. It is as close as you can get to working with natural media tools.
Painter resources: minimum of 80486 or better, a Pentium with at least 8 MB of RAM, Windows 3.1 or 95, color display (24-bit recommended), math coprocessor is required for some effects, and Win95 is required to use Net-Painter. For more info go to http://www.fractal.com.
Meredith Foster is a HAL-PC member and Art Director for the Magazine. She can be contacted at webmaster@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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