Poser 5: Curious Labs' upgrade.

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Poser 5

Price: $319

Minimum System Requirements: English versions of Windows 98se, 2000, ME, or XP with a 500MHZ Pentium class or compatible processor and 128MB of system RAM or Mac OS 10.2 or later with a 500MHZ G3 processor and 256MHZ of system RAM; a 24-bit color display with 1024x768 resolution; 500MB of free hard disk space; and an Internet connection for Content Paradise.

Curious Labs www.curiouslabs.com infoNOW 114

Poser has come a long way. I remember the first version and its unique ability to create and render human figures quickly. When an update added animation, it was clear that the tool would generate a following. And it did. The only problem was that, at the time (I'm talking circa Poser 2), the images had a distinctive look. If you saw an image, you could essentially tell that it came from Poser. Fast forward to 2004 and Poser is all grown up. Poser has matured into a top-level, professional tool offering the ability to create original and stunning character animation at a very reasonable price.

Perhaps the most important new feature is the FireFly rendering engine. Early versions had chunky rendering; you had to touch up quite a bit in Adobe Photoshop to approach photorealistic quality and correct slight rendering inaccuracies. Not anymore: output is stunning with polygon-smoothing, displacement mapping, depth-of-field options, procedural textures, 3D motion blur, and raytraced refractions and reflections. Poser 5 offers two main rendering modes, draft and production, and scores of parameters. Draft, what you will work in mainly when creating, renders speedily and provides nice final output. Production mode takes longer to render, but you can add reflections, textures, depth of field, and raytracing for the ultimate in realism.