TEN SWEET BUYS FOR POSER

by Argo {argoforg@earthlink.net}

If you're anything like me, getting Curious Labs' Poser 4, Poser Pro Pack, or Poser 5 suddenly opened your eyes up to a brand-spanking new world of possibilities-- both for statue pictures and for other, less immobility-intensive art.  I was utterly goggle-eyed at what I could supposedly do with the program.  I mean, according to the manual, I could change morph targets to create brand new characters, pretty much from scratch, and then change their textures, poses, and facial expressions, and add props and other characters, all put together to create a picture where the action was exactly the way I wanted it to be... the model was in the pose I wanted! 

Rather than hunting through the various softcore porn sites for model pictures in which a model was posed 'just so', or had an expression other than the vaguely smiling 'you can see my spleen with this lens' one so I could haul the picture into Photoshop and texture it for a statue photomanip, I could alter all of that to taste!  Oh, yeah.  I was not only sold, I was hooked from moment one.  Visions of all sorts of pictures and captions ran through my head from the moment I had that (at the time) Metacreations box in my grubby little hands.

And then I loaded the program for the first time and began to muck around.  Talk about a cold splash of water to the face.

It wasn't that the program was hard to learn-- far from it, in fact, even though I'll be the first to admit that the Poser user's manual has never been its strongpoint.  Poser, in almost all its incarnations, is remarkably beginner-intuitive.  The program was pretty much aimed at the mass market of people who either don't have the time to learn all the intricacies of 3D modeling from scratch or just have little interest in it.  Yes, you can certainly do pictures with it.  You can even do fairly good ones.  And of course, you can always just pose the base Posette (P4 female) model and photomanip it just as you would a picture from the local nude/lingerie site.

But with just the base Poser program itself, and nothing at all added on, you pretty much have the equivalent of an artist's palette with three primary colors... and no color chart.  Mix and match and you can get a wide range of colors, but it's far easier to buy a tube of burnt umber if that's what you want to get the best effect.

So what I've done here is put together a list of 10 'sweet' buys... meaning add-ons, utilities and the like for sale that I think will best enhance your Poser experience, allow you a lot more variety of effects, and generally allow you to make dramatically better renders than you might have been able to make with Poser 4, 5, or Pro Pack alone.  These are the creme de la creme of my own Poser possessions, the sort of things I use most when it comes to rendering my own pictures.

Keep in mind that I'm by no means an expert on the subject, and that all of these products are ones that I personally have seen and can make judgments on.  In other words, there's a whole freaking plethora of stuff out there, and these just happen to be products that have really caused me to stand up and take notice.  And this is by no means a complete list-- even though I have a pretty immense set of libraries in my Poser runtime directory (that's where all your props, poses, expressions, lights, characters and the like are kept), I still find myself hitting the online stores and freestuff areas when I've gotten a concept for a picture, because I might have a certain piece of clothing, backdrop or such that I don't have.

CRITERIA FOR THE 'SWEET' LIST

When I started compiling this list, I started running through my own Poser directories, looking for the most part at some fairly basic criteria to decide if a Poser product I subscribed to or downloaded made the list:

PRICE/COST

There are a buttload of free items, programs and models located all around the net that are made specifically for Poser, alone.  And considering that Poser can import 3DStudio and OBJ 3-d model files, both of which have been around for a lot longer time, the number of files you can find for free for use with Poser is damned near astronomical.  And I personally didn't pay attention to any of them for this article.  The reason why is this: Free stuff all around will get you a long way, but more often than not, the best and most versatile items by far are those you'll find for sale.  It's a simple fact of life that applies to Poser.  Most often, what you put into a program directly affects the quality of what you get out of it.  And most modelers and Poser gurus tend to tease and tantalize with their free stuff and put their heavy hitting stuff in the online stores.  Not always, but often enough that I discarded free items from this particular list.

You'll tend to find that most poser items run on a sliding scale from about $5 to about $60, sometimes more for CD collections.  And obviously, the lower-priced an item ran, the higher its score.

VALUE

Sort of along those same lines, I judged based on the value of a package for its price.  A single item of clothing that runs $10 obviously isn't going to stack up well against a set of clothing items with multiple textures that runs $20.  So it wasn't wholly just the price, but what all you get for that price.  Of course, to be fair, there isn't a single set of clothing on this list whatsoever.

VERSATILITY/ADAPTIBILITY

This goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the Value side of the equation.  Can a product be used for multiple pictures, or for multiple characters?  Can a single item be changed within Poser so that from one render to the next it doesn't look like exactly the same product?  Does it include a texture template so that you can create your own textures for the item or adapt existing ones?  If so, it got high marks here.

LOOKS

For items that would eventually render in Poser, the 'Looks' factor included whether the finished product looked good.  And believe it or not, although most products tend to look pretty good when they are rendered, there are some clunkers out there in the looks department.

GENERAL USEFULNESS

This was a more personal bias issue than anything else.  If I tend to use a product a lot, or would have a lot harder time doing art without a particular product or service, it scores high here.

I'd love to say that I ended up ranking each and every one of my Poser supplies and services based on this, and came up with some keen mathematical formula that gave me a composite score that indicated whether a product was more or less useful, but that would be a pretty heinous lie... especially considering that doing that would take me months, and even then, the scores would be woefully unscientific at best.  But beside that, I think this is pretty accurate for my own Poser work.

So without further ado, except to add that I've included links to each item where possible, in no particular order, I give you...

THE LIST

1.  VICTORIA 2  (Available at Daz 3D)  -  $39.95

The standard, base P4 woman is not by any means bad for renders.  You can actually do some interesting things with her if you have the right set of morphs, a few good textures and a lot of patience.  But even so, there's only so much that can be done... sadly, she only has so many polygons, so even with morph targets and textures, she tends to have a fair degree of 'sameness' to her, no matter what.  There are only a couple ways to change her shape and body style, and only a few expression morphs embedded in her.

Victoria 2 is to her like an ocean is to a lake.  Victoria 2 (or V2, or Vicky 2) comes with 150+ facial morphs, which includes dials for everything from setting up her ethnicity and age, to subtly altering her eye height and depth, to giving her pointed ears, to changing her lip shape, to making her seem to scream, laugh, wince, sneer and approximate phonemes of spoken words.  And remember, that's just her facial morphs.  Her body morphs are every bit as impressive, allowing for full body morphs to allow for her to appear toned, muscled, overweight, emaciated, young or old-- and just about any stop in between-- just to name a few, and you can 'sculpt' a body style by only affecting certain portions of her body, as well...  give her natural gravity-realistic breasts or use any or all of the 8 breast size morphs to change her from a blossoming teen into a 38DD stripper.  Soften her stomach or make her a bit more rippled.  She's remarkably versatile like that. 

She's based off the original Victoria mesh, meaning that all clothing designed to fit Victoria 1 will fit her as well... and Victoria 2 also has a very good-- although slightly declining-- third-party following on the web, so finding clothing, hair and textures for her is fairly easy.  Unfortunately, you'll need them.  For all her good points, the $40 price tag Daz places on her does not include hair, clothing or even body textures.  The model on the right has hair (natch), but also a body texture.  On loadup, Vicky 2 won't look nearly as good until she's textured.

But even with that caveat, you will likely find that V2 is a must-have for your Poser arsenal.  The usefulness of the model, the third-party support you'll find for her, and the sheer versatility of her available morphs make her the first model I look for whenever I create female characters.

I should also point out that many Poser artists are starting to lean toward the newer Daz 3D creation, Victoria 3, which is NOT based on the V1 or V2 mesh, and therefore, her clothing will not fit V2.  I chose V2 rather than V3 as a sweet deal for two major reasons... first, in the long term, she's much less expensive and user-friendly (V3's base figure is $32 alone... however, it comes almost morph-free, because the morphs for her head and body must be bought in separate 'injection' packages, each running about $16 a piece, and then you still have textures, and hair, and clothing, and so on and so on...).  With V2, you click on her and get her as-is, with all the morphs ready for tweaking, rather than deciding what morphs you may use and then adding them in after loading the base model... much simpler for first-time users. 

Second, for the more casual Poser user-- meaning, someone who hasn't crafted their system specifically to run high-end 3D applications and who doesn't have a couple gig processor and an assload of RAM-- V3 will very likely swallow your system whole.  Daz crafted V3 with 74,510 polygons, compared to V2's poly count of 28,989.  This essentially means that loading up a single V3 model takes about the same amount of RAM as three V2 models.  Also, the more polygons a scene has, the longer it will take a program like Poser to render it, and the easier it will find it to choke in the middle of a render and lock up.  To contrast, a full-bore scene with three models, background, and props usually tends to come in just under 100,000 polygons when I import it in Vue... anything above that causes Vue to run fairly slowly.  If I were to use V3, my programs would slow down noticeably after loading up just the model and maybe a shirt.  If it tells you anything, Daz notes that it created its new injected morph system for V3 specifically to minimize Victoria 3's memory usage within Poser.  That's a red flag for me, so I suggest V2 instead.

2.  MORPH WORLD ARCHIVE CD  (By Traveler, Available at Morph World)  -  $45.00

As I stated before, a Morph Target-- or Morph for short-- is what changes the general look of a character in Poser, and the more of them you have available for your use, the more versatile a character can be.  In Poser, you can add morphs to an existing character to get a range of facial expressions, emotions, body styles and deformations that would ordinarily be unavailable.  And no one in the Poser world comes close to the undisputed master of morphs, Traveler. 

This CD is an archive of his early works, and is a treasure trove of new characters, props, clothing, textures, and some 2300 morph targets for Poser characters.  The price tag might come off to some as fairly steep, but if you do plan on sticking it out with the standard Poser 4 figures, you'll consider it more than worth it for the body and facial morphs alone...  this CD will give Posette and Dork (the lovingly named P4 base figures) a range of body styles, head shapes, facial casts and expressions that Poser alone couldn't have dreamed of dropping onto their characters, and has morphs for many other human characters, including Daz's Michael and Victoria, and Traveler's own Eve, which also comes on this disk.  And along with that, there is a good selection of clothing, props, and textures that are every bit as well done.

3.  RM WORLDS  (Available via LordsWarrior's Homepage)  - Range from $15 to $29.95 per set, $30 for CD's.

Okay, you have your model, now... you have him or her all dolled up (whether literally or figuratively) and posed, and you figure, you know, something's missing.  Maybe it's that plain grey background that Poser loads in as a default.  Yeah, a picture is all about composition, and while plain grey backgrounds are great for model sheet renders, plain backgrounds usually just don't impart a much-needed feeling of setting into a picture.  Lords Warrior is here to help with RMW (Ready Made Worlds), a collection of interior and exterior design kits for making dungeons, castles, rooms and churches.  Although many of these have a sort of medieval flavor, the texture templates and UV mapping of each piece allows for adjustments of textures to less archaic looks-- more than half the floors and walls I use in any given picture, if they're not already part of an existing scene prop, are based off one of the RMW sets.

And on top of the sheer adaptability and top-notch construction of the sets, they are remarkably easy to use and to render.  Windows and doors are set up so that they will fit seamlessly within their frames with little to no adjustment, and most walls and floors fit seamlessly together just by using the included floor guide props.  On top of that, each and every prop I've loaded up from the RMW set not only loads up quickly within Poser, they all render fast-fast-fast even with bump maps and heavy duty textures.  So that in turn means that you won't cause Poser to lock up just because you've decided you want to plop a couple extra walls or loose props into the scene you've been crafting for a couple hours.  That and the value for the price is right on, too.  $15 can get you an entire interior set that includes walls, floors, or complete sets that you can use over and over, with only minor texturing adjustments (4 of which come with the interior room set, for example), and you'd never know they're the same walls.  Some of these sets may not be available any longer at Renderosity, but I am working on finding out where they are still available, if at all.  If they're not still available, this is a collection that I will personally be sad to see go.  Price, ease of use and overall flexibility make any of these sets a very sweet buy.

4.  POSERSTYLE SUBSCRIPTION (Available at PoserStyle)  -  $30 for a six-month subscription

Subsciption sites for 3D models can tend to be a little hit or miss when it comes to offering products for 3D art.  Some sites that I've run into are set up on a 'trade for download' basis, in which you hand-craft a 3D model, and provide it to a site in exchange for being able to download, say, three more models offered in the catalogue.  And on top of that, you get to pay a subscription cost.  Say it with me, now.  That BLOWS.  Especially, if, like me, you're barely a modeler to begin with. 

Thankfully, there are a few sites catering specifically to Poser who seem to realize that the vast majority of the people with the program are, at best, hobbyists, and offer a wide range of products for people with little to no modeling skills of their own.  Of these, I tend to be biased toward two in particular.  The first is PoserStyle, WHWhitney's great addition to the Poser world on the net.  PStyle offers a large selection of characters, textures, pose sets (including pose- and character- construction sets), clothing, props, scene files, light sets and the like, all for a very manageable price, which comes up to less than 99 cents per product available for subscribers to download.  Their clothing originally tended toward period pieces, but has since grown and expanded to include second-skin uniforms and more extreme wear perfect for the sci-fi and superhero genre, and their pose and expression construction sets get very high marks from me as far as adaptability and sheer use goes, and the clothing and textures that I've seen available there are almost all first-rate quality.  The site makes new product available more or less on a once-a-week to once-every-other-week basis, so a six month subscription pretty well sets you up for about eighteen to twenty downloads during your membership, along with the scads of product already archived and available to members.  And on top of that, renewal is discounted down to $22.50.  A good deal?  No, a great one.

As a side note, I wouldn't personally subscribe here if you don't own Victoria or Michael, the Daz upgraded models (either version 1, 2 or 3), because it's just not quite worth it to pick up the few items (mostly textures) available for the P4 women.  However, PStyle has recently opened a store where non-subscribers can buy single items, and those items for the P4 people will likely be in there sooner or later.  That's not as good a buy as the subscription package, but if only one piece interests you, it may be worth it to just buy it separately.

5.  A to Z for VICTORIA 2  (By Silverleif Studios, Available at Daz3D)  -  $29.95

Remember when I said that if you picked up Victoria 2, you'd want to look around for textures ASAP?  Well, here's a good start.  This package includes five full body material (texture) poses for ethnicity, along with the ability to change eye, eyebrow, lash, lip and fingernail color with a single mouse click.  Also included is 26 facial structure morph poses, which will give you a variety of facial casts for Victoria 2, and colors for the (quite possibly no longer available, which is why this didn't get a higher score) Victoria's Changing Ponytail collection.... All in all, this very well could be one of the few texture packs I've come across that actually has the ability to give you fifteen to twenty fully realized characters rather than just a single one, and that makes it an utter godsend for Victoria 2 owners.

Pricewise, the $29.95 tag is worth it.  But joining Daz's Platinum club service (at $29.95, then 7.95 renewal) cuts that price, plus the price on quite a few more products for Victoria and Michael (some for 1, 2 and 3) to $1.99 a piece.

6.  THE TAILOR 1.5  (by Codetwister, Available at Daz 3D)  -  $ 29.95

If Victoria 2 is ridiculously high on the "must-have" meter, then very simply, you will just out and out die a horrible messy death without this program.  That's how much you need this.  It works on the concept of 'conforming' clothing, where you load up a character in poser, then load up that character's clothing, and conform it-- or fit it to-- the existing model.  In theory, it works great.  In practice, sometimes it doesn't.  And it becomes even worse when you spend minutes or hours crafting a model's body to exacting standards: fill out her breasts, curve her hips up, give her slightly wider thighs, and then conform your clothing to find that your model pokes through it all over the place.  What to do?  Make your body parts invisible?  Well, that won't work with bikinis.  Just return your model back to factory specs and live with the fact all your models will have remarkably similar body styles?  Well that means all your hard work is down the drain.

Codetwister's Tailor 1.5 says there's another answer.  Using this remarkable piece of software, you load up your base model, and then the article of clothing you wish to conform, and use Tailor to transfer the body morphs of the model to the clothing.  Now if your model has a 36D breast size, your clothing will actually reflect that.  If your model is muscular, or emaciated, or has an overhanging arse, you can tell, rather than just waiting until those nude shots to show the work that went into crafting him or her.

The program might not be the easiest to use right off, but Codetwister includes a startup wizard that runs you through the process until you become familiar with it.  And 1.5 makes it tres easy to select which morphs you want to include in the clothing... Now your boots will fit your larger-than-life amazon model and fit the petite schoolteacher every bit as easily.  If everything else on this list is simply a godsend, this program is God coming down and giving you a lottery ticket besides.  It's that important to good Poser work.

7.  POSER WORLD SUBSCRIPTION  (Available at Poser World)  -  $35/3 month, $40/6 month, $50/Annual, $150/Lifetime

I said there were two subscription sites I swore by.  This is the other.  Steve Shanks has been running Poser World since 1999, and the results are astounding.  Poser World boasts quite possibly the largest collection of P4 figure and Millennium (Michael and Vicky) clothing available at any subscription site, and almost all of it is remarkably beautiful... and available for you upon subscription, along with the 'sort of once-a-week' new download.

Again, this site has tended to mix in Period Piece clothes with the more modernesque stuff, but with well over 100 pages of clothing items, props, scene files and the like for a multitude of characters, this may well be the only subscription site you'll ever want to join.  Couple that with a very active request board, and you can see why some people call this the best deal around for Poser users.

8.   RDNA MICROCOSM  (Available at Runtime DNA)  -  $18.75

Poser is a blast for indoor scenes; the light packs and shadows are just about preset for interior work.  Textures for floors and walls are available almost everywhere on the web, too.  But what if you want to have a scene that doesn't take place indoors?  What if you want your characters to kick back by a lake, or sun themselves in a meadow?  Well, before, you were pretty much screwed.  You had a couple choices: you could either export them into another expensive program, such as Vue or Bryce, and go about making your terrain there, and carefully trying to match it to your character's pose (which can be done. and is great everywhere but the wallet), or you could import a picture as a background, and just sort of conveniently forget trying to match up the lighting and shadows to your imported picture, which tended to look pretty bleah.

The RDNA Microcosm gives you the best option of all; namely, crafting a beautiful terrain right within Poser 5.  (Poser 4 and Pro Pack users may not be able to use this set... I would contact RDNA to be sure, because it's worth it if you can.)  With new use of injection pose technology and some terrain materials that are utterly eye-popping, this set (and its expansions, which are very reasonably priced... some of which RDNA even offers for free!) gives you the ability to craft a world for your Poser characters to occupy from the ground up.  The Microcosm is utterly set up for expansion and flexibility, and the fact that RDNA isn't charging an arm and a leg for expansion packs, materials or water packs makes this a very sweet deal indeed.  I won't lie here... the actual creation and morphing of land planes can definitely seem a little daunting at first, but once you become familiar with it, the results are more than worth it.

9.   TOTAL HAIR COMPLETE  (By HMann, Available at Renderosity)  -  $24.00

Ordinarily, I wouldn't include a hair set in this list, simply because there are very good hair props available for both the P4 female and Victoria for free out there on the web.  But I'd be really negligent if I didn't include the Total Hair Complete in this list of sweet buys, because, very simply, picking this product up is the same as picking up about 25 hair products in one.  It's Renderosity's top selling product for Poser, and it's easy to see why.  HMann has created a hair prop that has singular 'style' morphs-- for changing a hair style from a simple Bardot style to a lush, wavy, tied back or swept style-- 'action' morphs for movement or blowing, and singular part morphs for 'nudging' sets of hair strands, like the bangs and fringes, in almost any direction you'd wish.  The hair comes with preset poses for four different hair colors (although you will more than likely want to pick up a third-party color package for $10- $20 more just to have a fuller range of color styles), and for transparency mapping, so that you can click a pose to turn off the transparency to see how the hair is posing, then turn it on for rendering.  And yes, it does render beautifully.

So if you're looking to buy hair for your Poser characters, you can spend $10-15 on a singular hair style, or buy Total hair and have 20 preset styles and a few hundred different variable looks.  That's what makes this such a sweet buy.

10.  AZL SKIN TONERS  (By AZL, Available at Renderosity)  -  $9.99

I'm one of those people who's not comfortable remaining a silent majority.  And along those lines, I'm certainly not shy about leaving positive response for a product I think is either very good, very affordable, very useful or just very adaptable... and in the case of AZL's Skin Toners, I left a review at Renderosity simply because it was all four.  What the skin toners set does is give you the most versatility from your character's textures by allowing you to color-tone them with a click, adding tone to your standard skin material, so your base Vicky, P4 male or female, or Mike can be given a bronzed tan, an oriental hue, a grey-skinned sickly color, or a cafe-au-lait complexion with a single mouse click. 

For sheer usefulness and adaptability alone, this product gets high marks from me... after all, what other product could possibly expand the use of your available textures by a hundred times just by color-toning them to make them look different?  AZL has done a bang-up job in customer service, too, allowing buyers free updates to this product to allow it use with the new Daz Michael and Vicky 3 models.  And when you add in that the price of the set is under $10, this could quite possibly be one of the best sweet deals out there for the money. 

HONORABLE MENTION:

These products certainly deserve mention, even though something about them right off kept me from giving them full-bore 'sweet deal' status:

DARK AGES BUNDLE (By Caleb 68 and Dark Faction, Available at Renderosity)  -  $18.00

The pieces in this set look great, and I even managed to get past the fact that the word 'bundle' was misspelled on the title image.  (Of course, I misspelled medieval on my review, and I'm sticking to the story that it was an ironic attempt at an in-joke)  Truthfully, for the price, this is an outrageously HUGE set of props and building casements and such to complete your renders.  The only thing that sets this product back at all is that the pieces are definitely set up for a middle-ages bent, and unlike the RMW props, are not nearly so forgiving for altering textures to more modern needs.  A rock wall, for instance, is modeled as a rock wall, and putting a steel texture on it makes it look like a really weird bumped steel wall.

However, the sheer amount of props and items in this package, and the sheer beauty of the included textures, make this package a must for people wanting to do Fantasy or Medieval renders in Poser.

WorldzV2  (By The Sligner and 3DModelz, Available at Renderosity)  -  $8.50

Think of this as the pre-cursor to the Microcosm.  It was quite possibly the first 'World Builder' available for Poser, and it did its job admirably, using sets of alpha planes for mountains, hills, buildings, skylines, foliage, realistic sunlight/moonlight and water materials and the like, and came with a morphing terrain that did look primo and had multiple morph and texture settings to allow for the greatest latitude of creating realistic-looking backdrops for exterior scenes.  The props tend to load up very quickly, do not add as perceptible a time delay for rendering as the RDNA Microcosm, and the price for this set, which included EVERYTHING, absolutely could not be touched.

The problem with this set was not at all in its execution, but with its looks, especially at more focused camera settings.  Poser loads up with a 38 mm camera set, which looks fairly blah.  But using Worldz at camera settings of 60-120 mm (which I normally use for most pics) tends to bring out the flaws in the textures of the alpha planes, making the trees look a little flat, and the mountains look a little 'painted-on'.  Still, for its price, it's a very good and versatile set, and if you are happy with pictures at 30-40 mm camera focals, you can do an awful lot with this.

Well, that's it.  Hope this has been both enjoyable and informative, in showing you some of the best buys I know for expanding your Poser libraries and giving you the most bang for your buck on the road to making renders, both of statuary and immobility pics and the not-quite-so-fetish-driven art.  Please feel free to comment, if you so desire, and keep watching for new articles here at Gorgon:Art.

- MH/AF

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