Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. ractal Design Poser is an inexpensive ($100) application that creates a wide variety of male and female body types, including skeleton and stick figure, in any pose you may wish. You can also select baby, toddler, child, juvenile, adolescent, ideal adult, fashion model and heroic model. It requires a 486 or better computer with Windows 95 and 8 MB of RAM. There is also a version for the Macintosh platform. oser comes with 14 preset poses, 9 preset bodies, 12 preset cameras and 12 preset lights. These presets are in the form of libraries and you can easily create your own libraries in any of the 4 categories or just add your own stuff to an existing library. The 100 page manual is well written and provides excellent coverage of Poser's features. The first chapter tells the user that the pose mode allows the user to change the position or size of individual body parts. The body mode allows you to control the entire body as a single object. The camera mode allows the adjustment of the main window's view. The light mode allows you to color and aim the lights. The tools are available as needed in the various modes and some behave differently depending on the mode. nfortunately there is no bubble that pops up and tells you what each tool is for. The pop up menu which is accessed at the bottom of the view port allows you to select a specific item and simultaneously switches to the proper mode. The first tutorial experiments with leg and shoulder rotation. You learn that when moving the shoulder the arm will follow and ditto for the thigh, calf and feet. The translate tool is also experimented with. That tool allows the entire body to be swayed from side to side. A running figure is created using the various moving tools then the left elbow is bent - 90 degrees using the bend parameter dial. The right elbow is bent by the exact amount by making the right arm symmetrical with the left. The shoulders are twisted to give a more realistic look. Various renderings are tried. Next the image is added to the existing library of poses. After I saved the tutorial image and came back the next day I discovered that there is no list of recently opened files. There is also no option to allow automatic backups. These are two oversights that I hope will be corrected in the next release. ext a background is added to an existing image. The background selected is a path through the woods and the runner is placed on the path. The camera is adjusted to give the correct appearance. I had some trouble with this and never did quite figure out just how this was supposed to work. Next lighting effects are explored. Poser has 3 lights that can be positioned anywhere, made any color and any intensity the user may want. Next a bump map and texture are selected for the figure. The figure is then rendered to a new window and is rendered over the background. When I tried to save the rendered image I discovered a very strange thing. Poser will only allow me to save images into its tutorial directory. Even though I navigated to another directory in the standard Windows 95 fashion the image ended up in the Poser/tutorial directory. I suspect this is because the tutorial directory is where the background image came from. hapter 2 covers some of the basic features of Poser in more detail. Poser only allows one undo/redo however you have the revert option to revert to a saved file in its original form. Multiple figures can be added to a scene. Parameter dials are covered in chapter 2. I have to say that I really like these parameter dials. They bring precision to what otherwise would be an eyeball seat of the pants drag and move situation. I wish all graphics applications had something like this. Chapter 2 also covers file importing. Backgrounds can be .tif or .bmp. Figure import must be in Poser's .poz file format. Files may be exported in .bmp, .tif, .dxf and .rib. Chapter 3 covers posing the figure in great detail including setting the hand position, symmetry, moving and turning the entire body, etc. Chapter 4 covers body shaping. Chapter 5 covers the camera and all of its various parameters. Chapter 6 covers lights and all of its parameters. Chapter 7 covers rendering. Several rendering options are offered. A smooth rendering is very fast but gives just a general idea of what the image will actually look like. A muscle rendering shows muscles popping up all over the body. An additional rendering situation occurs when the rendering options dialog box is chosen. It is here that you can specify options such as render to a new window, render over the background, antialias, use bump map, use texture, specify window size, etc. It also is one way to access the surface material options. Bump files may be .tif, .bmp or .bum which is Poser's bump map file format. Bitmap and .tif files are automatically converted to .bum files when they are selected. Texture files may be .bmp or .tif. Bump map strength can be from -100 (inverted bump map) to 100. Texture strength goes from 0 to 100. Poser comes with a male and female muscle texture map. None of the pose or texture maps are anatomically correct. You can load the muscle texture and achieve a very muscle look by setting the texture strength slider to 100. If the slider is set to 50 then the image is less muscular. You can also create a custom texture map. The manual has the procedures. You can also control the object color and the highlight color. ppendix A provides some tips and tricks. Appendix B covers how to use Poser with other programs. Great detail is given as to the use of Poser with Painter. A few pages are also devoted to 3D programs.   Roger A. Moncrief e-mail All pages copyright © Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997 Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.