Amazon.com Review
Whether you're a 3-D novice or an experienced digital artist, Poser 5 makes it extraordinarily easy to create complete 3-D character stills and animations. Yet while this new edition definitely has advantages over previous versions, it is not without its glitches.

Pay attention to the system requirements on install. This program needs room and power. With more than the recommended 256 MB of RAM, rendering seems a bit sluggish in spite of the new FireFly micropolygon-based rendering engine. Though considering all Poser 5 does, immediate rendering of complex 3-D objects might be asking a bit much.

Working in Poser 5 is remarkably simple considering the capabilities of the software. The workspace is clean and easily customizable, with a majority of the tools accessible from floating palettes and windows. A collapsible library palette gives you fast access to all available content such as figures, poses, faces, and expressions. Plus, there is an entire CD of additional content including sound files, props, textures, templates, samples, and demos.

The interface is broken down into different rooms: Pose, Material, Face, Hair, Cloth, Setup, and Content. The new Face Room lets you map any face onto a 3-D head using just front and side photos of someone's face. Use the Hair Room to grow actual 3-D hair for figures in just a few steps. Go to the Cloth Room and convert objects into fully dynamic cloth with complete control of behavior. A full, revised reference manual is included.

So many things are under your control, it's hard not to want to tweak every little detail. However, on more than one occasion making an adjustment caused the software to lock up and quit. At other times, it would complete the changes, but the document window would be blank, making it necessary to close and reopen the program to continue work.

Instability issues aside, Poser 5 is loaded with fun tools, content, and utilities, making an upgrade worthwhile for serious users. Ease of use makes it a good choice for beginners and hobbyists as well. --Joshua Goldman

Amazon.com Product Description
Poser 5 is an ideal 3-D character design and animation tool for artists and animators. Create 3-D figures using a diverse collection of ready-to-use 3-D human and animal models. Poser's innovative interface makes figure design, posing, and animating fast and easy. Map facial photos, grow and style dynamic hair, and create dynamic cloth to add extraordinary realism to your figure.

Quickly output movies and images from your posed figures for content in Web, print, and video projects. Add life to your 3-D worlds using exported, posed figures. For those new to 3-D, digital artists, and hobbyists alike, Poser 5 is easy to learn and quickly generates fast and dynamic results.

Poser 5 delivers a stunning host of new tools including Facial Photo-mapping, Dynamic Strand-based Hair, Dynamic Cloth, new Figures, and FireFly, Poser 5's powerful new renderer. Use Morph Putty to directly manipulate facial expressions. Create realistic dynamic cloth and make it flow and drape around any object in your scene. Build powerful node-based material shaders to create any material texture you can imagine. The Poser 5 Content CD contains a host of extras, including props and textures.

• Average Customer Review: Based on 55 reviews.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: 664

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Nice, but not worth the money., Mar 9, 2023
Poser 5 has real potential and from what I know is the only human render there is out there. For my project I needed human figures, and had Poser 5 had a Demo of its' abilities I would have opted to create cartoon characters. Poser 5 has too much bleed through except for standard poses that are not moved, move it and it bleeds some where. I spent a day trying to get the woman's boot to Conform to any thing, the best I got was for it to conform with the toes hanging out.
It renders good images if you can afford days to get it right by reloading the base image over and over. Don't look to the manual for help it has so many "Please see page XXX" that it is next to impossible to retain a thread of thought.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

help is out there, Feb 11, 2023
In response to a the person from PA, and a few other similar posters, yes, the manual that came with the software is basically useless. But I would recommend that you do what I did, which is order the video "Poser 5 Demystified". Its simple tutorials take you through the hair, material, and cloth rooms and explain how to use each. What it doesn't explain is how to do keyframe animation, but if you don't understand that, face it, you're not ready for Poser anyway. Anyway, I was able to follow along and complete all the tutorials in one weekend, and even though I still don't know everything, I'm able to move between rooms and focus on making my film rather than learning the basics. It saved me countless hours of frustration.

As for the Poser software, I've found it to be quite stable. I've experienced none of the problems that others have described. Of course, I just bought it about six weeks ago. I assume that Curious Labs have worked out most of the bugs by now.

I would highly recommend Poser. If you want to do character animation on a limited budget, there really is no viable alternative. I love Animation Master, and still use it almost exclusively for creating non-organic models, but if you want to create characters in AM, you're going to have to create the entire character from scratch, plus add materials and textures, phenomes, and emotions. Working alone and doing it as a part time hobby, it will take you months of preproduction before you can even start animating your characters. In Poser, all the grunt work I just decribed is built into the software, so you can create unique charcters in hours rather than months. This alone makes Poser well worth the investment.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Too many problems, Feb 4, 2023
The software does not work. After many re-installations, I gave up. After launching the program, it crashes. I discovered after running scandisk, there's an array of invalid files, in the female folder. Tried to repair error and didn't work. The patch SR4 doesn't solve the problem. Wrote to customer service about the problem and no answer from them. I won't buy anything else from this company and I'll look somewhere else for a more reliable, friendly and committed company to their customers.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

A very odd software package, Feb 1, 2023
Poser...hummm...where to begin? Poser 5 is a program with immense, immense potential. There is so much that one could do with this program, if one only knew how. But then, that's exactly the problem. The interface is really awful, the manual is totally worthless, and there are no good books on the basics of how to use the program. So you are basically flying blind. I have been (trying) to use Poser 3 and now 5 for about 2 years with limited success. In some ways, I prefer Poser 3. At least I can kinda use that version, and the manual that came with it was really rather good. But Poser 5 has so many cool new features that I would love to use it, if only I could find some information on how to do so. But there isn't any good basic information out there. So it is like chasing a rainbow - you just can't get there. Unless you're really clever (or cleverer than me, at least :-) . So...good luck. Maybe if you can master Posers mysteries, you can write a book for the rest of us!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Poser 5 experiences, Sep 25, 2023
Poser is a difficult program to learn, partly because so many of the meshes/objects are out on the web in the user community. You should check Renderosity.com to see what Poser can do. It is an incredible program. Poser 5 seems pretty solid now 09-04 - when earlier released I stopped using it, going back to Poser 4, but the file management and morph controls are much better in 5 than in 4. However, this is not a crack the case and start using the software program.

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