Poser 7 is an awesome program. If you're like me and your human character modelling leaves a bit to be desired then Poser allows you to add professional looking character into your CINEMA 4D scenes. Plus for studios needing some quick high quality figures in their projects then again Poser 7 comes to the rescue. The program is quite straight forward to learn and use but because it does so much, learning it will take some time. As mentioned in the introduction, Poser 7 is available for both Windows and Mac platforms. Probably my biggest gripe with Poser 7 is how sluggish it is particularly when doing anything related to animation. I found it sluggish on my Intel Core 2 duo PC 2.4ghx, 3gb ram and nVidia 7900GS graphics when animating. On my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86 ghz laptop with 1.5gb ram and nVidia 7400go graphics card, working on animations was painful. I also had stability problems on the laptop as it was running Windows Vista Home Premium. Some things like changing characters instantly crashed Poser 7. I installed the service pack and this made no difference. On my desktop PC dual booting to both Windows XP and Vista, Poser 7 ran okay although from time to time Poser 7 stopped responding. Seems Poser 7 likes truck loads of memory. The big thing that Poser 7 has going for it is you get a lot for your money with all of the included content. At $249.99 US to buy it's an excellent buy but if you're running Windows Vista on a laptop I urge caution.
Poser 7 has a built in render engine. This produces reasonable results but compared to CINEMA 4D's render engine speed it's real slow and render quality is not as good. I don't think this is much of an issue as usually you're using Poser to 7 to create content to be used other applications. In our case CINEMA 4D.
Poser 7 comes with excellent documentation. The tutorial documentation is excellent and I worked through much of it during the review to learn how to use the program. I guess the only thing I would have liked to have seen was a few video tutorials included. But there's quite a few on the Internet so probably not that much of an issue. It would also have made the download when you buy the downloadable version of Poser 7 even bigger than it was already.
You saw in the review that I was using the excellent plugin InterPoser Pro to get Poser content in CINEMA 4D. For some people this may be all that they require without having to actually buy Poser since there's so much Poser content available either free or for modest prices on the Internet. This plugin allows you pose and animate Poser figures right there in CINEMA 4D. You then of course have CINEMA 4D's renowned stability and far better and quicker render engine. I thoroughly recommend this plugin.
Review by Nigel Doyle / 3DKiwi
Review by C4D Cafe © 2008