When I bought Poser three weeks ago, I also bought an extra mesh, a human female named "Miki2". I decided I'd wait until Christmas before looking at her.

So it's Christmas, and let's take a look, shall we? (synthetic nudity NSFW below the fold)

This is Miki in her school girl costume:

The skirt really is too long, isn't it? Let's shorten that up a bit:

MUCH better.

Actually, it looks a bit strange that short, but it turns out it also looks wrong at the full length. You can't see it, but when it's in the original size her butt sticks out past the cloth on the back. I think that the artist made the skirt at a certain length, and management freaked and told him (?) to make it longer, so he just did a vertical scale and left it at that. Which means the shape in the rear doesn't match her body. But if you shrink it to about half way between these two, it's just right.

Of course, we need to see the Naujica Blitz Tactics camera angle, right?

The real NBT perverted dwarf cameraman would shoot something like this. You can make the skirt flare, and it looks better with a bit of flare. (Not as much as in that picture, of course, but our perv dwarf has a table fan along with his camera.)

Every time they release a new version of Poser they include a new set of figures for it: a man, a woman, a boy, and a girl. Over time they've gotten better. There are also a handful of other sources where you can get figures, but it's a lot of work to create one, so generally there aren't many.

We could look at all of them, but there would be too many, and in any case who wants to look at men, boys, or girls? So here are the recent women figures I have.

I put a 1600*1200 version of this here.

On the left is "Judy", the Poser 5 woman. I've done some adjusting on the skin color to match the red hair I put on her, which is why she's so pale. (As a redhead myself, I know what our skin is supposed to look like.)

Next to her is "Maya", a free figure I downloaded from here. I had both of those when I used to use Poser 5.

Next is "Jessi", the Poser 6 woman. That one was included with Poser 7, so she's new to me. I don't like how she looks. She's too buff. In particular, her deltoids are much too big, and that can't be adjusted. She looks like she's been using steroids and working out with weights. Most women aren't built like that. I don't like her face, either. And her head is disproportionately small.

Then there is "Sydney", the Poser 7 woman. VAST improvement; probably the best free figure ever. Her face is wonderful and they got all the rest of it right, too.

Last, and far from least, is Miki, the one I purchased when I bought Poser 7. I think I like her even more yet.

Is it my imagination, or are they getting shorter as time goes on? It isn't parallax; I used a 150 mm camera for that shot. I don't think it's really significant. Certainly it isn't for Miki, who is deliberately designed to be east-Asian, where the people really are shorter than North Americans.

But if Poser 8, whenever it is, comes out and the woman is a midget, then I'll start wondering. (And what will the perv midget cameraman do?)

One of the best changes in Poser 7 is that they've added a new kind of light. In addition to "infinite" and "spot" there's now "point". That's quite cool; you can use it to do things like this:

That used to be somewhere between "really tough" and "impossible". The only way to do it was with a spot set for a really huge spread (150 degrees or more) placed close to the objects being lit, and even then it only lit part of the object. Sometimes when you download older PZ3 files where people were trying to get this effect without the "spot" feature, you'll find ten or more lights all clustered in a particular area, pointing in a circle, or even in a sphere. The result isn't very satisfactory, and with that many lights the rendering time gets preposterous.

I'm finding that the "point" light is very useful, and not just for this kind of image. I've already found that when I'm lighting indoor scenes, it's easier to use two or three point lights than to try to make spots or infinite lights work. One reason is that ceilings block lights from outside, so if your set has a ceiling you can't use "infinite" at all unless you disable shadows, and that doesn't look good. Two or three well-placed points under the ceiling provide lighting that is particularly natural looking, because when we're indoors our lights really are points (unless you're using flourescent tubes, like in my kitchen).

All in all, I'm quite impressed with Poser 7. Definitely worth the money I paid for it.

UPDATE: But it's rather surprising that they didn't include a bra (i.e. a bikini top) in the clothing pack. There are three shirts, one jacket, one sailor scarf, one pair of pants, two skirts, three pairs of shoes, one pair of socks, one panties (i.e. bikini bottom). No body stocking and no bra; how am I supposed to do swimming pool scenes? (Ahem)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Poser at 01:04 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 937 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Hah, I see all those girls have what one of Heinlein's characters termed a profound interest in recreational sex.

Posted by: RickC at December 25, 2007 04:15 PM (PoCOp)

2

Darned if I know how you came to that conclusion.

"It's only a model."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 04:44 PM (+rSRq)

3

When I was googling around a couple of days ago I ran into mention elsewhere that yet another free figure, named "Aiko 3", could be downloaded free from here. But that link times out for me. The parent URL does, too. I am not sure if that's a temporary condition, or if DAZ went OOB. The reference was something like three years old, so they could have died since then.

It's entirely possible that someone out there is mirroring the download file, but if they are I probably won't ever find it. Googling for "Poser Aiko" brings up 97000 hits, virtually all of which are about modifications to the basic figure that require you to already have it. Alas; she's pretty cute, and I'd like to find it somewhere.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 05:10 PM (+rSRq)

4 The link works fine for me, so probably they had an outage and no-one was around to notice.

The base Aiko model doesn't look that great, but some of the variants and add-on packs are pretty interesting. Which is why they give the base model away for free, I guess - they have 32 not for free add-ons.  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 25, 2007 05:39 PM (PiXy!)

5

Well, that's interesting, because I still can't reach it. However, that other download is complete and I'm going to unpack it now.

I wonder if I'm blocked by a firewall or something? I should have tried it through Anonymouse.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 05:59 PM (+rSRq)

6

And I can see it through Anonymouse. I wonder what the deal is?

(Maybe I blocked it in my own firewall; it's happened before.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 06:00 PM (+rSRq)

7

The base Aiko model doesn't look that great...

Boy, you're right about that. She isn't very impressive at all. But there are a bunch of makeovers and upgrades available as free downloads on Renderosity and ShareCG which require you to have Aiko 3, so it's still worth having.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 06:09 PM (+rSRq)

8 Steven, I was referring to the shaved crotches.  It was kind of a joke.

Posted by: RickC at December 25, 2007 06:53 PM (PoCOp)

9

Oh, that.

Back to my connection problems, it was indeed my fault. I did have a firewall rule. It's gone now, and I can reach the site. (I'm an idiot sometimes.) (Sometimes? Shaddup...)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 07:11 PM (+rSRq)

10

Boy, you're right about that. She isn't very impressive at all. But there are a bunch of makeovers and upgrades available as free downloads on Renderosity and ShareCG which require you to have Aiko 3, so it's still worth having.

And with the paid add-ons (which aren't that expensive individually) you can end up with results like this:


Not feature-film quality, but not bad either.

They also have some free software, so I've just downloaded that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 25, 2007 08:05 PM (PiXy!)

11

If you're starting to get into this, then here are a couple of links to big sites with large collections of free stuff:

Renderosity
ShareCG

You do have to join Renderosity, but it doesn't cost anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 25, 2007 09:06 PM (+rSRq)

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