Poser 6

Over Poser's ten-year history, the 3D application has grown from a plaything for manipulating virtual Barbies and Kens into an impressively powerful program. Unlike most 3D programs, which allow you to model, texture, and animate any object or creature you can imagine, Poser is specifically designed for creating images and animations of realistic humans.

To this end, the program comes with a handful of prefabricated figures, saving users considerable effort in the modeling, texturing, and rigging departments. (There are also several realistic animal and cartoonish human figures available.) You can pose these highly customizable figures in various wardrobe choices or in the buff (with optional anatomical correctness). For further customization, you can make easy adjustments to facial features and body type by twirling a few dials in the interface.

But Poser also lets you dig surprisingly deeply into the 3D process. The interface is divided into seven "rooms," each devoted to a specific task. The default Pose room lets you position your character, a process made easier with the program's switchable inverse kinematics. Drag a model's hand through space with IK turned on, and the rest of the body follows. In the fun Face room you can import photos of your face and map them onto a 3D head, using Poser's extensive controls to shape the geometry of the head into a dimensional replica of your own.

The Material room allows you to create node-based shaders to determine how your model's skin and clothing respond to light, with complex control over specularity, refraction, and bump and displacement maps. But most impressive are the Hair and Cloth rooms, which allow you to create hair and clothing that respond realistically to an animated character's movement. Rounding out the package are the Setup room where you can construct and adjust a character's underlying skeleton rig, and the Content room which hooks up to Curious Labs' online Content Paradise site.

All in all, the tools used are very similar to those found in high-dollar programs like Maya and Softimage XSI. Users of Poser 5 will find that most of version 6's new features are dedicated to improving render quality, with enhanced shadows, toon shading, image-based lighting, and subsurface scattering. Newcomers to Poser will find portions of the program quite complex, making the program's lack of multiple undos almost criminal. Even worse, many actions aren't undoable at all. And all users should consider Curious Labs' recommended system requirements (700-MHz processor, 512MB of RAM) as a bare minimum for working with this demanding application.

But for creating realistic 3D human avatars, Poser 6 has no peer for the price.