Poser 2 Evaluation

Poser 2 is (was) an inexpensive human figure posing and animation package from MetaCreations.
The latest version is produced by Curious Labs, Inc.

• Model Quality
  • Poser acquired its models from Viewpoint, usually a high quality source
  • Only 19 segments/degrees of freedom (no hand or foot segments, 5 point spine)
  • Each joint has all degrees of freedom, and their "limits" to joint rotation are well outside that of typical humans
  • 24 body types are included, with and without clothes built into (not on top of) the meshes
  • The 4 most general-purpose are Male, Female, Male Detailed and Female Detailed
  • Poser's initial position/rotation does not match the industry standard (ie. H-ANIM, MPEG-4)
    • Poser's arms are pointing straight outward, not hanging down
    • other joint rotation fields have "natual posture" rather than "reference" values
    • When the female model's arms are 90º down
      • the arms radically intersect the body mesh
      • the shoulder blade mesh is disjointed and sticks into the arm
• Export
  • 3D file formats exported: RIB, 3DMF, 3DS, DXF, OBJ, Detailer
  • Poser's 3DS output does import 3DS MAX with some success
  • In order to extract models with industry standard reference orientation:
    • turned off Inverse Kinematics
    • went through each joint setting rotation to 0
    • set hand posture to "flat"
    • set rShldr and lShldr joints to 90º rotation
    • special consideration for the female figure
      • tried to work around the arm rotation problem by using 85º for the shoulder joints and scaling the collarbones by 10% in the X direction
      • scaled up the abnormally small abdomen of the "detailed" figure by 20% in the XZ (ground) plane
  • Problems with the resulting model in 3DS MAX
    • difference in axis convention - model comes in on its back
    • figure is only .7 units tall
    • no pivot points or texture
    • at random, some mesh segments (shin/foot/shoulder) are missing faces
  • Resulting model statistics in MAX (affected by missing face issue):

    body	total faces	faces in head
    Male	4,500	956
    Male detailed	18,518	3,124
    Female	4,170	1,110
    Female detailed	17,547	3,726

  • Female shoulder problem is very apparent in MAX rendering