From its first release 12 years ago, Poser set a new standard for easily creating 3D human characters. Unlike other 3D animation programs, just about anyone could use Poser to create 3D characters for storyboarding or illustration. Just start with a stock male or female 3D human character, and then use an intuitive interface to adjust everything from how the character stands to the expression on its face.

Despite the challenge of being shifted from company to company over the years, Poser has continued to survive and evolve. Now a part of E-Frontier, Poser 7 adds a host of new features, including improved lighting, faster rendering and animation enhancements. While Poser 7 may not help you animate the next Pixar blockbuster, it will be able to help you visualize key scenes with stunning realism.

The new Talk Designer feature lets you bring in a .wav or .aif sound file and have your character "lip sync" to the audio. Poser does this by mapping the sounds of the audio file with mouth positions for the various vowel and consonant sounds. The results are amusing-not something that will impress audiences raised on Pixar animation, but about as sincere a performance as you'd find in most late-night infomercials.

As with previous versions, Poser 7 adds several new human figures for manipulation, as well nearly a gigabyte of additional figures, scenery and animals. The beauty of this is that Poser also contains all models from its previous versions for you to work with, so you immediately have a wealth of characters, props and poses to work with.

Poser 7 leaps ahead in speed with improved OpenGL hardware and multi-processor rendering acceleration, features sorely missing in previous versions. Now you can change camera positions, and adjust characters while keeping the models resolution in the preview mode. The only down point is that OpenGL doesn't accurately show you the lighting in a scene, so you'll still have to do test renders for lighting precision. To create more realistic figures, Poser 7 also adds new lighting capabilities, including Image Based Lighting (IBL), HDR lighting (for a more realistic look) and new point lights.

One of the greatest assets that Poser has is a solid community that’s built up around the program. Not only can you find many user groups, but there’s also a wealth of Poser models, textures, tutorials and more. E-Frontier continues to tap into this fan base by adding many new vendors in the Content Paradise section of the program, which provides links to each company’s online content marketplace.

During testing, a lot of great content from the Content Paradise site was found, as well as a full set (complete with various models and textures) from the extensive DAZ Productions Web site (www.daz3D.com). The DAZ site also offers new character models and accessories to augment the standard Poser models.

Despite improvements in rendering, Poser is still more effective as a still-image creation tool. Rendering with the FireFly Ray Tracing engine is still painfully slow, especially if you’re creating an animated sequence. The standard Preview render engine created acceptable animation, but not anywhere near the quality of the programs FireFly Ray Trace rendering engine.

Ultimately, Poser needs to move towards some type of network rendering in order to output high-quality 3D animations. According to E-Frontier, the company is aware of the render-speed issue and is looking at a variety of options that will hopefully be addressed in later versions of Poser.

Poser 7 is still the reigning champ of 3D character visualization for the amateur 3D artist. Although perfecting a 3D scene takes time, Poser 7 is simply the best and easiest way to visualize 3D human characters.

Poser 7 is an invaluable resource in visualizing scenes, creating illustrations and is ridiculously inexpensive. The bottom line here is, if you do any work requiring human characters for storyboards, still images and basic visualization, then you absolutely need to add Poser 7 to your production toolbox.