View this article at: http://dev.macnn.com/articles/08/05/06/power.po.for.2d..3d
Tuesday, May 06, 2008 7:35pm
Smith Micro releases Poser ...
Smith Micro on Tuesday announced Poser Pro, which it says is designed for professional content creators within studio and production environments. The software offers advanced features that include scene-hosting plug-ins for popular 3D environments, as well as a 64-bit render engine, COLLADA support and advanced network rendering. Poser Pro offers 3D character design and animation tools that help artists integrate custom and pre-built characters into professional projects and production pipelines; it lets artists fine-tune light, shadow, color and detail on figures, and ships with distributable 3D characters that are specially designed to provide a starting point for scene development, thereby saving production time.

Poser Pro offers new content-specific features, including Normal Mapping support to increase surface detail without increasing polygon count. Poser Pro offers a collection of four medium-resolution, face room compliant, rigged human characters that can be modified and freely redistributed as new content, serving as an excellent starting point for the development of new characters for games, movies and other real-time 3D projects. Poser Pro includes PoserFusion plug-ins, which enables hosting of both animated and static Poser scenes in Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Maxon's CINEMA 4D. Poser Pro supports COLLADA data interchange, which permits the import of 3D data and the export of Poser scenes with character rigging and blend zones, morph targets, texture information, lighting, cameras and other scene details. In addition, Poser Pro includes a distributed Network Render Queue and Queue Manager, which allows users to set up and manage a cross-platform rendering network. Background rendering enables users to continue working on Poser Pro scenes while rendering, and the updated 64-bit Firefly Render Engine permits full system memory to be utilized for the rendering of large scene files. Smith Micro's software also provides both high dynamic range (HDR) image import for textures and image-based light (IBL) maps plus optimized export of those rendered HDR images. Gamma Correction permits users to accurately match rendered image output to the final output or display device by setting gamma values on a material-by-material basis. Poser Pro is $500 and sidegrades from Poser 6 or 7 are $200 until July 31, 2008.