This new edition, Poser 4, responds to these weaknesses with vastly improved control and a wealth of new features. Traditional artists who have found the computer an additional expressive medium will be delighted with the program's new ability to render with natural media styles. This somewhat approximates having a live model sit for you, while you paint the scene with traditional brushes and oils or watercolors. To complement this feature, Poser 4 now includes a special edition of Painter 3D.

Definitely one of the most requested features for Poser 4 is interchangeable clothes, which meld to the Poser figure rather than working like a Colorforms "plop-on" as in earlier versions. One of the features likely to be overlooked by newcomers is the immensely powerful Deformers function. This allows you to stretch facial features to create sagging skin, aging effects, and for animation you can create water ripples or make clothing blow in the wind.

Experienced 3D dabblers will appreciate transparent and reflecting materials support, which works nicely with the included robotic models. Full-figure morphs allow you to animate the transition between body types, which can create super hero "Hulk" morphs.

Another of the earlier version weaknesses was the rather limited library of models, animals, and props included with version 3. Poser 4 readily addresses this with a second CD containing more than 70 high-resolution 3D figures, more animals (horses, dogs, etc.), and libraries of preset facial expressions, body and hand gestures, and bendable props. The largest complaint with all previous editions was the lack of hairstyles (I think there were maybe four per male/ female). Now there are 22 and some are morphable for animation.

Poser 4 certainly won't put 3D Studio Max or any of the professional high-end applications out of business, but it's a joy to play with such a simple-to-use product with highly complex features right behind the "new edge" GUI. This is the type of program you want to show off your new G3 Power Mac with rather than run those Photoshop gaussian blur filters a wee bit faster (yawn suppressor on full). Speaking of 3DS, Poser 4 supports importing 3DS files along with Wavefront OBJ, 3DMF, and DXF.

MetaCreations continues to get my applause for shipping software as dual-platform in one package. For those of us with true multiplatform work environments, it's of tremendous benefit to have Windows/Mac versions together without having to buy two boxes with duplicate manuals and whatnot. Be warned, however, this program takes up a lot of hard drive space. The Mac version totalled about 360MB, with roughly 100MB of that being library files. Although the box states you can run Poser 4 with 64MB and a 604e processor, in reality I wouldn't expect reasonable performance with less than 96MB and a G3/233 or faster. And, as with most 3D applications, a video card with more memory than 4MB will enhance your experience.

Poser 4 is an essential application if you are interested in 3D, want to add people and animals into Bryce scenery, or just like to play with your computer instead of work on it for a change. The 364-page manual and 6-panel reference card are the icing on the cake, with simple to follow duotone illustrations for first-timers and returning posers.

Poser 4's only technical weaknesses that continue to annoy are the lack of options to set scratch disks and render-to-disk options. When rendering an 8x10-inch, 300-dpi image, my machine rendered to screen perfectly but then crashed when saving to the hard drive--and this with 100MB allocated to the application and a total of 224MB on the machine. It also has a limitation of rendering images only slightly more than 4000 pixels. However, with the ability to export posed characters to higher-powered 3D applications, and Bryce in particular, the internal limitations for middle-end work can be overcome.

For the price, features, fun factor, and the potential for creating truly unique artworks, Poser 4 is a one-of-a-kind product that must be experienced by every artist.

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