Review: E-Frontier Poser Figure Artist design software

E-Frontier’s Poser is used by a lot of designers to create and animate 3D human figures. However, not everyone needs Poser’s sophisticated animation features, so E-Frontier has launched Poser Figure Artist as a less expensive alternative.

Figure Artist is primarily designed as a tool for artists who want to experiment with depicting the human form using computer graphics. It’s not as sophisticated as Poser – as well as omitting Poser’s animation features it also lacks features such as the ability to create realistic strands of hair and other textures. It therefore might not be suitable for creating commercial-quality artwork.

However, this program could be useful as a visualisation tool for quickly sketching out ideas for a client, or simply for experimenting with 3D graphics, lighting and other artistic effects.

The Figure Artist workspace splits the screen in half. The left half of the screen displays your 3D figures, while the right of the screen contains the Library window. The Library is sub-divided into a series of so-called rooms that you can enter by clicking on the tabs running down the right-hand edge of the screen.

These rooms split the design process into a series of simple steps. The first room contains a series of predefined figures – male and female adults and children, as well as skeletons and specific body parts such as hands and heads. Once you’ve chosen a figure you can move into the next room, which lets you select a pose for your figure.

There are dozens of poses available, including running, jumping, and heroic action poses, although they’re somewhat poorly organised so you’ll have to rifle through a long series of folders to get an idea of what’s available. You can also modify these basic poses yourself, by directly manipulating body parts in the main display.

The program provides fine control over your figures, allowing you to manipulate individual body parts right down to individual finger joints.

There’s also an Expressions room, which allows you to add facial expressions, such as surprise, horror or smiling. We hit an annoying glitch here, as the program would sometimes throw up an error message saying that a particular expression ‘does not pertain to figures of this type’ – and then it would go and apply the expression anyway.

Other rooms allows you to add a variety of hairstyles, hand gestures (even including sign language), and props such as clothing and furniture in order to create a complete 3D scene.
The final step in the process is to select a render style for your finished artwork. You can either opt for standard photorealistic settings, or choose a variety of sketch options that will convert the final image into artistic styles such as pastels or pencil sketches.

You’ve certainly got plenty of artistic control. However, we weren’t happy with the program’s documentation, nor some of its basic controls. There’s no printed manual at all, and although there are two pdf manuals and a selection of online help files and tutorials, we found it slow going to sort through all these in order to figure how specific features work.

There are also some basic weaknesses, such as a very limited Undo command, which at best only allows you to undo your most recent command, and often doesn’t work at all. For instance, you can’t add a prop to a scene and then quickly use Undo to remove it. Nor is there a Select All command that would allow you to quickly select all the objects within a scene.

At well under £100, Poser Figure Artist is certainly good value for money, but its ease of use could be much improved by overhauling its documentation and some of its basic menu commands.

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