For all of you who are wondering, Poser 5 is nearing completion with a release date scheduled for sometime in August. The creators of Poser wanted to "Make the Impossible Accessible." And I believe they have. They built Poser 5 from feedback from the Poser community and from their own knowledge and visions of what could be done. They also worked with people from the Poser community, gifted artists Syyd Raven and Colm Jackson and the runtimedna team.

I was able to spend a wonderful one on one hour with Steve Cooper, President of Curious Labs, while he demonstrating and talked about Poser 5 at Siggraph 2002 in San Antonio in July. This preview is a result of my meeting. I came away feeling the same way I did when I saw my first Poser. What a revolutionary product! The change from Poser Pro Pack and/or Poser 4 is monumental. These figures easily come to life.

The new Poser is a stand-alone product. One can create full scenes with in Poser itself and not rely on other products. One can consider Poser to be a stage on which can be created backdrops, props, etc. When you are ready to either render your Poser figure alone or in conjunctions with other figures on a stage, the new and better render engine will create a very smooth final rendition without any faceting or irregular edges. The new rendering engine is called "Firefly" and it is a Micro-polygon Subdivision Surface and Raytracer renderer. This engine enables: rendertime smoothing of facets; displacement mapping; 3D motion blur; depth of field; procedural textures; luminosity, refraction, and reflection; and Shader Tree with material nodes. In addition it is fast.

Dynamic is a good key word to describe what is happening in Poser 5. Hair can now be styled strand by strand. Yes, there is actually a wig cap from which sprouts strands of hair. This hair can be styled in all directions as if it were actually growing. It also can be made to be dynamic. So if a figure jumps up and down or runs into the wind, the hair will follow suite, but at the user's control.

Cloth and clothing are also dynamic. The cloth can be adjusted to follow the movements of an object, be the object a body or a sphere under a square of cloth. Steve Cooper created a square of cloth for me from scratch, yes this can be done, and draped it over a sphere; he animated the whole and adjusted the dynamic properties. It was truly amazing to watch the cloth drape itself around the sphere as it moved.

Poser 5 is constructed of rooms. The different rooms are used to control the different facets of Poser 5. There is the Hair Room where one can proceed step by step to actually grow, style, and then determine how the hair will behave; a Material Room for texture mapping. Movies can also be used as maps; a Face Room which obviously is for the creation and modification of faces. However, in Poser 5 one can actually reproduce the face of a person using two photographs, a front and a side shot by matching points. I saw this done with a photograph of a person who was in the booth at Siggraph. It was truly amazing! The Cloth Room will contain with many cloth files. It is easy to create dynamic cloth from static cloth. And Content Room will be set up like a shopping mall with actual third party vendors. Items will be able to be downloaded directly from it. I do not know if I have named all of the rooms.

There are also new tools in Poser 5. Two of these are a FacePutty Tool and a MorphPutty tool. One can close an eye lid by simply dragging it closed with a tool. The control is incredible. One can also move each toe on a foot independently of the other insuring positioning for dancers, etc. These morph targets can also be locked so as not to be accidentally moved.

There is a "View Magnifier" where one can click into an object to see it better. For example, one can click on an eye, and that eye will be magnified. Thus, one can see the tiniest detail in a figure, basically down to the highlight in an eye. Even this highlight can be controlled. It can be textured, for instance.

The suggested retail price for Poser 5 will be $549 (US). Upgrades from previous versions of Poser and Poser Pro Pack will be available through a tiered price structure.

There is a lot more to Poser 5 than I have described. It would be hard to say what impressed me the most. There was so much. But I can say that the nudes I saw rendered on the screen were life like. But this is only a "Sneak Peek." I cannot wait to start using the finished product. Everything I have written about I saw demonstrated in real-time not through a prepackaged demonstration. It was AWESOME!