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Jimco Software Reviews - Poser 6 (continued)
Immediately to the right of the parameter dials, you'll find the Library, shown in figure 4. From the Library, you can access the figures, props, stored poses, facial expressions, textures, hair, etc. that are available to you.
Figure 5 - The Poser Library
 Posers's library system is incredibly powerful and flexible.
 As you might imagine, in addition to the library that is provided with Poser, there is a large collection of additional Poser material available on the Internet. After a while, you're likely to build up a huge number of figures, clothing items, and everything else that Poser has to offer. Each time you load Poser, all of these objects are loaded into the Poser runtime. (A runtime is a specific directory structure that is loaded into the Poser library.) By default, you have one runtime located at c:\Program Files\Curious Labs\Poser 6\Runtime. Inside of that Runtime directory, you'll have numerous other directories as shown in figure 6.
If your runtime contains a large number of add-ons, loading Poser can take quite a while. You'll also find that the more items in your runtime, the more memory Poser uses. Not to worry though. Poser gives you the ability to create multiple runtimes and only load one at a time!
Notice in figure 6 that I have a DAZ Runtime folder located directly underneath the Poser 6 directory. That folder is my runtime that contains all of my DAZ content. It only gets loaded when I switch to that runtime in Poser.
It's important to realize that you can use objects from multiple libraries in a single scene. Loading a new runtime replaces the objects visible in the library with the objects from the new runtime, but your scene remains unchanged. Using this method, you can organize things just the way you want them.
Posers's library system is incredibly powerful and flexible. If you'd like to read more about using multiple runtimes, Dr. Geep (a well-known tutorial creator for Poser) has an interesting tutorial on them at Renderosity.
Finally, the animation controls appear at the bottom of the Poser interface. Animation in Poser is nothing short of extraordinary. Poser uses a keyframing system to perform animation. To see a small example of the kind of output that you can get with Poser, watch this video (high-speed Internet connection required) from e-frontier. It is a remarkable demonstration of the capabilities of this product.
The Material Room
Materials are the paint in 3D graphics. Materials can be image maps (where an image is wrapped onto a 3D surface) or procedural. Procedural materials are computer generated and are generally more flexible than image maps. Poser does both, and it does both very well.
Poser's Material room makes it easy and fun to experiment with materials. It's easy to lose track of time and spend hours tweaking things.
Figure 7 shows you a complex material opened in Poser's Material room. The interface may look complicated at first glance, but the documentation provided with Poser is excellent and you'll be able to work with this dialog pretty easily. The material editor is intuitive and it's a simple process to experiment with settings. That's important because experimentation is the key to creating cool new materials.
Figure 7 - The Poser Material Editor
Creating new textures is not the only possibility. In fact, much of your learning in this area can be accomplished by examining existing textures and modifying them to see the result. Poser's Material room makes it easy and fun to experiment with materials. It's likely you will lose track of time and spend hours tweaking things.
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