after seeing an offhand comment in another forum expressing curiosity about the original poser interface, i couldn't resist dusting off the old performa, firing up my copy of poser 1.0 (circa 1995) and posting some screen shots. i have a ton of ancient software still around, all the way back to the original macpaint and macdraw. i even still have a macplus to run those on as well.

as you can see, the poser 1 figure (male shown) was very rudimentary.

flat shaded, with the parameter dials and library palettes open.

wireframe closeup -- the p4 "dork" gets a lot of crap these days, but when he showed up, a lot of people were very happy to see him.

fully rendered closeup -- running on a 25mhz machine under os 7.5 with 20mb ram and 20mb of virtual ram took about 20 min to complete. note the lack of eyeballs, and check out that ear!

closeup of the hand, which was not poseable, but instead used morph targets accessible from the figure menu. can't get away with that today!

not very impressive today, but very exciting stuff back then -- human 3d models and cheap software to manipulate them was just about nonexistent, and who could afford the hardware to run it? certainly not me.

Very cool post. I see now why Poser has such a strong base with 2D artists. It originally provided a crude, yet fairly proportionate human base figure to work with as a starting reference point in paint programs. "Postwork", as it is called, would have been absolutely necessary to a lengthy degree. It's also clear why it wasn't picked up by 3D animators until it's most recent versions. Did it support 3rd party 3d file formats back then (import/export)?

in p1 the only import option was for a background pict image. you could export poser figures in dxf or rib formats. there were only 4 included props: ball, box, cane & stairs. other included figures were the stick figure, skeleton & mannequin.

p2 was a big step which allowed you to:

import dxf, 3dmf, obj, 3ds & detailer models, and background video

introduced improved models including the business, casual and child figures

added more hand morphs

introduced texture mapping (p1 did use bump maps, for musculature)

provided an animation palette.

I love the under/overweight options. Too bad they didn't somehow transfer those to the current versions, though I do understand why it must be difficult. All that's left (I suppose) is the height option, which doesn't really work with many characters anyway

I still both Poser 1 and Poser 2. Not long ago, I loaded both and played with them for an afternoon. You are right about coming a long way. Can't help but wonder how much futher can we go....

"Can't help but wonder how much futher can we go...." Oh, there are MILES of road still ahead for Poser if Curious Labs decides to follow through with their current developments in P5. Dynamic hair, cloth, the P5 node-based materials, and Metaforms plugin are just mere glimpses of what the future can bring if Poser users are willing to accept them. So far, the people who use Poser for fun (or for still images only) don't seem to want or need such enhancements, but I believe this progression (geared towards animators) is the inevitable future of Poser, especially considering they are now owned by the parent company of Shade. However, it's been mentioned the concern over an increased price tag on the software should it continue to utilize more high-end features. To that, I say it's also an inevitability. All one needs to do is look at Shade, and how that is marketed... multiple versions for different levels of usability. Given the fact of who currently owns Curious Labs, one could predict the same kind of marketing will be applied to Poser in future releases. For example, there may be several versions of Poser 7 (I don't think we'll see it in P6 yet). One "Artist" version (which is now what they call Poser4), which is geared toward the hobbyist and still-image creator and has less high-end features, and a "Professional" or "Advanced" version, which will pack more high-end features geared toward the animation professional who can NOT resort to post-working the imperfections from their frames and depend on superior lighting/render quality and network capability in the software. One can be marketed at a lower cost, and the other (obviously) a much higher cost. I'll bet my shirt this is what is to come in the "near" future, which is why we were given a taste of it in P5. Personally, I think it would be a step in the right direction for the company financially as well.

I still have the original Poser 1 box 8-) Yes, it HAS come a long way ... and I can't wait to see what the future brings.

The weight things still work in poser 4, but you get a lot of errors come up about some thing that isnt used anymore. The weights dont work on the hips of the poser 4 figures for some reason...