Visually impaired, I started using Poser to set up models for my drawings and paintings.  Next?

Have fun with this.

Boni

     I was on the computer at the firehouse and saw an ad for Poser 6;  I was fascinated that one could do 3D on one's own home computer.  I bought my first PC and a boxed copy of P6.  Took me quite a while to be able to get it to do anything worthwhile.

     My goal was to make TinkerBell pics.  Love that pixie! 

I somehow happened across this render on Kozaboro's site and wondered how it was done...

http://digitalbabes.jp/gallery/Lori.html

Was a big-time Vue user (Vue 2-3) and wanted people and animals in my scenes, so I found Poser (v4). I haven't used Vue since version 4...funny how that happens ;). That was around 1997 or 98 or thereabouts.

Laurie

What's my story ? ... WOW, that's a leading question ... ... Try this on for size ... :o) >---> http://www.drgeep.com/AODG_Vol_01/0101/0101.htm

Great Stories so far guys ... Dr. Geep that is a treat! :)

In 2001 I downloaded a free copy of the German edition of Poser 3 as a promo from an online software seller. Wasn't too impressed with it, then I decided to see if anyone else had been able to produce any decent art with it.  A web search led me to Renderosity, Daz and the now-defunct Poser Forum Online.  After looking at some of the art on these sites, I borrowed the $200 to buy Poser 4 from Daz (they sold Poser in those pre-Daz-Studio days)...

 Many, many moons ago, I bought a PC magazine in Leuven, Belgium, Europe. At the time they came with a 1.44 disk. Remember those?

On the disk was a demo version of Poser 1.
Yes, a Poser1 demo on a 1.44 disk..
I ordered Poser2 the next day.

The rest, ha-ha-, took many more moons LOL. I am a Poser old timer.

For years it was Poser and anim8or.
Morphing was vertex, per vertex, per vertex, and then you lost symmetry and could start all over again. LOL.
Oh, dear. . . .The hrs and sleepless nights I spend moving single vertex, per vertex per vertex.

After looking at some of the art on these sites, I borrowed the $200 to buy Poser 4 from Daz (they sold Poser in those pre-Daz-Studio days)...

DAZ sold Poser 7 for a time, too...

My first employer was the US Army.  My assignment was to draw/illustrate the manuals  Needless to say, my drawing was poor at best.  Poser solved that problem (Poser 1).  Eventually, higher versions went on to use in battlefield techniques and use in JAG proceedings. 

 I knew my talents as an artist was very limited but I was interested in art in general and when I had a free moment I would look at some of the galleries online.  One day I discovered some renders produced using DAZ and noticed it was a free program so I downloaded it not expecting it to be that good as it was free.  I must have spent the next year playing with a program that was way over my head with no real idea what I was doing but somewhere along the way I managed to produced a render I liked so I pressed on.  I really started to buy lots of content in 2004 by which time I was really hooked.  My first Poser version was version 5, having taken the gamble of paying for a 3D program, and I was immediately blown away by the improvement in my renders.  Looking back it was probably only the fact that the render defaults for Poser suited my scenes better the then render defaults for DAZ.

I have updated Poser at every update point since and still love playing around in the program.  I still only scratch the surface of Poser but I can now use the advanced button in the material room (on my first attempt I went straight back to simple, bewildered at what I had stumbled into) even if I still have a limited knowledge of what I am doing.  My renders are still nothing to get excited about, except for me of course, but they are a distinct improvement on where I was on 2004.  It has now encouraged me to start writing and illustrating my stories.

 In the last ten years the amount I have spent on the hobby could easily buy me a brand new luxury car today but I don't regret it in the least (my wife might have a different view) and it is the only hobby I have stuck with for more than a year or two.

I was developing courseware in 1999, using my own 2d animation system for shapes and lines and flows.  The reviewers wanted more liveliness, more humans in the animations.  I tried several other programs (eg LifeForms) but none of them worked right.  Finally Poser worked, so I stuck with it.

I'm a writer, and long ago discovered that an image of a scene could keep me focused on what I was working on. Not being a traditional artist, and said artists who were friends being either on the west coast or in another country, I started looking around for a practical alternative, and discovered Poser 4, a little bit after Fractal Designs gave way to Meta Creations. Then I started tinkering around with the animation controls. Then I found Philippe Bouyer's first tests with Vue 4 and Mover and well, it was off to the races. Now that I'm medically retired, I actually have time to dig into things properly (35 years of 6 day a week 8 hour a day stocking did for the knees; one is now artificial, and the other one is just waiting for the Synvisk to stop working, then it gets replaced as well. Can't squat or kneel, so can't do the job).

Back in the late 90's I had fun scanning photos of faces to be used on players in EA Sports NHL. I created an entire team made up of my coworkers and amused them by showing them pictures of themselves scoring goals or checking some well-known forwards. (Or violently checking one of the managers from work). ;)

A few years down the road, I was pondering how to make a digital clone of myself like the hockey players, and used a program called 3DMeNow or something. It did heads using a similar technique as the video game. But it wasn't very satisfactory. So I searched for other software, and Poser 5 advertised the ability to import a photo and sculpt the head in the face room. So I tried it. Didn't work at all. But I had so much fun playing with Don and Judy that I got hooked.

I killed a man. It upset me a bit, so... this is therapy.

Just joking. I got into Poser because I was writing screenplays at the time, and I thought that if I could see and visualize the characters, i could write them better.

In fact, my original Android webcomic was a screenplay I wrote for a screenplay contest. I lost.

Myself, Robert Daymon (aka Master Rob of the Ultimate Force and cousin to Lord Finesse), and two other guys were starting an independent comic book company. I was brought on as a layout artist and animation "expert" (term used loosely at the time). Rob asked me to throw together a list of things I thought we could use in terms of software, so I did. We ended up getting Photoshop 2.5 (and every release after for free somehow up until PS5), SoftImage, Rhino 3D beta and Poser 2. I was tasked with teaching Rob and our colorist to use Photoshop,while both Rob and I explored using Poser as reference for helping with layouts. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprising in hindsight, we ended up doing more music related stuff like album covers and videos than we did comics but that's how I ended up getting my hands on Poser. A years later, I ended up getting hired by e frontier for my knowledge with their brand new (literally, I think the same week it came out I wrote a tut using it) program Manga Studio as a tech support guy. Couple years after that, I got asked to work with the Poser team on content for Poser 8 (the dog and Andy/Andrea are all me) and the rest is history.

I actually had no interest in Poser at the time I first aquired it, but I purchased a Metacreations bundle when they launched Bryce3D (Bryce 3), and Poser 3 was one of the products in the bundle with Bryce (them both being under Metacreations at the time).

And from the first time I used Poser, I've always liked it.  But I think it was only the fact that I could make pictures with naked women in it, that 'hooked' me in to it.  I don't mean porn, I just mean that I could make images with a naked woman in it, make her look how I want, posed however I wanted her to be posed.  To this day, that's what Poser still is to me, really, if I'm honest about it.

After I'd been using it a few years, I had the idea to make a business out of creating a figure for it, and belive it or not, what DAZ have done with Genesis is pretty much what I had in mind - just done differently.  I saw the figures that were available back then and thought to myself, you know what would really sell, is a figure that could be any age and sex you want it, all in the same figure, something that could morph from young to old, and even male to female (by giving each version the same universal mesh).  I started developing it (I even had a name ready to call the mesh) but gave-up for various reasons, and I never could find a program that I could get along with enough to model the mesh in anyway, and now that i know a little more about the way morphs work, it would never have worked anyway.

After that idea died, I got obsessed (very obsessed) with the idea of creating a super-lifelike virtual babe (but strictly for my own use this time).  Because back then, Athena street stores used to sell posters, and I thought to myself, if I were to really put the effort in and create a convincing babe, I could keep her to myself and use her exclusively to create my own posters and maybe scrape a living from the royalties or whatever, creating the sort of thing Athena sold in their steet stores (nicely framed posters of babes and stuff).  Today, reality bites and the web is bursting at the seams with this stuff, and any thought of making a living from it has gone right out of the window for me.  But I still like to play around with Poser, I'll always love Poser as long as they don't destroy the interface, and I still do have that obsession to try and do things convincingly if I'm in the mood for it.

So, long live Poser, just sort the freaking bugs out, please :-)

I was a traditional artist/illustrator

and was frustrated with the tedious process of applying

and cutting frisket masks  to create the various parts of an airbrushed 

illustration.

Around 1995

I saw my first bryce render online

and immediately  got bryce2 from "metacreations"

then a co worker at "kinkos Kopies" showed me some poser 2 renders

and I  immediately bought it from "Fractal Design"

I immediately learned how to export meshes from poser and render them in Bryce

and have never completed a final still in Poser. 

I moved up to poser 3 and disovered the animation features

late I got my first seat of Maxon Cinema4DXL6

and began the long and often frustrating years of trying to get my poser

animations into other applications.

I stopped buying poser at version 6

Due to the repeated Failure of its owners to implement 21st century Character animation tools

I also have,for years now, been using a C4D plugin that fully supports ALL POSER FORMATTED content with full poser functionality directly in Cinema4D without the need have the poser application installed.

At this point poser is no longer major part of my 3D animation pipeline

as I have recently partially Migrated from Mac OSX to windows 7 and am enjoying

creating amazing& Complex character animation Data using Real illusion Iclone 5,

Natural Motion "Endorphin"and the nonlinear motion creation system of Daz studio 4.7.

All exportable from DS in PZ2 format to use directly in Cinema4D Studio.

I had poser when it was own by curious labs.  At the time it frustrated me because all the renders looked really crappy.  I gave up and came back to Poser with Poser 6 and broke down and purchased better models instead of using what came with Poser back then.  Now I'm addicted and I've made both Daz3D and Renderosity richer.   My wishlist has a total of $15,631 worth of models on the list.   I figure my bank account will be safe, so long as my mind is straight.

Great Stories ... Keep them coming!!

Maybe 15 years back, the software house I was working at made a lot of 3D games and I was doing research into making better likenesses for the models.  I was also cutting my teeth in modelling, but needed a more ready to go option to tinker around with.  I was introduced to P4PP and liked it.  ISTR V2 and Dina (who?) were big news back then.  Oh, and I also got talking to another Poser artist called Ilona, who I talked into starting a gallery here and becoming a merchant.

I've been fastinated with computer graphics since I got a Commodore 64. Unfortunately that was probably one of the worst computer to use for graphics at the time. Sometime after I got my first pc I  found Paint Shop Pro. I could do tons of editing of images but I couldn't make something from scratch. From one of the message boards I used to frequent I heard about Renderostiy and was visiting the psp forum here and heard about Poser. I downloaded a demo of Poser 6 and became fascinated with it.

 quite boring really yrs and yrs of engineering then plc then cnc then cad/cam [big fan of autodesk in them days lol ] early retirement (ill health) and I needed something to keep the brain working so found anim8tor terragen wings bryce poser carrara {hush up I had the detox from Ds ;-) } sorta stuck in blender now but P14 is slowly getting a hold on me

I'm into Computer Graphics and Animation since say 1978, having ascii-art Snoopy walking around over all (=2) admin monitors onto the Uni's Cyber mainframe. Punched tape, punched cards and printed output, those times. Then the mono-green Tektronix graphics terminals came around, and in 1985 I purchased my own personal mini-frame (PC).

Since then computing has hardly improved anymore, haha. Each new machine costed as much as the existing one, each final render took about two days and each harddisk had the capacity of say 1000 MS Word installments. Okay, we've go a mouse, and colored screens, and iconic interface and plug & play / pray and images got larger and internet and nowadays my PC looks like an oversized Mobile Phone, but that's about it.

I guess I picked Poser 1 from a floppy attached to a magazine, so my story is something between Vilters and Dr Geep. I still have it, and it still runs okay on my super mega turbo box. Some details on http://www.main.artbeeweb.nl/?page_id=2 .
Sometimes I launch it, especially after reading all those posts complaining and fulminating on Posers advanced features. And smile.  

I like making animations on music. 2015 will bring me a full 5 min Octane rendered on. Here's the first published still from it: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2585883  . In order to make it, I had to master dynamic cloth and hair, advanced materials, external rendering and that gave rise to my Missing Manuals website, forum contributions and more. Now I only have to master good posing ...

All the best, see ya !

(@Boni: Yara & Yuki are still doing fine and say hi ! ) 

Mine is a LONG story, but it comes with pictures!

:)

Old Art on Newadventure

Enjoy!

 In late '98 I had been playing around with online Kisekae sets (paper dolls) but wished there was a way to pose them. I ran across an online mentioning of Poser and looked into it. Poser 3 had just been released, and there was an upgrade offer from Poser 2, which could still also be bought for cheap.

It turned out to be cheaper to buy Poser 2 and the Poser 3 upgrade than to buy Poser 3 directly, so I went that route. Poser 3 was feature-limited by modern comparisons, so morphs worth having were a rarity. Zygote was the only game in town for good 3D humans, and supplied Poser with content, and also had the first Poser-ready offerings that could be ordered on a CD (and then when DVDs came out...)

Once I got Poser 7 and Aiko 3, that was it for me - the summit had been reached. I did not acquire anything new until PP2014 (for the Fitting Room) and have recently been experiencing the joys of Genesis 2, and running headlong into what appears to be an on-going war between Daz and Poser-users.

I don't remember when it was, but I got into Poser to develop cartooning skills. As a graphic designer I am a decent illustrator, but not particularly fast. Getting characters 'right' made things a lot quicker. I'd simply pose one or more of the default poser characters to the pose I needed, print it out, and draw the characters on a light table (the Poser print out underneath to show the positions). Before long I had moved out of graphic design into other areas, and I can now render full scenes much faster than I can draw or paint them (although I'll NEVER regret gaining the skills I did with pencil, brush, pen and camera).

A friend had Poser 2 and after trying that I looked online and bought Poser 4. I was really disappointed after loading a figure and a clothing article and it looked like it half fit. It was later I learned of the conform feature. ^ ^;

For years I helped a series of friends edit and or clean up their online single pane comics in PhotoShop. Over time their comics became more complex and colorful  and lead me to the Akvis plugins for PS. One person in the group could come up with the most humorous comics but couldn't draw for shit, like me. Via a akvis forums I visited on and off I stumbled across the first version of Studio and recommended it to this guy to help him at least create a human form to trace over in his comics. Vicki, recall was 2.0 at the time. Neither of us could figure out the interface of Studio and it crashed none stop so we gave up. Shortly after that the same guy started writing what I will call semi-sexual based short stories and asked me to create the covers and other illustrations from scratch myself using Studio. He just wanted to concentrate in writing and not the drawing side and told me Studio was better and give it another try. Which I did to no success. . But in the Daz forums I learned about Poser and Renderosity. Purchased P6 and V3 was the dominate character at the time and been a Poser user and mainly Renderosity content customer ever since and now create scenes-rendered images for several of the original group who have also transitioned to short stories from single pane comics. Lately my job requires me to travel for long periods of time, and have actually tried writing myself since I can't always bring my runtimes with me. Nothing worth publishing yet as nothing is close to being finished.

I was always into drawing, modeling and animation.  In the late 80s I still had giant robot fever, and by the time I started high school was pretty heavy into mech modeling and had started dabbling in stop-motion.  I saw the Amiga around 88-89 and talked the folks into getting one of those thinking that CG would eventually replace practical effects in film.  As an avid gamer I could already anticipate the convergence of 3D animation and gaming, so it seemed natural to explore modeling and rendering.  I stuck with the Amiga throughout the 90s, building low poly mechs (such as the one in my avatar) and figures.  I really enjoyed building the mechs, but none of the tools available to me were up to the task of producing detailed poseable figures.  I didn't really have any aspiration toward sculpting characters (at least not before seeing "Sinkha" in Heavy Metal) but felt I needed figures in my scenes to provide a sense of scale and purpose.  I had long held onto hope that the Amiga might bounce back as a viable platform and was optimistic that more programs like Tornado 3D might keep interest in it alive.  Yet even in the Amiga magazines I kept seeing works produced using "crazy" new programs such as Bryce and, of course, Poser.  Poser was something that had no counterpart on the Amiga and so became the biggest temptation toward getting a PeeCee I had felt until that time.  A few short years later, and the writing on the wall was undeniable; the Amiga was never going to be at the forefront of digital design and even Amiga 3D pioneers Caligari had finally jumped ship.  I knew I had to get a PeeCee, and so around late 2000/early 2001 I spent all I had on a K6-3 450 box.

Throughout the Amiga years I had been adamantly anti piracy, at least with regard to productivity apps (I could see clearly how piracy had hurt developers despite helping the Amiga overall).  With most Amiga games being written for PAL machines I had at one time frequently copied games, though later preferred to purchase US developed titles in stores on the rare occasions I came across them.  But having spent my last dime on the new PeeCee and having no software I reluctantly looked around for graphics tools online and finally stumbled across Poser 4.  Seemed pretty harmless to download and install it so I did, although I can at least say I've proudly bought every version since 5 (though I may have skipped one along the way).

My forum stats show that my interest in Poser has had its ups and downs, and since discovering it I've went through a number of creative phases...  I was in an experimental noize band, edited wedding videos, did a lot of low-poly modeling...  But something would always bring me back.  In 2011 I thought I was just about to break away for good (possibly for A:M, or Carrara), then got a surprise contract with a gov't agency to produce a large number of short clips using Poser.  It seemed only fitting to spend some of my fat check on the just released Poser Pro 2012 and a hardware upgrade, and that combination of new features and having more computing power brought me back to Poser in a big way.  I was much more comfortable with Poser having worked on such a large project and was very impressed with the new features and improved render quality.  I had a very productive period of time from the beginning of 2013 until losing about 6-8 months of work to a hard drive failure in August of 2013.  I still have not quite got that momentum back but still use Poser quite often.  I'm currently using PP2014 to render elements for a 2D app game, and am looking forward to installing SR5 and EZMat as soon as I reach a stopping point in that project.