It's been a while since I gave you an update on the progress of Poser 11. I'm sure you're filled with anticipation as to what the new version will bring.

One of the biggest questions is about the next generation of Poser figures. We absolutely are making a new couple for Poser. They are completely new and very carefully designed. Along the way we've stopped and asked for feedback from prominent content artists and users to make sure we are making the next generation figures they need. I really want to show them to you but you'll have to wait a bit longer for that big reveal. They need a little more polish and refinement before their trip down the virtual red carpet.

There's a lot of talk about the new renderer I revealed last time. We continue to refine the implementation of Cycles inside Poser. We're trying to preserve as much compatibility with legacy content as possible while at the same time exposing the full potential of a physically based renderer. It is something of a balancing act. We’re working with texture and material artists from the community to achieve that balance.

We've also implemented GPU support for SuperFly. Currently this is based on CUDA and is for NVIDIA GPUs only. For systems that don't have compatible hardware SuperFly will run on the CPU too.

Now it would be easy to just focus on the big shiny render engine you've already heard about that. You probably want to know what else we've got. One cool new feature is something we call Custom Parameter Palettes. You can create a blank palette and then drag and drop any combination of dials from the Parameters Palette to the Custom palette. Let's say you're fine-tuning the pose of an arm. You can drag the rotations for the collar, shoulder and elbow to a custom palette so you don't have to keep switching between body parts to adjust the pose. You can have as may custom palettes as you like and they can be saved not only with the scene but also with the figures or props saved to the library.

Ginger shows off the Custom Parameter Pallet with some of her expression parameters added to the palette.

There's a recent actor list on the Parameter Palette. It works like a web browser history with back and forward buttons. Now you can just click the "back" button to select the last thing you were working on. It's great for working in complex, highly populated scenes.

You asked for it so we added a select tool. All it does is select so there's no chance of accidentally moving a figure or prop.

We've added a tool to automatically adjust the rigs of weight-mapped figures for drastic morphs. So if you want to make a troll morph out of a super model you can. Once you morph the figure just use the Adjust Centers to Morph command and it will match the centers and create all the code to make those centers follow the morph. For clothing to match these figures all you need is the matching morph and to enable the Follow Origins setting. There's literally nothing else to set up.

Since we've made it easy to create morphs for figures we needed to make it easy to share these morphs. We have a new command that will export a Morph Injection file right from poser. It's been possible to inject morphs into poser figure for a long time. Now you can create these injection files quickly and easily right from Poser. If you create characters for Poser, this will greatly simplify your workflow.

As we expanded the morphing capabilities, it was clear we needed to add power to subdivision. We could easily subdivide the figure but that didn't necessarily add detail. That brought us to high resolution morph targets. You can add high resolution details to sub divided figures right inside Poser using the Morph brush. It's really straight-forward. If your figure is subdivided and you add detail it's automatically baked down to the lower subdivision levels. It's all automatic and of course you can share your high resolution morphs using the morph injection export tool.

Not everyone is into hyper-realistic renders so we've added some great cartoon tools too. The coolest is the Geometric Edge Lines effect. This creates a hard geometry based outline that's displayed by the OpenGL-based Preview renderer. When combined with the comic book modes it produces amazing comic book style images.

This image from Brian Haberlin demonstrates Poser’s Cartoon Shading and combined with the new Geometric Edge Lines.

These are just a few of the things we have in store for you with Poser 11. Stay tuned and I'll reveal more cool features in my next announcement.