Functions of Face Room in Poser Software

Series Summary

The software program Poser is popular with fine art and commercial artists, who use it to create realistic human and animal figures for everything from product packaging to magazine covers. The program is set up as a virtual studio with lights, backgrounds, props, and wardrobes. Although it is compatible with a number of other 3D animation programs, Poser has limited animation capabilities of its own. Users choose from a basic library of human, animal and robotic figures to build their files, as the program cannot model figures from scratch. Poser also includes a variety of stock poses, textures, hair pieces and facial expressions to be used with the figure. Many third party merchants sell similar content which expands the possibilities of Poser-created figures.

In this free series of rendering software lessons, you will learn how to create faces for your Poser figures using the program's Face Book feature. This powerful option allows you to design eyebrows, mouth, nose and every other feature to make the exact face you want. Face Book allows you to select from different skin tones and hair styles and shape the face using the morph paint and putty tools. You will also learn how to load a photo into Face Book and create a three-dimensional versioin of your friends and relatives. Great for laughs at those tense family gatherings.

Video Transcript

"JOHN CARSTARPHEN: Hi. This is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. In this exercise, we're going to look at the different ways we can manipulate change and otherwise effect faces in Poser. And Poser has a couple of really fun tools we can use to change the faces and to change the look of our characters, and we're going to examine a couple of those. First of all, we're going to look at the traditional way of creating a morph in Poser, and what that means is that we would take an .obj file and manipulate it in another 3D program and then send it back to Poser, creating a morph with it. Now, this works most of the time but sometimes it doesn't work. And--but we're going to take a look at it anyway. The other tools we're going to look at are the Morph Putty Tool, which is a tool that's new to version 7, and we're also going to take a look at the Face Room. First of all, let's look at how we create a morph target out of Poser. So what we're going to do is we're going to export this model's head as an .obj file. We're going to select single frame, click ok, and then the hierarchy window will come up, asking us which body parts we want to have sent to another program."