Review by Bryan Newman

I got this software with what I thought was a fairly easy outcome in mind. I was going to work with my 11 year old to produce a small Jurassic Park like comic book. We were going to use some 3D dinosaur models, pose them as needed in Poser then composite them in photoshop to make the illustrations. All the parts seemed to be there but I keep running into issues.

First, I ended up having issues installing the software, two PC’s refused to read the installation DVD. I was finally able to get my work PC to read the DVD and install the software but that was mostly to make sure the DVD was actually usable. When I installed it on my Mac laptop it installed fine, but crashed shortly after I tried to open a file.

So the project was shelved for a long time. I recently got a new MacBook Pro and loaded the software. I played with some of the installed examples and again got excited for the possibilities. However, the frustrations returned when I tried to open the downloaded dinosaur models, I have followed the import instructions and still cannot get them to open in Poser. After 6 hours I was finally able to get a model to show in poser, and it was awesome, it was doing exactly what I hoped, awkwardly but a start. Many tutorials later and I can fairly get it to do what I want for my stills.

The truly frustrating part is that just playing with it, I can tell what it could do for me. There is a learning curve for beginners. I’m not giving up yet, but I am taking some time off to read the forums and try to tackle it again fresh.

Playing with the interface, it really is a slick software package. I love the rigging and quick animation it allows. I’m posting questions and reading so I’ll update if I’m able to get my models to work.