Take an in-depth look into the creative minds of top Poser artists! Secrets of Poser Experts presents a unique opportunity to examine the creative process utilized by industry experts as they create their digital art using Poser. With individual chapters written by each artist, this book offers an amazing look at the artists? professional background, techniques, insights, and resources as they showcase their stunning Poser masterpieces. Each section within the book focuses on a specific area of Poser expertise, including illustration, content creation, comic, Web,motion graphics, photo-realism, and sci-fi/fantasy. It includes an amazingly robust DVD, full of incredible Poser content, including art galleries for each artist featured in the book as well as Poser movies, animations, desktop wallpaper, and tutorials. It also includes free Poser content and a 30-day, limited functionality demo version of the Poser 6 software.

A comprehensive book examining Poser and other software tools from the professional?s point of view. This official guide looks into the artistic minds of top Poser artists, offering coverage of various areas of Poser creation--animation, Web, cartoon, fantasy, and motion graphics. Artists within each category discuss in detail their creative process, creative insights, biography, tips and tricks, education, and advice. Tackle each new skill through step-by-step instructions and full-color art examples.

Not for beginners.

This book seems to me to be more of a showcase for the artists featured than instruction for Poser 7. There are tips etc. as the title says but they are more aimed at a user already quite familiar with the program. I was looking for more of a beginners instruction manual so was disappointed. Having already bought Poser 7 I wasn’t interested in the free trial of Poser 6 which is included.
There are a lot of beautiful pictures showing various styles and ways that Poser can be used, but for me the book has limited usefulness.

Completely lacking in taste

When looking through this book I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s bon mot about a similar book..."This is not a book to be lightly tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force."

A bit of background; I’m an illustrator (the real kind...with paintbrushes) with decades of experience and a number of books under my belt. I remember when Frazetta was a hot item on the paperback scene. That was in 1969 about forty years ago. I remember seeing Star Wars when it first came out in 1973...about thirty-five years ago. I remember being dazzled by Blade Runner back in 1982, more than 25 years ago. So why is it that the imagery in this book has not grown past those old, hoary images? Has the world of art stopped? Evidently it has for these "experts," because this is all aimed at the very low-paying and over-crowded field of fantasy art.

To say that these artists are derivative is like saying those art factories in China are slightly influenced by cheesy poster art.

In years of buying books for the artists in the studio, this is the only book I’ve bought from Amazon that I really wanted to send back. The other artists looked at it and opinions ranged from "Gaacck" to "Arrggghhh." But then, what do we know? After all, we’re just well-paid working pros, so we must have missed the real essence of this book.

It’s soon to become kindling.

Great Way to Learn!

I have been trying to create some images for a while with very little success. With this book, if you TRY some of the examples, it really opens your mind to the possibilities.

I Highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to improve their creative skills!

Art book and how-to

Beautiful book. A great set of masterclasses on various poser/photoshop techniques for generating digital art. With all of the gallery sections in the book it works as a coffeetable book too.

Superfacial Secrets of Poser 7 or more source material for Photoshop

Disappointment was my reaction when I read this book. The art work and publication standards are very high, but if you are looking for ’secrets’ then this is not the book. There are sixteen (artists/chapters) and their work is outstanding, but their ’step by step’ instructions in at least 12 chapters is extremely superficial. In most case it runs like this. 1 Think of an idea 2 ’Fire up Poser and load a stock item’ pose and render
Stages 3 to 8 Enhance the image in photoshop. In all stages again the explanation is extremely brief and leaves you wondering how the outcome displayed was achieved. Mike Campau in Chapter 13 provides some stunning images but you are provided with three very brief stages of explanation and you get the strong impression that he has no intention of telling you his trade secrets. Which is fair enough I guess, but if you are paying for secrets then it does leave you feeling cheated.
Three artists provide more information than the rest but the impression is that the book is patchy and inconsistent.
It appears that there is more reference to Photoshop than Poser in this book. It does not provide any more or additional detail than the manual. Furthermore it doesn’t distinguish Poser 7’s additional features from earlier versions of the software. This could have be just as easily been titled an Introduction to Poser 5 and how it can provide intial renders for Photoshop.

Getting over the postwork stigma in one easy step

I’ve been slowly getting into CGI through the use of Poser and Vue since Christmas ’05. I have found that many websites/forums cast postwork as being a way to correct mistakes -- like you don’t really know how to use the software properly if you need to do postwork. This book blows that misconception away.

This book is a showcase for sixteen artists that utilise Poser somewhere in their workflow. They are all exceptionally talented in different ways. Each artist receives a chapter of the book and each chapter is in the form of a brief artist bio, a Poser technique/tutorial, Insights into each artist’s use of Poser, a Q&A covering some set questions posed by the authors, and a Gallery of the artist’s work.

What’s good about the book:

Each artist gives a brief summary of their Creative Process. I found it very interesting to read about how different people work and where Poser fits into their workflow. In a similar vein the Insights section wherein each artist describes the features of Poser that they find most useful was very helpful to me -- there were features I don’t even use that the artists were describing as their favourite feature.

The main plus for me though is in each artist describing their workflow for a particular piece, in the form of the Techniques/Tutorials sections. Its not so much the How as the Why -- the specific tutorials may or may not be that useful to you, but why the artist does *this* in Poser and *that* in Photoshop is quite eye-opening.

What’s bad about the book:

The DVD that comes with the book. The blurb on the back of the book devotes a large section to espousing the DVD’s content. I found the interface to the content to be gimicky, clunky, and flawed. The content itself is unexceptional.

Some of the techniques/tutorials are a little scarce on detail if you really want to replicate a particular image. Occasionally Photoshop is a bit of a magic box -- here’s the Poser image that went in to Photoshop (standard Poser image) and here’s the image afterwards (fabulous CGI image).

Favourites:
The chapters on Fabrice Delage, Brian Jon Haberlin, Daniel Scott Gabriel Murray, Gabriel Sabloff, As Shanim and Siliphiel, and Thomas Weiss. Quite inspiring and definitely informative.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is familiar with Poser and Photoshop.

Excellent Book

I am an employee of e frontier, the creators of Poser. I would like to say that the Secrets of Poser Experts is a well written book on what users can do with Poser. There are lots of great images and personality profiles of artists that create this amazing 3D art. By the way, it’s also been written by an industry insider who’s been in the 3D industry for a couple decades. I recommend this book to any one that has ever wanted to know and understand what Poser is about.

For us Poser fans, A TRUE GODSEND!!!!

I don’t write reviews much but every once and a while, something interests me right off the bat to the point where I have to write. This book is one of them.

Poser is not well received by the "High End" 3D industry at large. To many, it is still considered a "fast food" type application because it offers pre-rigged models and props and all you do is assembly them in a pretty picture.

Heck, a friend of mine even liken use of it to assemblying "paper dolls", however she also quickly admitted that she had no idea what it took to use the program.

Let me assure you, Poser is anything but a "fast food" application and the artists in this book demonstrate that to the hilt. Talk about inspiration to learn the ends and outs of an application and having it work in concert with others! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in 3D art, especially those snooty people who only feel you can produce amazing works of art with only Max, Maya, and any of the other so-called "industry heavyweights". The section about Daniel Murphy, creator of Ghost, alone was worth the price of the book and the software. I hope my art will appear in something like this some day and I will gladly hold the Poser banner high.

Highly recommended!

Poser artists discuss their personal styles and techniques

One of the best ways to develop a personal artistic style and to grow as an artist is to study other artists’ work. This book, by Daryl Wise and Jesse DeRooy, will show you how the experts use the 3D graphic software Poser from e frontier, Inc. Each of the sixteen Poser artists featured in the book discuss their personal styles and give you a peak into the techniques that they use in Poser to develop their art. At the end of each chapter, each artist shares a gallery of their artwork and answers questions about their creative process.

One of the things I like about this book is that some of the featured artists use Poser in interesting ways. For example, Kevin Airgid uses Poser when creating Flash games and Brian Jon Haberlin has an interesting technique for including traditional gouache and oil in his Poser graphics. He also gives a nice post production tip for creating an old Hollywood style render.

Have you ever wondered who makes all that Poser content? You are introduced to a few of these content creators and they share some of the techniques they use. Phil Cooke discusses Poser’s UV mapping and creating an hierarchy file for posing his characters. As Shanim and Siliphiel discuss posing characters and using the Poser Material Room.

Photo-realism is a very popular style and several artists discuss the important aspects of achieving photo-realistic Poser scenes. Catharina Harders uses image based lighting (IBL) to achieve realism and Fabrice Delage discusses creating realistic skin textures from photos.

Many of these artists use Poser along with other graphic software. For example, Tony Luke uses Adobe After Effects to create his motion graphics and Scott Thigpen turns Poser scenes into a stylized illustration in Adobe Illustrator.

The book’s DVD contains a gallery of the artist’s work, movies, and tutorials. It also has a demo version of Poser 6 and Poser content. Daryl Wise is an independent public relations and marketing contractor and is the author of Secrets of Award-Winning Digital Artists. Jesse DeRooy is a radio editor and independent filmmaker.