Me – More play with Poser

Today I spent a few hours playing with posing and lighting.

There are quite a few shortcuts to help make things a little easier on the user. One is the ability to lock portions of the body. The body of a human poser figure is divided up into sections. Such as the collar, upper arm, forearm, hand and each individual finger. The sections are chained such that you can effect posture of other sections of the body when manipulating an extremity, in an attempt to keep a physiologically realistic pose.

If you want to play with extremes, you can create some pretty freaky things. Twist an arm around a few times and the section between it and the next part will become weird and twisted.

Of course, getting down into the details of posing a figure into a precise posture is an exacting art. You can twitch the details of a finger’s position by the slimmest measure or twist an arm from the side, up and extended. But mixing all of the repositioning into an interesting and believable pose is difficult. Fortunately poser comes with dozens of preset poses. Apply it and it shifts the figure into the posture instantly, allowing you to focus on the details.

I was poking through the poses when I found a sitting posture that got me thinking. It was one with the male sitting, his legs pulled up and his head dipped to his knees. His arms were draped casually over his legs. I took that pose and then shifted the arms, using a hand specific pose to shift the fingers into the general state I wanted before tinkering with them just a bit to shift the casual pose into one of supplication.

Then I started to play with the lights. In Poser you have three lighting points that you can outfit with various levels of light with any color. By shifting their color, position and intensity you can drastically shift the feel of the image. After tampering with the lights for a while, I made up this image of the results. Titled Supplication.

Then, at a suggestion, I added a dash of hair and shifted the angle for part two.

A very basic pair of images, but fun in observing out the light and shadow plays upon the body. It looks nice without any background to detract from the main focus of the images. And they’re relatively easy to create. 😉