By Bruce Bicknell

It feels like déjà vu. As you may know, I’ve been fortunate enough to review Poser products from Smith Micro (http://www.smithmicro.com) for many versions now, and with each one I can honestly say that the bar gets raised higher and higher. This one, my friends, is no different, and without a doubt Smith Micro has hit it out of the park with this version.

For those of you familiar with the Poser programs, you know that it has always been a great tool for producing realistic human characters and high-quality animation. This time around they’ve taken it to a whole new level. With a look and feel that combines amazing new models with realistic textures, you’ll be creating everything from game characters to fantasy art in no time. All you have to do is take one look at the website gallery to see the possibilities.

Poser Pro 2010 offers a ton of cool new features that include 64-bit application (Mac and Windows), full-body morphs, layered action, a network rendering queue, searchable content library, and cross-application compatibility -- to name a few. The program also gives you complete control over every detail of physical structure, texture and motion, as well as the ability to create realistic skin, fluid physiques, detailed hair, and animated cloth at a pro level.

As mentioned, Poser Pro is now 64-bit for both Mac and Windows. If you do a lot of work in Poser, this alone is worth the upgrade. With this addition you can use all of your machine’s memory to increase the speed and performance, making rendering times faster and improving the quality of the animation.

A newly redesigned user interface provides a much improved workflow. With this new interface you have the ability to dock or float your palettes to maximize your workflow and improve your efficiency in the program.

Another new feature is the ability to load OBJ files as full body morphs. This allows you to bring your OBJ files into Poser Pro complete, without the need to break them up. The cool thing about this is that once you save the file as a single full-body morph channel in the Body parameter, you can create effects such as muscle bulges, horns, and whatever else you can think of.

For those of you who love Photoshop, this next feature is awesome. Poser Pro now has PSD layer rendering. This gives you the ability to output additional information to a layered PSD file by checking each additional data option that you want to carry into the PSD file on its own layer. This is great for doing additional compositing in Photoshop.

As usual, there’s never enough room in a review to go over all the new features of a great program like this. The other new features that you should check out are the improved joint rigging system, indirect lighting, the new robust library (more than 2.5 GB of content), the wxPython support, and much more.

Poser Pro 2010 is more than worth the money at $499.99 (upgrade from Poser 4 or later for $199.99). It will be a great addition to your workflow for sure, and a welcomed one at that. The possibilities are endless and my suggestion would be to go through the tutorials on the website to get a jump start on your learning.

Rating: 10 out of 10

(This review is brought to you courtesy of "Layers Magazine": http://layersmagazine.com/).