Poser and its problems for long form animation production usage
Poser has time and time again proven to be a simple, yet powerful tool in the world of 3d porn creation. Its versatile nature has been exposed through a bevy of high quality custom content created by a venerable army of hobbyists and artisans. But in its strength is also its weakness.
Because of its ease of use and humble production beginnings, Poser lacks the true flexibility of a production grade tool. Areas such as light and camera control, animation exporting capability and advanced animation tools for key framing or soft body dynamics limit its use in a longer form animation pipeline. If this shortcoming will be addressed in future versions (the current version is 7) is unknown.
Until that time, quality 3D animation production lies most firmly in a combination of higher-end tools such as Maya and studio max both currently owned by the same company. In order to create working soft body and cloth dynamics the poser content must be individually exported using standard OBJ or DXF formats and converted to a manageable polygonal mesh. The converted mesh must then not exceed the memory allotment in the import program in its chosen method of use. One example would be a scene that features a fully clothed figure that is disrobed by another fully clothed figure. If the underlying mesh of each figure will be featured in the nude, then management of both the underlying nude figures and the overlay clothing mesh object must be budgeted as well as the memory requirements of the dynamic computation which will be calculated using the mesh data objects that are being provided.