Poser Figure Artist

Poser Figure Artist is a aimed primarily at traditional artists as a replacement for wooden mannequins and human figure models. Its manufacturer, e frontier, insists that it isn’t just a limited version of Poser, but a tutorial-driven app in its own right. Its features include tutorial content tailored towards figure drawing rather than additional Poser tools.

So Figure Artist provides plenty of teaching content to help with the creative as well as technical sides of figure art, and its content library is easier to work with than Poser’s. However, Figure Artist’s renderer is straight out of Poser, its navigation tools and lighting are taken from Poser, and its figures and poses come straight from Poser. Basically, Figure Artist is a cut-down version of Poser.

Essentially, e frontier has created a new interface with just the basic tools concentrated in a way that makes posing and lighting as easy as possible. There’s a good range of Poser’s figures, poses and props, and you can easily create your own poses and add them to the library or expand them with content from sites such as Content Paradise and Renderosity.

Dynamic cloth would have been useful for studies involving draped fabric and clothes, but there is sketch rendering as well as realistic (IBL with Ambient Occlusion) rendering.

Figure Artist is great for anatomical drawing, but if you’re after extra features and animation tools, stick with Poser.