All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the first of a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to configure the interface and change preference settings.

Once you are happy with the layout of the interface controls, you can use the UI Dots, shown in Figure 1 to save the configuration. For the Document Window, you can use the General Preference dialog box to set its preferred state. There are several other preferences that impact the interface you can set as well.

[Figure 1] The UI Dots.

Using the UI Dots
If you like to use several different interface configurations, you can save each interface configuration using the UI Dots options in the Memory Dots control. To use a Memory Dot, simply click a dot to save the current UI layout. Clicking again on the dot recalls the saved layout. Holding down the Alt key while clicking a dot clears it.

Using Preferences
Poser lets you access the General Preferences dialog box with the Edit, General Preferences (Ctrl+K) command. This General Preferences dialog box includes five separate panels -- Document, Interface, Library, Render and Misc. The Library panel options are covered in Chapter 2, "Using the Poser Library," and the Render panel options are covered in Chapter 16, "Rendering Scenes."