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

This is the next in 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 about the other categories in the Library.

The Library palette includes much more content than just figures. It has a repository of content organized by category, including figures, poses, expressions, hair, hands, props, lights and cameras.

Accessing Other Library Categories
From the figure thumbnails, you can access the Library categories again by clicking the Category button located at the top of the Library palette, as shown in Figure 1. You can also access the various categories directly using the small circle category buttons to the left of the current category title or from a list using the pop-up menu.

[Figure 1] Library palette navigation controls.

Loading Library Poses and Motions
The second category in the Library holds figure poses. To access the available poses from the Library, click the Poses category and navigate to the folder containing the types of poses you want to apply to the current figure. Within each folder are thumbnails of the various poses. With a pose thumbnail selected, click the Change Pose button at the bottom of the Library palette. The selected pose is then applied to the current figure. Figure 2 shows several pose thumbnails contained in the Action folder with one applied to the default figure.

In addition to poses, the Poses category also holds some animated motions. Motion thumbnails are identified by the number of frames listed in the upper-right corner of the thumbnail, as shown in Figure 3a (left).

[Figure 2] Library palette navigation controls.

Loading Facial Expressions
The Expressions category in the Library holds various expressions to show emotion, as shown in Figure 3b. These expressions can be edited using the settings found in the Face Room. The Face Room is covered in more detail in Chapter 9, "Creating a Face and Facial Expressions." To load an expression from the Library, simply select it and click the Apply Library Preset button. The selected expression will replace the current face setting on the current figure.

Strand-based hair can be edited using the controls in the Hair Room. You can learn more about using prop-based hair in Chapter 5, "Dealing with Props," and more about using strand-based hair in Chapter 10, "Adding Hair."

Loading Hair
The next three categories let you load hair, hands and props. The Hair category includes both the older prop-based hair and the newer dynamic strand-based hair. Strand-based hair is identified by a label to the right of the thumbnail that says, "Strand," as shown in Figure 4.