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 how to set figure properties, height and style.

When a figure is selected, you can use the Properties panel of the Parameters/Properties palette, shown in Figure 1, to change several properties that are unique to the selected figure, such as its name and whether it is visible.

Naming Figures
The default names of Figure 1 and Figure 2 can get confusing if you have several figures in the scene, so you should try to name your figures something descriptive like "Scary dude with a bad attitude who likes to kick dogs that cross his path." Accessing the Properties palette lets you type a new name for the selected figure. Once a figure has a new name, this name will appear in the Figure Selection list.

Hiding Figures
With several figures in a scene, the redraw time can slow down, but you can speed up the redraw time by hiding the figures that you aren't working with. To hide the selected figure, simply disable the Visible option in the Properties palette. This won't delete the figure, but only hides it from view. Enabling the Visible option will make the figure visible in the Document Window again. You can also hide the current figure using Figure, Hide Figure (Ctrl/Command+H). The Figure, Show All Figures menu command makes all hidden figures visible.

[Figure 2] Various figure heights.

Setting Other Properties
The Visible in Ray Tracing option causes the figure's reflection to be cast to other objects in the scene when ray tracing is enabled during the rendering phase. Raytracing is covered in Chapter 16, "Rendering Scenes."

The Displacement Bounds value is used to set the maximum depth that a displacement map can indent an object. Displacement maps are discussed in more detail in Chapter 8, "Creating and Applying Materials."

Setting a Figure's Height
The default figure appears using a standard adult height, but you can change the selected figure's height using the Figure, Figure Height menu command. The height of each option is measured relative to the size of the head. The height options include Baby, Toddler, Child, Juvenile, Adolescent, Ideal Adult, Fashion Model and Heroic Model.

Figure 2 shows each of the various figure heights for the James figure. Notice how the body's proportion is changed along with its height.