Poser People and 3D Studio

[erickdt]

I was wondering if anyone here had any experience using people from Poser in their renderings as scale figures. Like many of you, I struggle with what is the best method of adding people into my 3D scenes to help my clients get a sense of scale. In a perfect world, these people would be 3D geometry that could be rendered as part of the lighting (GI) solution (I'm using VRay) as opposed to something that has to be added in post. I bought and have tried aXYZ people but they were not well recieved here in the office. To many, they (specifically their faces) look like those of people who've just seen the "Ring" movie. Because of this, I've reverted back to RPCs which I typically add in post. Lately, I've been using render passes of the RPCs as masks from which I make "white figures" which gives a nicer, cleaner look IMO. Still this solution is not ideal as it adds another step to my whole workflow and even though it looks passable it's still doesn't look great. Also, RPCs look pretty crappy when they're viewed from a high POV such as what you might see in a flyover...

 

So then I was interested when I saw a WIP post today from one of our fellow CG Architect members that used a person created in Poser and, I assume, exported to MAX. To me, this figure looked much better than anything I've seen from aXYZ or Archvision (RPCs).

 

I have played around with Poser before although, at the time, I was using FormZ for modeling and rendering which was not so great at excepting models exported from Poser. Now that I'm using MAX for my renderings I'm thinking that this option has become a viable one for me. I like the ease of use that Poser has and I also like the price (>$300).

 

So I'm wondering, have many people tried this method? How has it worked out?