MOODSTRControl Your Mood – Control Your Life

Description

Create Your Own Catoons and Animations

Make your characters talk with built-in Audio Recording and Lip-Syncing. View larger. Anime Studio Debut 8 Create Your Own Cartoons and Animations Create Animations in Minutes The fun, quick and affordable way to create animations, Anime Studio is the ideal solution for first-time animators, hobbyists and digital artists. A Beginner's Mode and Character Wizard allow you to design your own ready-to-animate characters in minutes. Organize Projects with the Timeline, Keyframes and Layers Move your character naturally along the timeline with keyframes, creating smooth animations. Use multiple layers to edit your animation and add sound, special effects and more. The Beginner's Mode gets you started quickly. View larger. Use Bone Tools to Quickly Animate Your Characters A unique bone-rigging toolset allows you to create a skeleton that can be easily manipulated to animate characters, simple drawings, or objects in your animation. Create Your Own Art or Import Content to Get Started Quickly Draw your own art with intuitive vector-based draw and paint tools or use pre-built content from the Library to get started. Easily import your hand-drawn sketches or existing artwork from popular graphics programs and automatically convert them to ready-to-animate vector drawings. Animate your creations using bones. View larger. Create an endless amount of ready-to-animate characters using the Character Wizard. View larger. Share Everywhere Export to the most popular web and video formats, or upload and share on YouTube or Facebook directly from within Anime Studio. Utilize an Array of Powerful and Versatile Features Free Characters: Use pre-built characters including Jace, Liz, Lightning Man, Dexter and Anime Boy. All are royalty-free, vector-based creations. Import and Export Art: Bring in your Illustrator or layered Adobe Photoshop files; instantly gather all your project files in one location. Tons of Tutorials: Access videos and sample files to master powerful features and start animating right away. Bring Your Photos to Life: Import your favorite images from your digital camera, attach bones and easily turn your photographs into animated movies. Features New! Character Wizard Creating your own characters has never been easier. Quickly design ready-to-animate characters using the built-in Character Wizard. Select a preset, dial in the body proportions and choose from dozens of predesigned 2D components such as hands, feet, mouths, eyes, noses and heads. The look and feel of each character is fully customizable with the help of easy to use sliders. Choose from various clothing choices and custom color combinations, or create a virtually endless amount of fun and different characters using the Randomize feature. Each character comes with multiples views and can be imported with a complete walk cycle, allowing you to have your characters walk in your scene with the click of a button. Even attach head shots of you and your friends for fast and easy jib-jab style animation. The Content Library is packed with hundreds of ready-to-use characters, props, scenes and more. View larger. New! Automatic Image Tracing Quickly bring your scanned drawings and photos to life by converting them to ready-to-animate vector art with the click of a button. Color your vector art, resize without loss in image quality and animate using bones. Existing drawings such as heads can quickly get attached to a pre-animated character that you created with the Character Wizard, providing versatility and speed when creating your own characters. New! Enhanced Drawing Tools Combine the freehand tool's smart welding feature with the Delete Edge tool to create complex shapes quickly. This eliminates the need for precise drawing, giving you the freedom to sketch as you desire. Additional brush styles have been included and optional rounded end caps have been added to the drawing tools. Apply a cut-out style effect to any character or object. View larger. Quickly convert existing drawings to vector art. View larger. Anime Studio Debut 8 offers an intuitive interface with powerful tools. View larger. New! Vector Shape Selector Quickly find and edit vector layers using the Vector Shape Selector. You no longer have to worry about naming each layer to easily find the one you're looking for. Just click on a shape in your project, and the corresponding layer automatically gets selected for editing. This eliminates tedious searching for the layer you want to edit. New! Layer Outline Effects Quickly apply a cut-out style effect to any character or object. Set the width and color for each outline and customize the look and feel of your animation. New! Enhanced User Interface Anime Studio 8 introduces new User Interface colors, allowing you to choose from various preset color schemes or create your own. The new Smart Tool Palette provides a less cluttered interface and a better user experience by hiding irrelevant tools. New! More Ready-To-Use Content Anime Studio Debut provides an extensive content library with hundreds of pieces of ready-to-use content that includes fully rigged, vector-based characters like Jace, Thorn, Anime Boy and Liz, as well as props, scenes, action words, stock video and images, sound effects and more so you can start creating your own animations right away. Beginner's Mode helps you start animating right away Incorporate sound clips with integrated audio recording and automatic lip-syncing Combine your animation with audio and video elements Apply cartoon effects to any image or video Integrate special effects such as motion blur and shadows Track, zoom and roll the camera Access the Content Library for hundreds of ready-to-use characters, props, scenes and more Pen tablet support simulates drawing on paper Built-in tutorials and sample files get you up and running quickly Import Quicktime, AVI or MPEG-4 video Export your animations in SWF, AVI or MOV format Render in popular formats and sizes Upload directly to Facebook and YouTube

Features

• Complete animation software designed for digital artists--perfect for first time animators, hobbyists and digital enthusiasts
• Create art using intuitive vector-based draw, paint and fill tools;
• Choose from pre-built content in the library or automatically convert existing sketches to ready-to-animate vector drawings
• Built-in Character Wizard lets you design your own characters complete with walk cycles, expressions and more
• Then make them talk with built-in Lip Syncing
• Export to the most popular web and video formats, or upload and share on YouTube or Facebook directly from within Anime Studio

Description

Poser 9 is the world’s easiest way to create amazing art and animation with 3D characters. Poser’s simple to learn tools and included characters let you focus on making art. Poser comes with over 3 gigabyte of ready-to-pose humans and animals, textures, props and 3D scene elements. In the Face Room, customize Poser characters from facial photographs. Add dynamic hair and clothing. Dress Poser’s virtual stage with props, lights and cameras to build 3D scenes. Animate and render scenes into photorealistic images and video for web, print, and film projects. Graphic artists, illustrators and animators all get creative with Poser!

Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation Poser 9 is the world's easiest way to create amazing art and animation with 3D characters. Poser's simple to learn tools and included characters let you focus on making art. Poser comes with over 3 gigabyte of ready-to-pose humans and animals, textures, props and 3D scene elements. In the Face Room, customize Poser characters from facial photographs. Add dynamic hair and clothing. Dress Poser's virtual stage with props, lights and cameras to build 3D scenes. Animate and render scenes into photorealistic images and video for web, print, and film projects. Graphic artists, illustrators and animators all get creative with Poser! Poser makes it easy to create gorgeous 3D art by dragging and dropping scenes elements and characters into position on a virtual stage. Add lights, cameras and render images and animation. View larger. Poser 9 provides robust OpenGL real time previews with ambient occlusion, soft shadows, and normal mapping making scene creation easier than ever before. View larger. Poser's 3D figures can automatically talk in sync to an imported sound file using the included TalkDesigner. View larger. With over 3 GB of included content you can get started building scenes immediately. Simply drag props, lights, cameras, figures and clothing from the library directly into the 3D work space. View larger. Transform your 3Dscenes into images and animation using Poser's powerful FireFly rendering engine with support for Raytraced Indirect Lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Motion Blur and Subsurface Scattering. View larger. Poser puts the most powerful controls right at your fingertips. With a right click, access the most important settings for every scene element. View larger. Subsurface Scattering, new to Poser 9, provides translucency for hyper-realistic human skin. View larger. Subsurface Scattering permits light to pass through the surface of skin for brilliantly lifelike images. View larger. Many stone, plastic and wax surfaces come to life with the use of Subsurface Scattering. Apply this effect to any object with the click of a single Wacro in the material room. View larger. Poser includes fully rigged, posable and textured 3D figures that can be infinitely customized with imported facial photographs, built in morph targets and ethnic texture sets. Image by Daniel Gabriel Scott Murray. View larger. Poser figures are anatomically accurate, and can be clothed with a full collection of hair styles applied to them. View larger. The Poser FireFly engine is perfect for rendering your scenes into images, and with our improved blurred reflections in version 9, realism has never been better. View larger. Poser is perfect for creating fantastic worlds that are only limited by your imagination. Image by Christel Dall. View larger. Add new characters to Poser to create cartoons, comics, sci-fi and fantasy images and animation. Image by Eric VanDycke. View larger. For amazing science fiction images with characters like robots, there's no better way to create than Poser. Image by Brian Romero. View larger. Need to recreate historic scenes? Poser is the right choice. Image by Brian Romero. View larger. Poser is used by numerous artists to create fantasy images for graphic novels and story illustration. Image by Paul Francis. View larger. For medical and scientific illustration, Poser includes accurate human skeletons and fully detailed human figures. Image by Stefan Werner. View larger. Poser 9 includes more features than ever before: Real-time OpenGL Scene Preview With Poser 9's OpenGL improvements, you'll see accurate, real-time previews of Spot, Point, Infinite and IBL (Image Based Lights) Lights, Shadows, with Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Normal Maps and Back Facing Polygons. The Light Properties control allows the user to toggle specific lights to preview in the scene, with accumulated brightness for each selected light. MIP Map support improves performance when previewing large textures. Our OpenGL hardware improvements preview textures more efficiently, with reliable onscreen display of lights, shadows, and color, for smarter, quicker interactive scene creation. Subsurface Scattering Skin, wax, and marble are just some of the materials that are translucent when struck by light. To recreate this subtle yet crucial effect when rendering these materials in Poser, we've incorporated a set of easy to configure Subsurface Scattering Material Nodes. New Nodes include Subsurface Skin, Custom Scatter, and basic Scatter. The Scatter Node includes a number of optimized pre-sets for Skin, Marble, Milk, Fruit and Vegetables. With Poser's new Subsurface Material nodes, you'll transform your scenes into rendered masterpieces with lifelike translucent surfaces. Rendering Performance Improvements Poser's FireFly Rendering Engine keeps getting better with numerous improvements in reflections, transparencies, depth of field and 3D motion blur quality, netting visibly smoother results without significantly impacting render times. We've invested time in Indirect Lighting (IDL) which now can be combined with Ambient Occlusion (AO), and is faster when rendering transparency. We've also enabled Light Emitting Objects which are invisible in final renderings yet contribute indirect illumination to the scene. In addition to our new Subsurface Scattering Nodes, we've included a new Custom Scatter Node to support effects such as bioluminescent skin. Weight Map Rigging High-end professional 3D applications like 3ds Max and Maya have set the standard for vertex Weight Map Rigging, and now both Poser provides the most open vertex Weight Mapping support available. Weight Map Rigging offers several benefits including smoother bending folds and bulges with vertex by vertex control over every bend or bulge. Weight Maps can be added to any joint bend, to twist and scaling channels and can be used to control bulges. Plus Poser takes the standard of Weight Map Rigging several steps further with support for Hybrid Joint Rigging (combining traditional Poser Sphere/Capsule Zones with Weight Maps), using either single mesh geometry or traditionally grouped geometry, and enables Weight Maps or zones to affect any number of body parts beyond the current joint. Poser's new Weight Map Rigging provides a platform that will support third party figures that use Weight Mapping, by expanding the open, well documented and easily editable Poser PZ3 file format, to encourage creativity and user driven enhancements to Poser figures. Grouping Objects Need a way to move, scale or hide a bunch of objects in a Poser scene, at the same time? Now you can simply add any number of scene elements, from figures and props to lights, into a Grouping Object. They can be moved, rotated, scaled and animated or even hidden and revealed. Create multiple Grouping Objects to hold different areas of a scene, or related props and figures. Adding selected scene elements into any Grouping Object is easy using our powerful new Context Menu controls. This significant new feature will change how you manage your scenes, providing you plenty of control over whole groups of objects in that scene. Expanded Context Menus Sometimes, it's the simple things that make the biggest difference. Poser's expanded Context Menus will vastly improve interaction and scene creation, and change the way you work with Poser forever. Six unique Context Menus have been developed for Figures, Actors, Objects, Lights, Cameras and Backgrounds to provide quick access to the most useful menu operations including selecting, toggling IK on/off, copying symmetry in poses, pointing lights, conforming clothing, setting parenting, changing light types, and even hiding/revealing all items in a Grouping Object. Once you start using Poser's new Context Menus, you'll enjoy working and playing with Poser all over again. Full Scene Category in Library In the past, if you wanted to re-use a Poser scene with that perfect environment settings, lights, cameras, props and dependencies and even render settings, you had to build it, save it, then find and import it. With the new Scene Category in the Library you simply add that full Poser scene with lights, cameras, all props and figures in place, and with all dependencies right into the Library. From there your new scenes can be dragged directly from the Library into the Poser workspace. For Poser content developers this new feature will enable you to deliver fully constructed scenes with dependencies and optimal render settings that require less user support and are far easier to use. Multi-select Drag and Drop Library Support When we introduced Drag and Drop support in Poser's Library, our users found it so much easier to apply materials, or conform clothing, or drop a pose right onto a figure. With the Library's new Multi-select feature, you'll be able to select several items of clothing and drag them right onto a figure and auto-conform them in one step. But it gets even better when working with multiple categories of items in your Favorites; Multi-select a hairstyle, several clothing items and a pose all at once, then click and drag them right onto your target figure. Poser will automatically apply the items. It doesn't get much easier. Within the Library, you'll be able to drag and drop items from folder to folder making it easy to reorganize your Content. Morphing Tool Tablet Support If you own a Wacom pressure sensitive tablet, Poser is going to make you a very happy camper. We've engineered Wacom tablet support into the Morph Tool so you can have much finer control when creating morphs. Vary brush strength with pressure for any brush size you've set. The Morph Tool is powerful, but with tablet support, it's gotten even better. The new 'Flatten' option for Morphing Tool Create mode moves points toward a "best fit" plane determined by the affected vertices. Constraint Channels and Constraint Objects For our animators that have been looking for a way to animate a ball being throw or caught, we've introduced Constraint Channels and Objects. Basically, the Constraint Object is an animatable handle for an object that will allow you to parent it to a figure's hand as it winds up for the throw, and then have the object leave the hand and fly through the air as if it's being thrown. Constraints are a simple to use feature that will permit all kinds of cool animation effects. Light Emitting Objects We changed the face of rendering in Poser when we introduced Indirect Lighting (IDL). Poser users quickly discovered that, with high ambient values to cast light that with a few tweaks, they could open up a huge array of lighting effects. Now you can create Light Emitters; toggle off visibility in rendering for objects, yet still enable them to cast light. Build light domes, environment domes and large area lights to cast ambient light without being rendered in the scene. Combined with our new Poser Scene Library category, this feature will be a great way to deliver a fully lit IDL environment. Frame Selected Object In complex scenes it can be a little challenging to keep your camera focused on an area that you're working on using Poser's original camera controls. To help out, we've introduced the Frame Selected Object Camera. With the click of a button, your current camera will zoom in on the selected object, allowing you take a closer look at exactly where you're working on. This makes it easier to navigate in and out of your deep scenes and saves you time when creating them. Orbit Selected Object Mode Poser also includes a new mode as a companion feature to the new Frame Selected Object Camera. Simply toggle on the Orbit Selected mode and your current camera will rotate around the center point of the currently selected object. This makes it easier to focus on a selected element, and view it from every direction by spinning Camera trackball controls. Faster Dynamic Hair Our engineers spent time under the hood to speed up Dynamic Hair. Now Poser's powerful Dynamic Hair calculates collisions faster and renders it faster as well. Pre-render Texture Caching We've heard your requests for faster pre-render texture handling and delivered two new methods that will save time the minute you press that Render Now button. Poser now preprocesses all scene textures in the background making use of your multicore processor, in prep for that first render, and can cache those textures session to session if you desire. Choose between traditional and the new Crisp' texture filtering options. Python 2.7 Support Poser keeps improving and so does Python. We now provide Python 2.7 support to take full advantage of improvements to the scripting language. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Support Poser 9 is now fully Cocoa based and supported on Apple's latest OS X 10.7 Lion. Why use Poser 9? Creating 3D illustrations that include people or digital characters is time-consuming and hard. Designers and artists want to create art and animations with 3D characters, without having to create those 3D characters from scratch. We don't blame you! That's why Poser and Poser Pro come with everything you need to quickly add life to your project. Poser lets you focus on the story you want to tell by freeing you from having to build the actors and props in your story. Quickly customize and pose your characters on the stage, set up the scene with props, backgrounds and architectural elements to support that story and then create your final 3D art and animations. Getting the right lighting effects on figures and objects is difficult. We changed the face of rendering in Poser when we introduced Indirect Lighting (IDL). And it became obvious when Poser users discovered that IDL enabled objects with high ambient values to cast light that with a few tweaks we could open up a huge array of lighting effects. Now you can create Light Emitters; toggle off visibility in rendering for objects, yet still enable them to cast light. Build light domes, environment domes and large area lights to cast ambient light without being rendered in the scene. Combined with our new Poser Scene Library category, this feature will be a great way to deliver a fully lit IDL environment. Poser 9's improved Firefly render engine now supports Indirect Lighting with Irradiance Caching for Global Illumination effects and even supports rendering with Ambient Occlusion. New Shader nodes enable Subsurface Scattering for luminescent skin tones and Custom Scattering for bioluminescent effects. Poser's physically correct light fall-off produces more photo-real final renderings. Skin, wax, and marble are just some of the materials that are translucent when struck by light. To recreate this subtle yet crucial effect when rendering these materials in Poser, we've incorporated a set of easy to configure Subsurface Scattering Material Nodes. New Nodes include Subsurface Skin, Custom Scatter, and basic Scatter. The Scatter Node includes a number of optimized pre-sets for Skin, Marble, Milk, Fruit and Vegetables. With Poser's new Subsurface Material nodes, you'll transform your scenes into rendered masterpieces with lifelike translucent surfaces. Putting actual people into dangerous, inaccessible or imaginary places to serve as a model for digital image or video creation isn't possible or practical. Take crime scene recreation for example: you need an imaginary 3D world where you can place all the suspects, victims, weapons, explosions, and more and play out their interactions without anyone getting hurt. In fact, Poser Pro is a critical tool used by the production crew for the television drama Bones. They use it weekly to pose and animate their re-enactments--check out this video straight from one of their episodes. Industrial and architectural designers, medical illustrators, product engineers and graphic artists often need virtual humans to interact with a design, to convey a sense of scale or draw attention to a feature in a designed product. Poser lets you work with 3D actors in scenes that would be impossible to duplicate in the real world. Historic scenes, imaginary or fantasy scenes, sci-fi and superhero scenes are easy to create in Poser, so you can let your imagination run wild and build exactly the world you want, and populate that world with 3D characters. At your fingers tips is a huge library of included ready-to-pose and easy-to-customize characters with clothing and props that will fit into almost any scene you can imagine. Customize those figures with poses, expressions and face room morphs and set-up cameras and lights to support any perspective, point of view or lighting condition.

Features

• Get Started Fast - Drag and drop characters and props right onto Poser?s virtual stage to create 3D scenes, add lights and cameras, then render away!
• Customize Characters - Start with one of the many included ready-to-pose 3D characters and customize them using your photos or hundreds of face shaping morphs to produce unique characters in minutes.
• Rendering Styles - Poser?s powerful rendering engine will transform any 3D scene you?ve created into photorealistic, cartoon or sketch style images and animations.
• Animate Easily - Poser?s key-frame animation tools make it easy to transition between poses, or make a character walk or talk, throw a ball or even dance.
• 3D Characters for Any Project - Create art or animation for graphic design, web, fine art and illustration projects. From comic books and animated shorts to architectural and industrial design, Poser adds character.

Description

Responding to popular demand, Dan Coates has compiled a complete collection of 77 great songs for all occasions, to be played by the advanced piano player. Titles include love and wedding favorites, Broadway standards, pop and country ballads, movie and TV hits, and many more. Two selections "Colors of the Wind" and "Star Wars" are included on the Royal Conservatory of Music Popular Selection List (2009 Ed.) (These arrangements were originally published in item #AF9842.)

Features

• Book Pages: 308
• Arr. Dan Coates
• Format Book

Description

Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation.

Poser 8 is the world's most complete solution for creating art and animation with 3D characters. With Poser, it's easy to make 3D art. Poser includes over 2.5 gigabytes of ready-to-pose human and animal figures, textures, props and 3D scene elements. Generate new characters from your facial photographs. Add hair and clothing. Dress Poser's virtual stage with props, lights and cameras to build 3D scenes. Animate and render your scene into photorealistic images and video for web, print, and film projects. Export 3D figures to add characters to other 3D applications. Artists, hobbyists, illustrators and animators--get creative with Poser! Poser 8's easy to use interface makes it easy to create 3D character images and animation. Click to enlarge. Easily Create 3D Character Art and Animation Poser 8 is better than ever Along with 8 brand new 3D humans, Poser 8 includes an improved user interface to maximize your workspace while providing better workflow, a new search-enabled library so you can find, organize and use your content easier, a dependant parameter tool that lets you teach objects in the scene to interact with each other, cross body morph brushes to smoothly sculpt a figure across every body part, new photorealistic rendering features that more accurately reproduce light and shadows, and improved character rigging for even better character bending. To save time, Poser 8 has been performance optimized so you can pose your characters and render them faster on today's multiple processor systems. Poser 8 includes: All Poser's included figures and 3D content are fully textured using our powerful node-based shader system. Click to enlarge. Turn your 3D scene into an artistic sketch using Poser 8's sketch designer. Click to enlarge. Automatically generate animated figures that can walk or run through your 3D scene. Click to enlarge. Poser 8's powerful cloth engine lets you transform any object or clothing prop into dynamic cloth that stretches, drapes and flows naturally, even over an animated figure. Click to enlarge. With Poser you can produce photorealistic images and animations, or render in styles including cartoon tones, sketch renderings, silhouettes, wireframes and even Flash. Click to enlarge. Import a spoken word sound file, and with the included Talk Designer, your Poser 8 figures will speak in sync with the sound. Click to enlarge. 8 new figures The new set of eight 3D humans included with Poser 8 are the most advanced figures ever included with the application, and are a showcase for new Poser 8 features. Built from scratch, the figures are performance optimized for the polygon count and have custom photorealistic textures. Rigged using Poser 8's new multiple sphere and capsule fall off zone technology, problematic joints such as hips and shoulders now bend with more realism than any figure on the market. By using the new Dependent Parameter tool to link deformers to specific joint positions, areas such as knees, elbows, chest and collar joints have smoother folds, less stretching and more realism. The new Poser 8 figures are offered in four pairs of male/female couples with European features, African features, Asian features and Hispanic features. The Poser 8 new figures are fully compliant with the Face Room, the Walk Designer and Talk Designer, and via the use of Wardrobe Wizard, much of the included legacy clothing content has been converted to work directly on the figures. ~1.5GB of new Poser 8 Content In addition to the new set of figures, Poser 8 includes an array of new content supplied by third party partners as well content created by the Smith Micro team of 3D artists. A new art-school inspired default manikin opens each new scene, and will serve as a remarkable reference figure for artists. Fully articulated human skeletons that match the male and female figures body topology are included. Various new poses, animations, light sets, props, and accessories to help new users get started are included in the Poser 8 content installer. Poser 8 also includes an additional 1.5GB of legacy Poser 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 content. New User Interface Poser 8 offers a new evolved user interface, preserving the elements that Poser users are accustomed to, while presenting them in a more concise layout that takes better advantage of various screen resolutions. The new layout produces a cleaner work environment so artists can focus on the project. All controls are presented in floating palettes that can be docked for consistency, session to session, or floated to free up space. Dependent Parameters Poser 8 unlocks an advanced user secret with the new Dependent Parameter palette. Poser 8 lets the artist create new Master Parameters or turn any existing Parameter into a Master Parameter that can drive any other editable parameters in the scene. Complex interactions can be created such as Full Body Morphs, Partial Body Morphs, Advanced Body Controls, Joint Controlled Morph Targets, Joint Controlled Deformers and Parameter Controlled Scene Assets. Indirect Lighting By bouncing light and color from object to adjacent object in a scene, Poser 8's Global Illumination system can render images that appear so realistic they can fool the untrained eye into thinking the images are photos rather than 3D renderings. OpenGL Preview Improvements Preview now displays up to 8 lights and their accumulated values, sorted by intensity. The light properties controller allows you to select each light you wish to illuminate in the scene preview. Content Management System / Library The new library presents content by category, but with a tighter list view with expanding previews and additional data for each content item. Content items can be loaded into the scene using the traditional Poser UI controls or can now be dragged directly from the Library into the scene. The Poser 8 Library also supports keyword search. Type in a keyword to find exactly what you looking for. Add any selected items to your favorites. Cross Body Part Morph Creation With Poser 8 comes a significant improvement to the current Morphing Tool. Now you can dial in a Morph Brush and paint morphs across body parts. Easily create effects such as muscle bulges, scales, bumps, horns, veins or wounds; it's only limited by your imagination. Improved Rigging System Poser 8 has improved upon the existing joint Falloff Zone rigging system by adding any number of new zones to a joint, while adding a new capsule shape to the existing sphere, and allowing the rigger to either multiply or add the Falloff Zone values. This system will permit figure creators to rig challenging areas such as hips and shoulders with more precision, yielding better bending figures. Tone Mapping and Exposure Tone Mapping helps control very bright and dark areas in an image to produce better, less blown out final renderings with deeper contrast. The feature is very useful, helping to bring the brightest areas back into a reproducible range. Two modes of Tone Mapping are available for differing effects: Exponential Tone Mapping and HSV Tone Mapping. Exposure values are editable when either Exponential or HSV Tone Mapping is selected. Physically Correct Light Falloff For Spot and Point lights, Poser 8 lets users attenuate (control) falloff to more closely reproduce real-world light behaviors. Constant falloff replicates the previous Poser behavior, and Inverse Linear and Inverse Square add two new methods for getting light to appear more realistic. Normal Mapping Normal Mapping is a resource-efficient technique to add the appearance of complexity and surface detail to 3D objects. It can transform object surfaces, making them appear more intricate than they actually are, without the added overhead of polygonal detail. This saves designers valuable time and offers increased creative flexibility by allowing faster and more light-weight computation of rendered results. Performance Optimizations Figure/Actor pre-lighting and picking Bending on multi-core/multi-processor hardware Improved multi-processor support for better scalability when rendering Cloth simulation multithreaded/optimized Increased performance for opening/handling complex scenes Poser 8 Uses: Professional 3D graphics professionals 3D Hobby/Enthusiast Market Comic book / graphic novel creators General Purpose 3D Users Upgrade Poser Users Art Students Traditional Artists/Sculptors Poser provides a number of professional users with a fast, easy to access resource for 3D humans, animals, and other scene assets. Professional users include: Architectural illustrators, industrial designers, medical illustrators, graphic designers, editorial illustrators, book illustrators, informational graphics, advertising illustration, web illustration, interactive content, story boarding, lighting and theatrical set designers, film/video production 3D hobbyists and enthusiasts who dabble in 3D for personal satisfaction, experiment with Poser to gain 3D experience, and may use Poser to expand into new careers, or create a graphic novel, sci-fi art, fantasy art, or develop a screen play. Comic book creators and graphic novelists use Poser render images and animations to create their own titles. Single images, multiple page comics and graphic novels delivered via print and digital media are a great use of Poser. If you work with other 3D applications such as Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Modo, Lightwave, Truespace, Bruce, or Vue; Poser is a perfect way to include 3D character content you're your projects. Art students looking to gain practical 3D animation experience hone their skills working with Poser characters as part of course work, in art school classes or for extra-curricular experience.

Features

• Poser 8 is an affordable, powerful, yet easy to use 3D character animation solution
• Includes 3D character tools and over 2.5GB of ready to use scene content and figures; no need to model 3D characters from scratch
• Includes 8 brand new, ready-to-pose, fully textured human figures with over 400 morphs and body controls to fully customize each character
• Renders photorealistic or stylized images and videos for print, web or animation projects
• With included Wardrobe Wizard, fit your Poser clothing assets to the new Poser 8 figures

Description

It's your zoo and you're in charge! Uncage your imagination as you build the most fun and beautiful zoo ever. Keep the animals happy and your guests will go ape. Now you can monkey around with all three popular games - Zoo Tycoon and expansion packs Marine ManiaTM and Dinosaur Digs - for a "thrillogy" of fun!Features:Play with all of your favorite land, aquatic, and prehistoric animals.Zoo Tycoon Strategy Guide (electronic on CD-ROM - Learn fascinating animal facts.More than 100 animals in total.Over 500 objects including exhibits, attractions and animal toys.30 challenging scenarios, test your inner zookeeper.Interactive tutorials and easy-to-learn gameplay.Bonus Endangered Species Theme Pack.System Requirements:Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP Graphics card: 32MB - INTEGRATED GRAPHICS CHIPSETS & LAPTOPS ARE NOT SUPPORTED. System Memory: 128 MB Processor: 233 MHz or higher Free Hard Disc Space: 1.4GB. Requires: DVD-ROM driveDIRECTX 8.1 or higher Sound Card: DX compatible

An insidiously addictive simulation game, Zoo Tycoon allows players to create their own zoo, but not just any zoo. It's completely free-form: Start with fences for your exhibits, then pick animals and give them toys, foliage, and anything else you want. For your customers, you can lay down paths to lead them around, then add food stands, amusement rides, even maps and trash cans. Not sure what you need? The zoo advisors will tell you how to make the animals happy, and the customers themselves will tell you what they're looking for, be it snacks, more animals, or anything else. There's also a vast amount of background information on each critter--its diet, its habitat, etc.--which can be useful when you're adding a macrauchenia or a Loch Ness Monster. In all, you can choose over 100 animals, plus countless habitat and park embellishments. What makes Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection especially compelling is its inclusion of the expansion packs Marine Mania and Dinosaur Digs, so you can add dolphin shows to your zoo, or even a T-Rex or wooly mammoth. Be sure to maintain those worn-out fences, though, or you could have big trouble on your hands. Zoo Tycoon is a great game for kids because while they'll have terrific fun crafting the zoo of their dreams, they'll also get a reality lesson about what customers want, and how their choice of expenditures ultimately affect the bottom line (that nacho stand sounds tasty, but is it making money?). If you've made a good zoo, customers will be happy, and the money will roll in. And it's also the kind of game grown-ups can enjoy, because there are so many possibilities. Be wary, however, of trying to sneak in 20 minutes of play before bedtime because you'll probably stay up a lot longer than you planned. (Ages 7 and older) --David Horiuchi Pros: Great game for kids and parents to play together. Endless replay possibilities Educational value in its animal information and "real world" economics Cons Sometimes tiresome trying to get an animal's exhibit just right How much free time do you have to spare?

Features

• Start out with the original Zoo Tycoon -- you'll have total control over a zoo, and create the animal displays that will impress and amaze people
• Create concession stands, take care of the animals and handle problems like escaped lions -- all while balancing the book & trying to turn a profit. It's fun AND challenging!
• Take it a step further with the Marine Mania expansion pack -- all-new exhibit materials, building and attractions for creating a beautiful aquarium display and dolphin show
• Dinosar Digs gives you the chance to create your own dinosaur park -- bring T-Rexes and brontosaurs to life and keep them from eating the customers
• Also comes with the Endangered Species Theme Pack, featuring a dozen unique animals, 40 objects, and 3 new scenarios -- plus bonus animals available for download

Description

Build The Ultimate Zoo! Product Information This place is a real zoo and you're in charge! Go wild building the most fun and beautiful zoo you can imagine. Care forunpredictable and untamed animals-and those are just the guests. Plan wisely, if animals don't like their food environment or handling they interact poorly with visitors and fewer guests mean fewer dollars. Play smart, keep everyone happy and you'llbe a Zoo Tycoon!  Ready, Set, Go! With an intuitive design and interactive tutorials Zoo Tycoon is easy to learn - so you'll be put in the fun in no time.  Limitless Possibilities - Withover 200 different types of animals, exhibits and building materials, Zoo Tycoon delivers all the content and fun needed to really get into building, managing and maintaining a zoo.  Two Ways to Play - There's something foreveryone. Jump right in and start building a zoo or try the scenarios that start out easy and become increasingly more difficult.  More Fun Than a Barrel of Money - Create the ultimate zoo and reap big profits if you manageit well. Learn what it takes to make your animals and guests happy so you can be a Zoo Tycoon!  Manage the Unpredictable - Managing the animals and zoo guests is an unpredictable job - you'll never experience the same gametwice. Product Features Lions, Tigers, Bears, and More Choose from over 40 unique animals for your zoo includingElephants, Cheetah, Penguins and many more! Uncage your Imagination Build with more than 175 exhibits and zoomaterials including wa

Everybody likes the zoo. And why not? Casual walks, exotic animals, and fried foods are good fun. Managing a zoo of your very own is even better. Zoo Tycoon challenges you to build a zoo one path tile, one iron-reinforced fence, and one animal at a time. Zoo Tycoon bears more than just a title similarity to Roller Coaster Tycoon: it appears to be based on the same basic game engine. Building pens and paths, decorating, locating buildings, managing your staff, even the way your patrons look and how you tweak pricing are all extremely similar to the fun and intuitive Roller Coaster Tycoon. The gameplay consists of a series of inventive scenarios--sometimes building a zoo from scratch, other times taking over a failing or failed zoo and bringing it back from the brink. Specifically, you've got to build pens and habitats with an eye toward the needs of each animal species. For example, putting bears in a savannah setting results in depressed, possibly sick, bears. You also have to tend to your human animals by locating gift shops, restaurants, drink stands, and bathrooms. Then you've got to adopt animals and hire zookeepers to tend your creatures. All of this costs money, but cutting corners can result in irate customers and unhappy animals. Unhappy animals bore people, and worse they make it difficult to adopt more exotic and finicky creatures, like pandas. Happy and well-fed animals will cavort and play, making your guests very happy. And happy guests results in more money for you to improve your zoo. It's a balancing act keeping all the animals, keepers, and little wandering people happy, but the game is also a decorator sim. You've got to beautify your park, and it's easy to forget the specific scenario objectives and lose yourself in building the ultimate zoo. If you tire of the objectives entirely, you can delete some of your fences and watch the animals run amok on your guests (sometimes, through negligence, they can break free on their own). The carnivores grab, pin, and fling your guests (no blood, and no killing here), which lowers your zoo rating and dissuades people from visiting for a while. Still, it's great fun to watch. --Bob Andrews Pros: Plays like Roller Coaster Tycoon Addictive and fun Cons: Plays, maybe, too much like Roller Coaster Tycoon Simple graphics

This place is a real zoo--and you're in charge! Go wild running the most fun and beautiful zoo you can imagine. Care for unpredictable and untamed animals (and those are just the guests!). Plan wisely, because if the animals don't like their food, environment, or handling, they interact poorly with visitors, and unhappy guests means fewer dollars. Play smart and keep everyone and everything happy, and you'll be a zoo tycoon.

Features

• Start building & managing your zoo right from the start -- plan out your exhibits and design a layout
• Do your very best to please customers and the animals
• Inhabit your zoo with the right animals to draw in the big crowds
• Over 200 animals to exhibit, plus all kinds of new & interesting plant life to help make your zoo more exotic
• Manage your zoo wisely -- meet the needs of both the people and the animals without losing all your money

Description

This is your chance to really take control, get creative, and have fun in a different LegoLand everyday. Question is....Have you got what it takes? Can you keep hundreds of visitors happy/ taking on this challenge means you'll have to not only design the perfect legoLand, you'll have to build and run it too!

Welcome to LEGOLAND. But don't relax--you're not visiting this place; you're running it. And if you don't stay on your toes in this blocky little world, you'll have hungry guests, broken-down rides, and bankruptcy to deal with. This game, which requires a Windows operating system, starts with a phone call: "Congratulations, you just got the job as trainee park manager!" Upon reporting to LEGOLAND, you discover that a resident mad scientist recently managed to blow up the whole park. Your job suddenly gets more complicated, as your new boss, park manager Jonathan Ablebody, coaches you on how to put the park back together. A series of tutorials teach the fundamentals of park management, from landscaping to ride repair. Free play is possible once the tutorials are mastered. The more a player builds, the more troubleshooting is necessary. Build too many rides and an alarm sounds--you'll need to build a power station to keep them all running. If you don't hire enough mechanics, rides break down. Panic and hire too many mechanics and you'll hear a "ka-ching" as your cash reserves are depleted by a bunch of lazy LEGO fix-it folks loafing around the park with nothing to do. This game is about management, multitasking, and sucking up to the boss. The folks at LEGO Media even created the perfect supervisor. He pleasantly orders players to do difficult tasks while never deigning to lift one of his own little yellow pincers to help out. Kids who have visited an actual LEGOLAND may enjoy slaving away in this virtual one. One warning: LEGO manages to plug the product with a selection entitled "Watch LEGOLAND Movies." Click on it and you'll end up watching an ad for LEGOLAND theme parks. Evidently the only creatures more ruthless than little plastic managers are the flesh-and-blood ones managing them. (Ages 6 and older) --Anne Erickson

Design, build, and manage your own LEGOLAND theme park! Let your imagination run wild as you construct the park of your dreams using elements from LEGO System Western, Adventurers, and Castle themes. Free play mode allows you to access a wide variety of attractions and build without restrictions. Game mode will put your problem-solving skills to the test with constant challenges.

Features

• Official Lego Product
• Great gift
• Hours of enjoyment
• Fun and educational
• Shipped immediately

Description

Challenging gamers to create one of the greatest empires in history, the third installment of the Caesar city building series proves once again that sometimes it's more fun to build a better past than a better future. You can open Caesar III's City Construction Kit and build a Roman city to your specification, or choose the Career Mode and face challenges assigned to you by Caesar himself. With success comes promotion and wealth, but failure will make you a feature on the lions' lunch menu. Increasing the game's lifespan is a particularly nice touch allowing you to choose either "peaceful" or "dangerous" assignments to match your mood or preferred play style. As you build colonies on the roads that lead to Rome you must encourage immigration and keep citizens happy. More than just bread and circuses, you balance trade, industry, city planning and deity worship, all while keeping in Caesar's good graces and fending off barbarian hordes. A plethora of animated visual cues show your success, as plebians and patricians noisily bustle about in a rich and lively recreation of Roman times. The tutorial levels might be a little simple, but the solid manual and fantastic in-game help should keep aspiring megalomaniacs crying "vene, vidi, vici" for hours on end. --Jack Gardiner

From the makers of the award-winning Caesar 2 comes a simulation combining the strategy of building, maintaining, and defending a thriving Roman city with the elements that make long-term playing fun. Caesar 3 includes richer graphics, new terrain sets, more progressive career structures, an intuitive interface, one-level game play, and visual feedback. The effects of the player's actions are immediately visible onscreen. Caesar 3 is sure to engross longtime Caesar fans as well as those new to city building.