With Poser 7 now on the horizon, the time has never been more right to purchase Poser 6. Everyone purchasing 6 at the moment will receive a free upgrade to Poser 7 when it comes out. Also if you own any other version of Poser, you can pay the upgrade price for Poser 6 now and still receive the upgrade to Poser 7 free. Get the special edition version and you'll also get the full Miki character (with clothes and accessories) and Shade Designer 7 LE for free!

Poser 7 will be reviewed when I've got my hot little mitts on it, but for now revel in the glory that is Poser 6. Oh yes, it's got its problems - we still haven't got that codebase rewrite that the software desparately needs - but my god, for the pricetag you really can't do better.

Poser 5 was a huge improvement over Poser 4/Propack, and 6 in its turn is leaps and bounds ahead of 5. I've now been using it for so long that I've almost forgotten how much better it is - when I go back to 5 to test something in it, I'm left wondering how I put up with it for so long!

Poser 6 brought with it some great advances in the realism area, introducing ambient occlusion, image-based lighting and sub-surface scattering to really help achieve close to photo-realism. Check out the Photorealism galleries at eFrontier.

There are a new "family" of figures included with the program, as usual. For adults we've got Jessi and James (har-har - wonder who thought that one up?) and the kids, Kate and Ben. As usual, the support for the child figures is best described as "slim to non-existent". However, James and Jessi have been much better received in the community than the ill-favoured Judy and Don. (As a quick comparison - there are 337 products for Jessi and James in the Renderosity Marketplace, but just 78 for Don and Judy.) Both figures have their problems - arm and shoulder bending is particularly problematic - but variety is the spice of life, and it's good to have more options. Each also comes with a lo-res version for medium shots, which helps conserve memory.

Which come to mention it, is something that can be in short supply. The thing you have to remember is that Poser is largely a hobbyist market, and the users are generally on PCs which can't compare to the big super rendering machines (render farms, in some cases) of professionals doing this for a living. Asking your machine to render a scene with a high poly architectural set as backdrop, a number of props, all with reflection nodes for added realism, 5 or 6 human figures, all clothed and with their own hair props, with ambient occlusion on for more realism... and you've got a good bet of choking on the scene. There are workarounds - rendering in separate passes, exporting figures and props as .obj files and then reimporting, reducing texture sizes - but it's nevertheless frustrating to get three-quarters of the way through a 12-hour render only to be presented with the dreaded "out of memory" error.

But those tricks aside, there are a number of nice little irritants fixed from previous versions which almost make up for it. The openGL preview now means items with transparency can be viewed in preview mode, which saves a huge amount of time. There's a spot renderer - no more re-rendering the whole scene again and again trying to get something right, just render that portion. That's a massive time-saver which in itself is almost worth the purchase price, if you consider that time is money... the library palette can now be expanded out sideways for easier searching. The Content Paradise tab now actually works and has a good selection of products for sale and free (although I'd bet most users do as I do and just use a web browser...)

Sadly, we've still no multiple select or undo, and the rigging system is still the same - no major steps forward there. The manual remains in the chocolate teapot area of usefulness - you'd be better off relying on user tutorials on the various sites in the poserverse, or buy Denise Taylor's Practical Poser 6 book (and it looks like she's another one coming out for Poser 7 - see link to the right.) But still, in terms of price, you'll never get a better deal, and now's the time to buy.