Much of Poser’s functionality is available through different "rooms," along with floating palettes and windows within the rooms themselves. These rooms allow you to pose actors, build scenes, manipulate materials, create strand-based hair and more.
Confused about where to go? Here's a quick tour of Poser's "rooms."
The Pose Room
The focus of almost everything you will do in Poser is the Pose room. This is where you add figures and props to your scene and perform your desired posing and animation.
The Pose room appears at 1920 x 1080 resolution. The number of palettes and options that you see in each room depends upon your screen resolution. At higher resolutions, the default workspaces display more palettes, while at lower resolutions, you see fewer palettes.
Most Poser rooms (including the Pose room) allow you to customize your Poser workspace by hiding/displaying and relocating controls anywhere you like. You can use UI dots to save up to nine different screen configurations for the entire Poser workspace.
To customize the Pose Room and your Poser experience, visit How to set up your Poser workspace and How to set up & use Memory Dots.
The Material Room
Poser’s Material room is used to create and edit procedural shaders for the content in your scene. The Material room is designed from the ground up to provide the ultimate in power, flexibility, and ease of use by artists and animators.
The Material room allows you to describe the material properties of your objects’ surfaces by giving you control over every aspect of shading a surface, from the surface color to complex lighting interactions.
The Material room offers two options for working with surface materials: the Assign view and the Edit view tabs. By default, the Assign view of the Material room is displayed when you first start up Poser. This allows new users to get familiar with assigning Materials before diving into the Advanced settings of the Material room.
Related: How to apply material layers to characters
Related: How to Assign Materials in the Material Room in Poser 12
The Hair Room
Poser’s Hair room allows you to create dynamic strand-based 3D hair for your figures or props. You can add hair wherever you like on any object in your scene and can add shaders in the Material room to give your hair almost any appearance from bleach blond to moss, lichens, grass, etc. (a shader tree is created for each hair group and is accessible in the Material room). You can even apply Force Fields to create realistic wind effects for your animations!
In addition to some standard tools, the Hair room also has controls for Hair Growth Groups, Growth, Styling and Dynamics.
The Cloth Room
Want to add custom clothing to a figure? Create a tablecloth? How about a flying carpet? Poser’s Cloth room allows you to create realistic cloth that behaves like real fabric. In addition to standard UI elements, the Cloth room contains the following UI elements: Cloth Simulations, Cloth Objects, Cloth Groups and Dynamics Controls.
Related: How to get the most out of Poser's dynamic clothing
Related: How to add and conform clothes to figures
The Fitting Room
What do you do if you get a new figure, but you find clothing that you like from an older character? You can take it to the Fitting room. The Fitting Room is designed to address the needs of those who want to use existing clothing to fit new characters. The Fitting Room allows you to convert the new fit into a prop (for dynamic clothing) or figure (for conforming clothing), including adding groups, skeleton, and character morphs.
The fitting process is done semi-automatically, in that you can use one of five different fitting methods (Prefit, Tighten, Smooth, Soft Features, and Rigid Features) to control what areas of the clothing should move more or less than others: The calculations for each of these methods are done automatically in Poser, but you can use paintbrush tools to determine the strength at which each of these fitting methods are used. This gives you full control over the appearance and result of the fit.
The Setup Room
The Setup room allows you to modify existing props or figures, or even create your own for use with Poser.
In the Setup room, you can fully rig new figures by creating and setting up joints, hierarchy groups and IK chains. It allows you to create these elements in a graphical environment, rather than having to manually edit a configuration file in a text-based environment.
When the Setup room opens, it displays many of the controls that you will need to create poseable figures. Depending on the size of your workspace, you may see the Camera controls, Joint Editor, Editing tools, Parameters/Properties palette, or Hierarchy Editor in this room. Of particular importance is the Bone Tool, which allows you to graphically create a skeleton for your figures.