When I received my copy of the book the binding had come apart as someone else mentioned. I ignored this and pressed the glued edges back together. While looking the book over I discovered that Chapter 5 was in the book twice and there was no Chapter 6 to be found! I am not sure if there are other mistakes like this as I don't have time to check. I am shipping it back and getting a replacement. Hopefully all of the pages will be there.

I'm a programmer and industrial guy who enjoys writing fiction shorts in my spare time and thought it might be fun to start cobbling simple 'illustrations' together to help set the mood for the stories. Really 2D stuff but I figured a 3D tool like Poser 3D would help create a series of modified images for different chapters. I'm of average competence in tools like Corel and PaintShopPro, which I use to illustrate tech articles and web pages. Poser's interface and paradigm is pretty tough to grasp - in part because I already know "other things" I guess and thus have incorrect expectations of how to do it.

I bought this book hoping to get myself up to speed; it isn't doing that. I think the author tried to mix in too much advanced material. Each chapter starts with a horrible "intro" which doesn't summarize where we're going - just bowls a lot of jargon at the reader. While the books seems to have nice "we did this - you learned this" like any good educational book, they seem to be "we pulled down the menu" etc (what our mouse did - not what we as brains did).

I'm sure I'll get more use from it once I know the basics, but for now it's not helping. The author should have gotten feedback from some absolute beginner trying to use the book to make a simple Poser image.

My first reaction to this book was that it wouldn't be very helpful in learning Poser because it did not contain any project-based tutorials. However as this book found a permanent place on my reference shelf, I quickly realized that I was wrong. As I worked through several project-based Poser tutorials from the web, I found myself frequently referencing back to this Poser 7 Revealed book to better understand how to use a specific tool or technique needed for the tutorial. The basic concept behind the Revealed book series is to supply simple explanations for each feature of a software and also give supporting exercises to reinforce what you have just learned. Although you will not create a finished project from this book, Kelly L. Murdock has written the perfect handy reference for the Poser 7 software by e frontier, Inc.

Murdock begins with an overview of the Poser 7 interface and introduces each major set of tools found in the Poser Rooms. He covers the Poser Libraries and then moves on to the basics such as posing figures, working with props, cameras, lighting, materials and building a Poser scene. With that background covered, he then discusses more advanced topics such as adding dynamic hair and clothes to your figure and creating facial expressions.

Posing your figure is only part of what can be accomplished with the Poser software. Murdock covers morphing and rigging your Poser figures for animation and shows how lip syncing is made easy with the Poser Talk Designer Interface. Lastly, he discusses rendering Poser scenes, using Poser with other software and writing Python scripts.

Although the book does not contain a CD, you can download from the publisher's website the supporting Poser files needed for demonstrating the more complex Poser techniques. Throughout the book, Murdock has added helpful comments and tips.

Kelly L Murdock has worked in the area of computer graphics for many years and has authored several books including 3ds max Bible, Illustrator Bible, Adobe Creative Suite Bible, Maya 7 Revealed, LightWave 3D 8 Revealed and Poser 6 Revealed.