Steve Lareau's
Poser Parts Symmetrical Art Tutorial

This image started life as a Poser Person.

This is going to be interesting, I assure you. It's nothing earth shattering, but it's cool if you're looking for something new to play with. One day, just to see what would happen, I decided to try experimenting with parts from Poser 4 models.  I get that way- I get tired of the same old thing, so I modeled a Poser 4 person, imported it into Bryce, then ungrouped the model to see what I could do with the individual parts. I stumbled across something cool, which I'm going to share with you here, and that's a way to get some very cool shapes out of Poser models inside of Bryce. The image above started life as nothing more than a Poser 4 head model, believe it or not. Notice the beautiful symmetry of the parts? That's because I used a cool feature in Poser 4 to get it to look that way, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. This tutorial was done with Poser 4 and Bryce 4- you should be able to do the same things you see here with other versions of Poser and Bryce.

The thing that I'm finding intriguing is the way that you can manipulate the transformed parts in cool ways, which you'll learn how to do here. If you've got Poser, fire it up and select a figure, any figure. For this illustration, I the figure type called Heroic, and I used a stock pose preset called VICTORY. Now- the cool thing is that you can use Poser to set left and right symmetry, which is a very cool thing for the way we're about to use it. For starting out, select any pose in which the figure is standing. 

Go ahead and pose the arms any way you want, once you play with this for a while, you'll see what different poses can do to the model's parts. Ok- let's say you've posed the right side of the figure to the way you want. In Poser, go to the tool bar at the top and select FIGURE, then SYMMETRY. To make the left side a mirrored copy of the right side you made, select  SYMMETRY and then RIGHT TO LEFT. 

It will ask you if you want to copy the joint zone's setup, say yes. In a few moments, the figure will be mirrored as far as one side matching the other perfectly. Ok- if it looks good to you, we're almost done. And for what it's worth, it's cool if you've twisted the model into all sorts of weird shapes- if the joints look wrinkled, that's fine, it makes no difference with the way we're going to use it.

Select FILE / EXPORT and Export the figure as a WAVEFRONT .OBJ file. Select SINGLE FRAME, and then the export dialogue box will appear. Leave it just as it is, with the exception of un-checking the box towards the top for the Ground. We don't need it, so leave it out. In a few seconds, the model will be exported, so you can save the figure in Poser when you exit if you wish- and it will ask you when you leave. 

If you don't have Poser, import any old model you have laying around- the more individual parts it has, the more fun it is to play with! Try meshes of cars, since they're symmetrical left to right, which is what we're looking for here. But you can experiment with different meshes,

Now import the figure into Bryce, ignoring the texture map that it wants to use- that texture map will be totally useless with what we're going to do here. Once the model is imported, go ahead and apply a material- to keep it simple for now, go ahead and use one of the metal presets so you can see the parts easier. You can play with more complex materials later. Select the Poser model with your mouse, and if the Poser model isn't standing on the ground, hit the down arrow to drop them to the ground.  

The second figure group was done by simply duplicating the first figure, then rotating it 90 degrees as you see here. The third figure is another rotation of the original. You can duplicate and rotate as many times as you want like this, but for now, let's just play with the first version.

Now- while all the poser meshes are  still selected, click the EDIT pallet on the main screen, and you'll see a little left and right arrow goodie as shown circled in red below. 

Hold the arrow down, then side it over and select the sphere shape. After a few moments, you'll see something like the guys below. How cool is that?

If you select the Torus shape, which looks like a donut, you'll end up with something as you see below.

From left to right, you see one poser guy, two poser guys rotated 180 degrees from each other, and as you can see on the far right side- once you replicate this a few times, you can start to get some pretty cool results like you see below.

Once all your poser people are set to the positions you want,  select the groups and hit the U button on the meshes to UNGROUP them. Once all the parts are ungrouped, select ALL of the parts with the toolbar EDIT / SELECT ALL  command. Now- see the E next to the grouped pieces? Select that E to EDIT- now you will be able to change the size of all the tori at once. Or, if you're really bored, you can toggle through them all one at a time, changing the sizes to what you want.

To take this stuff a step further, you can also create a stack of Poser people and rotate, turn, and pile them on top of each other, then ungroup them and with the drop arrow, drop the parts down into interesting shapes. Also, with a bunch of parts selected but NOT grouped, you can rotate the parts in different directions, which can lead to some interesting results as well. 

Also- try playing with the Show Origin Handle feature in Bryce- move the origin handle around and then replicate these Poser Parts so they take on some cool new designs. If you don't know what I'm talking about, click on an object, click on the A next to the mesh, then under the GENERAL tab, select Show Origin Handle. That will let you see and move the green dot on the model, which is what all movement and resizing attributes are based on, as far as the location of the "center" of your model. Or- crack open that dusty manual and read up on it. : ) 

Ok, that's the basics- the combinations are unlimited, or as limited as the computer you're using as far as your systems memory. Although these parts are converted into Bryce primitives, the scene files can get pretty large.

You can take a look at some of the images I created using this technique in my Bryce Galleries, as well as a gallery of images using standard Poser parts, like vases and bowls made entirely out of Poser hand models. 

Enjoy your journey into this weird new way to use Poser in Bryce!

Steve Lareau
Hilltop Design
http://www.hilltopdesign.com

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