An Inexpensive Substitute to Poser for Illustrators

For years now, I have wanted to purchase Poser 3-D Figure Design and Animation.  Illustrators use Poser models to model the human figure for their illustrations.  Why would I want to buy Poser?  Poser does almost instantaneously what takes me hours (if I'm lucky) or sometimes days to illustrate. 

For example, I wrote a story, about a mother and baby boy, called No Time For Bath.  The parent and child do some really active and crazy things in the story.  So, I need models of both persons to pose doing various activities.  To find a model of a woman and a child, I search Images on the internet.  I'm hoping to find a boy holding a shovel, a boy pushing against something, a boy hammering, etc.  The boy character in the story does all these things and more. 

On the internet, the images I may retrieve might be of a 6 year old girl hammering, a baby playing with sand, a 3 year old pushing a wheelbarrow.  The results can be so frustrating.  Also, the photograph lighting never seems to come from one location, children have different body types, different coloring, and their clothing may cover their body shape.  It's difficult to have a realistic character illustration look relatively the same in each pose.

So, this winter I scraped up the $200.00 I needed to buy Poser, but my son mentioned a program called Daz 4.  He said it was being advertised as free for a limited time.  With the help of my husband, I downloaded the program.  Sure enough, I was able to pose a female model in a variety of ways, set lighting, add hair, and clothes. 

Then, I went to the Daz 4 store and purchased Millenium Baby 3.0 and Cute Baby software.  For under $30.00 I had a posable model of a realistic baby.  I've started posing the baby in various positions.

I just started playing with a Daz Studio Pro 4 "child" this week. 

The boy image is clearly defined when I'm working with it.
I don't yet know, why it's a little blurry when I insert the
image into my post.

What's neat about the software is that it works with Poser, too.  (That's what it says on the software description.)  So, maybe one day, I'll buy Poser.  For now, I'm happy with Daz Studio Pro 4.  I think the next thing I'll purchase is poser crow software ( > $20.00) .  This model will work nicely with the crow character in book 2 of Adolfo and Athena.  Book 2 is called Adolfo - The Sequel.  ;)