www.artist-reference.com

After focusing on textures, props and scenes in our first review on PoserWorld, now it is time to also depict the core section of the website formed by human models and clothing. PoserWorld is one website of its kinds, which offers such wide range of human designs and clothing.

At this point it is needless to repeat the fact that the site boasts of its collection of almost 2000 downloadable products and that the company has been operating since 1999. Although the basic information like membership details, downloading charges, licensing details and information about general image resolution have been discussed in detail in our previous review, in order to provide you better overview and for those of you, who haven´t read the first part of PoserWorld review yet, let´s summarize in short some of the most relevant information you should know about this site.

PoserWorld updates and keeps adding new designs on a regular weekly basis. The site offers 3 types of membership, namely 3 month membership for 20 USD, 12 month membership for 50 USD and lifetime membership for 500 USD. If you choose to become a lifetime member, you also get a set of 5 DVDs offered by PoserWorld free along with lifetime access to website’s whole collection of designs. If you choose to not becoming a member of the site, you can download the images of your choice at an average rate of 3 USD per image. The image sizes range from 512×3000 pixels to 3000×3000 pixels. All the images and textures offered by the website are royalty free for personal and commercial use (if derivated), but for more info be sure to check its Terms of Use or rather contact somebody from PoserWorld if you’re expecting specific usage.

One interesting thing that would grab a viewer’s attention is the fact that they have developed different categories of clothing and designs as per human models. Different models like Aiko, Laura, Luke, Michael, etc. display eye-catching themed clothing. Especially certain characters such as Koshini, Manchu Emperor and Milbaby are quite peculiar and unique. For example the set of Manchu Emperor showing his rich cultural heritage contains images of its traditional clothing (casual and formal), slippers and hair, while set of Giselle, an interesting Alien character, shows off interesting vector designs of hair and body texture. These types of figures are quite unique and can be used for different purposes. I personally downloaded some for my presentation – David and Royal Canadian Mountain Police outfit for him consisting of hat, red jacket and black pants. As remarkable I found also Digital Seamless Royal Period Fabric 1 & 2, each having up to 15 rough woven textures that could be used as robes, tapestry, garments, floor coverings etc. Though the seamless fabric textures are of 512×512 pixel sizes, they could be very useful. There are some real fabric textures with finished seams and edges as well. PoserWorld also offers several DVDs containing huge collection of designs and other items provided by the website with single page menu to navigate easily through the DVD content. The DVD’s prices range from 15 USD to 45 USD for the content of 160 – 1000 items in one DVD. There is also ´3D clothes texturing tutorial video DVD´ for 19.95 USD. It is a 31 minute tutorial video which helps you to create a detailed clothing texture using Photoshop or any other image editing program.

The thing I really liked about the site is that it maintains the high quality of the designs. They are quite versatile and one can use them in almost any work. Though, one thing which could be improved is the website’s search engine. Of course, a smart search engine in a website with this heavy load of designs and textures is a must! As the website contains huge collection of images, despite of using a good search query, you might end up with a long list of images to search through. The search engine also displays the list of DVDs which contains the searched images. One more thing that I did not like much about this site is that even if you wish to download the whole set of textures, you get to see only one sample texture and based on that you have to rely and pray that the whole lot of designs are as good as the sample.

Although I wouldn’t say that I found all the collection I needed, I would like to mention that the quality of images I found here was truly worth appreciating. The site provides a great variety of human attire from casual to business. I must admit that I have never come across such a huge collection of men’s and women’s clothing in any website before, except the times when I had been visiting a mall .

Summary:

+     Good range of unique collection full of models in various themed clothing. Good resolution and flexibility of using the images anywhere as they are developed in vector style to suit all resolutions and sizes.

-     Sometimes it seems clumsy to find the right image from such a heavy load of human designs and clothing textures. Pages are unnecessarily overloaded by lot of same information in headers and footers, which is a little bit distracting.

Popularity: 39% [?]

As technology goes incredibly fast forward literally day by day, 3D graphics have became matter of course and
standard in PC games, animated movies and other similar projects. 3D artists working with 3D graphics know how important are resources of photos taken for this purpose. In following review I am trying to point out some of the 3d.sk website’s main features, both positive and negative. This is supposed to be something like guide which should help you to make your own opinion and decide whether to subscribe or look for another website.

The content of www.3d.sk is made up by more than 240 200 unique royalty-free photos of human references, animal references, clothes, costumes, pre-made head textures and 3D human models. The basis of the website is formed by pictures of human references, both male and female. They are taken on the street or in the photo studio. Set of street references is basically varied collection of different types of people you can meet on the street. These are great if you are looking for interesting details (dreadlocks and other haircuts, piercing or tattoo, beard and moustache, any kinds of accessories, etc.). Sets of studio photos are more extensive, because they are enhanced by pictures of some specific poses (walking, sitting, modeling references, etc.) and even face expressions (basic emotions and phonemes). Photographed models in studio are both dressed and undressed. You can find photos of whole body, which are mostly taken from 5 or 8 angles, as well as details of particular parts, for example hand, eyes or recently added photos of fingers etc. There is quite nice collection of animal references, too – from tiny insect like butterfly, bugs, sea fish to big animals like horses, elephant or rhinoceros. Some of them are stuffed, photographed at the museum, other are live. Except references, 3d.sk provides also wide choice of photosets with regular clothes, working uniforms and various costumes from different historical period. Pre-made head textures, ready for comfortable and fast use while texturing, belong to premium content. With premium membership you will get access to more photos than with the regular one – in addition to head textures and 3D human models also more sets of costumes, clothes and animals.

Website has been designed with accessibility and ease of navigation in mind. Quick photo search is ensured by basic categories like age, gender, human race (asian, black, white), body type, clothes type etc., but there is also another way how to find more photos related by required feature. In behalf of more specific description, each photo is identified by tags, too. By clicking on one of tags you will get all photos tagged by this word. Speaking about search engine, I recommend you to use searching by categories instead of full text search, because photos may not be indexed by the key word you will type in full text search.

The pricing seems to be a really good deal, regarding the amount of photos provided. Although there is no free membership offered, the subscribing system is well adjusted, so at least one of the subscriptions should be affordable for any 3D artist or 3D graphics company. The price rises according to length of membership and according to whether it is premium membership or not. It is possible to subscribe hobby or commercial membership plan in length of 1, 3, 6 months and 1 year. Premium content is provided for subscribers with 3, 6 months and 1 year premium membership. Subscription starts at 24,95 EUR for 1 month hobby plan and the price rises up to 1290 EUR for 1 year premium commercial plan. Let’s see some example- if you were big company, which yearly use a great amount of pictures, and you subscribe the one-year-premium commercial plan, you would get access to more than 240 200 high quality photos for 1290 EUR. With daily download limit of 12 000 photos per day it equals 3 399 Hi-Res photos for 1 EUR! You should keep in mind that with hobby plan you are allowed to use photos only for non-commercial projects, while with commercial plan you can use them repeatedly and for commercial purposes.

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Photos are of great quality – you can clearly see skin pores, hairs and wrinkles in detail. Most pictures are 3744 x 5656 pixels, that is about 21 Mpx. If you would like to check the quality before paying anything, there is a chance to download some free samples. To prevent downloading all existing free samples, the website always shows same 20 free photos for some uncertain time. There are also shown some user works on the website, so maybe looking through them could help you make opinion on usefulness and quality of the photos from 3d.sk (while taking into account skills of their authors, of course ).

Summary:

+      broad source of varied photos needed for creating 3D characters and animals (especially surprisingly wide choice of varied clothing)

-       missing more anatomically interesting models, variety of races, body types, ages, etc.

Popularity: 52% [?]