Curious Labs' Poser was my first major 3D graphic purchase, and I drooled over it for a couple years before I found the cash to make the purchase.

Poser is a figure posing and animating software package. It comes with a variety of figures, human and animal, and clothing and so forth, and you can move the figures around, dress them up, change how they look, and take pictures of them. Just like having your own portrait studio inside of your computer. The Poser online community provides lots of free stuff to download. My own free downloads can be found on the Air Castle download page along with those of other members of the Air Castle Academy.

I wrote a tutorial about describing characters for Renderosity, and the character I described in the examples was a dark-skinned warrior woman with tattoos. When the time came to make an icon for the tutorial, I pulled out Poser, got a dark-skinned character out of the library, and then I used PhotoDeluxe to paint tattoos on that character's texture file. When I rendered the figure, there was the character I had described in my examples.

This image of the Goddess Racciman, was my first ever poser graphic. It uses the standard Poser 4.0 girl figure. I used the grouping tool to assign parts of her body to the texture 'outfit' and then I painted the patchwork texture on it. (It doesn't look too bad, I don't think but I'd probably do a better job of it now.) After posing the figure and painting her outfit, I imported her into Bryce so that I could render her floating over her world.