ArtPose

This app can be very helpful however there are several things that drag it down. The amount of options for lighting and pose are near limitless and completely open for you to manipulate. The preloaded poses are varied and dynamic enough that I find very little need to ever pose one of the 3D models manually. I can usually find a preloaded pose easily enough and move it around a little bit to get what pose I’m looking for. In those respects the app is great however its limitations rear their head soon enough. You are very limited when it comes to body shapes, a problem that is very noticeable with the women models which don’t really mimic any body shape except the classic “superhero” shape. You cannot alter the face/expression and there are only a few options for hair (all of which are nothing near realistic). So any drawings you do from this app quickly begin to all look the same, same body shape, same proportions, same face, same hair. For the price the app is good enough, just wish you could alter actual appearance of the 3D model more. It’s fine if you’re gonna crank out canned drawings of superheroes but if you want to explore drawing actual figures you’re gonna be left wanting. Oh also for the male version of the app always turns my music waaaay down when I open it and won’t let me turn it back up, super weird cuz the woman version doesn’t, I dunno.

I have only played with this app for a short time, and I think it has great potential for the figure artist, but I can already see an area that I would like to see modified: while it is very easy to pose the various body elements, it is imperative to see the figure from different points of view to make sure the pose is working as the parts are positioned. As currently implemented, the pose widget is positioned on the right side of the screen, while the camera widget is on the left side of the screen, making it necessary to continually interrupt the posing process to activate the camera, then activate the pose tool again and so on. This slows the posing down. I believe it would speed things up considerably if the pose and camera widgets were both on the left side of the screen so one hand could activate them both in their turn. Or make the positioning of them user-customizable to accommodate righties or lefties.

I really enjoy the work that was put into this program. It fantastic for quick reference and the posing is quick and intuitive. All the additions to the programs have been great. I use this all the time in my comic book work. My one suggestion is the ability to make just the background a solid white or black. When I camera shot the pose I need I spend a lot of time having to carefully select around the pose in my art program. They gradiated gray that is the same color of the model makes it unnecessarily difficult to pull the model reference out from the background.