It may have started life as a 'figure reference tool for artists', but each new release has taken Poser far beyond that basic remit. The latest version brings a wealth of new features, including lip syncing, transferable poses, multiple undo, multi-threaded rendering and many other tweaks. The biggest news of all, however, is that Poser 7 is now fully Intel native and runs smoothly on new Macs.

No new version of Poser would be complete without a new set of figures, and the male, female and child models in Poser 7 don't disappoint. More realistic than ever, largely due to good polygon smoothing and high-quality photographic textures, the figures are endlessly customizable to produce a huge variety of forms. The male figure now has his genitals in a separate folder, as it were, to prevent them accidentally bursting through his clothing; they're not unloaded by default.

Also included is a variety of additional figures such as cartoon and manga characters, a realistic skeleton complete with optional muscle map, and a range of animals, including a T Rex skeleton for all those who want to recreate Night at the Museum.
Where previous versions of Poser tended towards a set of poses for each figure, version 7 introduces Universal Poses, which can be applied to any human figure. Motion, always a tricky animation element trick to get right, is eased by the new ability to copy and loop frames within an animation - and to save them to the library for reuse.

Lip syncing was previously available for Poser as a third-party product, and it's good to see this much-needed feature incorporated into the main application. Once a sound file is imported, the current Poser figure will move its mouth in time with the speech: the mouth shapes make a good stab at reproducing the sound of the phonemes. Users can drag a slider to control the strength of the enunciation - the degree to which the mouth opens and closes for each sound - as well as the rate of eye blinking. Automatic eye, eyebrow and head motion synchronized to the speech adds to the effect; and sliders for anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise allow each speech to be further customized.