This week we bring you a very short film created in Poser by Poser QA Lead, Brian Romero (AKA Bugs).  Brian leads the Poser QA team remotely from his home southeast of San Francisco.  Learn more about this film and the creator in our interview below. 

Tell us a little about the "Knock yourself out, Poser!" short animation. Inspiration, assets, features used/tested, etc.

"Knock yourself out, Poser!" came about from not only my regular testing of the main functionality and features of Poser but also the additional plugins. In this case, before Bullet Physics was added as a main feature, there was Poser Physics which was introduced in 2010 as a Python scripted add-on. It contained 'drop to the floor' ragdoll simulations among other collisions and dynamics. When I was testing, I had the idea of poking fun at Andy. Every time I opened Poser 9/Poser Pro 2012 Milkman Andy was there standing rigid and staring stoically back at me.
Wouldn't it be funny if he punched himself in the noggin and fell unconscious to the ground not knowing his own robotic strength? I watched a lot of Warner Bros cartoons and Three Stooges slapstick comedies after school when I was a kid.

I love doing Poser animation testing. I have decades of short animations starting with Poser 3 to now, Poser 13. Come to think of it "Knock yourself out, Poser!" was animated in 2012, which makes it a 10-year-old test scene.

I'm very pleased to have had a hand in improving Poser's toolsets and workflow. There are professional animators that use the Poser animation tools like Jesse Griffith, who created clips for broadcast television and his own shorts, Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth on the early seasons of RWBY, and Shane Newville who was on Monty's Poser animation team and is now doing work Dillion Gu/Dillion Goo Studio. Shane is part of our current beta team.

Brian Romero, QA Lead for Poser

How and when did you become part of the Poser dev team? Which versions did you help create?

I entered the Poser scene in 1996 and it was by chance. I was hired as a contractor at MetaCreations in Scotts Valley, CA to work on a 2D vector-based illustration/painting software called, Expressions. No more than a month in, the project folded and since I was only three weeks into my contract, the product manager asked me if I was interested in working on Poser doing QA testing. At the time, I was also an evening LightWave 3D modeling instructor and had been introduced to Poser 1 by one of my students.

When asked if I wanted to join the Poser team, I calmly outwardly answered, “Yes” but in my mind, it was more of a, “Oh, heck yes!” I immediately started working with the Poser 3 dev and QA team.
The first time I ever spoke with Larry Weinberg was a few weeks after. It was over the phone, we had a brief discussion about gimbal lock.
I finally met Larry in person, and we’ve been friends and part of the dev team from Poser 3, Poser 4, Poser Pro Pack, Poser 5 through 12, and now 13.

What is your role on the Poser dev team today?

Prior to working on Poser, I began my role in hardware and software QA at Apple Computers in 1995 and continued working on testing various 2D graphics and 3D modeling animation software packages. Poser has been my mainstay from 1996 to today. My QA duties have increased throughout the decades to where I am now part of Bondware’s Poser Software dev and team lead of the current Poser beta test team.

What do you enjoy most about working with Poser?

I really enjoy the ad hoc aspect of functionality. I’ve written formal test cases and test plans since Poser 5 to the point that I know the key areas of Poser second nature and investigation and reporting of the cause of bugs of every level of severity, and assisting the dev engineers in finding a technical solution always gives me great satisfaction.

Also, not only the technical aspect of QA bug reporting but also the creative part of building complex test scenes and animations for rendering in Poser is probably the greatest enjoyment of working on Poser.

What do you think users will enjoy most in P13 (currently under development)?

Users will definitely enjoy the new additions to the PostFX palette, Bloom in particular. That's a fun post-render effect to have. It brings light to life.
Improvements to the Raytrace preview window are welcoming and will help the workflow of creating scenes and seeing real-time renders. You can now set render modes to Optix, CPU,f and quick SuperFly or FireFly modes. The window is much larger and re-sizeable.  On launch, you now have a list of recent or startup scenes to choose from.