Two ways of posing

You probably can't wait to create your first pose, right? Our posing tutorials will walk you through the details of how every joint works, along with basic human anatomy knowledge. First, let's look at the two basic ways of posing in Magic Poser: dragging and rotating.

Drag a control point

One of the coolest features that makes posing so easy and fast in Magic Poser is that you can drag on the control points to pose the character. You can think about the 3D character as a real ball joint doll, used traditionally for drawing reference.

Now, imagine that you are pulling on the wrist of this doll, the doll's whole arm will move in the direction that you pull, right? That's exactly how our virtual 3D character moves too. When you drag on any control point, other body parts will move along naturally according to real world physics:

Just like that! Our powerful inverse kinematics engine does all the heavy lifting of calculating this movement, and you can just lie back and enjoy how easy it is to get the character to a natural looking pose!

Rotate a control point

What if you only want to rotate the character's wrist, but not change the position of the whole arm? Rotating a control point allows you to only change the orientation of one single joint at a time, without affecting any other joint. To access the rotate option:

• Select any control point by tapping on it. The color of the control point will change from blue to orange when selected.
• Choose the rotate action  from the action menu at the bottom.
• Now you will see three circles showing up. Each circle controls rotation around one of the three main axis - x, y, and z. To learn more about axis and 3D rotation, take a look at our Common actions to 3D objects tutorial.
• Drag on the circle to rotate around the axis you want.

When to use drag vs. rotate?

A general rule of thumb: Use drag when you want to make bigger, global changes; use rotate when you want to make smaller, local changes. As you use the app more, you will become more and more familiar with the posing mechanism, and you will find it to be indeed very intuitive!