ArtPose Pro 12+

This app has been very helpful to me as a non-digital artist when developing preliminary studies for oil paintings. Manipulating the figure by clicking on the circles to move the segments of the body is hard to get used to but once I got the hang of it, not so bad at all, and the ability to manipulate the direction of the lighting is a very useful feature. But it isn't the kind of app that works in an intuitive way (this isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself), and there doesn't seem to be a complete help file, so it can be difficult to use at times, especially for a relatively infrequent user. A far more complete text based help file, either available within the app or available for download would be very much appreciated!

Even without such a help file, the app needs to somehow provide info on how to update to the newest version, 2.01, in my case on a Macbook Air. I can read all about the new update on the Steam site, but there is no link anywhere that I could find. It's not availalbe within the app itself, nor through the App Store, nor on the Steam site - at least not that I could locate.

Should these two issues be solved I'd be happy to revise my review upward.

The controls are extremely awkward, not intuitive at all. When you select the wrist, for example, and move up (in all other programs, this would tilt the hand slightly back), it may tilt back or it may twist into a mess you can’t recover from. Lining up the camera and focusing solely on the joint you want to move, looking at it perfectly straight-on, seems to produce the best results but it’s a test in patience. Some joints work more sensibly than others, so they CAN work, but when I try to manipulate another joint, the same moves don’t translate. Possibly it’s TOO sensitive, meaning even the slightest deviation will set it off. There’s no real rhyme or reason to what works to manipulate a joint with ease and predictability. I don’t get much use out of this beyond the pre-defined poses because it’s so difficult to set up a pose.

Other than that, the hairstyles and lighting effects are nice bonuses that I wasn’t expecting to get much use from. Camera settings are intuitive and easy. Grid on the floor is helpful. I would just like to see a wider variety of body shapes and a more refined control over joint manipulation.

I woud like to say this is a very limited app in terms of giving you different types of bodies. It can be a good reference when you are trying to sketch, but also, it has a major glitch as you try to articulate the models. It starts rotating continuously, and that is deterring me from using it. I hope this gets fixed.