Elegant app puts posable models at your fingertips

Now iPad artists can create fully adjustable 3D mannequins at a bargain price with ArtPose.

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Posable models at your fingertips

Altering the lighting can produce dramatically different results.

With iPads fast becoming a dominant medium for portable digital art, it’s no surprise that an entire ecosystem similar to PCs and Macs has sprung up.

Posable models at your fingertips

The red and green spheres enable you to bend and rotate joints – sometimes a little unnaturally.

A drag of the finger rotates your view, and pinch or punch gestures zoom in and out. Icons in the four corners change the scene, adjusting haircuts and lighting, taking snapshots, moving the camera and adjusting the angles of various joints.

The latter is particularly easy-to-use, with spheres appearing above joints and swipes of the screen adjusting the angle and rotation of limbs.

Like Poser, your model can be contorted into some very unusual, unnatural positions, but thankfully ArtPose includes a few predefined poses (for example, running or skydiving) that you can alter further to achieve the perfect stance.

Posable models at your fingertips

Preset hand poses remove the fiddliness of bending individual knuckles and fingers.

You can then use the camera icon to take a JPG snap and then import it to your art program of choice so you can sketch around it, or use it as reference.

The models are of a high quality, and the Unity engine adds some impressive lighting effects.

It's a shame you can't export figures as transparent PNG images so that they can be imported as a layer in Sketchbook without the slightly annoying backdrop.

We'd also like to see a few more body types, but these are undoubtedly planned for further updates. Overall, though, this is a useful and well-priced app and a must-have for iPad artists.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine issue 115.

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Beren Neale
Ecom Editor

Beren cut his teeth as Staff Writer on the digital art magazine ImagineFX 13 years ago, and has since worked on and edited several creative titles. As Ecom Editor on Creative Bloq, when he's not reviewing the latest audiophile headphones or evaluating the best designed ergonomic office chairs, he’s testing laptops, TVs and monitors, all so he can find the best deals on the best tech for Creative Bloq’s creative professional audience.