Monthly Archives: March 2012

Sea Life! A quick survey of ocean and underwater life and lighting for DAZ Studio and Poser users. (Updated, May 2014).

The Terrors of the Deep: Jellyfish pack has some nice jellifish, which seem to render best in Poser…

Although note that the starfish and shell and other content is not included — it’s just the jellyfish. There’s a Biolight textures addon for these jellyfish.

Most people should have an Angelfish as standard, as it ships with your Poser install (or at least, it did with older versions). But overall there’s a surprising lack of the sort of small colourful fancy fish that you’d see in an aquarium, at least ones with really good textures. Also missing currently is a really strong pack of corals and small intricate shells with superb textures.

Although the Toucan Museum in Japan does have some beautifully textured OBJ fish for free.

The Pacific Rockfish Collection perhaps offers the brightest colours in fish, it has good textures…

There are a variety of shark packs, but one of the most fearsome sharks — as well as the best textured — is Dinoraul’s Carcharodon Megalodon…

Stonemason made an early venture into creatures, with his Creatures of the Deep deep-sea angler fish, before he went into making his famous large scenes. Although I found the textures on these only worked for Poser…

For more monstrous ocean dinosaurs see Jurrasic Seas.

There’s also a very nicely made and textured Marlin and Ray in the Sea Life Pack 2…

Personally I found the earlier Sea Life Pack 1 to be showing its age now, in terms of the modelling and textures. The Octopus in it still stands close-ups, though.

Also lacking, these days, are most of the aquatic creatures vended by Smith Micro on Content Paradise. Only the Octopus (also available on its own) can stand close renders, but the rest are ok for middle-distance and background. You’ll find the octopus and other creatures bundled in the “Ocean Pack Bundle”, currently at $7…

The best crab is “Aquatic Crab” on Content Paradise…

Also have a look at PoserAddict’s crab.

I’ve yet to find a really good starfish.

The best Poser ocean is RD’s Poser Ocean, although this is ocean-surface only…

You might also look at the 360-degree environment Ocean Wide, although note that it’s for DAZ 4.6 only.

Those who just want beach and sea view scenes could look at the detailed Waves on the Beach scene — but be warned that this pack puts a very heavy load on the average PC, even before you try to render it.

There are some nice shallow underwater ‘sandy seabed’ scenes to be had by sinking the camera in the sea around the Ultimo Paradiso island, available on the DAZ Store…

For a lagoon also look at The Lost World for DAZ Studio 4.6 and Poser…

The deeper sea might be covered by the With the Fishes pack…

Also have a look at Aquatica Reef on the DAZ Store, which (unlike older cycloramas) claims to be hi-res and able to stand close-ups and hi-res renders…

There’s a huge bundle of underwater plant props in the Gardens of Poseidon Bundle and also hunt around for “Lisa’s Botanicals – Sea Floor Pack 1” (it seems to have vanished) and look at Runtime DNA’s older Sea Critters pack…

The best undersea light sets are the DAZ Store’s Under The Sea, which work for both Poser and DAZ. They tend to ‘moire’ when used on large seabed scenes, but work nicely on characters and props that you intend to composite into a scene using Photoshop.

Also look at Camera Magic: WaterCam DAZ Studio.

Photoshop users who are not afraid of a little post-production on their renders can generate sea caustics overlays for use with layers / Screen Mode, with the Caustics Generator software.

Natural landscapes survey for Poser and DAZ, Part One — terrains and plants:

Spring is here, and perhaps you want to have Poser render a beautiful wild garden? But is it possible for Poser to compete with Vue? No, it’s not. Although some content artists have had a jolly good try at providing Poser users and Daz users with the means to try it (for DS3: Mood Master 2 / Light Dome Pro 2 / etc). What follows is a quick survey of key basic landscape resources in this area.

The Runtime DNA store seems to have cornered the market on naturals for Poser. They have three main series…

Series 1: Microcosm. These are terrains and the texture sets for them. There are a lot, and they even extend to undersea-style terrains. Though the geometry is very flexible and quite realistic, I found the textures to have too much of a ‘moire’ repeating pattern. Though that may not matter if all you want is a base on which to paint in Photoshop post-production.

Also worth a look is the older GeoForge for Poser or the Terraformers series for Poser.

Series 2: Old Wood. RDNA’s wide variety of trees designed for Poser renders, although I found the leaves on these to be unacceptably fuzzy. The render times were also through the roof…

Series 3: RDNA Grasslands. A huge variety of grassland types, although be warned that these are mostly somewhat fuzzy 2D billboards (that oddly take a long time to render). Only some are 3D models like Lisa’s Botanicals…

Many of the natural packs shown at Content Paradise fail to convince — although you might want to look at dinosaur specialist Dinoraul with his prehistorical foliage pack ‘DR Plants 1’.

The DAZ Store also has a vast range (nearly 100) of the high-quality Lisa’s Botanicals series. These provide almost every garden flower you could want in beautiful 3D, plus exotics, a range of creepy dead woods for Halloween, and some fantasy plants such as a giant beanstalk. These are 3D models and will all work in DAZ and Poser.

Also worth a mention, in regard to the DAZ Store, are FirstBastion’s fine The Hidden Waterfalls and The Old Waterhole…

And on Renderosity…

There are also various older 2D cyclorama systems around, but these seem to be getting a bit long in the tooth these days. Few of their backgrounds can convince when a scene is rendered at 3600px with crisp models set in front of them. Although I guess you may find that you can retrofit them with crisp modern stock photography?

There is also Dimension Theory’s Ecomantics Efficient Ecosystems, available at the DAZ Store. The product page for this says “DAZ only”, but there are definitely Poser install files available since late 2011. Poser users should consult the Ecomantics forum. The system uses a mix of billboards, shallow 3D elements, and panoramas to speed up rendering dramatically. Personally I found it to be unacceptably fuzzy/muddy and could render nothing as crisp or vibrant as the preview images — although the render times for Efficient Ecosystems are certainly fast. Possibly the pack only really works well in DAZ? And that’s why DAZ doesn’t advertise the Poser version? My guess.

So I found that all the trees and tree and grass systems are rather disappointing, except for Lisa’s Botanicals. Lisa’s are the only natural packs I could really recommend spending good money on.

Incidentally, if you want to see beautiful 3D woodlands landscapes running at 60 frames per second in 1920px, try the free videogame The Hunter. And they look 10 times better than anything you could spend days rendering with the likes of the Runtime DNA natural packs. Possibly some screenshots from this could be made to fit the old Poser cycloramas?

One rather more expensive possibility, for Photoshop users not afraid of doing post-work, would be to look at expensive 2D clipart DVDs meant for architects and the like, such as Dosch Foreground Plants and Trees and the XFrog plants billboards series (although the latter are only at 800px).

That’s it. I’ll cover atmospherics, sci-fi “alien plants”, and mushrooms / toadstools in later posts. But I’ll just note that Renderosity has an especially good selection of “alien worlds” plants and strange fantasy fungi.

Sky Captain, the very interesting new vendor of high-quality steampunk models, has a fine new one out today. The Cryo Chamber ($10) is fully posable in Poser…

Mad Scientist Lab Survey: Part Two.

This post looks at the resources available for the classic 1930s-style laboratory itself, for DAZ Studio or Poser users.

Some products were a good fit for the days of Poser 4, but things have moved on a bit and today you may want to re-texture some of the props. There’s a nice range of electrical capacitors and suchlike here.

This could be combined with the products by Coflek-Gnorg…

This could be paired with the M.S.L. Cloning Facility…

DAZ has a larger stage for Tesla-like lightning experiments, the “Faraday Cage” pack…

The Science Lab and Chemistry Set is a good selection of Poser-ready objects…

You can also get a free set of lab stuff from the CG Lighting Challenge archives.

The DAZ Store has a full Mad Scientist Lab, the “Mad Lab”.

For free tanks, those with old runtimes may have the Zaibora Nexus tanks in the library…

The Angel Egg Dream Machine pack has a useful vintage control panel and projector screen…

Finally, there a basic Lab Mouse which is light on resources, so you could have many of them in a scene. Poser’s Hair Room should be able to give them fur fairly easily.

Mad Scientist Lab Survey: Part One.

The brain-in-the-jar has been a staple of science fiction since the 1920s and probably earlier. This blog post is a survey of the 3d content assets available in this line for DAZ Studio or Poser and elsewhere. It’s the first of an occasional survey of the contents needed for a ‘mad scientist lab’.

The DAZ 3D Brain Model, complete with shelf jar, is an obvious first stop…

The AntFarm on the DAZ Store has this Dr. Mason package…

A contemporary update on the theme, the Memory Storage Device…

The Cargobots And Containers set could also be adapted, with transparent materials.

Need something bigger? Coflek-Gnorg’s Sci-Fi Chambers Megapack should do the job for your giant talking brain scenes…

Runtime DNA has the RDNA Psiberion Vol 1 for Michael 2… Was at the RuntimeDNA store, but since its closure the model now appears to be lost.

Also worth a mention is that iClone users have this fully animatable Cyborg Librarian head…

There were also a couple of ‘alien brain in tank’ Poser models I remember from way back, but they seem to have vanished from the Web.

Update, Oct 2013: Think Tank.