News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: March 2014

Firefox gets native 3D via bundled Unreal Engine 4

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

A new Firefox feature is rather cool…

“You’ll soon be able to stream and play highly realistic three-dimensional video games from within the Mozilla Firefox [Web] browser. … Firefox’s gaming capabilities don’t even require a Web browser plugin to function … ability to run the Unreal Engine, even the new Unreal Engine 4”

Firefox joins Google Chrome in this, as Chrome has had the same HTML5 3D gaming ability for a while now.

Given the pace that Firefox is developing it can’t be long until we see it in the latest Firefox downloads. In fact, those with the 64-bit developer Nightly build of Firefox can already play Monster Madness. Or, they can if they play it if can get past the dreadfully unintuitive UI interface which serves to hide the buttons that actually starts the gameplay. I clicked the main play button, but was then presented with nothing that would actually start the game. Though the game’s interface elements loaded fine…

madness

Such teething problems aside, we’ve come a long way from those far-off years when a clunky Java browser applet would load… and load… and then… crash and freeze your entire PC.

Heavy Metal puts Poser on the cover

Posted on by Posted in 3D Renders, Comics, Poser, Vue 1 Comment

This is great to see, and shows the graphics world what DAZ Studio and Poser content can do in the hands of talented artists. The famous comics magazine Heavy Metal has used a Poser render created by Isikol, on the latest issue’s cover no less! #268 is the April 2014 issue.

Heavy_Metal_268_Cover

His foreground character was rendered in Poser. The background is Stonemason’s The Enchanted Forest + Return To The Enchanted Forest + Jungle Ruins, all sent over from Poser to be rendered in Vue. Then the two renders were composited together in Photoshop.

Carrara 8.5 Pro at half-price

Posted on by Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment

DAZ’s Carrara 8.5 Pro is currently nearly half-price on the store…

car85

The Octane renderer for DAZ Carrara is due sometime this Springtime. Back in early February 2014 Octane was announced as “a few weeks” away. Octane is a GPU (graphics card) based renderer, and here’s a Jan 2014 preview. It’s not iClone — in terms of true “what you see is what you get” real-time rendering — but for a viewport updater it’s still pretty impressive, and is apparently even doing automated replacement of the textures with Carrara shaders…

Poser and Daz: new releases round-up

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio, Poser Leave a comment

After a break from 3D for a couple of weeks, I’ve been looking through all the new DAZ Studio and Poser content that’s been released recently.

Oskarsson’s Neon character is another movie-quality character, a more organic looking variant of one of his earlier characters…

neon

Stonemason keeps delighting 3D sci-fi artists, and he has a new robot out called Prototype. This character has a nice “Iron Man meets the school science project” feel to it.

prot

The Prototype could look rather good in Dreamlight’s new The Pit sci-fi environment…

pit

This large-scale environment probably works best with Dreamlight’s Light Dome PRO-R lights/render/composite system, so you can get the distance fogging (this requires Photoshop and the ability to use it).

Rather more twee, but also of amazing design quality, is The Unicorn from LittleFox. There are also poses and there’s already a small avalanche of texture addons for this one! Just search RuntimeDNA for “unicorn”.

unic

Also rather unusual is Moscowich’s Shamaness (for Poser) which is a semi-toon standalone character. She might work well with some of Nursoda’s standalone characters.

sham

Let’s not forget steampunk. The Steamway (for Poser) is a nice bit of quality steampunk transportation, with a number of different configurations.

steam

Steam-heads should also take a look at the new Technomancer Mask, for which there’s also a Victoria 4 edition…

techn

On a more mundane level Loft for Lease looks like a very useful multipurpose environment. Suitable for everything from a H.P. Lovecraft “Shadow Over Innsmouth” comic, through to just about any city crime stakeout scene.

loft

Loft for Lease can also be given a makeover to make it into a very nice looking Dance Studio or Gym Hall…

dance

And last, but not least, Millenium Cat aniblocks animations. Go, kittee!