The Poser developer team are looking for a Product Manager.
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Virtual apartment tour in real-time
Tour a 3D apartment rendered in real-time with the Unreal Engine 4 videogame engine…
GeForce GTX 960
This is interesting, especially if you were looking at buying Reality 4 because you can’t run Octane with Daz Studio. NVIDIA has released a powerful new GeForce GTX 960 slot-in graphics card (review) that should run Octane, and at an ideal $200 price vs. power point. But before you whip out your credit card, just remember to factor in:
* The probable need to upgrade your PC’s power supply unit. Even a new PC probably only came fitted with a wimpy PSU, unless you have a hardcore gaming PC.
* The electric bills that these graphics card beasts run up, once you slot them into a domestic ‘always on’ PC.
* Do you actually have the space and the correct type of slots in the PC case, so you can fit the card in?
Those fans are going to make a fair bit of noise, too, if you pride yourself on how quiet your PC runs.
Stock wig cutouts for Daz and Poser renders
It seems that no-one has ever taken a range of realistic wigs, photographed them pin-sharp and hanging from different angles against a good greenscreen, then used the pictures to create a royalty-free stock library of cut-out hair? With no stands, manniquin heads or other elements showing. Just the hair, looking as though it’s actually sitting on a head and not slumped on a desk. I just can’t find anything like that. A search for “wig” on Thinkstock finds only one suitable ‘isolated’ (cut-out) image, on Shutterstock there’s two, and even those have the shadows and highlights too stark…
In the age of Reality 4, is the ‘bad hair day’ hair we usually have to put up with in 3D renders holding back our art? While also massively boosting the render times, I might add, even if you have software that can ‘grow’ and ‘style’ its own hair. Wouldn’t it be easier for many portrait picture makers to ‘Photoshop on’ some quality hair afterwards, from a good stock collection? And ideally one slanted toward sci-fi and fantasy hair, rather than middle America blow-dry styles taken from the 1977 Hairstylists’ Guide, of the sort that painted stock hair collections seem to favour?
Post-Christmas new content survey: 2015
It’s still a little early in the month, but I’m taking my monthly look at some of most eye-catching content released on the Poser and Daz stores since Christmas:
Steel Town Blast Furnace is large and unusual. Often the sort of setting used at the end of 1980s gangster and cop movies, and some types of superhero movies (Wolverine, Spiderman). Which shows that the pro’s have found it to be a usefully generic setting…
Want the Hulk to come along and “SMASSHHH!!!” your Blast Furnace? Well, just slip the new Ogora the Orc HD into the nearest phone booth for a superhero quick-change and… you might get Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk character. Even as an Orc, he has more character than many of the generic orcs available for Poser and Daz…
The Wild West seems to be deeply unfashionable these days, killed off by self-indulgent dross like the dire Lone Ranger movie and rubbish ‘comedies’ like A Million Ways to Die in the West. But Western Outlaw for Genesis 2 Male looks like a fine outfit, and could fit nicely in a historical scene alongside last month’s DAZ release of the American Bison…
An equally cool new wilderness outfit is for V4, the Pulp Heroes: The Explorer for V4…
Songbird ReMix: Birds of Prey Vol 3, Hawks of the New World offers American Hawks for Poser-only, to the usual superb standard of the Songbird ReMix series…
The toon character Pink is not at all well-served by his initial promo picture on the store. Nor by his ‘search-engine unfriendly’ name. But behind that there’s an interesting-looking aquatic sprogling character from new developer Chk2033, just crying out for immersion in a sparkling Spore-like pond…
Pagan Throne seems a suitable setting for the Winter Birds masked fantasy characters (requires The Owls for V4 and M4)…
If I were making a Doctor Who 3d comic and I wanted a cool new-look Tardis that hadn’t yet been used by anyone else, I might try to adapt and retexture the pods of the new retro-style Cryogenic Chamber from BlueTreeStudio…
Steam Outpost is another in 1971s’s extensive fantasy-architecture series. Nicely Morrowind-meets-Myst. Equally nice is his new steampunk Diesel Daisy…
Also in steampunk, Cybertenko has a rigged Poser Turtle Submersible, a copy of the first submarine in America. This is available free as a static mesh elsewhere, but Cybertenko has obviously done a great job of fully rigging it…
That’s it for now!
Comic Life 3 – for Windows desktop
A new version 3 of Comic Life software has been released, and it’s a desktop Windows version. Comic Life aids you in layout out and lettering a comic book page. Sure you can do this with Photoshop, but it’s much more fiddly and will probably take most people about twice as long. You can also do it with Manga Studio, but that’s software for professional comics artists and there’s a bigger cost and a learning curve. So it’s good to see Comic Life back in the game and on Windows desktop again with a fresh version that works on Windows 8.x.
Something Brewing…
Cartoon Brew Seeks An Associate Editor…
“the animation industry’s most visible news source” seeks “a key member in the website’s development, someone who understands both the practice and business of animation inside-out”.