News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: November 2017

Poser and DAZ new releases survey: November 2017

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It’s likely that few people have any pennies left in their Paypal after Black Friday, but here’s my selection of the most interesting new Poser / DAZ content released in November 2017.

Science Fiction:

MedBay by Stonemason, for DAZ Studio.

Space Wreckage from The AntFarm, for DAZ Studio.

v176 Another World for DAZ Studio, a fine ‘alien shoreline or pool’ scene complete with believable plants.

Mechanical Sandworm for Poser. Looks different enough from the Dune sandworm that you’d be able to use in commercial renders.

Cyberspace Junction by Coflek-gnorg, for Poser.

HFS Ultimate Shapes for Genesis 8 Female and Male.

Steampunk:

Now on Renderosity, London224’s MS15 Victorian Steampunk Terminal for Vue.

The Terminal might be run by Clockwork Squirrels, for Poser.

Cyber Heart for DAZ Studio. Replace the heart with a nut, to make it fit with the Clockwork Squirrels.

A steampunk textures makeover, OOT PBR Texture Styles for the recent Sayomi Anime Outfit for G3F.

Lord Cogsworth texture makeover set for Mr. Cogsworth for G3M, of DAZ Studio.

Tram Line. It’s lovely to have this in 3D and in DAZ Studio, but the model fairly closely references the satire painting “Der tod eines Pioniers” by Waldemar Kazak, so presumably it shouldn’t be used for commercial renders in your graphic novel or the like.

Fantasy Zeppelin from 1971s for Poser, in a lovely Jasper Morello-ish style.

House on a Rock for Poser, also from 1971s.

Storybook:

The HiveWire Unicorn is now also on the Renderosity store. Requires the HiveWire Horse.

MDD Polly the Patchwork Dolly for V4.2, for Poser.

3DA Blythe for G8F, Daz Studio. A characterful middle-aged woman, with a somewhat eastern European face.

Fantasy:

Desert Mage for Genesis 3 Male, which would fit well with the new Labyrinth Circle scene.

A fabulous RPG game-style fantasy outfit, Rogue Element Outfit for Genesis 8 Female.

Tithe Barn. I’m fairly sure this used to be on RuntimeDNA, but it’s now on the DAZ Store, and is now for either DAZ Studio or Poser.

Branchenia DR by Dinoraul, for Poser. An unusual “fantasy dinosaur” from expert dino-crafter Dinoraul.

Toon:

The great Nursoda is back (hurrah!) with a new character. Holke is presented as a Russian taxi-driver kind-a-guy. But he looks fairly adaptable. 82 poses and a basic clothing set.

Star Casual 4 for the original Star! character for Poser. The boots and hat could be replaced, to get the basis of a new sci-fi outfit.

Billy for Genesis 8 Male and Erre for Genesis 8 Female and Candy for Genesis 8 Female, three new Star!-like characters for Genesis 8.

Precious Clydesdale by Lady Littlefox for DAZ Studio.

Scenes:

The Heart Of The East, by Stonemason for DAZ Studio.

Stones HR would probably be a useful extender/background terrain set for The Heart Of The East…

Biomes 02 for Vue. A huge landscape with different ecosystems merging into one another.

Conifer forest for Vue.

Hidden Waterfall Pool for DAZ Studio. Similar to the Forbidden Pool in The Lord of the Rings. Would probably look better exported to Vue and there layered with an ecosystem of small ferns and mosses. Might also be used as a tidal rock-pool on the beach, when seen from above.

Building Site is an unusual one.

A complete Fitness Club for DAZ Studio.

Night Lounge for DAZ Studio.

Add-ons and plugins:

Look At Me Pose Control for DAZ Studio. Looks like it might be as vital an add-on as the Eye Clock Pose Control is.

This new add-on has:

Look at That.
Look at Each Other.
Look into My Eyes.

Emission Profile Master. Quickly load a standard IES light profile to your DAZ Studio light.

And finally, learn how to create your own texture sets for DAZ Studio, with Esha’s The Complete Guide to Texturing Clothing. A huge 32-session structured workshop.

That’s it. More picks next month.

“Death by Powerpoint”… in VR

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Just announced, Amazon Sumerian. It’s Amazon’s crassly-named new tool for building 3D in virtual and augmented reality. Judging by the cringe-inducing 2002-style picture it looks like they’re anticipating organizations will be using VR for the same-old “Death by Powerpoint” presentations, but done in a way where you can’t look away… because you have huge goggles strapped to your head.

Perhaps you’ll at least be able to close your eyes, and thus have a snooze without anyone in the room knowing, though I guess there will also be all sorts of prompts and audio pings that will try to prevent that. Horrible. Why would anyone want to work for an organisation which inflicted such horrors on staff, at a time of near-full employment (at least here in the UK).

But one hopes that employer fears of lawyered-up claimants — claiming motion sickness / eye-strain / headset-allergies / ‘unfriendly to disabled people’ etc — will put the kibosh on this before it starts.

And it that doesn’t do it… nodes. Nodes with adjustable spaghetti wires. Ugh.

And… it’s dusted and done…

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Well, that was good Black Friday – Cyber Monday for me. And the nice thing was that it was all paid for by a $240 payment from the iClone store, finally paying out on some paid content I was slowly selling there. Their well-timed payment got me: a new Kindle Fire 10″ HD tablet; about 18 really nice Poser/DAZ models and shaders; some more Crossdresser licenses; 50% off 500px, a Flickr alternative, plus the Bulkr software for mass downloading from Flickr. Lovely.

(Before anyone starts thinking that the iClone store is ‘a sure thing’ for selling 3D content, I should say that my $240 had been building up very slowly over a number of years).

Cyber Monday – a round-up of the bargains

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Right then, let’s have a quick look at newly-spotted ‘Cyber Monday’ bargains:

Rocketship 3D’s excellent PzDB Poser content database is down to $37. There’s also a Trial version at PzDB Downloads if you want to see how well it makes an index of your Poser runtime. My review is here.

CrossDresser License sale. 75% off, excellent. This is Poser clothing conversion software. If you have a paid pack of licenses in your CrossDresser 3 clothing conversion software, an upgrade to the 4 bundle is currently just $3.75.

Most CrossDresser licenses are down to $2.75 each. The store is a bit confusing: you might find it useful to start with my CrossDresser 4 test and review which has Web links at the bottom which take you straight to the license pages for the core/leading Poser figures.

Comic-book and webcomic artists may also be especially interested in licenses for NearMe and the Nursoda line of characters. You can also just say “what the heck”, and get all the licenses in a big bundle for $25.00.

I see that a couple of new items are at 60% off in my WishList at the DAZ Store, this morning. You might want to check your WishList to see what’s updated.

Content Paradise. No movement on my extensive WishList of older Poser content. I guess there’s no sale there this year.

Judging by my Vue WishList, there’s still been no general sale at the Cornucopia store (for Vue content). But there are the excellent personal sales there from two vendors, Geekatplay Studio and Tony Meszaros. No sign of any discounting on the Vue software itself, this year.

That’s it.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – Expanded soundtrack

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – Expanded. A limited edition soundtrack of 3,000. Released on 12th September 2017. Edward Shermur’s classic soundtrack for the classic valvepunk movie, with a whole hour of additional tracks over the 2004 release. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this movie, must be 20 times at least. It could never be made today, the studios would dilute it to death before it even got started.

Shipping – Anomaly: The Rubicon

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Amazon UK and USA both report that Brian Haberlin’s graphic novel Anomaly: The Rubicon is shipping. It’s made with Poser + digital overpainting, and those who have enjoyed the earlier Anomaly will need no introduction.

Listed as 244 pages in the UK, and 264 pages in the USA. I hope that’s a mistake and there’s been no censorship of the graphic novel for the UK market.

Vue license server seems to have had too much Thanksgiving turkey, gone to sleep?

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Really weird behavior from Vue. Open it up. Told that the license has “expired”, and Vue will revert to a PLE (Personal Leaning Edition).

“Reactivate”, successfully log onto online account, send new key by email. Load the emailed key, but then get a ‘bad key’ message on loading the key.

Exit the key loading process.

Then I consult “About Vue…” for license info… and it’s the same as it was before. Works fine. Full license and there are no PLE watermarks on big renders. Weird.

I guess their registration/license server is on the blink. I can still get into the Cornucopia store fine, see my wishlist etc, with the usual registration details.

To get past it, without explicitly clicking on the SWITCH TO PLE button (which then induces watermarks), is a sequence something like:

Load empty scene.
Reactivate Now.
Activate with Account Information. Web browser opens to https://secure.e-onsoftware.com/register/RegForm.php?Product=Vue14xStream&Serial_number=*** Ignore it and leave it open.
In Vue, choose Activate Manually.
Load License file (I’m assuming you already downloaded this via email once already).
Bad License!
Vue will auto-decide for you that “This is the PLE” (only it’s not really)… click OK on that message.
Close Web browser window.

Then it works fine. For instance, a 1800px render of the Steampunk Elevator in action, an item which was purchased yesterday and locked to my license. No watermarks, despite all the alarm…

It appears that if you actively tell it SWITCH TO PLE it can do so (temporarily, as you get another chance next time you load VUE), but if it auto-decides that “it’s now the PLE” then it can’t over-write the previous license settings.

Black Friday – a roundup of the other offers

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More Black Friday/Cyber Monday, likely to be of interest to readers of this blog…

* 50% off Comic Life 3, the easy-to-use comics layout and speech-balloons tool. Cheesy marketing at the website, but it’s perfectly adequate for making a comic page if you don’t have Photoshop or don’t want to wrestle with all the complexities of Manga Studio.

* The Unity Asset Store has 50% off. It’s the store for assets for game makers, which may interest some who need low-poly models.

* Xfrog 3D plants, 60% off.

* Blender Marketplace is at 25% off.

* Quadspinner GeoGlyph 2, 40% off. Terrain and erosion synthesis engine for World Machine.

* Reallusion store (iClone, CrazyTalk Animator), up to 50% on selected products.

* KeyShot upgrades will be 20% off on Cyber Monday.

Black Friday – Amazon offers big discounts on the new Kindle Fire 10″ HD

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Wowzer, I didn’t think the new Amazon Fire HD 10″ 1080p tablet + Alexa would get lower than the standard £150 UK retail, but it is! £109 and free delivery. Nice. It’s included in Black Friday on both Amazon UK and USA.

Amazon must have decided they want to take a big loss on the hardware, to get the eventual income from ongoing content sales.

Things to bear in mind:

* It’s not really going to be the sort of ‘digital painting tablet’ that a 10″ iPad + Apple Pen can be. But then… it’s a fifth of the price.

* Amazon has their own equivalent of Google Play. The Fire 10″ can’t access Google Play without some workarounds, and even when it can it runs an older streamlined version of Android and thus may not play nicely with some Google Play apps.

* If you find you really don’t like Amazon’s mis-targetted ads and “your tasteless friends also brought…” on the lock-screen, you can do a unofficial workaround to remove them. Or just pay Amazon £10 later on their website, to have them removed.

* It has a 16:10 screen, eminently suitable for movies and showing your widescreen artwork — because no “black bars” above and below such content. Also good for comics and graphic novels and magazines. Shows 104% of the sRGB range, and has good blacks.

* Alexa hands-free voice assistant. Apparently it works well, and it always listening.

* Mediocre camera.

* Apparently it’s going to be rubbish in sunlight, re: reflections etc. It’s an indoor tablet for lower lighting situations.

* Reviews say it’s ugly. But I checked out a model on display in my local Tesco store and it looks fine to me. It looks even better at £109. 🙂

Black Friday – the haul

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So what did Black Friday amount to, for me?

* I got a Flickr replacement in the form of 500px, at 50% off for the first year. Plus a most excellent Flickr bulk-browser and downloader, Bulkr Pro, at 60% off. Savings = $50.

* $35 spent at Renderosity got me $70 of really nice sci-fi and fantasy items, plus the Thumbnail Designer addon for Poser. Actually, it was a little less for me, as I had some store credit. Savings = $35.

* $11 at Conucopia, for Tony Meszaros’s high quality Vue items, after he ‘jumped the gun’ with huge 70%-80% discounts a week early. Savings: About $70.

* Another $11 of Cornucopia items, after Geekatplay Studio also joined the discounting at 50%-off. Savings: $15.

Not bad. In terms of 3D, $57 got me a nice bundle of 15 of the highest-quality items. Plus another $67 to escape from Flickr before the idiots at Yahoo crash-and-burn it completely. Total savings: $170.

If there are eventually Cyber Monday deals on Monday, from Cornucopia and DAZ and Content Paradise, then they’ll likely be a little late. As my PayPal is now all-but flat…

Black Friday: DeviantArt CORE membership

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DeviantArt’s CORE membership has a Black Friday sale on. It’s not a great offer, frankly. And you can’t pay by PayPal, and I’m always very wary about putting recurring annual memberships on a credit card (because they can be so difficult to cancel). But it might save you some cash, if you were going to buy a CORE membership anyway.

I think the banner flash is misleading. I thought “buy one, get one free” would mean: you buy a year, and you get a free year’s membership to give to a friend. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s on offer.

Black Friday: 50% off 500px membership

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500px, the worthy Flickr alternative for photographers, has a Black Friday sale. Coupon code: BFRIDAY

It’s $28 (after a 50% discount) by PayPal (recurring annually, note). That gets you a basic 500px membership, for which the main benefit is an unlimited number of uploads. There is a free account, which I was on previously, but it only allowed something like ‘four uploads a week’.

If you want to swop to 500px from Flickr then Bulkr Pro is your best option for bulk/automated download of the full-size pictures. I see they also have a discount currently, from $60 to $39. That’s a one-time purchase of a license key for the desktop Windows software. It appears that the license key delivery for Bulkr Pro isn’t automatic, and you may have to wait a while before the maker manually sends the email with the key.

VUE 2016 R4 update – available now

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The VUE 2016 R4 update patch has just been released. A few of the selected highlights of the 480Mb patch…

* Stereoscopic rendering and VR180 Panoramic rendering.

* Better multi-pass masking, re: semi-transparency (“For instance, cloud passes or tree leaves masks won’t show the sky in the background”).

* You can now embed the alpha channel for each mask pass, when the output format supports it.

* Path Tracer Renderer improvements.

* VUE now supports CPUs with more than 64-cores on Windows. [Meaning that Xeon users with multi-workstation render farms will be happy]

* Added Cinema 4D R19 support.