Ah, well… that’s DeviantArt ruined. They’re now forcing the appallingly un-usable new ‘Eclipse’ interface on everyone, from 20th May 2020. The new look is somewhat prettier, but is absolutely vile to try to use. Its poor usability and layout is just so bad, and in so many places, that it’s amazing how it all got past the beta testers. I can only assume they were all using tablets, not widescreen desktops. It’s so bad that I’m considering moving. Are there any real alternatives to DeviantArt, that are not the dour and fun-free ArtStation?
Monthly Archives: April 2020
Release: Lightwave 2020
Lightwave 2020 has been released. The “what’s new” highlights for artists appear to be:
* Two new hair shaders in FiberFX, with “a simple artist-friendly shading option” which makes controlling and styling the strands easier.
* Tone mapping and better SSS.
* Improved workflow in the Scene Editor.
* “More features” are now supported in the FBX format.
* Updated OpenGL, for a “closer to final render” look in preview.
P3DO Explorer Pro 2.8, for $12.50
The Poser library manager/finder alternative P3DO Explorer Pro 2.8 is 50% off until 30th April 2020, including the upgrade. That makes it just $12.50 for first-time users.
The last P3DO Pro update was December, with many new features added, and this new 2.8 is March/April 2020. Again, lots of new items added and other tweaks, on which the changelog is linked here. Much as I like PzDB as a Poser library manager, this new P3DO 2.8 has to be worth a mere $12.50 just to have as a backup. I believe it also works offline, whereas PzDB needs to ‘phone home’ occasionally, which may make P3DO useful for offline Poser creatives. P3DO’s main problem is that searches are so incredibly SLOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW. Really, really SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSLLLLOOOOWWWWWWWWWW. Like eight minutes for one search.
Curiously, the DuckDuckGo search-engine seems to heavily censor searches for the software (six results for “P3DO Explorer”, none relevant). Whereas Google Search is happy to provide 14,000 results. I assume that the word “p3do” is now on the Bing bad-words blacklist (DuckDuckGo is mostly Bing, with a bit of Yandex). Yes, it’s 2020 and advanced search-engines are still using clunky old keyword-based censorship. This is yet another reason why DuckDuckGo isn’t something you should use for serious searching, only for quick navigational searches and image searching (on which it’s actually quite good, mostly because it has less spam and fluff than Google Images).
Also, in other discount news, the main Reallusion Store has a coupon code for 50% off everything, also until 30th April 2020. Theoretically that brings the standalone conversion utility 3DXChange 7 Pro down to $99, which will be of interest even if you don’t want to get into the iClone ecosystem.
Furry fun
The iRay devs reported a few weeks ago that iRay “2020.0 final has just been released”. Strand fibers do “especially well” with the new iRay 2020 + an RTX graphics card, even fibres with dense intersections.
iRay 2020… “introduces native fiber intersection support! This delivers perfectly smooth hair, fur, carpet, and similar curve-based primitives out-of-the-box, without paying for extra memory and/or additional pre-computation time for tessellation to triangle-data!”
Good news for fur render speed and for Look At My Hair users. Though not quite yet, as the latest iRay in DAZ Studio is currently 2019.1.4. But it can’t be long until 2020.1 gets plugged in.
Several other major bits of software are also doing short hair, KeyShot 9 has its new “fuzz”, and Lightwave 2020 also adds new shaders and easier controls to its existing FiberFX.
Free cute cats
Free cute cats, delivered to your home! Nope, not an April Fools’ Day prank. HiveWire are giving away their high-quality Housecat for free until 31st May 2020, along with other goodies.
For fur also get their free LAMH Presets for the HiveWire House Cat, which are not on the new freebies page, but are free on the general store.