News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: July 2020

DazToBlender8 is the new DAZ Blender plugin

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Ah, so the $15 Japanese DAZtoBlender8 plugin is the new official DAZ Blender plugin.

It’s been taken off sale at Gumroad, and the maker states there that… “DazToBlender is now available for free in DAZ 3D.” He also reports that there’s been a slight change due to the swop-over and name-change, and… “Props from Renderotica cannot be [used with] the version published on the DAZ 3D site.” The trade-off is that in DAZ’s hands the plugin appears to have been quickly extended to supporting transfer of Genesis 3 as well as 8.

The last non-DAZ developer version was 2020-07-01 | Version 1.9.3.4, then newly supporting Blender 2.83.

Another interesting item to note is that, now this is with DAZ… “This project is open source.” That’s from the DAZ Store page.

DAZ to Freestyle

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Tutorials Leave a comment

I was pleased to find a new YouTube video from the 3D Comic Creator, “DAZ Studio To Blender To Freestyle For Inking Your Comic”. He shares an in-depth 90-minute workflow for taking a DAZ Studio character into Blender and wrangling Freestyle lineart onto it. It’s clearly explained and he’s a good presenter.

I’m not sure I’d want to go through all that pain and intense fiddly-ness, though. Just to get what Poser 11’s Comic Book mode / Sketch Designer can output ‘at the drop of a hat’ in real-time. But it’s interesting to see how the most advanced DAZ users are trying to make artwork for comics. And as Freestyle is currently something of a “moving target”, along with the rest of Blender, there’s always the possibility that Freestyle and other NPR aspects of Blender will start to become easier and more automatic to use, in future. But for now the problem with Freestyle is that it’s old, and thus can only use one CPU thread. It’s not multi-threaded. Nor can it work with alpha-channels.

It’s very early days, but a better option might be a project called BEER/Malt that intends to try making NPR easier to get from Blender. Another hopes to add an easy SketchUp-like ‘sketched outlines’ capability to the default install of Blender (something you can only do with a paid plugin at present). Although both have very primitive demos at present.

Blog overhaul and link-fix is now complete

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Phew! I’ve just added to final touches to the update and refresh of this blog, checking and fixing this blog’s pages titled “Poser: the missing training DVD” and “DAZ Studio : the missing training DVD”, which have video and other vital tutorial links for newcomers.

The whole blog has thus now been overhauled and link-checked. The Technical Search and another page have also been newly added. The blog should now be good for another 18 months or so, before it needs another check-up, though of course the links in the many posts can’t be checked. You may still find broken links in old posts. And of course, a release of Poser 12 (September 2020, for the back-to-school crowd?) might require a whole new Poser 12 scripts page relatively soon.

Don’t forget, I’m on Patreon and am happy to see any new patrons there.

Hatching in MotionArtist

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Here’s a quick demo for Tom, who asked about the automatic hatch-shading of Poser imports in MotionArtist…

This is my new “Captain Bromley” M3 head, and you can see that MotionArtist has added hatching in the right places, but it’s not very convincing. Here is a screenshot of the basic controls you have on import…

Basically, you make a 2048px screenshot from this rather clunky little Poser scene mini-viewer. There appears to be zero control over lighting. The screenshot gets inserted into the timeline and.ore the current comics panel, and then you exit the mini-viewer. Fine for making up a quick ‘motion storyboard’ to a deadline, as a guide for filming a scene with human actors, but not for a finished motion-comic. For that you would render in Poser, and import the render, not the raw scene.

New free Bridges from DAZ to C4D and Blender

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DAZ now has a new open-source DAZ to Cinema 4D Bridge, and it’s free. It transfers “Genesis 8 and 3 content” from DAZ 4.10 onwards, into seemingly any version of Cinema 4D from R15 onwards. It will also “Transfer Figures/Props/Environments”, but judging by the description it sounds like the poses don’t get sent. Facial morphs do, though. With the Poser equivalent, the whole scene is sent to C4D, poses and all.

Scrolling down the page a bit reveals a family of such plugins, also free. Maya, Blender, 3DS Max.

The Blender one is interesting, potentially making a DAZ figure real-time in Eevee? Yes, it seems so…

“Supported Blender Render Engines: Eevee …”

There’s no manual download of these new Bridge plugins, and the install has to be done through the DAZ Install Manager. Once installed they’re then found under: Scripts > Bridges. YouTube has new tutorials on their use.

Bromley

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I’m quite pleased to have crafted this slightly-stylised and distinctive custom M3 head with the morphs and Brom injected, seen here auto-inked by Poser’s Comic Book mode under a simple two-light preset. The Hair is Neftis’s Mature Mark, with no retexturing, and it’s inking reasonably well — although the comic book inks are actually doing nothing to it and it’s all coming from the display mode. The eyebrows would need to be further inked in manually, and some bits of hair added if it was going in a comic frame.

Could be called “Captain Bromley” perhaps, which is a British placename that also gives the nod to the Brom morphs.

His face also looks good from the sides, which is not always the case. The inking would need to be cleaned up, as there’s some doubling of lines and there are breaks on the nose.

However some of these problems go away in PhotoLine, with a plugin and a 3 second custom filter preset I call “Commando Comic 1974″…

It could, of course, be blended with other Poser renders adding colour, shadow etc.

Regrettably, it appears that the Brom morphs for M3 are no longer sold. Hope you got them when they were $10, recently, and were featured here.

Comics from Unity – via Poser 12?

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Renderosity is calling for beta testers for Poser 12 and they specify Unity knowledge as one of the skills they’re seeking. Which makes it sound like there will be a Unity bridge in Poser 12. That would make a lot of sense. Unity is one of the two big free game-engines (the other is Unreal), and it’s reasonably well-supported by third-party add-ons. The free Unity Personal Edition allows commercial use, as long as you don’t make more than $100,000 per year in your business from using it.

The ideal would be, at a guess, an integrated three-click “Poser 12 to Unity” workflow that’s as easy as getting a Poser scene into Vue. But which also sends Poser’s current camera and framing to Unity. The other useful thing to get, either in Poser or from Unity itself, would be some form of Matcap. For the pros ‘Matcap’ is about basked shadows, but the basic involve a process that inspects the existing texture, then automatically tries to replace it with a best-guess toon material. So a red shiny dress becomes a red toon shader with ramping and highlights and a baked shadow, for instance.

The other possibility would be a live-link via a websocket, to drive real-time mo-cap of figures and faces in the Poser viewport. F-Clone, built on Unity, shows it’s possible.

In which case, what is available in Unity-land for tooning? Below is my initial survey of this. Please don’t go buying these yet. Not least because some of them are rather expensive (“‘Cos yur gonna make big bucks on your game, guys…” Yeah, right…). But mainly because a three-click fiddle-free ‘Poser 12 to Unity’ process is just my hope at present, based on very slim evidence.

Shaders in Unity:

Sugiyama Toon Shader, aka SugiyamaToonShader. An early success in 2016, but said not to work with newer Unity versions?

TypeA AnimeShader. Said to work especially well on hair.

VaxKun’s Anime/CelShading Shader. Includes emissive glow and toon-reflective glass. I suspect the demo pictures are being a bit more honest than the other packs, re: what you’re likely to get.

However, you don’t need to go to Unity to get the above looks. With a bit of setup, re-texturing and the right IBL lighting, they can be had now in Poser 11.

There are two competing suites or kits for Unity…

Toony Colors Pro 2 shaders set, with basic lineart.

Flat Kit: Cel / Toon Shading. Also with basic lineart plus a depth-fogging effect. This might be your best starting-point, though Toony Colors Pro seems to have been out longer.

Flexible Cel Shader. Possibly an additional useful set to have, in combination with one of the above two kits.

Nice Water Shader, adjustable and with a toony edge-ripple preset.

And lastly, RealToon shaders set. Seems to be older but is apparently quite flexible, and you might brew up a more unique look?

Lineart:

Jiffycrew Post Process Line. Seems to be outstanding, and thus has left little place for others in the market? The monopoly position has made it rather expensive. Update: withdrawn from the store.

The slightly more stylised NPR Contour Drawing and Sketch may also be worth a look.

Contour-hugging hatching on 3D models:

ToonSketch Core. A bit too grungy, and may work best on models with big flat surfaces?

NPR Cartoon Effect. Unappealing demo images, but scroll through to the simple hatch-shading demo.

Jiffycrew Hatching. Not very convincing, but with a bit of wrestling I guess it might produce dash-shading that looks cleaner and a bit more Moebius-like?

Obviously hatching still has some way to go in Unity. There are also some rather ikky attempts at manga halftone shaders.

Painterly:

Painterly.

Kuwahara Filter.

Flockaroo’s full-screen camera effects Aquarelle, Colored Pencils and Sketchy effects filters. It looks like you could cook up a reasonable ‘storybook look’ with these. These are full-camera effects and, by the time Poser 12 is released, Unity should support… “Camera Stacking, enabling users to layer the output of multiple cameras in rendered output.”

Watercolor Painting effect. The first picture seems a bit questionable, re: what you’re likely to get. As all the other demo pictures look very different.

Hand-painted skyboxes, inc. clouds:

Hand-painted toon sky-boxes include: Toon Sky, Toon Night Sky, PDG Cartoon Sky, Cartoon Skybox – Red moon. There’s also a starry night-sky in the Toon Skyboxes pack.

Toon Clouds is a dynamic cloudscape generator. Though they’re not as nice as the hand-painted ones seen above.

Amplify Impostors seems likely to be useful here, for quickly duplicating content to fill backgrounds that have large views with skies. There’s also a free SVGimporter which brings in a vector shape as a tessellated mesh.

You can also find packs of other “quickstart” Unity files on Gumroad, although they appear to be just skeleton set-ups and to lack art assets.

Vivify/re-colour:

Amplify Color seems the best option, enabling in-engine colour grading and saturation. Free.

Exporting big, hi-res, and nicely anti-aliased screenshots:

MadGoat SSAA & Resolution Scale. Because the aim here is not to make games or animations, but to get output for comics frames. A short endorsement of this by an architect is encouraging, re: getting clean hi-res output that’s then usable in graphics editors.

Visual novel engine:

And if you did want to make a game, Naninovel is quite capable. It’s for making a Japanese style ‘visual novel’, where the game elements are nearly all in the story choices. (Though note that the similar Ren’Py Visual Novel Engine standalone is free, and has a much larger user-base).

Having said that many Unity addons are expensive, the starter kit for ‘comics with Unity’ seems more reasonable. I’d start with the TypeA AnimeShader ($10), the Flat Kit ($40), Amplify Color (Free), and MadGoat SSAA & Resolution Scale ($16) for export. Total: $66. Though even then you’re probably not going to get a dramatically different look than you could get inside Poser and with a couple of filters applied to the renders. You’re not going to get realistic sketch pen-hatching or a sophisticated shadow-puppets/silhouette effect with light-leaks. What you might get that’s unavailable from Poser, if you want it, is a sort of pixellated Minecraft or low-poly look.

There you have it. These seem to be options for getting big comic-book frames from Unity in late Summer 2020, and mostly with a look that regular comics readers won’t cringe at.

Renderosity is hiring

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Following their DAZ announcement, Renderosity are “Now Hiring Community Moderators” more generally for the forums and other community aspects of the site. It seems a good time for this to be happening, since the forums have become a much nicer place to be than they were seven or eight months ago, and there are also many indications that Poser 12 is coming fairly soon.

My hunch is that 90% of the former problems in the forums were actually caused by one person, who was using a variety of aliases and sock-puppet accounts to aggravate and annoy. I assume the troll has now been detected and ejected. Just my guess, but things seem much better there now. Sign up, and help to make it even better!

Skin and G’MiC

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I’d forgotten that the G’MIC filters have a “Colors: Detect Skin” filter, in my recent quest for a skin-extractor. I’d never saved a preset for it, so I’d rather forgotten about that particular filter among the long list. Here it’s tested using the free Paint.NET, which now runs the G’MIC filters and loads up far more quickly than Krita (which also runs them). Once installed they’re found under “Effects”.

The filter’s method of targeting of the skin is fairly clunky, by sliders than move a green target patch about. There’s no “one click to set”. It’s clumsy at best, but simple and relatively quick.

Once your target is set, you then have three sliders with which to try to capture the mask…

Here’s my first quick preset. If this will work well on other Poser Comic Book renders… I’m not sure. But it’s likely to be a reasonable starting point.

Above we see the mask returned by G’MIC to the Paint.NET canvas. We’d only be using the layer colour-blending mode with this, to bring colour back to a filtered Poser render. Thus the clunkiness of the cut-out is not really all that important. It’s an interesting alternative to know about, but if you’re in Paint.NET then its free Color to Alpha v2.2 plugin is preferable, faster, and a bit neater (less fringing) and seems the overall best solution. It’s also nice that it’s totally free.

That said, it would still be nice to have a native real-time Poser solution, for automation purposes. While you could theoretically plug the skin into an auxiliary render node in Firefly, you would not get the masking of the skin by the hair, etc.

Open the hatch

Posted on by Posted in Natural media emulation, Poser 4 Comments

This is for Tom, showing one of my custom Sketch presets at work in Poser’s Sketch Designer, biting into the shadows of the Smooth Shaded display mode. In the comments, Tom asked about what MotionArtist’s 3D auto-hatching looked like, and I said a render from Poser’s Sketch Designer would be more acceptable to regular comics readers.

It was a bit more faint on the actual 6 second Sketch render at 1800px, and here I’ve tweaked contrast for clarity. In Smooth Shaded you don’t get the eyes, but you’d be compositing those in via a line-art render. The problem with this kind of fine hatching is that as soon as you start to reduce it in size, it smushes down into a smudgy haze. For a comic one would have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning it and making it consistent for, say, a 10″ Kindle screen. Still, nice for one-off illustrations, and a bit of smart blur gets you a pencil-smudged effect without damaging the linart.

Here’s an earlier attempt, with a more Bernie Wrightson look. This was on a straightforward figure, so it can also be done on normal display modes.

These are a bit hatched or whorled, but Sketch Designer will also emulate cross-hatching.