The Black Friday Store sales are opening up, plus more software.
* AKVIS has announced quite a nice offer, up to 50% off everything including their latest improved/speeded-up Decorator and Charcoal (together, $61 with 40% off). They have a Sketch too, but I don’t rate it highly in the scale of such things. The discounts are coupon based, see the page for details. Sadly their payment system is nation-aware and they thus charge an extra 20% sales tax in the UK, which rather wipes out most of the discount!
* 50% off the entire Renderosity Store, except software and out-of-contact vendors. Many will want the La Femme 2.0 Pro edition (the standard ships free with Poser, but Pro adds naughty bits and more) and perhaps also her La Femme CrossDresser License for the free CrossDresser clothing conversion software to expand her wardrobe. Some older Poser scripts are on sale, such as f68 Poser Crowd Generator (scatter and auto-pose figures) and f68 Easy Environment (a non-people scatter tool), but who can say if they’ll be updated for Poser 12? Note there’s also a new Scatter tool at HiveWire, far more likely to go to Poser 12, though it’s $20 and there’s as yet no sale there. There are HiveWire items on sale at Renderosity though, such as the new Tiger and the Egyptian Cat. DAZ and Poser users fond of the old Genesis 1 may be interested in the Renderosity Store’s Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis, which lets the original Genesis wear G8 stuff. Now I have this and the original Poke-away! for Genesis to remove poke-through, I can have “One Genesis to Rule Them All”: a DAZ Studio Genesis figure can wear any outfit from A3/V3 to G8 and everything in between.
* SketchUp plugin Transmutr is on a 30% discount at 55 euros. It imports common formats such as OBJ into SketchUp, poly-reduces and adds other fixes.
* DxO (Nik) have discounts but, just as I was starting to peruse these, a giant screen-blocker appeared and blocked my view. First rule of marketing, guys: Don’t. Block. The. “Buy”. Buttons.
* Smith Micro still lives. Had an email offer on Moho, now effectively defunct but it seems still available.
* The CGTrader store has a five-day sale on now. Sadly the Vue creator Raffy Raffy recently moved from the store to ArtStation, wiping out my CG Trader Wishlist. There are still some nice models down at the $2.50 mark, and you may find a few that can’t be had elsewhere. Of special interest may be the Poser stuff, DAZ stuff (the large numbers of Age of Empires-style ancient warrior and soldier outfits are not discounted), and some Vue content. Many of the detailed science-fiction scenes are expensive, but not all. One can also find quirky things like this Eastern European / Soviet flying van for $10…
* The ArtStation Marketplace sale is also on. There’s a whole lot of fluff in the store, but a key attraction is the Raffy Raffy store with expert Vue and Blender scenes at affordable prices. Raffy knows what he’s doing and the scenes are relatively lightweight despite their size.
There are also a couple of preset packs there, made back when Zbrush introduced NPR, such as BPR Sketch/Cartoon Shaders for ZBrush 2019 and BPR Filters + 3D Skull. If you pick these up you may want a Realtime Viewport Anti-Aliasing script, though be warned that getting a big anti-aliased render from ZBrush is an utter pain-in-the-neck, and even then is only 72dpi — so far as I can recall the recent updates have not solved this show-stopping problem with trying to use Zbrush’s NPR/BPR for comics and illustrated books.
If you’re signing up with the ArtStation Marketplace for the first time, watch out for this nasty little privacy-invader which is not checked by default…
* And finally, advance news that the Blender Market is set to start its sale tomorrow.