Time for a quick summary of my Black Friday this year, if anyone’s interested.
Software:
Hovering in the background was the anticipated cost of the Poser 12 update in mid-December, which pulled me back from the possibility of some other software purchases. Despite their discounts, AKVIS Decorator and AKVIS Charcoal were just too expensive, with the UK 20% sales tax wiping out most of the discount. The same with 3D-Coat, as it was just too expensive even though there was a small discount on the Amateur tier this year. An email offer of an upgrade to Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator Pipeline 4 (from 3) was slightly tempting, but I don’t really need the 4.0 features.
I was also tempted by an upgrade to Clip Studio EX (the real ‘pro’ version) of the comics making software, as I had picked up the discounted $25 standard version in the summer. But I looked again at its line-art conversion of 3D models (an EX-only feature), and decided it just wasn’t worth it. Poser does it vastly better, and the rest of Clip Studio is still an intensely fiddly and badly-translated and mis-named ‘nightmare’ software. Nice inking brushes and multi-page comics layout don’t compensate for all that clutter. So, I’m glad I only wasted $25 on it and can just thing of it as a nice easy $25 vectorisation tool. Thus I’d say that the cheap and friendly Comic Life is the best and easiest tool to make non-manga comics. If you haven’t looked at Comic Life for a decade, and are still thinking of it as a $35 kiddy-tool, you’ll find it has a wealth of new features and refinements at the same old price. And it’s also in continual development.
One “curiosity” purchase this year was $10 spent at the ArtStation Market sale, on Pascal Blanche’s ZBrush NPR preset packs (made when the new Zbrush NPR feature was ‘a thing’) and his painting process video. Also a plugin that’s supposed to make it easier to get a viable anti-aliased illustration from ZBrush. I’ve yet to try these out.
Subscriptions:
No subscriptions this year, as I don’t do subscriptions at all. No ownership, no value.
3D content:
The DAZ Store’s pre-Black Friday discounts were resisted. These days the lower sub-$10 end of my WishList is fairly well cleared of the “highly desirable” stuff, and thus it’s fairly easy to resist. But the DAZ sale did see me adding to my little “DAZ Genesis 1 turns into anything, wears anything” completist project. For this I had already picked up two heavily-discounted packs of Genesis 2 clones for Genesis 1, and also the original Poke-Away! for Genesis 1, with Mavka For Genesis 1 bringing the total to just $10.
At the Renderosity Store sale, my little “Genesis 1 project” was then completed for clothing fits by picking up “Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis 1” for $5. With this and my other add-ons a Genesis 1 can now look like or wear anything in the entire Genesis line, and also from the older figures too. And any Poke-through can be dealt with too. And I also already have various Creature Creator and figure-shapes packs for Genesis 1.
But my Genesis 1 uber-project is not quite over, as I’d also like to add “the cherry on the cake”. This being the original Genesis Generation X2 and its GenX AddOn Gen3 Bundle. These enable “any morph” loading for Genesis 1, including from legacy M3/V3/A3 figures. Sadly these two are $50 together and did not go to a discount.
Also at Renderosity on Black Friday, I had Meshbox’s vast Steampunk Arboretum for Poser for $5. For $10 I also picked up Action Toolkit for M4 and Action Toolkit II for M4, on Mike Mitchell’s recommendation re: their usefulness as go-to sets of partial poses for comics.
But at Renderosity a lot of the action actually happened in before-and-after sales. “Must-have” 70% discounts on three choice 1971s scenes, and three sets of quality steampunk props, dinged me just before Black Friday. Then after Black Friday was over, the late arrival of the new Nunatak figure from Nursoda dinged me again with a “must have” discount. Thankfully I found then that my sluggish Renderosity credit had unaccountably increased a bit since Black Friday, and I was thus also able to get Poisen’s Helmetz3 pack (has a cool Moebius-type sci-fi helmet in it) and ShaaraMuse3D’s Stick Collection (Nursonda’s Nunatak needs something to carry on his back, is my excuse)… for just $10 all-in.
So, in all, this year saw $56 go to Renderosity, for some $150+ worth of content.
What of the DAZ Store? Just $14 went to DAZ in total, though I did get a very good haul of freebies from them. Including some time-limited Poser lights packs which would otherwise have cost $50, and other freebies such as the new Santa Gnome and AprilYSH’s Dforce Myles Beard For Genesis 8 Male. I also had the new “How To Use the DAZ Studio Geometry Editor” as a personal gift via DAL and found it quite interesting. Who knew that the feature existed, and works?
But the winning store this year is likely to be HiveWire, as any big store-closing sale is going to draw down the PayPal and this one is no exception. They’ve had one $30 order from my well-weeded WishList, including the Poser 11 Scatter tool, and there’s still another $35 of “possibles, maybes” left in the WishList, including Ken’s G’s excellent dragonflies.
So… a total spend of $120 so far, which has been effectively covered by some unexpected bonus income into my PayPal from elsewhere. Nice. And I thus still have enough left in the PayPal to get the Poser 12 upgrade when it appears in mid-December.