News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: December 2020

On the Kirb

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics Leave a comment

A quick experiment to see if Mike M’s “Jack Kirby in 3D” dream is actually possible. The style can certainly be approximated, and quickly.

Yes, I know, shadows and other embellishments would need to be added. The colours would also need to be muted back to more of a “faded 1960s comic-book” look (I’m not a fan of garish re-colours of 1960s comics, printed as reprints on slick white paper). A firmer holding-line would need to enclose the character, and some clean up is needed on the over-complicated head.

Release: NVIDIA Omniverse

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

NVIDIA Omniverse has been released in open beta. In its current form it appears to be an extensible virtual production studio, giving teams the ability to… “simultaneously work together on projects with real-time photorealistic rendering” but also to “work concurrently between different software applications” via Omniverse Connectors which bridge into “leading” content creation software. Most interestingly, there is a promised Connector bridge to the free Blender in the near future. Naturally, your studio’s creatives all need to be brewing their wizardry on fast n’ shiny NVIDIA graphics cards and Windows.

The Omniverse platform is only in open beta at present, but already has several working modules within it. Including ‘Omniverse View’ for architects, and ‘Omniverse Create’ for designers and creators. It seems to use the Pixar USD format for universal ‘in-out porting’ of the 3D scenes and moving them around the various applications?

“Early next year” this virtual studio platform will see the release of…

“‘Omniverse Audio2Face’, AI-powered facial animation; and ‘Omniverse Machinima’ for GeForce RTX gamers”.

Machinima being the term for real-time WYSIWYG animation using a game-engine, and from the sound of it ‘Omniverse Machinima’ seems to be tilted toward Unreal Engine users and TV studios — rather than the hobbyist crowd that is currently using iClone.

The ‘Audio2Face’ module is more interesting and will aim to have an AI… “generate expressive facial animation from just an audio source” without any need for expensive and fiddly camera-based mo-cap. That makes a lot of sense. Train an AI to match millions of audio vocalisations with visual expressions, then have it generate expressions purely from audio. In fact I’m a bit surprised such a thing doesn’t already exist in software — beyond the existing ‘vocal audio to mouth phonemes’ lip-sync automation. But perhaps animating a full face and escaping from ‘the uncanny valley’ in real-time may need a Cloud connection and a zillion back-end NVIDIA GPUs to work? My guess is that you would need a second AI to weed out the “ugh, no… uncanny valley” results.

Anyway NVIDIA Omniverse looks good and may even be free(?), albeit after the entry-ticket price of a 30-series NVIDIA graphics card and (ugh) Windows 10. When it’s all polished up and hooked to a Blender bridge, that could make it very interesting for small indie animation studios. But what are the prospects for non-techie hobbyists? Well, DAZ is also an NVIDIA partner, so I guess if DAZ Studio implements a Pixar USD-format bridge then they could also enter the Omniverse?

Santa drops a .8BF

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News 3 Comments

Would you like the free G’MIC filters running in Photoshop, for Christmas? And in PhotoLine, Serif Affinity Photo and IrfanView too? Santa has visited early, on that one!

Yes, the latest G’MIC has been successfully ported to the old Photoshop .8bf plugin format. It’s been a year of work, in an official project, and is stable in 64-bit.

Be aware that if you have saved custom “Favorite” presets, some may no longer work after installing this. This is because this G’MIC is incomplete, and this incompleteness will affect presets on all your other G’MIC installs (Krita, Paint.NET etc). The solution is to tick the “Internet” check-box and run the “Update filters” inside G’MIC. This will give you the extra super-secret “Testing” folder of filters (and perhaps others in other folders) that you didn’t have before. G’MIC is now complete and all your custom “Favorite” presets will now work.

NVIDIA Studio Drivers for DAZ

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio Leave a comment

Who knew? NVIDIA Studio Drivers…

NVIDIA Studio Drivers provide artists, creators and 3D developers the best performance and reliability when working with creative applications. To achieve the highest level of reliability, Studio Drivers undergo extensive testing against multi-app creator workflows … for the latest releases of top creative apps, including … DAZ Studio.

Good to know about this alternative to NVIDIA’s mass-market videogame graphics-card drivers, especially if you’re about to plunk down cash for a new graphics-card.

Not having been an NVIDIA card user for many years now, other than the antique NVIDIA Quadro in my Xeon workstation (which has its own drivers, and is anyway now too puny for modern software to consider using), I hadn’t known about this line of drivers.

Release: Cartoon Animator 4.4

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

Reallusion has released a cool new Cartoon Animator 4.4, with the ability to tweak and adjust imported 3D motions. This feature is apparently not just a Pipeline edition thing, but is also in the cheaper version.

Don’t want to tweak? This is Reallusion, so you can of course also buy very expensive packs of pre-made 3D motions, well-suited and tested for the latest sophisticated G3 generation of Cartoon Animator figures.

What about importing freebies? At the end of the video, Reallusion’s 3DXchange utility is shown and third-party motions are being converted. Sadly 3DXchange (a sort of universal converter) is no long available as a standalone, and to get it in a useful version I’m pretty sure you need the expensive iClone Pipeline bundle. So don’t go rushing to pay for an upgrade to Cartoon Animator 4.4 in the hope of importing oodles of free .BVH motions, unless you also have the matching install of 3DXchange.

However, note that applying 3D human motions in Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator) is not new. You can already do free BVH to Cartoon Animator conversion with an older copy of 3DXchange by saving them to iClone ‘non-standard figure’ motions. Many will have picked up a free copy of iClone 5 at some point and may well have the 3DXchange that came along with it.

Indeed, old-school iClone users may not even need to do that, as they likely already have a large library of 3D-figure iClone motion files on their PC. These are now (mostly) drag-and-drop onto Cartoon Animator figures. However they may not “take” on the latest shiniest G3 figures. So if you need to upgrade will partly depend on what figures you’re going to be using, G2 or G3.

It’s a finny thing…

Posted on by Posted in Tutorials Leave a comment

Got fins?

I’ve greatly updated my September 2020 post on how to fix the fin… when loading or opening a scene with DAZ Studio’s Genesis 1. There are now four fix methods. I’ve also finally tracked down what’s causing this annoying problem. It was one of a free set of head morphs, that others have also had the same problem with. Delete the rogue morph and the problem is cured.

Poser 12 Early Access – new incremental release, fixes

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

Poser 12 Early Access has a new public download. The download had been at “Poser 12.0.306 – 2020-11-25” for a while, and has now jumped forward three iterations to “Poser 12.0.322 – 2020-12-08”.

The most important changes, for those considering downloading the latest version:

* ShaderNode equivalency behaviour in Poser 12 is now consistent with Poser 11.

* Additional support for Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics cards.

* Partial fix for seams showing in SSS, when traditional skinning [of figures] is used.

* Can export an image from the PostFx palette.

* Fixes to the Python Addons.

* Fixed exporting SuperFly renders to ‘Aux’ layers as .PSD and .PNG – the “Original” layer is no longer dark.

Have a BEER

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

A new video on “Getting Started with BEER/Malt”, this being the new free NPR plugin for Blender. The video shows how to download, install and active the newly public Release v1-beta. Also how to apply a basic shader and line to a sphere.

The development work is done, but according to their YouTube channel they still need to hire a developer to add a nice UI and a layering system. You can donate here to help make that happen.

CTA4 at NeoWin Deals

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Special Offers and Discounts Leave a comment

The discounts keep rolling, as people try to find ways to wiggle those last few dollars out of your precious PayPal balance. I see that Reallusion has followed Renderosity’s lead and are offering their software at a heavy discount via NeoWin Deals. They now have Cartoon Animator 4 Pro of offer there, bundling this starter version (ignore the “Pro” label, the real Pro version is called “Pipeline”) with their 12 Principles of Animation Course, for $49.

CTA 4 is the latest version of their 2D animator software and it’s a fine animation tool in terms of both its ease-of-use and general friendliness. It’s less friendly in terms of the cost of content and add-on packs, so ideally the impoverished hobbyist needs to make or find their own 2D assets and backplates. I have a big bundles of freebies in that regard, to start you off. Also, while their training is always top quality you do need to always check if a paid ‘training DVD’ of theirs is actually also available free online — sometimes it is.

You should also know that iClone motions, if you have any, can be used on the G2 CTA characters via simple drag-and-drop.

PoserWorld sale – 50 items for $50

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Special Offers and Discounts Leave a comment

PoserWorld has a Christmas coupon-sale on their legacy Poser content, mostly V3 and V4 and with many unique items in military and police, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and many historical curiosities such as a Theramin (early electronic musical instrument) or a 1950s cigarette vending machine. 30% off at the Checkout with the Holiday2020 code. Where else will you find items like these…

Note they also have a new Bronze Membership at $100, but… with a 50%-off coupon to take it down to $50. This lets you get any 50 items from the 3,300 items in the Club Classics category. That’s a good deal, at $1 an item, provided you’re not expecting the latest Genesis 8 dial-a-girls and are willing to spend an hour picking from the pages. The 50% off coupon there is: ITSBACK50

Black Friday: my summary

Posted on by Posted in Special Offers and Discounts Leave a comment

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.

Poser 11: ramped

Posted on by Posted in Freebies, Poser 2 Comments

If you were somehow thinking of doing ramped toons with Poser 11’s Cycles-based SuperFly rendering, rather than in the fast real-time Comic Book mode, there’s now a new free .MT5 Poser Cycles Color-Ramp to help with that.

But, as Poser’s own Charles Taylor advised in the recent Poser 12 Early Access webinar, basically… don’t try to use SuperFly for toon. I agree, learn to use the Comic Book mode properly instead. Real-time, fast, great results if handled correctly.

Still, I guess the ramp might be useful in other complex node setups that you need to port from Blender to Poser.