Nunatak from Nursoda for Poser and DAZ. It’s always great to see a new quality figure from Nursoda. This is the male figure to accompany his female Utla of a few years ago.
Currently on a discount at $11 at the Renderosity Store.
Monthly Archives: December 2020
24 Days Of Christmas Freebies at Renderosity
24 Days Of Christmas at Renderosity, a fun Advent Calendar that is now slowly filling with freebies. I’m not sure the bloody Guillotine Props Set is really suitable for Christmas, though it’s from RPublishing and thus it perhaps wryly symbolises the Poser 12 developer workload and its shipping-date deadlines.
Amazingly, I had somehow managed to miss getting Powerage’s Pacificator for Poser, over the years, but it’s an Advent Calendar freebie and I have it now…
There’s also a free Textures Pack for Pacificator if you want to make it look jazzier than my quick real-time Comic Book render shown here.
Also note the new free preset to Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings for DAZ Studio 4. Very useful if something you loaded as an experiment (such as HD morphs) has messed with your settings, or you’ve been fiddling with the settings and things have not gone as planned.
For some reason, under any version of DAZ Studio and across different PCs, I have never ever been able to get anything at all to show up in the “Presets” render panel…
I can only assume it’s an un-fixable perma-bug. This freebie is exactly the same in this respect. Nothing shows up there after install.
The clunky workaround is then to drag-drop the “Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings” .DUF file to the DAZ Studio Viewport. This will reset the iRay settings to their defaults, and also sets a 1600px render setting.
Apocalypse Girl – now complete and available for the Kindle
Did you get a shiny new 10″ Kindle on Black Friday? Need a comic to put on it? There’s a new graphic-novel, from well-known store vendor Sixus1 (Les Garner), and it’s now a complete story. I’ve just spotted that his final Apocalypse Girl #6 issue landed on the Amazon Kindle store at the very end of September, thus completing his graphic novel of Apocalypse Girl…
“Dogs of War”, the conclusion of the first Apocalypse Girl” graphic novel
Congratulations to Les for getting it completed and published!
DAZ Store freestuff – updated
The DAZ 3D Store’s Freestuff page has updated. In terms of stuff without dependencies, the old $38 Runtime DNA Ultimate Lights And Backgrounds bundle may be of interest to Poser users using FireFly. There are also some sky sets with matching lights, which require the RDNA Terradome uber-environment as a base dependency in Poser.
While you’re there, don’t miss the free toon Lil Gnome which is new.
Goodbye to the Mac
Based on what I hear about NVIDIA drivers and OpenGL, and also the ‘death’ of DAZ Studio and Vue on the ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS, it seems to me that the Mac can no longer be considered a serious and stable platform for 3D graphics production work. As such I will no longer be wasting time on this blog in also trying to note or consider the tedious “Mac issues” in my posts. I’ll simply assume that all readers are running Windows.
OctaneRender 2021
OctaneRender 2021 has moved up to a closed beta, with the forthcoming OctaneRender 2020.2 as its release-candidate engine. Octane is interesting because DAZ Studio already has it, currently via a Free tier in the subscription rates, and because Poser 12 is to get a current-version Octane plugin in 2021.
OctaneRender 2021 is said to add…
* Improved volumetrics.
* Improved performance for scenes too large for the GPU’s memory.
* Updates to the AI Light algorithm, said to accelerate final renders by “2x or more”.
* Octane can now also work as a host for other renders such as “Arnold, RenderMan, Radeon ProRender, and Blender Cycles”.
* There’s hazy talk of something called “Brigade” which will offer real-time Eevee-like rendering via Octane, but ray-traced rather than OpenGL. But if you have the horse-power to do that then why not just use real-time iRay instead, and for free?
* There’s also an even hazier mention that OctaneRender 2021 could introduce Octane’s own “AnimeRender” rendering engine.
AnimeRender? It’s said to have been in development since 2018 but is not yet released. But let’s assume that AnimeRender does what it sounds like, an NPR toon render that is i) not fiddly to set up or use; ii) can be used with just a few clicks without having to manually re-texture figures with toon materials; iii) has a quality and style that would be commercially-viable in terms of appealing to regular comics readers.
If then available via Octane in DAZ at the Free tier (doubtful, but possible) then AnimeRender might open up easy comics rendering from DAZ Studio, and with more or less the same ease as Poser 11’s existing real-time Comic Book mode. I’m making a lots of guesses and assumptions there, though. AnimeRender might turn out to be be just another naff attempt at a few cheesy NPR filters and some ugly hatching. Poser’s easy real-time Comic Book mode remains the gold-standard for now.
HiveWire sale now on
HiveWire have just launched their big sale and it’s a store-wide sale at 40% on everything. Included are the many SongBird Remix and Nature packs, and the new and desirable Poser 11.x script utility “Scatter”. Comics makers and animators may want the Universal Anime Head and Universal Chibi Head. And there are of course a wealth of beautifully crafted horses, cats and other animals, including a few rare animation items such as ‘running dog’ animation packs.
Until the end of 3rd January 2021. Sadly you can’t just splurge all your “store points” at once, but you can draw them down a bit by a series of purchases.
Hide all “out of stock” items on Amazon
Searching for a new graphics card on Amazon? 98% of what you want will be “out of stock”, so there’s a handy new UserScript that shows “Amazon in-stock only”. I’ve looked at the code and it’s clean.
For those using their national Amazon rather than the main .com it needs some slight tweaks to work. It’s easy to run it on my Amazon UK, but there you change the detection-phrase from the capitalised “Out of Stock” to “out of stock”.
Black Friday: NeoWin Poser (extra 20% off) / Blambot / HiveWire / Eye Candy
And… it’s a wrap. Black Friday has fried, Cyber Monday has sighed, and only a few week-long sales continue. I hope this blog’s readers managed to bag themselves a few excellent discounts. Here are a few final items…
* There’s a new coupon that’s worth a try with the $80 Poser 11 Pro at NeoWin Deals. They have a… “Use code CMSAVE20 for an additional 20% off site-wide.” Posted Nov 30, 2020 15:00 EST. Poser 11 Pro for just $64? Try it and see.
* The HiveWire 3D store sale has not yet started, but should do so later today.
* Blambot Comic Fonts have finally loaded their discount… 30% off with coupon code CYBERWEEK until 7th December 2020.
* The venerable but still-useful Alien Skin Eye Candy plugin for Photoshop is modestly discounted to $74 from $89.
* The Comic Life software seems to have had no discounts at all this year. They usually do. Oh well. Nothing either from PhotoLine, Expressi, Redfield, Wonderdraft, or Jitbit Macro Recorder. Flaming Pear (Flood 2) offered their discount a week early then closed it before Black Friday, as notified here.