News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: January 2021

Poser 12 now at 12.0.386 for Windows and Mac

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The Poser 12 Early Access installer yesterday moved forward a month, and is now public in the latest version 12.0.386 (28th January 2021) for both Windows and Mac.

The very latest version has two key fixes… “Alpha channel from Cycles image-node renders correctly in SuperFly” and “SuperFly motion blur fixed for background rendering and the queue”.

Before that there were slightly earlier iterations, unreleased until now, which fixed shadow-blur and unsightly ‘seams’ on figures… “Shadow Blur Radius fixed and now working in SuperFly” and “Body part seams [which used to show] in SSS no longer appear, when traditional skinning is used”, and the “Diffuse Value on Poser Surface now correctly functions in Superfly renders.”

Actually the seams do still appear on some figures. The simple fix is to switch the figure to use Unimesh…

It looks like these should fix most of the forum gripes, re: photoreal rendering in Poser 12 Early Access. To aid newer users there are also newly tweaked render presets… “Updated SuperFly presets with improved consistency between threshold value on medium and high adaptive settings, and GPU and non-GPU settings.”

Other notable items are several fixes for CUDA/Optix and other hardware-related glitches, and “Render in Background, with GPU or on CPU, no longer crashes.”

Elsewhere it’s stated that SuperFly now does background transparency and shadow catching, making compositing renders together in a graphics editor easier.

The full technical Changelogs are here along with the installers.

Dead Poly

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Google has an online 3D object library, Google Poly. Who knew? Not many it seems… it closes down on 30th June 2021. It seems to be all VR paintings made with Google Tilt Brush, their now-abandoned VR tool which has just gone open source. These take so long to load that I gave up on the site. I couldn’t even get one of them to load… they must be huge.

Poser/DAZ Content Survey – January 2021

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It’s near enough the end of the month, so it’s time for my regular survey of this month’s new and eye-catching DAZ and Poser items.

Science fiction:

A free Obalisk for DAZ Studio. Simple, but effective.

A free Tank Body with a sci-fi Syd Mead feel to it.

Bonefish as a static .OBJ and .FBX. Low-poly so you could presumably scatter and flock them in a large underwater scene.

Pick it Up G8F poses, which could be useful for action superheroes. Likewise the Look at That G8F pose set.

Steampunk:

A Flying Bicycle.

Possibly also useful for the bike, the GrossArts Air-Propeller for additional lifting power. Need a map-case for a trip on the flying bike? Take a look at the free Cartable. I seem to recall this does not install well.

A free Steampunk Bike in Collada format.

The Watchmaker and the Automaton for DAZ Studio.

Allan Quatermain Adventurer suit for V3, now free. And in a similar old-school mode, a new free set of Michael 2 Expressions. While almost no-one now uses M2, some other old figure might be able to use them.

Fantasy:

Library of Wizardry, a nice variant on the setting that ships free with DAZ. Which I think is called Alchemy Chasm or something similar.

DA Sword and Shield Poses for Genesis 8. These are for round-shield fighting.

Mystical Mushrooms.

A curious Tree hut.

Historical:

Prohibition Alcohol Bottles and Barrels, Tommy Gun, Prohibition Delivery Truck and and Sedan. Also Prohibition Decals including bullet-shattered windows. All for DAZ Studio.

MS20 Country Store for DAZ. I’m fairly sure this used to be for Vue. Useful for use with the Prohibition-era items.

A Mississipi River-boat of the old paddle-steamer variety.

18th century Bicorne French hats in the Napoleon style.

FG Bluson Library, a 1900s-20s U.S. library, suitable for Lovecraftian scenes.

A Second World War Japanese Pillbox and accessories. Possibly also useful for a science-fiction comic, kind of like something you might see in a 1970s Moebius comic, with a sci-fi crystal glint to it.

A Soviet Tank Maintenance Station, which might also serve for other types of tank or even for sci-fi mecha servicing scenes.

Toon:

The Boneyard, a toony take on a stone-age setting and suitable for toon cave-men.

Ronk Artist – Clothing Add-on for Ronk, and Jeloda, both from Nursoda himself.

Also for Nursoda figures, Zlata Fashion, a free addon for Nursoda’s Zlata, and a new Space Pilot PigZZCommander outfit for Frankie.

The Puppet Company, suitable for use with DAZ’s Lenore and the Raven gothic toon figures.

Also suitable as addons for Lenore and the Raven, a free Medieval chair and Stool.

Storybook:

Bugga Boo for Genesis 8 and Morphs.

Loose braid for Blender.

Victorian-era Housemaid outfits.

Emmy Lou and Her Dress for Genesis 8 Female, a ball-joint doll like character. With the hair being Untamed Curls.

A free Punch and Judy Theater for DAZ Studio.

Scuffed up Hi-Topz Sneakers for Genesis 8 Female.

Wooden Float for DAZ Studio. A classic small castaway raft for small adventurers.

If your storybook’s lead character is on this raft, you may also need the new HF Powerful Swimming Poses for Genesis 8 Male.

Animals:

The HiveWire animal texture sets and their LAMH presets are now on Renderosity. Their creatures will presumably follow in due course. Some of Ken Gilliland’s bird packs are also starting to appear on Renderosity, having previously been at HiveWire.

AM’s new Wolverine. You just know that some wag is going to make a miniature spandex superhero outfit for this one.

Ladybug, aka a Ladybird.

A free dinosaur-friendly Tropical Rainforest as a .DAE (Collada) file. A bit of a tricky format, but better than his previous format, in terms of ‘import -> save as native scene-format’.

African Acacia Tree, for use with African animal scenes.

Casual Cat for DAZ House Cat, a pose set.

I guess this one sort of belongs with the animals. A free Shaman Hat for L’Homme. For those mushroom-munching moments when you think the buffalo are telling you the secrets of the cosmos…

But let’s not forget that modern humans are also prone to the need to wear crazy hats and see visions… in which case you’ll be needing the free Tin Foil Hats.

Scripts and related helpers:

La Eyebrows Gone, to hide La Femme’s eyebrows. Useful if you want to manually draw them on later, perhaps for a graphic novel.

Find it – three Python scripts to help you automatically find the folder for the figure’s .CR2 files, .OBJ files, or the .MATs and/or Poses. Works like the Poser 11 Library’s “Find with Explorer” right-click, but after you’ve put a figure in the Scene.

Alienator Pro for DAZ Studio. Replace all instances with other types of props.

Hand Gestures Pose Collection 1 For Genesis 8. They end up in an utterly stupid folder name, “windfield”, where you would never look for hands in a million years. You may want to rename the folder “hands”.

Tutorials and learning demo-files:

Tutorials for Poser 12, a new YouTube playlist.

Digital Art Live has launched the free STUDIO forum, a virtual artists’ studio to hang out in and learn from others.

A 3Delight Render-engine Tutorial Workshop, as a webinar recording.

That’s it, more picks next month.

Release: ArmorPaint 0.8 (Jan 2021)

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ArmorPaint (aka Armor Paint or Armour Paint) is an open-source standalone for painting on 3D models, including with PBR. Very like Substance Painter, but free and with no subscription shackle. Or… sort-of-free. It’s 16 Euros on GumRoad, where your $20 also gets you the latest builds dropped into your GumRoad Library. Or you can compile an .EXE yourself for free from the source-code — if you have a few hours to spare, a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio (free, when last heard of) and a YouTube tutorial handy.

ArmorPaint has had a couple of big updates, and the latest is now 0.8 (19th January 2021). There was another big update you may have missed hearing about, this time last year. There’s a YouTube video for ArmorPaint: Four key new features, January 2021…

“Added Viewport cel-shader plugin”.

Nice. It’s ‘two-clicks’ instant too, and it appears there’s no need to fiddle about with setting up special toon materials. No lineart on the edges, though you might paint along the seams. For the huge list of fixes and changes, including new .SVG import, see the Changelog.

There’s a Blender bridge, but as yet not ones for Poser or DAZ.

Apparently the freeware Materialize, from Bounding Box Software, is said to work well with ArmorPaint as a flanking ‘assistant’ software. Materialize can “create an entire material from a single image”…

Tutorial: where are the Genesis 1 expressions?

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One of the things that confused me about going back to explore the rich possibilities of Genesis 1 was… where are the figure’s Expressions in the Library/UI? A number of old forum answers, to similarly puzzled users, were confused and not very helpful.

There are two ways of accessing them.

1. The most obvious way only gets you to the third-party expression morphs…

‘Genesis’ | Posing tab | Head | Expressions.

There will likely be very few, or none in here, at least at first. They’ll be specialist expressions morphs like “Lion-man roars”.

2. The other and trickier way gets you to the standard human Expression morphs, or at least it does after installing the vital Genesis Evolution morph packs for Head and Expressions…

‘Genesis: Head’ | Posing tab | Expressions.

See the subtle difference? You open up the figure-tree and drop down to select the Head first, up in the Scene tab. Only then can you see the expression morphs down in the Posing tab…

Seven clicks, straddled between two panel tabs that may not be in sync, before you even touch an expression slider… it’s hardly ideal.

There can also be third-party Library packs of Genesis 1 expressions, which show up over in the Library under…

People | Genesis | Poses | ‘Expressive for Genesis’ etc.

It’s also possible you may find a few Genesis 1 expressions up in the AniBlocks folder. Some Genesis 2 packs also work with 1.

DAZ-zling!

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The DAZ Store builds a handy Library of your purchases, and very usefully allows re-downloads of .ZIP files, for manual installs. Sometimes for stuff you purchased years ago. It’s a good system. But in the last few days or weeks all the old Poser .ZIPs have been re-labelled as “DAZ Studio”, and here’s an example…

Good luck getting ‘Send in the Clones for Poser’ running in DAZ Studio 🙂 Thankfully the actual sales page still says only “Compatible Software: Poser”, so the Helpdesk team shouldn’t be seeing too many confused customers.

Other tests suggest the Poser installers are still in there, but they’re now mis-labelled. You thus have to squint at the filename and hope it has “Poser” in it, or see if the sales page states ‘Poser only’. Otherwise you have to download all the ZIPs and then open them locally to determine which would need to go in the Poser runtime and which in the DAZ content folder. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference… if it has a “data” folder, then it’s for DAZ.

Update: “Send in the Clones” is said to need Poser Pro 2012 with its service release SR3 patch. But I could not get it working even then, in a 64-bit Poser.

The Vue from here…

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A translated report from the German forums…

The import of scenes from Poser 12 Early Access does not seem to work so well with the current Vue version. According to Walther Beck, from Vue Support, there are apparently inconsistencies.

Vue import of Poser scenes has always been excellent, something that was honed and crafted and aligned over many years. There was a minor glitch with the Vue 2016 R4 patch (Poser 11.2 scene saves may not open correctly in Vue 2016 R4), but this bug was fixed in Vue 2016 R5. But after that, the compatibility has so far continued under the new ownerships.

Let’s hope the problems are not too difficult to fix, and that Vue keeps the ability to nicely import Poser scenes. Vue R6 should be out relatively soon, and that should hopefully fix it.

“It’s clobberin’ time!”

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When Oskarsson had a big sale at the DAZ Store, I picked up a Genesis 3 starting-point for making Thing from The Fantastic Four.

He’s HD though, so expect heavy render times in 3Delight. Fine in iRay, though those without workstations may want to lower the HD figure SubDivision levels down to 2 in both instances.

In Shaping, adding 45% ‘Barbaric’ give you the extra body bulk, then ‘HFS Brows’ gets you a bit nearer the Kirby uni-brow, etc.

You of course make your own orange version of the texture and could optionally ‘ink in’ the crack lines. Adding ‘Superhero Underpants’ gets the basic clothing look (though I think longer ‘swimming trunks’ is the current look). Still not great, even then (see below) but it provides a starting point that’s better than any other I’ve seen. The legs and feet need more work and widening, the mouth needs to be wider and the chin rounder, and Thing only has three thick fingers and a thumb.

Update: HFS Fantasy Shapes – ‘Hands: Beast’ are also useful morphs for getting more over-sized hands. Similarly for feet. Regrettably there is no three-finger morph for Genesis 3, though there is said to be one in HFS Ultimate Shapes for G8. Shrinking the little-finger down, pinky by pinky (there are three sections) to almost nothing, is a basic substitute but not ideal. It would require some Photoshopping later.

Update: JoeQuick had a Thing morph and MAT for Freak 4.

Release: DAZ Studio 4.15.x

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DAZ Studio 4.15 has been released, as 4.15.0.2 (7th January 2021). My last detailed consideration of DAZ Studio changes was back in November 2020, when I looked at…

What do I get if I move from DAZ Studio 4.12.1.117 (approx. midsummer 2020), to the very latest version 4.14.0.8.. (just released yesterday)?

… and I decided not to make the leap.

Ok, so what’s new in the latest 4.15 (Jan 2021)?

* It newly integrates the latest iRay 2020.1.3. Back in November 2020, iRay 2020.1.2 was a mystery. But it now has a DAZ-specific changelog along with one for the newly integrated iRay 1.3. Notable 1.2 additions were: bugfixes; “performance optimizations for some material paths”; “general improvements to volumes and materials featuring sub-surface scattering (SSS), both in performance/convergence and quality”. 1.3 has bugfixes and “fixes 3D textures being wrong with motion blur.”

So, sounds like 4.15 is mainly a useful upgrade for those using complex materials and motion-blur animation.

* Additions to the scripting API. The sub-link for this at docs.daz3d.com is current non-responsive, even when using an alt. DNS and/or a USA VPN. But the main changelog states… “Made additions in various areas”. I assume “additions” means new additions, not changes to existing scripting items that might then break old scripts. Perhaps these additions are part of the fixes needed to get DAZ working on the latest Mac OS, at a guess?

* Various in-scene opacity and tinting changes. Also “added support for visualizing an iRay Section Plane node in the viewport”. The latter appears to be about spaces that allow light through walls, such as glass windows?

All in all, then, there’s no outstanding reason for me to jump six months forward to the latest 4.15, and some drawbacks re: some of the small UI and labelling changes of render-engine and Viewport draw types. I’ll wait for the next version.

Looking at the official iRay Dev Blog, it has a new question about NPR and an interesting answer. This makes a future DAZ Studio look more interesting for me…

Q. Will iRay Toon be coming to DAZ Studio?

A. Unfortunately we cannot speak for DAZ. I’d hope that this will make it into a future release though.

This is, apparently, not the same “iRay toon” which some third-party DAZ Store products claimed to do circa 2015-18. It sounds like something official and currently known to the iRay devs and insiders. Of course, if it’s iRay then it will not be rendering in real-time (as with Poser 11 and the Comic Book Mode). Unless, presumably, the user has a $700 NVIDIA 30-series card and a PC able to keep up with it. It would make sense for NVIDIA to be developing such a thing for their forthcoming Omniverse releases, so I guess that could be it.

Also revealed by the developers on the blog is that…

In the next major release of iRay, we will also improve the filtering of normal maps and bump maps dramatically.

… which at a guess might even mean a boost for rendering speeds? A further guess would be that these changes could have to do with making a ‘iRay Toon’ render mode run sufficiently fast?

Flash, begone… or not

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The enforced removal of the Flash Player by Adobe means that Flash .SWF files can no longer play, at least when opened with a tool that relied on the PC’s main Flash Player engine.

However this has not caused problems with Reallusion Cartoon Animator, which can still import .SWF files for conversion to props. For instance I can still drag-and-drop a Flash .SWF asset to the CrazyTalk Animator (now Cartoon Animator) stage, and have it instantly become a prop…

Possibly this is because Animator appears to have its own internal standalone Flash player, presumably for import of props and not under the control of Adobe, at least in the version I’m using (Animator 3 Pipeline)…

Tests also show that vector-capable graphics software such as PhotoLine, able to write .SWF files, are still able to do so.

$100 vs. $80

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Poser 11 Pro is now newly discounted down to $99.99 at Renderosity, until 31st January 2021. I assume it must be the latest Poser 11.3, which now makes the old ‘Pro only’ features available to everyone.

But the offer’s a bit moot, when parent company Bondware are still selling Poser 11 Pro over at NeoWin for $20 less. That $80 offer has just rolled over again, and now has 5 days left.

But the new Renderosity price and date is useful information, of a kind. It seems to imply we’re not going to see the release of the long-awaited Poser 12 Final before the end of January 2021. It had been slated for December 2020. Update: the Mac version of Poser 12 is now due at the end of January.

PzDB – still $21 for now

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I hear that users of some older versions of Poser are finding their Content Library has gone “phut!” They were still running their Poser Library with Flash, and it’s reported that Adobe has officially stopped all Flash code from running. Some Poser Pro users can apparently toggle some settings, and have their Library run on Adobe Air instead. That was a Pro-only feature and Air is still safe for now, or as safe as it can be.

But some may be looking for a new way to run a Content Library. In which case you may be pleased to learn that the PzDB 1.2 sale is still continuing.

Still $21… if you buy via the Store page. Elsewhere on the site it still has its more expensive price, perhaps on a page that has been overlooked for updating. In my opinion it’s still the best Poser content library and wrangler addon for those with very large runtimes. There’s also a version 1.3 which tried to add the newer DAZ formats, but the cheaper 1.2 may well suit the needs of someone who mostly uses the old Poser 10. Also, neither version will blow up in Poser 12… as PzDB doesn’t use any Python code.

There’s also the P3DO Library, as an alternative. I have this, picked up during a sale, but it’s rather baffling and I have never been able to fathom how it’s meant to work.

Specialist Studio Supreme

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The venerable PC Pro magazine makes its pick of the pre-built desktop PCs for UK buyers, this month, in a big test-survey. Joint top was a 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X with workstation levels of supporting components + a compact GTX 1660 Super card. But that’s sold out. Yet I see the same Specialist Studio Supreme PC can be had in an even-better config, with an 8-core Ryzen 5 5600X CPU + a RTX 2060 card, for £1,116 inc. UK sales tax. If only I could afford one.

Update: Have prices come down in May 2023? Well, things have shifted from a 2060 to a 2080 card. I took a quick look. For a good in-stock RTX 2080, from a reputable seller in the UK, still around £450 ($560). Plus shipping, cables, probably a new PSU too.

Blender 2021 Roadmap

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The Blender 2021 Roadmap is out. What’s important for those interested in real-time? And what might (at a guess) eventually be ported over to Poser 12?

* The next-generation OpenGL initiative ‘Vulkan’ is to be integrated into Blender’s real-time Eevee viewport, said to currently run as OpenGL + PBR materials. It’s difficult to discover what specific on-screen whizz-bangs Vulkan might enable, but under-the-hood it should offer “direct control over the GPU and less CPU usage”, compared to standard OpenGL.

* Nishita Sky, ported as a native feature to the real-time Eevee viewport. This is said to be a … “system that allows you to procedurally adjust the sky and atmosphere” with fine controls. At present you do this with plugins.

* For the main render-engine Cycles, a focus on… “improving performance, especially in scenes brimming with meshes, hair and volume objects”. Sounds like a nice speed-boost, and I’d assume it could then be ported to Poser 12 in 2022? In Poser, Blender’s Cycles is tweaked a bit and branded as SuperFly.

* And a Content Library… “The long-awaited Asset Browser is a new editor window in Blender, allowing you to create and save asset libraries.” With preview thumbnails.