News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: July 2021

Time to move to Texas…

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You now have to smuggle some types of gaming PCs into some U.S. states. The PC makers such as Dell can’t ship there…

“This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled.”

Even a really rather basic one from Dell, that is little more than a standard £800/$1100 desktop…

Presumably any kind of slightly-powerful graphics production workstations must also be effectively banned in those places? Hollywood, which last time I heard was in California, may be rather annoyed at this… though not quite yet. Because a little research shows the legal problems will only start for non-gaming high-end PCs from 9th December 2021. Time to follow Elon, Hollywood… and move to Texas?

One wonders if the politicians who passed these laws have electric cars standing next to their heated swimming-pools, and how much energy those need.

Anyway, it’s often rather pointless trying to regulate such fast-moving technology. It just shifts things sideways. The politicians have probably never even heard of eGPUs.

All fired up

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Darkseal’s Fire Sprite Demon is currently on a heavy discount at $4 at the DAZ Store and, though it’s lacking in poses, there are now 16 quality free poses for it. It toons quite nicely in colour, and has some impressive morphs for a custom figure.

Note that tests show that these do not work well with Darkseal’s similar Lynx cat figure. I think that was perhaps made by someone else (Versus, who did a few standalones back in the day) and then Darkseal bought him out and he put a new rig in the Lynx and reshaped it to become his own Fire Sprite Demon. Thus the rigs are not the same, though the figures are similar.

A custom painterly Poser Sketch preset render, with Poser’s standard real-time Comic Book lineart dropped on top, then the lineart filtered with a custom G’MIC preset. Only the top-right arm has had a few strokes of extra manual inking, to firm the holding-line…

How to run Python scripts in Blender

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Until today I’ve been a clueless newb when it comes to finding and loading/running the Python scripts that shipped with Blender 2.79. I knew Blender could run Python, but had no idea where to find that in the folders or the UI. Here’s what I learned with Blender 2.76, an older (2016) version needed to access many older free assets in .blend files. All this assumes that you don’t have a weird custom UI embedded in the .blend file you downloaded, which unfortunately is perfectly possible to set up in Blender’s utterly vile UI. In which case you may never find the following items.

Anyway, in Windows a set of free helper (‘template’) scripts are installed to…

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.76\scripts\templates_py\

Then in a sensibly set up normal Blender UI, you can find these at…

The Animation UI also has access to the same “Templates” menu-item, but it seems the other UI panels do not.

You can also paste your own .PY Python scripts in the above folder, and they will also show up in the UI via the same method. If you only have a few (you’re likely just being forced to use Blender to export from some free .blend files for DAZ or Poser use) then you probably want to prefix their name to get them to the top of the list (e.g. AAA-my_script.py).

Note that you don’t need to re-start Blender after pasting a new script in there (as you do with Poser), in order to see it on the list.

The above then appears to be the somewhat trickier-to-find equivalent of Poser’s Python scripts folder…

C:\Program Files\Smith Micro\Poser 11\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu

And of Poser’s rather more obvious Scripts drop-down…

The other and more ‘console-like’ temporary way to test an in-progress script in Blender is to go into Scripting or Animation, as seen above. But then…

1. Click on Text menu label.

2. “Create a Text Block” (Crtl + N).

3. You see an empty panel. Here you paste in the script from a plain text editor such as Notepad++.

4. Slide the infernal UI out the way, as it’s likely hiding the ‘Run Script’ button over on the right.

5. Run script (Alt + P). You can also do this by going back into the Text menu, where it is the top command.

Release: 3DCoat 2021 / and the budget 3DCoatTextura

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3DCoat 2021 has been released, with the all-important UI makeover. For those who don’t know it, I guess it could be described as: ‘ZBrush without the mad interface, combined with Substance Painter without the Adobe shackle’. At least one beta tester appears to have been running it successfully with Windows 7, thus it appears not to be ‘Windows 10 only’ software.

It’s also very nice to see a simultaneous release of the new budget-priced version of 2021 just for painting and texturing of 3D, no sculpting. This is called 3DCoatTextura and currently has a nice introductory one-time purchase price of 79 Euros. I think that’s meant to be a Euro symbol…

Sadly YouTube knows nothing of something called “3DcoatTextura” and assumes you’ve made a typing mistake, but I’m sure there must already be previews and even tutorials on the software out there.

The other one-time purchase alternative would be the new Marmoset Toolbag 4, but that’s $300 and so rather out of the range of most hobbyists. Marmoset 4 also took an absolute age to load a test scene, was less than stable in my testing, had a very unlikable UI and then fell at the first hurdle — simple framing of a figure with the viewport camera… how? Where the heck are the camera controls? I gave up. Uninstalled.

WordPress theme-wrangling done

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More or less back to normal, now with this blog’s wayward template. The sidebar is still too narrow, compared to how it used to be. Sadly the WordPress theme’s old “make a wide sidebar” toggle no longer seems to work.

I’ve tweaked the post font-size to 14.8pt, so posts should be a little more readable now. This partly compensates for the newly added width of posts.

But otherwise it all works as before. I’ve also tweaked it so that sidebar text-padding looks more acceptable on the Pale Moon browser (Firefox-based), compared to the Chrome-based browsers it’s targeted at.

Fixed a jammed blog theme

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A jammed WordPress theme had caused the blog to fail for a few hours. For the time being, I’ve switched to an updated theme which has no such problems. The blog now seems to be working again at the level of the front page and individual posts, albeit not quite so prettily and with links and sidebar widgets missing. Expect a few ‘speed bumps’ over the next few days, as the design and other things are fixed up again.

Blender Content Creation for Daz Studio – discounted bundle

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New on the DAZ Store, Blender Content Creation for Daz Studio Bundle. Currently in the sale at $88, this bundle of three gives you nearly ten hours of friendly and DAZ-friendly learning. It’s also keyword searchable, and has subtitles.

While you’re there don’t miss the Platinum Club Anniversary 2020 Bundle 10. A mega-bundle that appears to have been created for the Platinum Club members… but which is now available to all at $6.

By the way, thanks to Kevin M. I’ve solved my problem with the infinite scrolling on the DAZ Store, which going back more than about two weeks causes the thumbnail loading to freeze up. Setting “Items Per Page” to 60 (rather than All) brings back the old paginated or ‘per page’ browsing. It’s still a bit sticky, even now, but is much more workable.