News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: October 2021

Renderosity Forums URL changes

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Renderosity has a new format for Forum URLs. Was…

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?forum_id=12589

or

https://www.renderosity.com//forums/?forum_id=10139

Now…

https://www.renderosity.com/forums/12589

The redirect is automatic, but a bit sticky and often fails. Thus manual fixing of bookmarked URLs is best.

Delete…

mod/forumpro/?

and replace

_id=

with

s/

Sadly the change appears to has bjorked the Python forum. Hopefully a proper code-display module will be plugged into the new forum software, soon.

Update: Copy-and-paste from a proper code editor (not Notepad++) now works. Suggested code editors are Microsoft Visual Studio Code, and PyCharm. Digital Art Live magazine has a two-page guide on how to install and set up the free Visual Studio Code.

Black Friday, too late…

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

Black Friday 2021 falls on Friday, 26th November 2021 this year. Way too late. Less than a month to Christmas. Haul it forward by a complete month, would be my suggestion. That’s what sensible consumers will be doing with their Christmas buying, for fear of truck-driver shortages, packaging shortages, gadget and computer shortages, fuel shortages, power-cuts, Internet outages, port snarl-ups and lockdowns.

Cyber Monday on the 29th November looks a bit more viable, though if Black Friday effectively comes forward then you have to wonder if anyone will have any Paypal left by the end of November.

Not a great deal left for my wants-list this year:

Two remaining Raffy Raffy Vue landscapes, Path Forest in Vue and Dangerous Canyon in Vue.

Two remaining Xurge M4 armours, ATES for Mike 4 and HYPER SUIT for M4.

Some CrossDresser Licenses. Not vital, but nice to have for a couple of Nursoda characters and I think I’m still missing Mavka.

Lepus K4.

A few 90%-off sub-$4 picks from the “nice to have, but don’t really need” items in the WishLists at DAZ and Renderosity and ArtStation Marketplace, with Renderosity edging ahead in terms of quirk-appeal. But that assumes a 90% off sale.

Blambot fonts, and Retro Supply’s $20 TOOM Horror Comic Font.

AKVIS Decorator 8.1 for Photoshop. But it never goes low enough, when you factor in the 20% UK sales tax that’s added at the Checkout. 50% off and bundle it with a 50%-off Charcoal, might do it.

Booksorber, for quickly digitizing books and journals with a digital SLR camera.

Poser 12 still doesn’t appeal — due to the need for Python 3 scripts and lack of changes at the Comic Book / Sketch end of rendering.

On the fringe

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Poser Leave a comment

Here’s another reason why you might not want anti-aliasing on your ToonID (aka ‘Clown Pass’) render, as explained by Photoshop plugin maker Peltmade…

“for best results, make sure you don’t have anti-aliasing. This makes it easier for MultiFill to paint the white areas in your image.”

They’re assuming here that you’re working with Photoshop and their comics flatting plugin the old way. Scanned hand-drawn lineart, and then you manually make colour flats from that by painstakingly using the Paintbucket.

But with 3D renders from Poser you already have the colour render and also (ideally) a ToonID render in your layer-stack. If you then Paintbucket into the ToonID render when it’s in Photoshop, and the render is anti-aliased (i.e. ‘the jaggies’ are smoothed out, which is not normal but is possible if you do it a special way or blur it), then you’ll likely get some fringing at the edges of each of the colour wells.

Most of the time that should not matter for 3D comics makers, as the lineart you lay on top should be thick enough to cover those fringed edges. And you’re likely filtering a colour layer anyway, and the filter will smush any edge-fringing. So will the blending going on in the stack. If you’re only using the ToonID for area-selection with the Magic Wand + Smooth, then it also doesn’t matter.

If you chop or filter the lineart in Photoshop, such that the colours-edge beneath is revealed, it’s going to be a problem to fix either way. Best to get it as right as possible in the original 3D scene setup.

Adding to the line-art is not a problem (i.e. adding missing bit or lines, or chips in lines, even erasing and re-drawing simple toon eye-brows). But cutting it away or cutting into it would be, in this sort of situation.

But of course, now you can use my new Poser discovery to effectively get pseudo colour-flats within Poser and in real-time.

Fix the DNS ‘not found’ problem

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I’m currently experiencing severe website-lookup problems, effectively blocking my access to about 20% of sites. Especially smaller sites such as David Revoy, HiveWire Forum, GreasyFork, Blender Nation, eTools, Major Geeks, Stack Overflow, Nitter and many others, completely ‘not found’ seemingly due to patchy DNS on all DNS servers. Some are complaining about being unable to register Corel software.

Users of commercial services such as Slack have been very annoyed about being locked out…

It appears to affect Chrome-based browsers only, and is continuing for many sites. So… installing a Firefox based browser (I recommend Pale Moon) should at least get you to the missing sites. No amount of jiggering about with clearing DNS caches and adding new public-DNS addresses will cure the problem, I’ve spent the whole of Saturday morning trying to fix it for the Chrome-based Opera browser.

Update: It’s due to dodgy free root SSL certificates on the sites. Firefox has its own store of these at my end, so it was unaffected. Fixed by installing fresh root certificates. (The Slack outage mentioned above actually appears to have been down to its own stupid DNS jiggering-about, rather than SSL certificates).