June 2022 – MyClone Poser and Daz Studio blog

Release: 3DCoatPrint 2022

Posted on June 30, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in Companion software, Freebies Leave a comment

A new wholly-free and seemingly perpetual version of the 3DCoat software, in the form of 3DCoatPrint 2022. This is the latest version and is even partly licensed for commercial use. Ah, but how is it crippled? Well it’s…

* capped at “40,000 triangles on export” as a .STL mesh for 3D printing.

* has no “paint and retopology toolsets”.

* apart from 3D printing, “other uses may only be for personal non-profit activity.”

That appears to be it. So 3DCoatPrint looks reasonably good, even if you have no interest in inflicting yet more plastic junk on the world. Possible use-cases:

* you want a more rational sculpting replacement for Zbrush / Blender, and yet don’t need a Zbrush round-trip interface working with Poser / DAZ Studio.

* you “sculpt for greyscale render + partial auto-colour + paint-over”, making elements for assembly as 2D concept paintings.

* you specifically target the ‘low-poly look’ aesthetically, and might even find the 40,000 triangle limit a creative spur.

The software works on Windows 7 and up. Regrettably it’s not just “download an .EXE and install”, through. You do have to ‘sign up’ / ‘sign in’ to get it. Which suggests there’s some sort of online leash which could eventually pull your access, years down the line.

Release: KeyShot 11.2

Posted on June 30, 2022 by jonahjameson

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

Last noticed here as KeyShot 10.2 in June 2021, a year later KeyShot 11.2 is out. 11.x’s bugs are fixed and there are some nice new features…

* “a new 3D Paint system, making it possible to texture assets within KeyShot by painting directly onto the surface of the model”. Plus Layers, Material Management.

* the ability to “import animations in .FBX” will also please many.

* and “a Python 3-based scripting console” for scripted automation.

The bad news is that “sales of perpetual licences are discontinued” for this nice and relative easy-to-use software. All versions are now “subscription-only”. Even the entry-level version now costs $588 per year. It’s now “Windows 10 only”, too. Sigh.

Digital Art Live #69 / PlantCatalog’s new ‘English oak forest’

Posted on June 28, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News, Vue Leave a comment

The latest Digital Art Live magazine is now available as issue 69. Free, but small donations are now encouraged via Gumroad to help keep it going. This month’s theme for the midsummer issue is “The Misty Isles”, loosely based around mythic and mystical ideas of our own British Isles.

In related ‘British landscape’ news, which sadly came just too late for inclusion in Digital Art Live #69, Vue’s grand English oak forest official pack is now available…

“This PlantCatalog update adds everything you need to create a full English oak forest, including trees, mushrooms, ferns, dead undergrowth and more.”

Brilliant, just add Robin Hood. Also in the pack are native lichen, moss, and even ‘pollarded’ willows (they grow alongside English rivers and large streams, and are harvested for their withies)…

Accessed for Vue via E-on’s standalone sister-software PlantCatalog. The PlantCatalog plants… “can be used both within [the subscription] VUE as procedural files and within any other 3D application as baked polygon meshes, with or without wind animation.”

Also interesting is that with this update to the software, all… “existing PlantCatalog species files are now up to 60% smaller than before.” Thus saving hard-drive space.

New for Poser and DAZ in June 2022

Posted on June 27, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser Leave a comment

Time for another survey-pick of what’s new for Poser and DAZ Studio, in June 2022.

Science-fiction:

Modular Sci-fi Chamber. Simply but stylish and believable. For added visual effect, have the ceiling be transparent revealing stars, swirling nebulae etc.

A free Astronaut sculptured bust. Useful clutter for your starship conference room (although by that time all decisions will of course be made by bio-AIs in nano-seconds across quantum-space).

Free today, only. DAZ Platinum Club Anniversary 2021 Mega Pack 4 with lots of sci-fi goodness. Get it while it’s hot.

Steampunk:

A free simple Compact Mirror for the hand.

A free toony steampunk Cannon.

M3D Victorian Hair, Facial Hair, Hats, and Aging for G8M.

Fantasy:

Moonboat for Poser by 1971s. Appears to be new, as I don’t have it in my runtime under that name. Though it is similar to early 1971s boats.

Free Antlers for G8 Female.

Storybook:

Ponytail Hair Accessories – Set 1 and Set 2. For the 3-in-1 Low Ponytails Hair.

An unusual free Candy Hat.

The above led me to a freebie I missed in 2021, Lea Hair. For some reason this is a huge half-gigabyte download!

Toon:

Flossie for La Femme for Poser.

Fancy Cats – Tuxedo and EveryDay Dogs – Beagle for Melody and Micah, and Furries for Melody and Micah. I have a guide to setting these up, re: their base dependencies, finding and loading order.

Masataka for Walther 2.0 for DAZ Studio. A manga style character for G8M.

Patrick base mesh, affordable and with a permissive licence. It wouldn’t take too much work in ZBrush or Blender to turn this into H.P. Lovecraft.

Carnivora for DAZ Studio iRay. Plants go wild!

Landscape:

A modular Deep Rainforest by ShaaraMuse3D, for Poser and DAZ. Looks great. Could be paired with the new Tanglewood – Tormented Trees for a more Avatar-ish look.

Medieval Ruin – Modular for DAZ Studio. Medieval, but has a nice fresh feel about it.

Photo Props: Chiselled Blocks by ShaaraMuse3D.

Animals:

Savannah Cat for Cat Mars for DAZ Studio.

Songbird ReMix: Birds of Legend for Poser and DAZ.

Historical:

The Domus of Victory Training Arena. A nice small gladiatorial training area from antiquity. Though no spectator poses. Could be paired with the new Majestic Plaza.

Shakespeare’s Puck for G8M.

A free Flintlock Pistol for DAZ Studio. And from the same maker, a free classic Wild West Colt Peacemaker pistol for DAZ Studio.

A free 1910s European Street Lamp Type 1.

The free Erte inspired dForce dress #3 for G8F. Looks great. Remove the 1920s hat, add rusty textures and it could work well as a steampunk outfit.

A free Vintage late-1950s dForce swing coat for G8F.

Free Low Poly Hair, 1970s cheerleader style and colour materials.

Characters, poses, hair:

Free, Five Soft Fashion Poses for G8. The listing page is confused, so ignore the ‘for Poser and Windows 10 only’. It’s for DAZ. This appears to be a free sampler for the larger paid pack RAV Fredda Soft Fashion Poses 25.

A new “Hr” from Ali is always welcome, the latest is Hr-252.

D9S Brianna for La Femme for Poser. Excellently done, in that I can’t tell it’s based on La Femme. Has a sort of ‘1930s Berlin’ feel.

Kneeling Poses 001 for G3F and G8F. Could be useful for those who need a lot of such poses, e.g. a children’s garden bug-hunt or a tunnel-based thriller. See also the new HF Creeping Poses for G8F.

HID Lucy for G8F, another high-quality Emma Whatsername clone.

Software, utilities and scripts:

Node Navigation Tools for DAZ Studio. Here “node” means in the figure hierarchy (i.e. body, hand, feet etc). This script set can be linked with keyboard shortcuts to let you move up/down the hierarchy without having to squint at or open a long list.

Select the BODY script for Poser.

Bone Minion for Generation 4 Poses. Appears to be a reliable on-the-fly conversion utility for old poses. Looks very useful.

It looks like Renderosity is keeping Poser 11 Pro at $52, at least for now. What a superb bargain, especially if you want to make non-photoreal renders from 3D.

Tutorials and more:

The Geometry Editor: An In-Depth Tutorial Guide. In three hours, “14 case studies to demonstrate how effective the geometry editor is” and what you can do with it in DAZ Studio. Indexed and searchable video. Looks good.

The latest Digital Art Live magazine #69 (June 2022).

That’s all for June. More next month!

Select the body

Posted on June 27, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in Freebies, Poser, Python scripts 1 Comment

A small script to select the BODY in Poser 11. Should work in nearly all cases, re: figure types. Buttonize it on the XA Toolbar, for a one-click BODY select.

Save as a .py script.

# A simple Poser script to select BODY on the figure in the scene. 
import poser
scene = poser.Scene()
figure = scene.CurrentFigure()
actor = scene.CurrentActor()
# Setup done, now set current figure to its Figure | BODY root
scene.SelectActor(figure.ParentActor())

# A simple Poser script to select BODY on the figure in the scene.

import poser

scene = poser.Scene()

figure = scene.CurrentFigure()

actor = scene.CurrentActor()

# Setup done, now set current figure to its Figure | BODY root

scene.SelectActor(figure.ParentActor())

You can also tweak the script, to select any body part you regularly need to select on a figure over and over again.

Actually Poser already has the BODY select built in, though. Press 2 on your keyboard to instantly move the figure selection from the currently selected body-part up to the main BODY. So the script is only for those who don’t want to be constantly peering down at their keyboard to find the “2” button, and prefer to have everything in front of them in the UI.

Alternatively you could use a mouse-gesture software, and assign a ‘B’ gesture to Press 2 on the keyboard.

SIGGRAPH 2022

Posted on June 13, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

Noticed in the official SIGGRAPH 2022 Technical Papers Preview…

A 3D figure’s bone-movements drive momentary natural ‘swing-flicks’ in the dynamic clothing, e.g. a skirt flicking outward while dancing.

Have an AI take a single animation sequence, and automatically create new similar sequences that fit the same rig.

Add very realistic ‘white froth’ running on top of a stream of water, as an animation.

Take a product designer’s 2D concept sketch and automatically build and extrapolate a fully rotating 3D mesh for it.

Also a new AI to… “train primitives in seconds and render them in milliseconds, allowing their use in the inner loops of graphics algorithms”. Not 3D primitives, but Z-depths, “light fields, textures”. Sounds like a new type of ‘on-the-fly’ intelligent adaptive shader?

And a tool to “sketch objects at different levels of abstraction”. It’s “semantically aware”. So it sounds like an AI art-gen where you type “a cat sat on a mat”, and you get a picture of a cat on a mat. My guess is that here you’d get eight sketchy pictures of a cat on a mat, each more abstract than the next?

Finally, an interesting tool in which a five-year old child appears to ‘battle’ with an AI art-gen tool which has a robot drawing arm. They go through “a series of translational stages between humans and non-humans” in drawing, while presumably learning from each other along the way.

3D G’MIC

Posted on June 13, 2022 by jonahjameson

Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

3D .OBJ import and lit manipulation in the free G’MIC, developing nicely and coming soon in version 3.1.3. And since G’MIC for Photoshop also works as a standard .8BF plugin in other graphics software, then they’ll also get the same 3D import capabilities.

Of course, older versions of Photoshop have 3D, but G’MIC will be able to provide simple 3D import for all current versions. From which, for some rather murky reasons, Adobe has ripped out all the 3D features.

Update: now released. Rather clunky at present, and .OBJ only (i.e. missing textures are likely). Experienced 3D users will be best to render in DAZ, Poser, KeyShot etc and export as a masked .PNG file.