News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: July 2022

Release: Material Maker 1.0

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RodZilla’s Material Maker 1.0 is now available. It’s standalone desktop software for making PBR materials and more, and is a simpler-to-use open-source alternative to Adobe Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter. Version 1.0 (July 2022) adds 13 new nodes (inc. noise: dilate, erode, mask), undo/redo system, animated materials, sprite-sheet output, and more.

Free as ‘name your own price’ as a download on itch.io, but of course donations are encouraged for this very worthy software. For Windows, Mac (now ‘signed’), and Linux.

The nodes display will look familiar to anyone who knows the Poser Material Room.

Video intro at YouTube.

New for Poser / DAZ in July 2022

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Welcome to this month’s survey of recent Poser / DAZ content and scripts. Yes, it’s a week early. But I may be busy at the end of the month.

I’m pleased to say that the DAZ Store seems to have fixed their slow loading / no loading problem, which had persisted for over a year. The store is now loading delightfully fast, for me.

As usual there’s no “HD” character stuff here (most people can’t run it) and non-commercial freebies are only mentioned if obvious fan-art.

Science-fiction:

Jepe’s WonderPlantZ 3 for DAZ Studio.

A free Space Girl Outfit for Genesis 8 Female.

The free CyborgHarry for Hivewire Horse. The horse ships free with Poser 12, with both Firefly and SuperFly materials.

A usefully generic DZ G8M ZSuit, though look at Xurge’s future-suits before you buy this.

A free Vorlon Alien. Only for non-commercial Babylon 5 fan-art, obviously.

The free SY Body Sockets for Genesis 8. Cyborg body plugs. Now it just needs someone to make the tangle of fitted pose-able connectors.

The unusual alien HF Prystine for Genesis 8.

Steampunk:

Hat Couture for La Femme & L’Homme, for Poser.

The free Syncope Round Glasses for Genesis 8.

Free Fitted Pipes for Bryce. Ready-made gnarly pipework for a steam-room.

Fantasy:

A free pack, FP Iconic Makeups for Genesis 3 & 8 Males. Non-commercial use, but that’s presumably because most of it is obvious fanart.

A free Sandclock, aka an hourglass. For DAZ Studio, and also an .OBJ version.

La Femme Warrior for La Femme and LF Warrior Poses. Pretty good. I don’t care for the warrior thing, but having a more Aiko 3 look for the flagship Poser female figure can only be a good thing.

Storybook:

Sweet and Sleepy Pillows for DAZ Studio. Probably destined for a cushion-fight in this new room for DAZ Studio.

Dynamic nightie for Diva for Dawn, for Poser.

Free socks for G8M, and textures.

Flink’s Rolling Hills – Daisy, new for Flink’s Rolling Hills base. Likely to be home to the naughty Storybook Mole.

Floppy Beach Vacation Hat for Genesis 8 Females, and a more formal straw boater hat in the new dForce Summer Tourist Set for G8F.

Toon:

Almost nothing in toon this month. But over on ArtStation, 20 Stylized Aircraft Base Mesh with .OBJ and .FBX formats. Free, but $25 gets extended commercial use.

A free Marshmallow Man for GM8. Not sure how close this is to a once-famous 1950s U.S. marketing figure, so beware of commercial use.

Hair and character:

dForce Gentleman Suit for Genesis 8. Looks usefully generic.

The DAZ Store temporary freebies page has updated. Capsces pose sets are always worth having, and here we have Ethereal Lady poses for Ninive 6. Also for G2F is the toony The Girl 6 Hair.

A free Telescopic Walking Stick of the sort given out by modern hospitals.

Free stylish Syncope Sunglasses for Genesis 8.

Lusitana. A free re-release of a universal Poser girl from 2011, made to work in “for all Poser versions”. Presumably if for some reason you have to use Poser 4, she’ll work there.

60 x Low-poly hat and headwear base meshes. With commercial use.

Gaming Poses for G8F, a set useful for those needing poses for tabletop role-playing and card/dice games.

Animals:

Songbird ReMix Birds of Prey Vol 6 – Eagles of the World 2. A Spanish eagle, among others. For Poser and DAZ.

Nature’s Wonders Lizards of the World Vol. 5. For Poser and DAZ.

Millennium Dog Motions 2 as AniBlocks. I seem to recall that Millennium dog / cat / sheep / lamb etc motions were cross-figure, so they may also work for other early animals.

Landscapes:

Just Beachy – Underwater Kelp Forest for DAZ Studio.

Underwater Seabed for Blender. I wouldn’t normally mention Blender stuff, but this is especially made to be “very light and easy to manage” by the expert maker RaffyRaffy.

Modular 3D Kits: Craterscape by ShaaraMuse3D. Shallow small crater impacts, lots of photoreal detail. For Poser and DAZ. Cover them with ocean and they could be underwater nests.

Modular 3D Kits: Sandwashed Desert Ruins by ShaaraMuse3D. For Poser and DAZ.

Ancient Ruins – Lost Civilization, a useful set of mixed generic props.

Mega Terrain: Swampland for DAZ Studio. ‘Beware of falling magicians’ (old Morrowind joke).

Historical:

Stonemason’s new Temple Of The Sun, a classical Chinese hilltop town setting.

Yo ho! ho! me harties, it’s free Pirate Treasure for DAZ. See also the older free Beach Cave as a setting to try out your treasure. You’ll also be needing your new free Flintlock Pistol, m’ lad.

The Eiffel Tower for DAZ Studio. Annoy ze French copyright trolls…

Free Pilot for Michael 4 set. Appears to be American, Second World War. For Poser.

A 1950s female office suit, dForce Basic Jacket Outfit for Genesis 8.1 Female.

Utilities:

DAZ to Cinema 4D Bridge, updated. “Improved UI, better GUI”, and “Basic support for earlier versions” in the form of C4D R22 and R21.

Bone Minion for Generation 4 Poses Bundle and and useage video. Apparently a seamless on-demand pose converter. No need to have a script chug through your 15Tb runtime, for a week. The poses get converted one at a time when you try to load to a figure.

Free Node Navigation Tools for DAZ Studio. DAZ has nodes? Who knew?

dFast for DAZ Studio. Jiggling body-bits for animations, done without dForce… apparently. Don’t blame me if you spend $20 on it and then don’t like it.

A free four-layer iRay shader.

My Technical Search for Poser and Daz Studio, a search-engine for those needing technical information. Now drawing on and searching across 173 sources.

Scripts:

P12 – free Python scripts for Poser 12, my new mega-list page. Poser 12 moved to Python 3, so the software needs these new scripts.

The free SnapTo for Poser 12. A simple object-mover script for Poser 12, and should also work on a Mac in Poser 11 (unless Apple’s Weird Foibles Dept. decided to ban Python this week).

A free Poser 12 Script Starter. A neat little panel to pin stuff to, including one-click render-size settings.

Small script demos on how to Load and Render a Sketch Preset in Poser 11 and Store and Restore Render Size Settings for Poser 11 and 12.

A free pack of Poser 12 helper scripts & a perma-palette, and More Poser 12 helper scripts.

Tutorials:

Digital Comics Creative : Volume 1. A new how-to part-work publication for digital comics makers.

How to Master Material Zones webinar recording, for DAZ Studio.

Expert Compositing with DAZ Rendered Backgrounds webinar recording.

Free, the defunct Artzone Wiki 2012 archive – 50 selected pages that could still be useful for Poser / DAZ people in 2022. The Wiki is no longer online.

How to fix the ever-accumulating lights in Poser 12 scenes. A default behaviour that seems likely to be a key show-stopper for new users.

That’s it for this month. As always, please consider becoming my patron on Patreon. Even pledging a few dollars a month is a great help. Thanks.

Fake Poser updated

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adp001’s Fake_poser is now updated for Poser 12. His Fake_poser3a.py “supports editors while writing Python scripts” for Poser. See the free Digital Art Live #56 for a short practical plain-English tutorial on getting the free Microsoft Studio Visual Code editor installed (a good replacement for Notepad++) and then this Fake_poser3a.py installed to run in it and help you with the PoserPython bits.

Also, my P12 scripts page is now many times larger than it was at launch a few days ago. Also my Technical Search tool has grown further as I’ve found older Poser 12 relevant pages, tutorials, scripts etc.

How to run a Python script using a keyboard shortcut

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If you want to run a Python script in Poser using an assigned keyboard shortcut, you can.

1. The script must be in the software’s ScriptsMenu folder or sub-folders…

C:\Program Files\Poser Software\Poser 12\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu

2. Rename your target script filename in the following format…

my_fabulous_script###Alt+C.py

Use of Ctrl or Shift and Alt are permitted, as are capital letters. Capital letters correspond to a lowercase key-press: e.g. C = c.

3. Close and reload Poser. Try your new keyboard command to invoke the script. Tested and working on Poser 12, and once done you see the shortcut on the drop-down if you look there…

With this in place you can now also use mouse-gestures, tied to a keyboard shortcut… which in turn invokes the script.

Python Script: Store and Restore Render Size Settings

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It appears that Poser can easily memorize and restore several things using Python scripting commands. Such as lights, camera, figure etc. But not the user’s current render setting dimensions.

Here’s a demo of how to do that in a script. Working in both Poser 11 and Poser 12.

Copy and save as Store_and_Restore_Render_Size_Settings.py

A useful basis for making a script that does a quick 600 x 450px test render, without affecting your main render dimension settings.

You could probably tweak this to save/restore other settings within a scene.

SuperFly in seconds

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I’ve been re-listening to the Poser 12 launch webinar recording, and learned a few things…

39:53 mins – the new Cycles 2 “Adaptive Sampling works best with smaller bucket sizes”.

40:27 mins – “Branched Path Tracing works well for CPU renders, but not GPU renders”.

For me this custom SuperFly preset works so well even at a bucket size of 64…

For me it closely mimics the behaviour of iRay. Not sure where I got this iRay-like preset now. One of the forums I think? I don’t know the mind-bending math/theory behind it, but it works for me. Bear in mind that this is for a Windows PC with multiple Xeon CPUs running a total of 24 render-threads, and that “Branched Path” does not play nicely with graphics cards. Your super-powered graphics card may need something completely different.

Of course, this assumes you don’t have awkward old slow-rendering Poser hair bogging down the render speed. Once you have good go-to hair, it’s best to turn it off until the final render.

If lacking hair or other boggers, this superfast preset gives instant pop in like iRay. Quick de-grain too. Fast finessing to reach a usable image. All very iRay-like, which I like. Also works very with Poser 12’s CPU-friendly and very quick denoiser. Manually cancel it after about some 20 seconds, wait a moment for Poser 12’s excellent de-noise to do its work, and you’re done.

Of course, it’s no challenger to DAZ’s iRay after it’s had a dose of Scene Optimiser. Which then lets me run three dressed and hair-ed characters in real-time iRay in the DAZ iRay-driven viewport. But the above Poser SuperFly preset may be of use to some.

Also of note, in the webinar it’s clearly stated of the Library Panel… “You can float it, but you can’t float it outside the app window. I don’t see that happening any time in the future”. But in 2022 this can now be done, and you can now float it over to a second monitor and yet still do drag and drop to the Poser stage.

Poser 12’s External Library

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Well well… who knew? Poser 12 does have a nice External Library panel feature after all. The AIR Poser 2014’s Air External Library works with Poser 12 and can drag and drop across when Windows is running two monitors + set to “Extend These Displays”. AIR is fast and rock solid. It displays an interior thumbnail on folders, which Poser 12 doesn’t yet (despite the manual saying it does). It can also look at a loaded DAZ runtime and automatically filter for what Poser can load.

At first sight the Air Library’s view of the content leaves a lot to be desired, with collapsed grey folders, no grid view for search results and tiny icons. But this can be fixed in the settings…

Of course not everyone has an old copy of 2014 or an OS that will let them run Air. Mac users in particular may have problems.

I find you also now do the same with either a detached Poser Library panel (it used to be that it could not be taken outside of the Poser main frame). You can even have AIR and PzDB side-by-side on a second widescreen monitor, and either can drag-and-drop to Poser 12 on the main monitor. Figures, poses, lights, they all work.

It seems this behaviour did not used to be the case. Here’s developer Charles Taylor in the official Poser 12 launch webinar: “I remember when the separate window for the Library came to be. I loved it. But I don’t see us being able to bring it back with the current implementation of the Library. You can float it, but you can’t float it outside the app window. I don’t see that happening any time in the future”.

So I guess he may have been right at that point at the time, but later a way was found and it was fixed? Because you can do it now. Or maybe it can still only be done on Windows and not on a Mac?

How to fix the ever-accumulating lights in Poser 12 scenes

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New Poser 12 users may be frustrated by the default behaviour of their light presets. Clicking on a preset light-set adds its lights to the existing lighting in the scene. Until you have a ‘hedgehog bundle’ of lights on the light-ball. Most of which are actually not doing anything in Preview, because there’s a cap on the number of lights that OpenGL can display.

The Poser 12 newbie may think: “Ah, so that’s why the ‘delete all lights’ Python script is needed” and/or “So that’s why some people don’t like using the Poser lights”. Ideally, such thoughts could be avoided if the default shipping state of Poser was that a double-click on a light preset replaces the existing scene lighting.

This can be achieved. But how? It’s quite simple…

Top menu | Edit | Preferences.

Library Tab | Double Click Behaviour | tick ‘Replace Existing’ | OK.

That’s it. You don’t even need to re-start Poser for it to take effect. Light presets now replace the existing lights, rather than adding to them. You can still add the lights in an accumulative way if you want, but you now do that by selecting the Library light preset with a single-click. Then clicking the double-tick icon at the base of the Library panel…

Figures are added in the same way, or can simply be dragged-and-dropped and then they won’t replace an existing figure. Props and MATs can just be double-clicked.

The behaviour is different than in Poser 11, but the above is a partial fix.

New users will also want to set Library search-depth to “Shallow”, to prevent Poser from bringing Poser to a grinding halt and spending ages looking for lost textures on badly installed or made freebies. “Deep” initially, overnight to index all the content. Then “Shallow”.

Why upgrade to Poser 12?

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I was asked “Why upgrade to the latest Early Access Poser 12.0.x ?” Good question.

Here are all the reasons I can find or think of:

* You want to try the new improved Blender Cycles version which has been plugged in, and which is branded in Poser 12 as SuperFly. This now has newer photoreal rendering nodes (too many to detail here, but “Principled BSDF” is the biggie) and other photoreal improvements. SuperFly now also does Ambient Occlusion. There was some early marketing confusion between “Cycles 1.2” and “Cycles 2”, but it is Cycles 2 in Poser 12.

* You want speed. “Adaptive Sampling” means faster SuperFly rendering on either CPUs and GPU. There are new tuned rendering presets for which take advantage of this. CPU renders with SuperFly should be twice as fast as before, as long as your preset’s bucket sizes are tuned to your PC’s capabilities. The same benefit (or probably more) should be seen when rendering with a GPU, depending on graphics card. “Adaptive Sampling” seems to translate to English as: “the renderer spends less time removing noise in the bright smooth or small-details parts of the picture, and more time on smoothing out the noisy shadows”.

* You want SuperFly renders to do what Firefly could always do — save renders as layers into a layered .PSD destined for Photoshop. Including z-buffer auxiliary render output such as a Z-Depth pass (used for quickly adding a depth haze to a scene, when in Photoshop).

* You work a lot with PNG cutouts and shadow layers. “SuperFly now does background transparency” and shadow catching aka shadowcatching, and has an Alpha node. These are apparently not GPU/OptiX graphics-card dependent.

* You want to try getting PBR materials into SuperFly. Apparently that’s now “really easy”, though I’ve yet to see an automated importer-script take advantage of that ease. I’m uncertain if using PBR materials might remove the 2x speed advantage gained with the the “adaptive sampling” rendering in SuperFly.

* You want to port some fabulous Cycles node layouts into Poser 12, including ones using the funky “Hair” nodes. Blender’s Cycles node setups can be easily ported over, once you know that Blender’s direction of node flow is a “mirror-reverse” of that used in Poser.

* You have twin graphic cards. A Superfly render can now be done using multiple graphics cards, and twinning also works for the Render Queue. Apparently the cards don’t need to be identical.

* You want a built-in denoiser for quick-but-speckly renders. A menu easily adds new PostFX options such as “Denoising”, which is done fast and very nicely via Intel OIDN software rather than a graphics card. Apparently “Bloom” was set to be on the PostFX menu, but has not yet been added.

* You want to run Poser 11 and Poser 12 alongside each other. They can live happily side by side. Though I’m assuming here that the Poser 12 upgrade installer lets you keep your Poser 11 intact and doesn’t remove it. Just in case, you should make backups of vital 11 custom presets etc before install of either the main or upgrade Poser 12. I have a step-by-step guide for archiving the custom bits of Poser 11.

* You want a nicer Content Library experience. For instance, the “search/locate feature now jumps to the selected item, so the user no longer needs to scroll for it”. The Figure Hierarchy Window also has some nice changes to make it less fiddly, such as alt-click to completely open the list of all sub-parts of a figure.

* You’d like a nicer experience in the Advanced panel of the Materials Room. This Room now has “significant speed improvements when displaying texture previews”. Also a new “‘Replace All’ button in Texture Manager”, and “drag/drop of an image map, to replace an existing image map node”.

* You use the Walk Designer, which now supports “Poser 11 Figures”. So presumably La Femme etc. Not sure about the Hivewire Horse.

* You want a slightly improved real-time Comic Book render… “OpenGL Comic Book Preview: Last Draw checkbox option added to improve quality of geometric edge lines”.

* You want to test and tweak vital older Poser 11 Python scripts in Poser 12, so that they work in 12. Though note that the standard scripts that ship with Poser have already been updated to work with Poser 12. So has the important EZSkin script and SnapTo. However, it’s a huge drawback that many vital scripts (XA Toolbar, Scene Toy, Poser to Clip Studio, Rust-icator, the Poser Python Tools, Shaderworks Library, DSON etc) no longer work in version 12. XA Toolbar can at least be replaced by the Python Scripts panel used in perma-mode. SnapTo has a Poser 12 replacement.

* You want to see which Poser 11 scripts work in Poser 12 without any tweaking.

* You want to develop new Poser 12 scripts, taking advantage of the new Python 3 and the new Cycles nodes and suchlike.

* You want to use Pillow for scripted image processing in Python 3. Pillow “adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving images” in response to commands from a Python script. This has now been added in Poser 12.

* You could really use the new Python “method to find a parameter specifically by internal name”. Also, the scripted “Disconnect” node command is now available for more Material Room nodes than was the case in Poser 11.

* You want to get Poser 12 and its massive content bundle snail-mailed to you on a USB key. You can. Useful for those with dial-up in the wilds of Whereizitagin. You will have to be online to run it, though, as 12 ‘pings home’ occasionally.

* You’d like a SuperFly horse. The free content bundle has had the HiveWire figures updated for SuperFly rendering (Gorilla, Horse, Baby Luna etc).

* You or your studio need to use the latest .FBX export specifications for figures and props.

* * You or your studio need an External Library. It’s called Poser 11. They can both run at the same time. P11’s Library can then drag-drop to the P12 stage.

* You need Poser to support a certain type of graphics card not supported by Poser 11. Specifically some in the Nvidia RTX 30 series.

* You and or your boss or studio team need good documentation. As of December 2021 the Poser 12 manual now documents the new features in 12.x in a nice online Web manual. There was even a handy 108Mb PDF version (now vanished, it seems, though I have a copy). Poser 12 also ships with good documentation of the Python methods.

* You work with creatives in Japan, and they need a really good localisation of the software before switching to 12. By all accounts, the Japanese support in that respect is now excellent.

* You want to make a scene in Poser and easily open it in E-on Vue. Poser can still “speak Vue”, so far as I know. Meaning that a saved Poser 12 scene should still load fine in Vue. Untested, and possibly Vue may not cope well some some new-fangled souped-up SuperFly shader. It’s probably best to stick to tried and tested materials for a scene intended for Vue, which is highly tuned to auto-interpret Poser scene materials.

* You want to make Poser 12 content with DAZ Hexagon. Poser can apparently still work with DAZ Hexagon for export for Poser, but may just need new export settings: “Poser 12 to Hexagon, export % value 26212.8 | Hexagon to Poser 12, import % value 0.381493011048”.

* Other than these new things, you want Poser 12 to have the same features as Poser 11 had. It does, and I haven’t heard of anything being removed other than: 1) the “Partners” scripts (which may return. once Poser gets out of Early Access); 2) the “Combine Figures” menu item; 3) the Face Room (no loss); and 4) the official script to help you calculate Depth of Field (but there is now a free Poser 12 script to do DoF setup). Also, “Show Folder Thumbnails” doesn’t appear to work in P12, severely limiting the usability of the Library.

* Poser 12 can also open scene files saved with older versions, and should also be able to write saved scenes that can be opened with older version (this may change in the future). Drag and drop from the third-party Library software PzDB works. All your old Poser runtime content works, provided it was not dependent on some complex Python script. It’s a tried-and-tested UI that’s very well documented, and which old hands can pick up again quite easily.

* You don’t want to be “nickel and dimed”, pressured and tricked into add-ons and plugins that are actually vital to have to run the software. Poser is more or less “all in” as a complete one-time purchase package, with little left to buy other than your creatives figures and clothing.

Incidentally despite the misleading “Windows 10” claim on the specs, Poser 12 works fine on Windows 7 and up. Though be warned that, last I heard, paid script downloading/installing from the Renderosity Store was not working on Windows 7. Specifically the scripts would not activate (i.e. be registered with a serial number) in Windows 7 for some reason. I’m not sure if this problem has been fixed yet. If it requires some Microsoft encryption that’s only built into Windows 8/10/11 then it may never work on Windows 7? Just my guess.

That’s it. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything.

Release: freeware voxelizer for .OBJs

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Discovered too late for inclusion in the forthcoming isometric issue of Digital Art Live magazine, “How To Convert OBJ to VOX color” with a new summer 2022 freeware .OBJ to voxels ‘voxeliser’ software…

“Convert your .OBJ and .MTL to the native .VOX format, including color and textures”

…and also automatically make the object look like it was built with those funky voxel cubes. Warning: the software is new and still at the level of command line input.

Note however that Qubicle 3.x can do this same process already, and with a very nice GUI too, albeit for $25. You do have to start with a small model though. It’s not going to cope well if you try to feed it Stonemason’s Urban Future scene or a Genesis figure, from DAZ / Poser.

Quickstart in Qubicle:

1. Export from Poser / DAZ / Blender a viable .OBJ file, with a viable .MTL and loading materials (easier said than done). Poly-reduce if needed.

2. Top menu | Voxelize | “Load Mesh” | Load .OBJ.

3. Top menu | Voxelize | “Scale Mesh” | Type in a scale factor, “Preview” and see what it looks like after that.

4. Looking good? Top menu | Voxelize | “Convert to Matrix”.

Everything in Qubicle has to be held with a ‘Matrix’, indicated by a yellow holding line around the model’s volume. If you want to colour or edit the model further, you first ‘enter’ the ‘Matrix’.

What use is Carrara in 2022?

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What would one use Carrara for in 2022? After a few hours with it again, I’d say it still has some appeal for those interest in non-animating NPR / stylised renders…

* Relatively light on system resources, uses multiple cores, stable, 64-bit. Doesn’t demand Windows 10 etc.

* Works with older Poser content, albeit from a very clunky and un-searchable Library.

* Nice NPR rendering on older Poser content, both line-art and painterly. Different and a bit more controllable than Poser line-art / painterly Sketch. Repeatable painterly and line-art renders are not render-size dependent, as they are with Poser Sketch.

* Has toon plugins and native tooning capabilities, and several toon plugins now free including YAToon and Toon! Pro. Neither seem to give very “pro” looking results. For a more CAD-style line-art there’s the Vector Style 2 for Carrara plugin which ships with Carrara. The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook has a chapter on using it. Can export to .SVG for vector packages, via File | Save as… but I had no success at all with it.

* Relatively easy to hide eyelashes for NPR / toon renders. Though, without any automation, such fiddly processes can’t be automated.

* Still has some nice bits in its default content bundle, such as easy-start pre-lit rooms, some nice Solar System planets.

* ‘Make anything glow’, albeit with a bit of fiddliness in setup.

* Can grow / groom fur and hair, and a bit more easily than in Poser or DAZ.

* Has a true Isometric camera / grid (which DAZ and Poser don’t have). Can also export depth data. (I discover Vue also has Isometric, and can import from Poser).

* Multi-pass rendering to Photoshop .PSD output, though it seems odd that NPR “outlines” line-art can’t be sent to its own layer? I would have thought that was vital. Though with a day of work you could probably brew several good NPR render presets that would bypass the need for Photoshop.

* Can apparently import old Bryce .DFX files.

* Has Mimic Pro for lip-sync, built in. I assume it still works.

* Has a ‘3D text extrusion’ tool, which Poser and DAZ don’t.

Difficult to think of things beyond that, things which other software doesn’t do better. You can’t do useful things like make new Poser content in it, or ‘live 3D’ paint a mesh of a Poser prop, as the needed Poser-native export and packaging options are not there. It’s all meant to go from Poser to Carrara, it seems, and not the other way around.

How to remove eyelashes for non-photoreal rendering in Carrara

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1. Load a standard figure. Here we have Aiko 3.

As you can see, horrid blocky eyelashes appear in non-photoreal line-art rendering…

2. To fix, enter Carrara’s Model Room. Use the camera to get a good view of the figure’s head. Her ten-trillion control points look confusing, but there’s an easy way to select just the eyelashes.

3. Top menu | Selection | Select by… | Shading Domain.

4. Choose “Eyelashes”. They are then highlighted in red.

5. Select the Scale tool (the ‘twin triangles’ icon), and make them really small. Then select the Move tool, and slightly push them back into the head.

That’s it. Line renders will now appear to omit the eyelashes. You could probably do the same with fat (rather than thin line) geometry eyebrows.

Incidentally, another problem discovered with Carrara. A bit of a deal-breaker, even for occasional work. No drag-and-drop of clothes / poses from PzDB onto the scene/figure, as can be done with Poser and DAZ. Since getting Carrara to see / interact with / load from a Content Library is such a nightmare, then if PzDB can’t be used… Carrara can’t be used either.

And Poser 11, as you can see here, effortlessly gives line-art that is just so much better. And does so in WYSIWYG real-time, and with no need to fix eyelashes…

Raw Poser real-time render, Aiko 3.

The only drawback of Poser is that for best results you need to render line-art, colour flats and shadows, and then composite the three real-time renders in Photoshop. Still, not bad for what now costs $53.