News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: August 2023

ElevenLabs is out of beta

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The leader in AI text-to-speech voice, Poland’s ElevenLabs, is now out of beta. Now supporting 28 languages in ‘Eleven Multilingual v2’. Can be paired with Professional Voice Cloning, which should mean that those with the correct intonations in the input can also get these in the output in another language. They also have a ‘Voice Styles’ library.

The newly added languages are…

Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Indonesian, Filipino, Japanese, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Finnish, Romanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Malay, Slovak, Croatian, Classic Arabic and Tamil.

The Pricing is nice, though no PayPal. Someone making a short 90 minute audiobook per month would need the $22 a month subscription, but the free and starter tiers are very reasonable. Especially so for those making short 12-20 minute animations with Poser and DAZ.

SuperFlying Dreamland for Poser

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Poser, Poser 12 Leave a comment

Poser could be the ‘killer app’ in creative AI, in terms of usable graphics production for storytelling.

Imagine an AI that takes what you see in the Poser viewport, and works on that, giving you 98% consistent character renders which would allow the creation of graphic novels etc.

The aim would be to keep all character details consistent and stable, while also ‘AI rendering’ the viewport into a consistent professional ‘art style’. Auto-analysis of a quick real-time render from the Viewport might be needed (already here, elsewhere) and auto-prompt construction (already here). Perhaps there might be some on-the-fly LoRA training going on too, behind the scenes. Then, the AI image generation would be done.

You can kind of do all this now, outside of Poser, using Poser renders. But what if it was all neatly integrated into Poser, and ran on SDXL? All those royalty-free runtime assets then become super-valuable, since with their aid you can easily get the AI to do exactly what you want. Face, expression, pose, clothes, camera-angle. Hands. All output by the AI to the usual masked .PNG file, ready to drop over a 2D backplate in Photoshop. In three clicks. And all consistent between images, enough to satisfy even the most fersnickety regular comics reader.

The aim would not be to go wild, but to get something very close to the arrangement and content seen in the real-time viewport. It doesn’t necessarily have to be done by Bondware/Reallusion either, since Poser is Python 3 friendly and very extensible. All that would be needed, perhaps, would be to open up PostFX to be able to run a Python plugin that applies its own FX on real-time renders.

So imagine Poser’s Comic Book Preview or Sketch rendering, but done by an AI on a purpose-built ‘AI-native’ PC (coming in 2025 in retail, if not before). With No Drawing Required™ and Character Consistency.™ Let’s call it SuperFlying Dreamland.™ 😉

Auto Effects

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AI-powered auto sound-effects for a video. Finds… “the right sound-effects (SFX) to match moments in a video”. A task which can take a day or more of finding, for a long video. Plus the trimming, volume balancing, and slotting in to the video.

Of course it’s not going to do much for Tom & Jerry style animation SFX, compared to the real thing. But I guess for regular normal Powerpoint things (“that’s a dog, it barks, get bark-sound”) it could be useful for those making a ‘holiday-photos slideshow’ presentation.

And it may also save time for creatives. For instance this could interface in interesting ways with the giant Freesound library’s new simple taxonomy. (“That’s a dog, it barks, get links to top-12 bark sounds on Freesound”). That would save some time. Not so much a new ‘recommender’ system (they’re always dim-witted), but more a new creative ‘options bundler’ system. Likely to find a place within the emerging and more complex AI-powered script-flow workflow software.

Renderosity Animation Contest 2023

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

A reminder of the Renderosity Animation Contest. The deadline is a bit close now, but a fast worker could do it: 30th August 2023. And don’t forget that Renderosity’s Poser software does real-time rendering of toons, via the easy-to-use Comic Book Preview feature.

Gift certificate prizes, no Poser 13 licences.

The featured artwork makes the mistake of ‘black on black’, a fundamental mistake which is beloved of 3D people trying to do a comic look (I blame Batman and Catwoman). Try to keep your character as ‘readable’ by the eye as much as possible. If you look at how a master like Brian Haberlin does it in his comics, he’ll often have a faint ‘fog layer’ across the whole background, as well as a ‘holding line’ around the character.

The left pigtail cannot be distinguished from the scenery.

Release: Poser 13.1, inc. Mac version

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Poser 13.1 is now available, and includes the new Mac version alongside the Windows version. It’s a free update for Poser 13 licence holders. Lots of rendering quality improvements for SuperFly (Poser’s version of the latest Blender Cycles). See the linked page for the full list.

No mention of changes to the Windows OS spec, so you should be able to run it back to Windows 7 (though without access to store-purchased third-party scripts on Windows , and likely with no helpdesk support).

No changes to PostFX on Windows, to OIDN de-noising, or to Poser’s unique abilities with real-time comic-book line-art, Firefly line-art, and Sketch rendering.

The current released version is 13.1.449.

Howler gets 9x faster

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The latest PD Howler 2024.2 is available. It has an interesting new way of rendering 3D, via an innovative CPU/GPU mix. The CPU handles the grunt-work on the render, then the GPU does the final shading. 9x faster rendering than before, apparently! Supports PBR materials, tone-map and gamma. 16x anti-aliasing.

Now also includes a full word-processor! Also .GIF animation loading. And the previous .point iteration had “Dark mode support in Windows 11”.

Hr-213

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The sci-fi friendly Hr-213 hair has mysteriously become unavailable on Renderosity, and has been removed from WishLists with no warning. I hope it’s not been removed due to some movie producer saying it’s too close to a sci-fi movie or TV series haircut (UFO, etc).

However, I still see it for sale at Mankahoo.

We’ve also mysteriously lost the excellent ‘dForce Space Jumpsuit’ for G8F, which has likewise vanished from my WishList.

1971s retiring products sale

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The great 1971s has a “Retiring Products” sale on Renderosity. Personally I’d perhaps sell the items as a $10 bundle on another store, or even give the best of them away free as a ‘free trial’ for his content. Rather than delete forever. But there you go.

Some beautiful Poser stuff at 70% off, and his models toon very well in Poser 11+’s real-time Comic Book line-art. As you can see here from the sci-fi Angelfish, one of the models set to be deleted…

You may especially want the Crane (set for retirement), a useful accessory for 1971’s many airships and potentially also for boats.

The Jetbee (set for retirement) is also a nice Dieselpunk craft…

And the SteamBoat (set for retirement) is a useful generic small steam-powered two-man harbour launch.