Autodesk Unveils Wonder Animation. Interesting…
* Film your sequence as live-action…
* … then an AI translates what is sees to 3D polygons and rigs (3D scene, figures, mo-cap, cameras, camera movements)
* … then you can render the 3D consistently and quickly as a toon in 3D (Maya, Blender, Unreal game engine).
The drawback appears to be that it’s an online cloud service. Not local desktop software. Still, I like the idea.
New for Poser & DAZ – October 2024. My personal pick of the new releases and similar for Poser, DAZ Studio and Vue, for October 2024.
Science-fiction:
We’re a bit future-lite this month…
Hologram for G8F and G8M and add-on.
Halloween:
A free Steampunk-Halloween Carriage.
Free Glowing Eyes MAT for DAZ Studio.
A very unusual podcasting desk, The-Author for DAZ Studio.
FPE Fantasy HD Skins Suite for Genesis 9.
Toon and semi-toon:
A new figure from Darkseal is always welcome. His latest is Mandrake-Root. Also new is his Bobbit-Worm.
Free poses and SuperFly materials for Toon Chicken for Poser.
A free One Eyed Spider, as a companion for the old Poser Eye-plants etc.
Mrs. Pumpkin for DAZ Studio. Also at 3D SHARDS.
Free Anime LIE Tattoos for Genesis 9 Toon. Also G9 To Toon Shaders.
Mirai Anime Hair for Genesis 9 Toon, one of the few that regular comic readers might not scream and run away from.
Characters (for non-commercial fan-art only):
A free James T. Kirk 2.0 for Poser and M3 LowRes.
Erik for Genesis-9 plus Outfit. Magneto, from the X-Men movies.
A free Vin Diesel For Genesis 8 Male.
Storybook:
Free, a Froufrou_Dynamic Clothing for Victoria 4.
Figure morphs and add-ons:
2nd Face for Michael 3, possibly useful for those who want to draw in the face later, e.g. in a comic-book page. Since you would then be erasing this prop, the no-commercial use thing would presumably not then be a problem.
Dawn 2 Expression and Viseme Morphs.
hisBodyFX Morphs for L’Homme2 and face morphs, for the current flagship Poser male figure.
Free Fiber Mesh Eyelashes for Dawn 2.0.
Animals and Plants:
European Otter by AM for DAZ Studio.
Nature’s Wonders: Frogs of the World Vol. 4. The Bullfrogs.
Corgi for Daz Dog 8, one of a selection of new breeds for DD8. The DAZ Store also has Buckingham Palce and interiors.
Poser Art Shader Series (P.A.S.S. Ultimate Bundle), still free on the ArtStation Marketplace.
Hedgerow Kit 3 – Fall Hawthorne Hedges Brambles and DogRose for DAZ Studio.
Historical:
Stonemason’s new The Streets of the Middle East.
dForce Louis Hair for Genesis 9, a loose periwig.
Free, the Kings German Legion KGL for DAZ, from the era of the Napoleonic Wars.
MS24 RAF FEb2 with Control Dials for Poser.
A 1930s dustbowl dForce Travelling Salesman for G9.
A 1950s/60s de Havilland Vampire Jet Fighter.
A cool van that looks like it’s from France in 1958, via a Bilal graphic-novel, XI NA Van.
A British Canal Narrowboat.
MD Classical Guitar for Genesis 9.
Scripts:
New this month, a free PoserPython script to batch render PNG animation frame-sequences, from a folder of saved Poser .PZ3 scene files.
Old but new to me, free DAZ Studio Rotation Scripts. Use an old-school gaming joystick to move figures, props etc.
Software:
On YouTube, PD Howler 2025 – What’s New? and Introducing watercolor FX in Howler.
HeadShop 2025 Full Bundle, plus an ‘Identikit’ based on G8 and G9.
Poser 13.3.864 is released (October 2023). I’m impressed by how much they’ve fixed and added since 13.0. And it’s currently just $99 for Poser 13, if you have a licence for any previous version. Which suggests that Poser 14 may be around the corner.
How to Restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software ‘PzDB’, if you’d lost it through Windows upgrades which affected MS Office 2007’s mso.dll.
DAZ Studio Premiere – a new subscription version.
Free, the ComicRack Community Edition. Your fave old-school comic-book reader desktop software, restored to life again.
Inkscape 1.4, the free vector drawing software. Filters gallery with adjustable thumbnail previews. Unified fonts browser. Opens Affinity Designer files. Now only for Windows 8.1 or higher.
The new 3DCoat 2024.12, now with “AI Assistant”.
Topaz AI Gigapixel 8.0, with much better ability to ‘recover’ faces that are turned to the side.
The free InvokeAI 5.3, for Photoshop-like (layers) local AI image-generation on your desktop PC.
How to get a Stable Diffusion 1.5 landscape to 1536px, easily and without horrible-ness.
Tutorials:
The AntFarm at Digital Art Live. 90 minutes exploring the capabilities and wrinkles of AntFarm’s great content, guided by the man himself.
On YouTube, fixing render crashes in Poser when rendering large scenes, and fix plant transparency problems and ambient light problems.
On YouTube, Improve the look of Poser skin textures by switching the lighting attenuation-mode away from its ‘Constant’ default.
And the Internet Archive is back online, which means old Poser manuals, how-to books and also some choice bits of old abandoned software.
That’s all for now, more in due course.
Poser is newly at Poser 13.3.864 as of 16th October 2024. Includes a September release which…
“Fixed issue where number of cores used for CPU renders was limited to 4”.
Ouch. Yes, rather useful for those with 12 or more! Check the big list of previous fixes, since it may be you still have an older version of 13 and thus are missing out on a huge amount of polish and hard-work by the dev team. Also fixed is a “memory leak” for SuperFly renders of more than 2048px.
Note also that Poser 11 has now regrettably vanished from the “Downloads Purchased” option on the official downloads page. Which seems a pity for late-comers, since 11 can happily co-exist with later versions, and a Poser 11 runtime is looked for by E-on Vue when you integrate the two softwares. Vue is now free, and I assume E-on didn’t remove the Poser SDK from their final release — but I can’t download the newly free Vue to check if 11 is still looked for / required. Since there’s region-blocking on the download and no .torrent for it.
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Now on, the Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition. Deadline: 7th January 2025. Prizes, including XP-Pen ‘drawn on the screen’ pen-monitors.
Categories include “Best Use of CTA5”. I read that as “Best Use of Cats” at a glance, which would be a fun category if it existed. But no, CTA5 is version 5.x of the worthy and very well-documented desktop software Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator). All entrants get a two-month free licence for CTA5.
I see the latest CTA 5.3 as a $90 upgrade from CTA3 Pipeline, at the Reallusion software store…
The “first purchase offer” coupon is because I haven’t logged in for a long time, I guess. It takes the price down to $90. The facial mo-cap bundle sounds fun, but knowing Reallusion it’ll only work with new characters which require expensive additional packs to make them work. That’s their long-time business model — low cost for the core software, and then charge like heck for all the additional stuff you need. Though admittedly, as I recall, there’s just the one version (no more ‘Pipeline’) which is something.
Come Home to Poser offer…
Until 4th November [2024], users of any previous Poser version can upgrade to Poser 13 for just $99.
A good deal, and I guess it will also put you on much higher on the upgrade track for the forthcoming Poser 14. By “any previous Poser version” I assume they also mean Smith Micro versions?
I doubt it will go lower than this on Black Friday (29th November, this year). Of course, once Poser 14 has been out a while, it might become a $50 bargain at some third-party cyber-store. But I’m guessing that may be a while yet.
The news completely passed me by, but I now see that Renderosity has a big Halloween 2024 contest with lots of prizes. Photography, 2D and Writers categories, as well as 3D. Deadline 28th October 2024.
The Christmas issue of 3D World, the magazine for 3D industry pros and wannabe-pro students, appears to be their last. Out now.
Following the recent demise of Digital Art Live, which faithfully served the hobbyist / amateur artist end of the same market for years, the demise of 3D World now leaves 3D creatives with no regular magazine. There’s still Imagine FX, I think, though it’s not much interested in 3D and in recent years its software news and reviews have become very sparse.
How to restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software PzDB, on an older Windows OS.
Problem: Likely you have been installing various Microsoft updates and C++ redistributables and so on, on an older version of Windows. These may have overwritten elements which enable drag and drop of files from software which uses an underlying MS Access 2007 database. As a consequence, your PzDB may have lost its ability to drag-and-drop from the search results, to load the chosen file into your Poser viewport.
Solution: Get the Microsoft Office Access Runtime and Data Connectivity 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) at the Microsoft Update Catalog. There get the accessrtsp3-en-us cab.
Once downloaded, right-click on and unzip the .cab as if it was a normal .zip file. Once done, double-click the accessrtsp3-en-us.msp installer. The Access 2007 components will be updated. There will be no ‘success’ message, but you can tell if it worked. No need to reboot now.
Launch PzDB and your drag-and-drop capability should have returned. It worked for me. Also seems to have repaired some lost functionality on the top menu icons.
Be aware that this will overwrite the core mso.dll in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12 with a possibly older version than you have. This may affect Office 2007 programs such as Word and Excel.
The alterative for drag-and-drop is to use the bare-bones but excellent external AIR library in Poser Pro 2014. This does, however, require that Poser 2014 be running first. You also need to update AIR to the latest version, for security.
I finally found out what the problem is with the Vue 2024 download, at last. Someone is doing region-blocking. I’m in the UK, which means the download never starts. The download also fails on a completely different PC, also in the UK.
British users of Vue are being actively blocked, is the only conclusion. Either it’s E-on doing this, or there’s a slim chance that my ISP has the video file-hoster Limelight.com on some blacklist? E-on is using Limelight.com to host the Vue 2024 installer .zip files.
I discovered the region-blocking because if I switch to a U.S. VPN, and thus have my browser pretend to be in the USA, the 1.9Gb Vue 2024 download starts immediately. Sadly the VPN is a free one, and won’t stay active for the length of such a huge download.
There are no .torrents, which would have been the sensible thing to offer for such large .zip files.
DAZ Studio at last has a real-time comic-book mode, somewhat like Poser. ‘Filatoon’ works with the Filament render-engine (I knew there had to be a use for it, eventually). It’s included as standard in DAZ Studio 4.23, and is not restricted to the new subscription DAZ Studio version. Note that the Filament engine can’t run on a Mac.
Judging by user try-outs and the official video trailer, it is definitely not as ‘artistic’ as Poser’s real-time tooning (which was made with the aid of comic-pros like Brian Haberlin). For instance, Poser makes its comic-book inking lines appear thicker as they near the camera. The DAZ real-time is definitely CAD-like, similar to what you can get with plugins at present with DAZ. Absolutely not going to satisfy any regular comic-book reader. Still, we have AI now, so it may be interesting to see what Stable Diffusion can do with the DAZ output, in terms of cohering it and fixing uglification, opacity map snaggles, and same-width outlines.
So, how to get DAZ Studio 4.23 with FilaToon?
On navigating the DAZ website to My Products / search ‘DAZ Studio’ / and then downloading the 756mb DAZStudio_4.23.0.1_Win64.exe — remember to also get the 48Mb IM00013176-42_DefaultResourcesForDAZStudio423.zip file which has the required Filament toon shaders. Copy the “Contents” in this .zip to your main folder path (if you have two paths, it seems it must be the first) and allow it to overwrite the existing Contents folder. Re-start DAZ.
Regrettably, Filament just doesn’t work for me in 4.23. All I get is a grey Viewport, despite doing everything correctly…
NVIDIA Drivers – yes
OpenGL 4.1 or better – yes
Load valid scene – yes
Set Viewport to Filament – yes
Set render to Viewport – yes
Filament Draw Options Node added to Scene – yes
Draw settings to ‘Style: Filament’ and ‘Bounding Box and Surface’ – yes
Distant and spotlight added to Scene – yes
Hardware anti-aliasing off – yes
… and absolutely nothing. Just a totally grey Viewport and a figure-control widget. I’d love to test and refine the new FilaToon, but… I can’t on my main workstation PC.
Filament does work fine for me in the older DAZ 4.21, which I did not allow to be uninstalled on installing 4.23. So it’s not like I can’t run Filament. It’s something in 4.23 that’s the problem.
I can also get the latest 4.23 Filament/ Viewport working fine on my Windows 10 Surface 3. But how then to get the FilaToon effect? Even after applying the shaders to a sample scene… I get nothing that looks like a toon. Nope… Filatoon seems to need a painfully detailed and long step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to set it up and get the effect. Quite the opposite of Poser, which makes the real-time Comic-book mode so simple that a small child can do it instantly.
DAZ Studio has split into free and subscription versions. DAZ Studio 4.23 Premier ($18.98 a month at present, with auto-renew) has features not present in the free version. “Available exclusively to DAZ Premier members, this enhanced version…” etc. The paid features mentioned are…
– “batch rendering”
– “new dForce management tools”
– “advanced sculpting tools”
– G8 to G9 “pose converter” and G3, G8 to G9 “shape transfer”.
That’s it. Though add-ons also in the subscription are…
* the various game-engine rig exporters
* a Blender “environments exporter”
* the DAZ to Blender Bridge
* the DAZ to Maya Bridge
* There are also various monthly discounts on content, offers, etc.
The Premier web page also appears to imply that the DAZ Install Manager is now Premier-only. Though that would be strange if it were true. Why would DAZ lock their ‘content installer for dummies’ away from the mass of buyers? Anyway, never used it myself… so no loss.
In fact, no loss at all. I wouldn’t use any of the above, don’t much care about G9, or about exports. As for the bundled discounts, I prefer to snipe the 70%/80% discount bargains as they pop up on my Wishlist.
Now, if they’d have had seamless AI integration, that would have been something. With depth and OpenPose renders plugging straight into ControlNet slots, even. Maybe Poser 14 will beat them to that?