My Technical Search engine is now at 82 sites or pages, now with greatly enhanced coverage of motion-capture relating to Poser / DAZ.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
ICC Magazine
Great to see 3D comics maker Drew Spence on the cover of the latest ICC Magazine #16 (October 2021), Interview inside!
ICC is the magazine for indie comics makers, and should fit nicely alongside your monthly VisNews for digital comics makers.
ArmorPaint 0.8
Out now, a new version of ArmorPaint, the PBR materials maker and 3D paint-on-the-mesh painter. Think of it as ‘Substance Painter for $20, without the subscription shackle’.
0.8 is described as “a major update” and it apparently also now runs on Android and the iPad, and has a new Cloud-based assets library. It’s sort-of-free. Free to compile from source code, or buy it ready-to-install for $20.
Movmi
On the sidebar ‘directory’ of this blog, there’s now a new “motion capture” set of eight links. All in some way Poser/DAZ friendly. Some of this software has been around a while, in fact so long that it’s vanished from sale (mocap software tends to do that).
But the latest software is Movmi V1.2.4 (October 2021), which is freeware. From one-man developer Ahmed Askar, making a free AI-powered 2D video-based motion detector software for Windows 7. Movmi has had mocap extraction capabilities added in the last few weeks. Export appears to be to .FBX for now?
It’s AI, so the download is hefty at 1.1Gb. He probably needs to get it on a torrent, in time for when the masses arrive, but for now it downloads fast. The lad’s got the right idea: Windows 7 support, free, no sign-up required and ‘just download it’.
Installing the Asus Xtion Pro in 2021
I bagged a nice “why-not” eBay bargain on an old Kinect-a-like motion-capture device. Yes, there are still a few real low-price auction bargains from real people to be had there, among the vast herds of re-listers and ‘gadgets from China’ sellers. The Asus Xtion Pro depth-sensing camera is arriving soon. Unlike the early Kinect it’s Windows-friendly and can do good face capture, and unlike a luxury iPhone it doesn’t require a small mortgage and a contract-shackle.
But until it arrives, after much search/research, here are some useful files for getting an old Asus Xtion Pro depth-sensing camera running on Windows. The links and notes may help others.
1. The official Asus drivers ISO are here (V1164_1202.zip), and also the firmware patch (FWUpdate_5_8_22.zip) to enable this camera to use OpenNI 2.0 or higher. (Your Web browser may need to turn off some blockers to see the javascript selection options).
2. Get the ISO unzipped and mounted. WinCDEmu is a good free driverless mounting utility, if your Windows baulks at driver-based ISO mounters. It’s important to note that once installed the firmware will require you also have the Primesense SDK Version 20.4.4.0 installed. The firmware-patched camera can only use OpenNI 2.x with this present. The installer from the ISO should get you this, as you’ll see by checking Uninstall…
Here there seems to have been some slight confusion, that now needs clearing up. I’m pretty sure that this “Primesense SDK Version 20.4.4.0” is what the official drivers page slightly misleadingly calls the “SDK OPEN NI Package 20.4.2.20 or higher”, from the Asus Xtion Pro’s sensor maker Primesense. There does not actually appear to have been a “OPEN NI Package 20.4.2.20″… and I think OpenNI Windows x64 2.2.0.33 and Primesense SDK Version 20.4.4.0 were confused and conflated by the person writing the driver listing. Easily done.
3. After the ISO install, check in Windows Uninstall to see the above version number is correct. Then connect the camera to a USB 2.0 port. I’m not yet sure what order the following two steps are to be done in:
i) install the updated firmware. Your original model Asus Xtion Pro should now work with OpenNI 2.0 and most motion-capture / robotics / 3D scanning software that requires 2.x.
ii) install the OpenNi 2.x drivers, presumably from your new C:\Program Files\OpenNI2\Driver folder. Possibly Windows will auto-install a driver as soon as the camera is plugged in, in which case you may need to ‘Update driver’ later.
On removing and then plugging back in your camera, the Primesense drivers should then — judging by screenshots from an old Windows 7 install guide — become visible in Windows Device Manager. The device shows as a “Primesense Carmine 1.08” (branded at retail as Asus Xtion).
OpenNI Cookbook has three pages which may help with this part of the process.
4. But the ISO appears to only install OpenNI 1.5.5. Now then… why does the drivers page say it contains the 2.x version? For the moment I’m guessing that the answer is that the Primesense SDK Version 20.4.4.0 may actually contain OpenNI 2.2.0.x within it or perhaps even 2.4.4.x. That would sense for a SDK (software development kit).
But if not, then as I’ve done here, also install OpenNI 2.2 from OpenNI-Windows-x64-2.2.0.33.zip at Stucture.io. This is a worthy community archive and so far as I can tell this appears to be the ‘last good’ version, before evil megacorp Apple stepped in and snaffled all the patents for use with their luxury iPhone.
5. Ok, you may then have something that will enable the camera to work when plugged in. If you look under C:\Program Files you should see these new folders.
If you get conflicts between OpenNI1 and OpenNI2, I guess you just uninstall version 1.
Note that there is also a firmware patch to take the camera’s USB 2.0 to 3.0, though one firmware patch will be enough for me for now. There are also various 32-bit installer versions of the above, if your old software requires 32-bit.
Note also that the Asus Xtion Pro is not to be confused with the Asus Xtion Pro LIVE version, which came out a year later and added an RGB camera to what is otherwise 99.9% the same model. Some old software appears to require Asus Xtion Pro LIVE, and I’ll test if it can run from a ‘firmware-updated Asus Xtion Pro capable of OpenNI 2.x’.
I’ll keep readers informed about progress, and if all this works when the camera arrives and is plugged in.
The original Xtion Pro works with:
* Unity (via various plugins and projects, or DIY your own)
* iPi Recorder + iPi Mocap Studio (body only, round-trips .BVH from Poser and DAZ)
* Fastmocap Professional (export supposedly via .BVH targets for M4 and Poser 6 and 8, body only – but see this Oct 2014 review before buying).
* Visikord (motion-controlled music for VJs, art installations, haunted houses etc).
* UNREAL4MIRROR (Virtual fitting / dressing mirror plugin for Unreal Engine 4).
* “The Claw is an arcade machine with futuristic controls. We replaced the traditional joystick and push button” with the Asus Xtion Pro.
* iClone 5.1 + one of three MoCap Plugins then offered (the latter now deeply unavailable).
* Blender (human motions automatically laid along timeline, to control a water surface).
* Artec Studio (scan 3D objects to meshes).
* Should work with most other object-scanner software. No textures, as that would also require the slightly later Xtion Pro Live’s added RGB camera. But ArmorPaint would do the job on the mesh fairly easily.
* Nuitrack.
* Faceshift (Facial mo-cap. Defunct now, purchased and killed by Apple. Later versions required(?) Xtion Live. But at 2015 they stated “All available cameras which produce good tracking quality are publicly supported by us or will be shortly. In 2015 you could get “a perpetual licence for non-commercial use for $150”, and don’t you now wish you did?).
* Matlab (for science/data analysis).
* GV-3D People Counter (counts the number of people entering a space).
Can also save a capture to an .ONI (OpenNI) file that appears to be .BVH-like… in that it packs all the frames as prerecorded skeleton movement data. This can be loaded to Unity via OpenNIContext. In addition, the .ONI timestamps can be queried with code, it’s said.
Also used in various robotics, medical, science projects etc. It has even been used in farming, as a “3D cow scanner” to detect lameness.
Fitted to some drones by ambitious drone-ers.
Also natively “supports push, wave, and tap gestures” for control of Windows software, and at launch shipped with the Kylo Browser (gesture-based Web browsing). Make “simple rotation gestures to zoom-out and zoom-in”, which sounds like it could get interesting with large digital maps.
At launch in Spring 2012, the list of compatible games included…
* SEGA’s Virtua Tennis 4.
* EA’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.
* Capcom’s Street Fighter 4.
* Rovio’s Angry Birds.
* Beatbooster was a slightly later flagship sci-fi racing/exercise game for the device. Judging by YouTube videos, not one for gamers who dislike motion-sickness. Seems to have vanished.
* Related to games, the TurboTuscany demo. World’s first VR headset with full-body tracking, which used the first Xtion.
Collapsing code in Visual Studio Code
The free desktop PC software Microsoft Visual Studio Code (‘VSC’) is a sort of super Notepad++. It’s what you now want in order to copy-paste coloured code into the Renderosity Python forum, since a recent back-end forum update. Notepad++ on its own can’t do that particular job.
Here’s a handy tip for editing a non-Python Poser file with VSC…
Crtl + K.
Then hands off keyboard.
Then Ctrl + 3.
This collapses the zillion lines of nested code, as you can see here. Much more comprehensible now…
Then Mouseover the blank bit, to reveal the arrows that expand the hidden code block…
Not sure if this also works in Microsoft’s newly launched online version of Visual Studio Code, but it probably does.
Also, in the sidebar of this blog I’ve added links to a couple of free community-made editors for Poser file types (.CR2, .PZ2, etc).
Poser 12 Early Access 12.0.703
Poser 12 Early Access has a new version, 12.0.703 (13th October 2021) for download. The last one noticed here was 12.0.617 (early August 2021). According to the Changelog / Release Notes it’s been through seven unreleased iterations since then, with this current public release being the eighth such.
This time around Python has been a clear focus of the hard work. Various PoserPython fixes, and some nice extensions of Python’s capabilities in Poser 12:
– Python API method poser.PrefsLocation() now returns full path including filename of Poser prefs file.
– Python: Provided an easier way to identify a library “prop”.
– Python: Now accesses some of the Material Room context menu commands.
– Added material.SpecularMapFileName() function to Poser Python API.
– Added support for addons-style third-party Python scripts that load at start-up.
– Added method to find a parameter specifically by internal name.
– Python API event now recognises when user has switched to another room.
Many more Python changes are detailed in the full Changelog / Release Notes.
I also see notes of various work done on Animation Sets/AnimSets and also the Material Room. Collapsible hierarchy. Also some small UI fixes, and the Japanese translation of Poser gets another tweak.
Lots of fixes for installing downloaded purchased content and scripts, too.
Jack’s Poser Pro Manual updates
Jack’s Poser Pro Manual (unofficial) has updated. A personal organised manual, useful to have indexed in your local keyword search option (e.g. the ‘last good’ Copernic Desktop Search 2.3 build 30 etc).
Renderosity Forums URL changes
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…
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.
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
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.
Halloween freebies
The thefantasiesattic Halloween freebies page, now live. One ‘reveal’ per day, from now until Halloween.
Fix the DNS ‘not found’ problem
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).
What was new for Poser and DAZ in September 2021?
It’s that time again. Here’s my monthly round-up of interesting or unusual new content for DAZ and Poser, and occasionally for other software. As usual the DAZ site locked up and became unresponsive after page 4, so I may have missed some. Also as usual, freebies are only linked if commercial-use or obvious fan-art.
Science-fiction:
Cybertenko’s Sci-fi Modular Helmet for M4, with lots of great variants.
Coflek-Gnorg’s Worm for Poser and DAZ. With a bit of wrangling two worms could also double-up as horns.
The Jar for DAZ Studio.
REX Hsu and his free mecha platforms in .OBJ format.
BackMatte Volume 1 – Desert Canyons.
Steampunk:
Steampunk Horse for DAZ Studio.
Steampunk Bird for DAZ Studio.
The free The Steampunk HeartGlass.
The 1900s dForce Bootstrapper Outfit for Genesis 8 Male.
Fantasy:
Monster Blades for DAZ Studio.
Fantasy Chess Set for DAZ Studio.
Aeros for the HiveWire Horse. A flying horse figure with animations.
Halloween toon:
Spooky Halloween for DAZ Studio. Appears to have a stylized broomstick/mop that would match well the DAZ toon goth-girl Lenore and the Raven. Just desaturate the textures and re-load.
Spooky Halloween also has a Cauldron addon and a Cute Bat add-on and a Cute Owl add-on for DAZ Studio. Again, all suitable for matching with Lenore and the Raven.
FrankenNip props set, a toon Frankenstein’s castle lab.
Toon:
Is it a cat, or is it a That? Can be made into a shaggy ‘hippy raven’ variant. Free Arms for That.
The free Lolo Kitty for Lolo Hai.
A free Pose pack for Darkseal’s Iznt toon character, with 24 poses.
A free Pose pack for Darkseal’s Minotaur Asterion.
Storybook:
Cute Socks Set for G8F with wrinkle morphs.
Various ‘Putting coat on’ morphs for the Hoodie for Kids 4.
Creatures:
Felidae by AM – Lynx, which requires the Felidae by AM – Lion.
Songbird ReMix Amazon. Quality birds of the Amazon Basin, for Poser and DAZ. A wealth of lovely birds in a pack fully updated in September 2021.
Songbird ReMix Cool & Unusual 2, for Poser and DAZ. Including hummingbirds.
Pip the Chick. A just-hatched fluffy chick.
Free PiSong Tree Frog Poses and Poses for Poser 4 frog. Poser 4? Well, yes… still useful for artists’ reference. And who knows, they may just fit the Gecko and other PiSong toonimals, which for some reason have no poses today.
Landscapes:
Train Tracks Seamless PBR Texture.
A free Basilisk Den set for DAZ Studio.
Predatron’s Date Palm Trees for DAZ Studio. Realistic, with browned under-leaves.
Egyptian Elements for DAZ Studio. Ancient Egyptian desert ruins, un-painted.
Unusual clothing:
Almost Mermaid for La Femme for Poser. A mermaid tail.
Anime Jester for La Femme, with a somewhat-Moebius hat.
Women’s jumpsuit with embroidery and blouse for Marvelous Designer. Could probably be got to DAZ by a clothing expert.
Scripts, presets and node-noodling:
A basic de-grunging Matcap for Poser 11. Remove grunge and speckling from materials, while retaining the overall colour. To be used in combination with the Poser Comic Book mode, to get colour flats.
Capture the DAZ Studio ‘real-time rendered’ iRay Viewport, and speed up animation capture by over 80%.
Face To Face Autopose Arms for DAZ Studio. Confusing named, but basically: put a hand or finger in contact with a specific bit of the scene. You already have “Look At That!” scripts. Think of this as “Touch that!”.
MARSA Pipe Dream. Again, another script that’s a bit mis-named. Tubing and pipe creator scripts for DAZ Studio. Can be randomized.
MAT Edit for Poser 12. A fully-feature material editor and wrangler.
One-click ‘Easy Silhouette’ view for Blender 2.9 or higher. See how your scene ‘reads’, in terms of its silhouetted shapes.
Tutorials:
FlowScape: Paint 3D Animated Scenes in Seconds. FlowScape is the affordable and fun real-time landscape maker.
Second Skin: The Complete Guide to Geoshells in DAZ Studio.
How to create fog in Vue, as in “true volumetric fog” which streetlights and window-lights mistily glow through. Nice, but I’m guessing you may need a big render farm to render it.
And finally, DAZ Studio now runs on a Mac again.
That’s it for this month. More picks in October.
Cory 6
The DAZ freebies page has just updated. Note Cory 6, a quality Genesis 2 boy toon base. With Poser transfer files for DSON, and also a free pack of Island Boy Poses.
A quick test in Poser 11…
Butterfly-wing eyelashes on import. But this can be fixed with…
Scripts | DSON Support | SubDivision | Set SubDivision OFF
Still not great in terms of taking the Comic Book lines, but would be ok for the middle-distance or if filtering a lineart layer in Photoshop. Or for use as artists’ reference, if manually inking with the lines as a guide.