Fantasy Attic’s Annual Christmas Freebies Advent Calendar is back online. The site had been moving hosts over the last week or so. So far, the gifts include a useful “quick drape” set of base lights for an illuminated Christmas tree.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
Release: Cartoon Animator 4.4
Reallusion has released a cool new Cartoon Animator 4.4, with the ability to tweak and adjust imported 3D motions. This feature is apparently not just a Pipeline edition thing, but is also in the cheaper version.
Don’t want to tweak? This is Reallusion, so you can of course also buy very expensive packs of pre-made 3D motions, well-suited and tested for the latest sophisticated G3 generation of Cartoon Animator figures.
What about importing freebies? At the end of the video, Reallusion’s 3DXchange utility is shown and third-party motions are being converted. Sadly 3DXchange (a sort of universal converter) is no long available as a standalone, and to get it in a useful version I’m pretty sure you need the expensive iClone Pipeline bundle. So don’t go rushing to pay for an upgrade to Cartoon Animator 4.4 in the hope of importing oodles of free .BVH motions, unless you also have the matching install of 3DXchange.
However, note that applying 3D human motions in Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator) is not new. You can already do free BVH to Cartoon Animator conversion with an older copy of 3DXchange by saving them to iClone ‘non-standard figure’ motions. Many will have picked up a free copy of iClone 5 at some point and may well have the 3DXchange that came along with it.
Indeed, old-school iClone users may not even need to do that, as they likely already have a large library of 3D-figure iClone motion files on their PC. These are now (mostly) drag-and-drop onto Cartoon Animator figures. However they may not “take” on the latest shiniest G3 figures. So if you need to upgrade will partly depend on what figures you’re going to be using, G2 or G3.
It’s a finny thing…
Got fins?
I’ve greatly updated my September 2020 post on how to fix the fin… when loading or opening a scene with DAZ Studio’s Genesis 1. There are now four fix methods. I’ve also finally tracked down what’s causing this annoying problem. It was one of a free set of head morphs, that others have also had the same problem with. Delete the rogue morph and the problem is cured.
Poser 12 Early Access – new incremental release, fixes
Poser 12 Early Access has a new public download. The download had been at “Poser 12.0.306 – 2020-11-25” for a while, and has now jumped forward three iterations to “Poser 12.0.322 – 2020-12-08”.
The most important changes, for those considering downloading the latest version:
* ShaderNode equivalency behaviour in Poser 12 is now consistent with Poser 11.
* Additional support for Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics cards.
* Partial fix for seams showing in SSS, when traditional skinning [of figures] is used.
* Can export an image from the PostFx palette.
* Fixes to the Python Addons.
* Fixed exporting SuperFly renders to ‘Aux’ layers as .PSD and .PNG – the “Original” layer is no longer dark.
Have a BEER
A new video on “Getting Started with BEER/Malt”, this being the new free NPR plugin for Blender. The video shows how to download, install and active the newly public Release v1-beta. Also how to apply a basic shader and line to a sphere.
The development work is done, but according to their YouTube channel they still need to hire a developer to add a nice UI and a layering system. You can donate here to help make that happen.
CTA4 at NeoWin Deals
The discounts keep rolling, as people try to find ways to wiggle those last few dollars out of your precious PayPal balance. I see that Reallusion has followed Renderosity’s lead and are offering their software at a heavy discount via NeoWin Deals. They now have Cartoon Animator 4 Pro of offer there, bundling this starter version (ignore the “Pro” label, the real Pro version is called “Pipeline”) with their 12 Principles of Animation Course, for $49.
CTA 4 is the latest version of their 2D animator software and it’s a fine animation tool in terms of both its ease-of-use and general friendliness. It’s less friendly in terms of the cost of content and add-on packs, so ideally the impoverished hobbyist needs to make or find their own 2D assets and backplates. I have a big bundles of freebies in that regard, to start you off. Also, while their training is always top quality you do need to always check if a paid ‘training DVD’ of theirs is actually also available free online — sometimes it is.
You should also know that iClone motions, if you have any, can be used on the G2 CTA characters via simple drag-and-drop.
PoserWorld sale – 50 items for $50
PoserWorld has a Christmas coupon-sale on their legacy Poser content, mostly V3 and V4 and with many unique items in military and police, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and many historical curiosities such as a Theramin (early electronic musical instrument) or a 1950s cigarette vending machine. 30% off at the Checkout with the Holiday2020 code. Where else will you find items like these…
Note they also have a new Bronze Membership at $100, but… with a 50%-off coupon to take it down to $50. This lets you get any 50 items from the 3,300 items in the Club Classics category. That’s a good deal, at $1 an item, provided you’re not expecting the latest Genesis 8 dial-a-girls and are willing to spend an hour picking from the pages. The 50% off coupon there is: ITSBACK50
Black Friday: my summary
Time for a quick summary of my Black Friday this year, if anyone’s interested.
Software:
Hovering in the background was the anticipated cost of the Poser 12 update in mid-December, which pulled me back from the possibility of some other software purchases. Despite their discounts, AKVIS Decorator and AKVIS Charcoal were just too expensive, with the UK 20% sales tax wiping out most of the discount. The same with 3D-Coat, as it was just too expensive even though there was a small discount on the Amateur tier this year. An email offer of an upgrade to Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator Pipeline 4 (from 3) was slightly tempting, but I don’t really need the 4.0 features.
I was also tempted by an upgrade to Clip Studio EX (the real ‘pro’ version) of the comics making software, as I had picked up the discounted $25 standard version in the summer. But I looked again at its line-art conversion of 3D models (an EX-only feature), and decided it just wasn’t worth it. Poser does it vastly better, and the rest of Clip Studio is still an intensely fiddly and badly-translated and mis-named ‘nightmare’ software. Nice inking brushes and multi-page comics layout don’t compensate for all that clutter. So, I’m glad I only wasted $25 on it and can just thing of it as a nice easy $25 vectorisation tool. Thus I’d say that the cheap and friendly Comic Life is the best and easiest tool to make non-manga comics. If you haven’t looked at Comic Life for a decade, and are still thinking of it as a $35 kiddy-tool, you’ll find it has a wealth of new features and refinements at the same old price. And it’s also in continual development.
One “curiosity” purchase this year was $10 spent at the ArtStation Market sale, on Pascal Blanche’s ZBrush NPR preset packs (made when the new Zbrush NPR feature was ‘a thing’) and his painting process video. Also a plugin that’s supposed to make it easier to get a viable anti-aliased illustration from ZBrush. I’ve yet to try these out.
Subscriptions:
No subscriptions this year, as I don’t do subscriptions at all. No ownership, no value.
3D content:
The DAZ Store’s pre-Black Friday discounts were resisted. These days the lower sub-$10 end of my WishList is fairly well cleared of the “highly desirable” stuff, and thus it’s fairly easy to resist. But the DAZ sale did see me adding to my little “DAZ Genesis 1 turns into anything, wears anything” completist project. For this I had already picked up two heavily-discounted packs of Genesis 2 clones for Genesis 1, and also the original Poke-Away! for Genesis 1, with Mavka For Genesis 1 bringing the total to just $10.
At the Renderosity Store sale, my little “Genesis 1 project” was then completed for clothing fits by picking up “Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis 1” for $5. With this and my other add-ons a Genesis 1 can now look like or wear anything in the entire Genesis line, and also from the older figures too. And any Poke-through can be dealt with too. And I also already have various Creature Creator and figure-shapes packs for Genesis 1.
But my Genesis 1 uber-project is not quite over, as I’d also like to add “the cherry on the cake”. This being the original Genesis Generation X2 and its GenX AddOn Gen3 Bundle. These enable “any morph” loading for Genesis 1, including from legacy M3/V3/A3 figures. Sadly these two are $50 together and did not go to a discount.
Also at Renderosity on Black Friday, I had Meshbox’s vast Steampunk Arboretum for Poser for $5. For $10 I also picked up Action Toolkit for M4 and Action Toolkit II for M4, on Mike Mitchell’s recommendation re: their usefulness as go-to sets of partial poses for comics.
But at Renderosity a lot of the action actually happened in before-and-after sales. “Must-have” 70% discounts on three choice 1971s scenes, and three sets of quality steampunk props, dinged me just before Black Friday. Then after Black Friday was over, the late arrival of the new Nunatak figure from Nursoda dinged me again with a “must have” discount. Thankfully I found then that my sluggish Renderosity credit had unaccountably increased a bit since Black Friday, and I was thus also able to get Poisen’s Helmetz3 pack (has a cool Moebius-type sci-fi helmet in it) and ShaaraMuse3D’s Stick Collection (Nursonda’s Nunatak needs something to carry on his back, is my excuse)… for just $10 all-in.
So, in all, this year saw $56 go to Renderosity, for some $150+ worth of content.
What of the DAZ Store? Just $14 went to DAZ in total, though I did get a very good haul of freebies from them. Including some time-limited Poser lights packs which would otherwise have cost $50, and other freebies such as the new Santa Gnome and AprilYSH’s Dforce Myles Beard For Genesis 8 Male. I also had the new “How To Use the DAZ Studio Geometry Editor” as a personal gift via DAL and found it quite interesting. Who knew that the feature existed, and works?
But the winning store this year is likely to be HiveWire, as any big store-closing sale is going to draw down the PayPal and this one is no exception. They’ve had one $30 order from my well-weeded WishList, including the Poser 11 Scatter tool, and there’s still another $35 of “possibles, maybes” left in the WishList, including Ken’s G’s excellent dragonflies.
So… a total spend of $120 so far, which has been effectively covered by some unexpected bonus income into my PayPal from elsewhere. Nice. And I thus still have enough left in the PayPal to get the Poser 12 upgrade when it appears in mid-December.
Poser 11: ramped
If you were somehow thinking of doing ramped toons with Poser 11’s Cycles-based SuperFly rendering, rather than in the fast real-time Comic Book mode, there’s now a new free .MT5 Poser Cycles Color-Ramp to help with that.
But, as Poser’s own Charles Taylor advised in the recent Poser 12 Early Access webinar, basically… don’t try to use SuperFly for toon. I agree, learn to use the Comic Book mode properly instead. Real-time, fast, great results if handled correctly.
Still, I guess the ramp might be useful in other complex node setups that you need to port from Blender to Poser.
New figure: Nunatak by Nursoda
Nunatak from Nursoda for Poser and DAZ. It’s always great to see a new quality figure from Nursoda. This is the male figure to accompany his female Utla of a few years ago.
Currently on a discount at $11 at the Renderosity Store.
24 Days Of Christmas Freebies at Renderosity
24 Days Of Christmas at Renderosity, a fun Advent Calendar that is now slowly filling with freebies. I’m not sure the bloody Guillotine Props Set is really suitable for Christmas, though it’s from RPublishing and thus it perhaps wryly symbolises the Poser 12 developer workload and its shipping-date deadlines.
Amazingly, I had somehow managed to miss getting Powerage’s Pacificator for Poser, over the years, but it’s an Advent Calendar freebie and I have it now…
There’s also a free Textures Pack for Pacificator if you want to make it look jazzier than my quick real-time Comic Book render shown here.
Also note the new free preset to Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings for DAZ Studio 4. Very useful if something you loaded as an experiment (such as HD morphs) has messed with your settings, or you’ve been fiddling with the settings and things have not gone as planned.
For some reason, under any version of DAZ Studio and across different PCs, I have never ever been able to get anything at all to show up in the “Presets” render panel…
I can only assume it’s an un-fixable perma-bug. This freebie is exactly the same in this respect. Nothing shows up there after install.
The clunky workaround is then to drag-drop the “Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings” .DUF file to the DAZ Studio Viewport. This will reset the iRay settings to their defaults, and also sets a 1600px render setting.
Apocalypse Girl – now complete and available for the Kindle
Did you get a shiny new 10″ Kindle on Black Friday? Need a comic to put on it? There’s a new graphic-novel, from well-known store vendor Sixus1 (Les Garner), and it’s now a complete story. I’ve just spotted that his final Apocalypse Girl #6 issue landed on the Amazon Kindle store at the very end of September, thus completing his graphic novel of Apocalypse Girl…
“Dogs of War”, the conclusion of the first Apocalypse Girl” graphic novel
Congratulations to Les for getting it completed and published!
DAZ Store freestuff – updated
The DAZ 3D Store’s Freestuff page has updated. In terms of stuff without dependencies, the old $38 Runtime DNA Ultimate Lights And Backgrounds bundle may be of interest to Poser users using FireFly. There are also some sky sets with matching lights, which require the RDNA Terradome uber-environment as a base dependency in Poser.
While you’re there, don’t miss the free toon Lil Gnome which is new.
Goodbye to the Mac
Based on what I hear about NVIDIA drivers and OpenGL, and also the ‘death’ of DAZ Studio and Vue on the ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS, it seems to me that the Mac can no longer be considered a serious and stable platform for 3D graphics production work. As such I will no longer be wasting time on this blog in also trying to note or consider the tedious “Mac issues” in my posts. I’ll simply assume that all readers are running Windows.
OctaneRender 2021
OctaneRender 2021 has moved up to a closed beta, with the forthcoming OctaneRender 2020.2 as its release-candidate engine. Octane is interesting because DAZ Studio already has it, currently via a Free tier in the subscription rates, and because Poser 12 is to get a current-version Octane plugin in 2021.
OctaneRender 2021 is said to add…
* Improved volumetrics.
* Improved performance for scenes too large for the GPU’s memory.
* Updates to the AI Light algorithm, said to accelerate final renders by “2x or more”.
* Octane can now also work as a host for other renders such as “Arnold, RenderMan, Radeon ProRender, and Blender Cycles”.
* There’s hazy talk of something called “Brigade” which will offer real-time Eevee-like rendering via Octane, but ray-traced rather than OpenGL. But if you have the horse-power to do that then why not just use real-time iRay instead, and for free?
* There’s also an even hazier mention that OctaneRender 2021 could introduce Octane’s own “AnimeRender” rendering engine.
AnimeRender? It’s said to have been in development since 2018 but is not yet released. But let’s assume that AnimeRender does what it sounds like, an NPR toon render that is i) not fiddly to set up or use; ii) can be used with just a few clicks without having to manually re-texture figures with toon materials; iii) has a quality and style that would be commercially-viable in terms of appealing to regular comics readers.
If then available via Octane in DAZ at the Free tier (doubtful, but possible) then AnimeRender might open up easy comics rendering from DAZ Studio, and with more or less the same ease as Poser 11’s existing real-time Comic Book mode. I’m making a lots of guesses and assumptions there, though. AnimeRender might turn out to be be just another naff attempt at a few cheesy NPR filters and some ugly hatching. Poser’s easy real-time Comic Book mode remains the gold-standard for now.