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.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
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.
HiveWire sale now on
HiveWire have just launched their big sale and it’s a store-wide sale at 40% on everything. Included are the many SongBird Remix and Nature packs, and the new and desirable Poser 11.x script utility “Scatter”. Comics makers and animators may want the Universal Anime Head and Universal Chibi Head. And there are of course a wealth of beautifully crafted horses, cats and other animals, including a few rare animation items such as ‘running dog’ animation packs.
Until the end of 3rd January 2021. Sadly you can’t just splurge all your “store points” at once, but you can draw them down a bit by a series of purchases.
Hide all “out of stock” items on Amazon
Searching for a new graphics card on Amazon? 98% of what you want will be “out of stock”, so there’s a handy new UserScript that shows “Amazon in-stock only”. I’ve looked at the code and it’s clean.
For those using their national Amazon rather than the main .com it needs some slight tweaks to work. It’s easy to run it on my Amazon UK, but there you change the detection-phrase from the capitalised “Out of Stock” to “out of stock”.
Black Friday: NeoWin Poser (extra 20% off) / Blambot / HiveWire / Eye Candy
And… it’s a wrap. Black Friday has fried, Cyber Monday has sighed, and only a few week-long sales continue. I hope this blog’s readers managed to bag themselves a few excellent discounts. Here are a few final items…
* There’s a new coupon that’s worth a try with the $80 Poser 11 Pro at NeoWin Deals. They have a… “Use code CMSAVE20 for an additional 20% off site-wide.” Posted Nov 30, 2020 15:00 EST. Poser 11 Pro for just $64? Try it and see.
* The HiveWire 3D store sale has not yet started, but should do so later today.
* Blambot Comic Fonts have finally loaded their discount… 30% off with coupon code CYBERWEEK until 7th December 2020.
* The venerable but still-useful Alien Skin Eye Candy plugin for Photoshop is modestly discounted to $74 from $89.
* The Comic Life software seems to have had no discounts at all this year. They usually do. Oh well. Nothing either from PhotoLine, Expressi, Redfield, Wonderdraft, or Jitbit Macro Recorder. Flaming Pear (Flood 2) offered their discount a week early then closed it before Black Friday, as notified here.
Octane and AMD – correction
I’ve updated and corrected my recent post “Christmas is on the (graphics) cards” post, re: Octane and AMD graphics cards. I had thought this was fixed up now, but no. Apparently it’s still only on the Mac that Octane-AMD is possible, not Windows…
“Octane X on Mac Pro Features. Completely rewritten mesh geometry engine optimized for AMD GPUs”
I’ve also added note about the NVIDIA driver problems. I’m about done with covering this tedious “Mac stuff” I think. Windows only from now on, on this blog.
Poser/DAZ new content survey: November 2020
It’s time for the monthly survey of the most eye-catching, possibly useful and interesting new goodies, as released for Poser and DAZ Studio in the last month.
As usual, freebies are not covered here if “non-commercial use”, unless obvious fan-art.
Science-fiction:
Colony Subway, which could perhaps double as a Hyperloop interior.
Space Agencies Pack 2 for FA FireBlade vehicle for Poser.
A new Ali “Hr-” hair, Hr-239 which looks quite suitable for science-fiction.
EArkham’s ZWorld Beast from Below. Could also be a shoreline scavenger on an alien planet, which would mean that you could hide the hands in shallow water.
The Beast from Below is probably lurking near the new Underground Bunker, from a name new to me, Dekogon Studios.
Steampunk:
Need a helmet for your helicopter pilot? Steam Punk Hats for Genesis 8.
Steam Drone for Poser.
The Strange Man Characters and Hair Set for Genesis 8 Male. Requires Strange Man.
Frankenstein Laboratory for DAZ Studio.
Cybertenko’s Instant Zombies 6: Human Experiments. Including steampunk elements.
Free Modular Facial Hair for G8M.
A free Camera and tripod.
Michael 3 1800’s, an M3 outfit.
England’s Glory Vintage Matchbox for Blender.
Storybook:
And for pudding, a yummy 41 Food Shaders for the kids.
The free Young Child Pose 4 – 13 and 4-1) from bbarbs. Requires Just Kids 4.
The free Weatherman’s Home for DAZ Studio, a storybook fantasy home.
Historical:
WashTub For DAZ Studio, and poses. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ materials.
There are matching Saloon Gal Bloomers for Poser at PoserWorld. For V2(!), but could be converted with the free CrossDresser.
Western Guns, a big collection.
Jamestown Smithy for Poser and Jamestown Stable for Poser which could also work as a Dark Ages farm.
Also a matching Jamestown Walls and Gate.
A free Ancient Rainforest Rope Bridge.
Arabian Dreams, now updated for iRay.
Need to bring your Ancient Egypt scenes to life? Now-Crowd Billboards – Ancient Egyptians. Don’t forget to add the kitties.
Animals:
Need to make your Ancient Egypt scenes pop even more? Bring on the Egyptian Elephant Warrior for African Elephant. Requires African Elephant Updated which needs the African Elephant.
Hippogryph Add-on for the HiveWire Horse.
A fine free Morphing Fishing Rod For DAZ Studio.
Animations and Poses for the HiveWire Mule Deer and Caribou.
Landscape:
Hawthorn Trees for DAZ Studio and iRay.
Forest Path Vignette. Simple, but nicely done.
ShaaraMuse3D’s Photo Props: Crystal Clusters.
Poser 12 and Python 3:
Poser 12 Early Access (upgrade) is now on the Renderosity Store. If you need the full Poser 12, save yourself $50 by first getting the Poser 11 NeoWin deal, and then use the licence to get the upgrade to 12. Be aware that 12 is not yet properly released, and you may want to stick with 11 for a few months.
A free Swimsuit for La Femme, who ships free with Poser 12. And a free Shape of Fifi: Youthful character for La Femme.
The free P12 Script Starter, a customisable panel for loading Poser 12 scripts.
A Poser 12 fix for the depth-of-field script.
Parent Lister. Shows a quick list of what your figure is parented to.
Useful for comics makers and over-painters are the updated Color Me White (strip all materials) and Color Me Random for Poser 12.
Utilities:
Spring Dynamics for DAZ Studio from 3D Universe. Can save and load presets.
Genesis 3 & 8 Face Controls. A non-rendering face-control plate. Overkill if you just want basic eye-control, but perhaps you can turn some of them off.
Instancify. Turns repeating props into instances, to save memory when rendering. There’s also the little “convert instances to props” script Instances to Objects that goes the other way, turning DAZ’s instances into proper props (vital when exporting to Reality, Poser, Vue, Blender etc).
Pixeluna’s SkinDesignS for Genesis 3 and 8 Females. Easily applied tattoos.
MK Facial Asymmetry Morphs for Genesis 8 Male.
A set of free pose-transfer utilities:
* G3M: M4/Hiro4/Freak4 to G3M; and the reverse G3M Pose Transfer to M4/H4/F4
* G3F: V4/A4 to G3F, and the reverse G3F to V4/A4.
* G8M: M4/Hiro4/Freak4 to G8M, and the reverse with G8M to M4/H4/F4.
* G8F: V4/A4 to G8F, and G8F To Victoria 3 / Aiko 3.
Tutorials:
Are you new, and baffled by all the different figures, their names and abbreviations? Generations: 3D Figure Evolutions is a webinar that surveys the key figures.
“How To Use the DAZ Studio Geometry Editor”. DAZ has an easy built-in Geometry Editor for cutting up and into meshes? Yup. Who knew?
Supercharge Your DAZ Studio Content with GIMP, the free graphics editor.
That’s it, more picks next month!
Black Friday: Teknology3d Poser/DAZ store / World Creator / itch.io / Blambot / Comic Life
* The DAZ/Poser store Teknology3d has 60% off the entire store. They mostly specialise in supporting quality toon figures such as Mavka, some of the Nursoda figures, Sam and Sadie etc.
* 30% off all versions of Stefan Kraus’s real-time World Creator 2 landscape software. There’s 12 months of “Free updates to major new editions” which should theoretically also get you the imminent version 3. Which will have a radically new UI, so if you do plunk down your $150, wait a few weeks until you can learn it on 3.0.
* Black Friday 2020 at itch.io, on now. No discount on the real-time landscape software FlowScape, which lives there. While you’re in there, you may want to add the “name your price” Call of the Sentinel graphic novel to your basket and pass it on to young readers with shiny new 10″ tablets.
* Blambot Comic Fonts usually have a Cyber Monday only sale. No word on that for 2020 though.
* Nothing yet at Comic Life but they also usually discount on Cyber Monday only. I may not be able to post here on Monday, so here’s the link now.
Still no movement at Flaming Pear (Flood 2), Redfield (maker of the best non-pencil Photoshop sketch plugin, Sketch Master), Expressi (inky Chinese brush painting software), Wonderdraft (a leading fantasy map maker software), or JitBit Macro Recorder (automate any software).
Poser 12 fix: depth of field script
A simple fix for the DOF (Depth of Field) PoserPython script (dof_p5.py) in Poser 12.
The HiveWire store is closing
Sad news, the HiveWire store is to close…
“We will have a final, FINAL storewide sale beginning the first of December and will run til the first week in January 2021”.
So, you may want to hold back some PayPal from your Black Friday/Cyber Monday purchases for that, with the date to mark being Tuesday 1st December. Especially if items such as the new Poser Scatter Tool (likely to make the move to Poser 12) and Ken G’s superb creature packs have substantial discounts then.
They’ll be moving the store into the Renderosity Store, which makes a lot of sense in terms of going where the traffic and buyers are…
“Renderosity is excited to receive content that has been published at HiveWire” and there “our impact as a HiveWire brand will continue”.
I’d suggest they’ll also be able to cross-sell better there, and create bundles that only involve purchase from one store. For instance, the new HiveWire Tiger is currently also on Renderosity, but if you also wanted its paid LAMH fur preset then you could only buy that from HiveWire.
However, their content sellers are not obliged to make the move to Renderosity and some may perhaps go elsewhere. After the move HiveWire will get access into Poser 12’s new in-software Store purchase/download tabs, though, which may encourage many to go to Renderosity.
It’s said that the HiveWire Community Forums will not be combining with the Renderosity forums and will be staying online at community.hivewire3d.com. If you’re going over there to take a look, note that the per-software forums there are not immediately obvious to the visitor, and are found under “Using 3D Software”.
The Vue from Big Sur
Oh dear, like DAZ Studio, Vue is the latest software to have been totally bjorked by the new Mac OS. E-on’s Black Friday page states of the new subscription version…
“VUE and PlantFactory R5 will not run in MacOS 11 (Big Sur)”
I’m not sure if previous versions will still run, but that was not the case with DAZ Studio. Which suggests that older Vue versions may also be dead, and like DAZ Studio will require nine months to fix. Reports on DAZ also say the fixes will break many plugins and scripts? Again, one wonders if that will also be true for Vue?
What’s next to break on the Mac? Well, at least it won’t be Poser. Forum reports say that Poser 11 and 12 are apparently running fine on Big Sur, if you were wondering. The final Poser 12 Mac version may of course have extra stuff that changes that picture.
Black Friday: Atangeo Balancer, Blender Market, DAZ Store, Patreon
More goodies…
* Atangeo Balancer is still 50% off, at $52 for the non-commercial use version. It’s the most faithful, stable and also quick/easy poly-reducer in terms of edge/shape fidelity, and can be easily used with a DAZ Studio freebie script to take any dressed/posed Genesis-line figure to Poser in a such a way that the figure is quite wieldy when in the Poser viewport. Going DAZ-to-Poser in that way is no good for animation or photoreal, but it is quick and easy and it can be used with Poser’s unique Comic Book mode. Especially if you’re planning to use the resulting line-art as a guide to manual comics inking or for further Photoshop filtering.
* The Blender Market has started the sale. “Get an automatic 25% discount on thousands of products”, though these are a little sparse. No discounts among recent NPR items.
* The DAZ Store now has the Black Friday Sale live. My WishList is a wall of “50%” off, though almost nothing below $6 and nothing enticing below $10. I see useful plugins such as Look at My Hair at 40% off, and the Reality plugins for DAZ and Poser at 50% off each.
Yes, Reality still works fine on Windows, though I don’t know about the Mac — but these days the Mac is an increasingly risky platform if doing serious graphics work. DAZ iRay materials and Poser strand hair are both converted in 4.3.x, and this final version also did skin beautifully and also slightly tweaked DAZ bump map import. To run the Poser 11 Reality plugin you just need the free AVfix hotfix. For DAZ Studio scenes with instancing you’ll need a little “convert instances to props” script like Instances to Objects. For some basic training see the YouTube Playlist Reality 4 for Poser and DAZ and Digital Art Live’s “Mastering Reality” webinar bundle.
* GumRoad. They’re just a platform and I don’t think they can do a “store-wide sale”. It’s down to individuals to discount. And I don’t yet see discounts on useful things like Brusherator for Photoshop.
* If you’re finding my Black Friday posts useful and saving a ton of money, please consider dropping me $1 a month or more via my Patreon. Thanks! This will help support this blog and my other projects.
Christmas is on the (graphics) cards
Christmas and the January sales approach, and the fabled NVIDIA RTX 3070 super-beast graphics card is… nowhere to be seen. In fact it looks like almost no-one will be able to buy it at the stated $499 price, and until perhaps January 2022.
What of rival card-maker AMD? Well, since you were asking, they have a shiny new Radeon RX 6700 announcing any day now and shipping in January. It might even be as good as the RTX 3070 and yet available in volume. It has not been priced, but its big brother the 6800 = $649. My guess would be the Radeon RX 6700 will pitched around $499.
Yet if the aim is to use it to get a smooth real-time iRay viewport in DAZ Studio, then it’s as useless as the invisible RTX 3070. Because an AMD card just won’t run iRay.
Both cards are then pointless in different ways. In which case, what is the next step down to a “budget” RTX ray-tracing card? That’s said to be the NVIDIA RTX 2060 (not Super) at about £320-£360 inc. tax in the UK. This is apparently just enough to get a real-time WYSIWYG viewport, even with hair and large complex scenes.
Will an NVIDIA RTX 2060 also run Poser? Yes… both NVIDIA RTX and the equivalent AMD RX cards are supported in Poser 11.3 and 12, so an NVIDIA RTX card would be a safe bet, if you can actually find one at the £320-£360 price-point in January. Or better still in the sales at £299.
Possibly a big AMD release would also dip prices on the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, currently at around £280-£340 and more or less the price equivalent of the NVIDIA RTX 2060. The problem there for Poser appears to be that hardware-accelerated rendering requires CUDA cores, and Poser 12 needs RTX. Thus for Poser it really has to be NVIDIA.
But assuming you were a DAZ Studio user and you wanted to go to AMD at either price, and give up iRay… what are the options?
1. Use the Reality plugin. It still runs fine in both DAZ Studio and Poser, and its Lux renderer is just as good as Octane if not as fast. It’s graphics-card agnostic and indeed even runs nicely on CPUs alone. It’s still available for $50, as Reality 4.3 for DAZ Studio. Again, it doesn’t give you a real-time viewport. But, once you have it running it will run as long as Windows runs and never expire — or ask you for a monthly payment.
(While you can apparently now run Reality’s rival Octane on an AMD Mac, you can’t yet run it on AMD Windows).
2. Use the Scene Optimizer, switch the viewport to Interactive iRay and then throw CPU cores at it. It’s a myth that iRay can only run on an NVIDIA graphics card. I can run a real-time viewport in DAZ on Xeon CPUs alone, albeit for a relatively simple scene with no hair or water. Imagine what it might do with a Ryzen 9 5900X CPU.
3. Switch to Poser 11, albeit at the cost of giving up on DAZ’s G3-G8 figures (except as OBJs or billboard renders) and any dream of a real-time WYSIWYG viewport. Even if you don’t care for Blender’s Cycles renderer, which in Poser is called SuperFly, there’s always the Reality 4.3 Poser edition which should run with AMD. Or, there is if you grab the Poser 11 Pro on sale for $80 at NeoWin Deals, and Reality 4.3 for Poser for $50. Also SnarlyGribbly’s free AVfix, a tiny tweaker needed to run Reality in Poser 11.x.
4. Use DAZ Studio and Poser mostly as figure/scene exporters to Blender, and its real-time Eevee engine. But expect to spend hours either fiddling around with texture fixes or learning to do postwork on your pictures. And spend a decade of frustratingly learning Blender, and a day a week just researching and keeping up with Blender-world. It’s a lot of hassle just to get a real-time WYSIWYG viewport. But if you do go that route then the new AMD 6000 series will be what you want, for Blender 2.91. Most likely the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700. Such a 6000 series card will also run AMD’s Prorender 3 plugin for Blender.
So all-in-all, even if AMD ship millions of $299 and $499 mega-cards in January, the all-round best just-about-affordable budget card on Windows seems to be the NVIDIA RTX 2060 at about £320-£360 in the UK, sometimes seen as low as £290. And if you can afford another £200, its big brother the NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super at around £500. Or you could wait for two years and save up that price for the RTX 3070 — when it eventually ships. By that time Poser 12 support for the RTX 3070 and RTX 3090s should be quite firm (it’s a bit shaky at present, as Renderosity have not been able to get a RTX 30 series test-card) (Update: now supported).
One slight drawback of an NVIDIA RTX 20 series card for Poser users is that you then need the Poser 11.3 patch installed to support the card. But that means you lose DSON import, as the same 11.3 patch bjorked the DSON importer, and it’s not coming back in Poser 12. (Update: I’m told that DSON is now supported on all Poser 11.x version, but never will be on Poser 12).
Finally keep in mind the physical size of the card (RTX is a different size than a GTX) and if it will even fit in your PC, and if you have the right connector slots and plugs. Also check if your PC’s Power Supply Unit can run the new card as well as everything else it needs to.
Update: in early December NVIDIA launched the “RTX 3060 Ti, a $399 8GB card that outperforms the old RTX 2080 Super”. But again, it’s just price-hype like it was for the RTX 3070, and no-one can buy them except at three times the list price (£700-£850 in the UK) from a few nearly-sold-out stockists.
Update: September 2021. AMD have apparently “dropped the ball” on OpenCL development and thus the only card choice now for Poser 11 or 12 is NVIDIA with RTX and at least 8Gb of memory, ideally a new 30 series card. The same would also run DAZ iRay well, and the coming AI image makers.
Black Friday: Renderosity Store / AKVIS / Tranmutr / CG Trader Store / ArtStation Store
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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The Black Friday Store sales are opening up, plus more software.
* AKVIS has announced quite a nice offer, up to 50% off everything including their latest improved/speeded-up Decorator and Charcoal (together, $61 with 40% off). They have a Sketch too, but I don’t rate it highly in the scale of such things. The discounts are coupon based, see the page for details. Sadly their payment system is nation-aware and they thus charge an extra 20% sales tax in the UK, which rather wipes out most of the discount!
* 50% off the entire Renderosity Store, except software and out-of-contact vendors. Many will want the La Femme 2.0 Pro edition (the standard ships free with Poser, but Pro adds naughty bits and more) and perhaps also her La Femme CrossDresser License for the free CrossDresser clothing conversion software to expand her wardrobe. Some older Poser scripts are on sale, such as f68 Poser Crowd Generator (scatter and auto-pose figures) and f68 Easy Environment (a non-people scatter tool), but who can say if they’ll be updated for Poser 12? Note there’s also a new Scatter tool at HiveWire, far more likely to go to Poser 12, though it’s $20 and there’s as yet no sale there. There are HiveWire items on sale at Renderosity though, such as the new Tiger and the Egyptian Cat. DAZ and Poser users fond of the old Genesis 1 may be interested in the Renderosity Store’s Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis, which lets the original Genesis wear G8 stuff. Now I have this and the original Poke-away! for Genesis to remove poke-through, I can have “One Genesis to Rule Them All”: a DAZ Studio Genesis figure can wear any outfit from A3/V3 to G8 and everything in between.
* SketchUp plugin Transmutr is on a 30% discount at 55 euros. It imports common formats such as OBJ into SketchUp, poly-reduces and adds other fixes.
* DxO (Nik) have discounts but, just as I was starting to peruse these, a giant screen-blocker appeared and blocked my view. First rule of marketing, guys: Don’t. Block. The. “Buy”. Buttons.
* Smith Micro still lives. Had an email offer on Moho, now effectively defunct but it seems still available.
* The CGTrader store has a five-day sale on now. Sadly the Vue creator Raffy Raffy recently moved from the store to ArtStation, wiping out my CG Trader Wishlist. There are still some nice models down at the $2.50 mark, and you may find a few that can’t be had elsewhere. Of special interest may be the Poser stuff, DAZ stuff (the large numbers of Age of Empires-style ancient warrior and soldier outfits are not discounted), and some Vue content. Many of the detailed science-fiction scenes are expensive, but not all. One can also find quirky things like this Eastern European / Soviet flying van for $10…
* The ArtStation Marketplace sale is also on. There’s a whole lot of fluff in the store, but a key attraction is the Raffy Raffy store with expert Vue and Blender scenes at affordable prices. Raffy knows what he’s doing and the scenes are relatively lightweight despite their size.
There are also a couple of preset packs there, made back when Zbrush introduced NPR, such as BPR Sketch/Cartoon Shaders for ZBrush 2019 and BPR Filters + 3D Skull. If you pick these up you may want a Realtime Viewport Anti-Aliasing script, though be warned that getting a big anti-aliased render from ZBrush is an utter pain-in-the-neck, and even then is only 72dpi — so far as I can recall the recent updates have not solved this show-stopping problem with trying to use Zbrush’s NPR/BPR for comics and illustrated books.
If you’re signing up with the ArtStation Marketplace for the first time, watch out for this nasty little privacy-invader which is not checked by default…
* And finally, advance news that the Blender Market is set to start its sale tomorrow.
Poser 12: SuperFly flies
Poser 12 Early Access has had another incremental update, on the way to the full release. The main change is that the ability to use multiple graphics-cards has been opened up, and for Queue rendering too…
* Poser’s SuperFly render settings… “now allow user to select multiple GPUs for hardware render”.
* The Poser SuperFly user can now use the GPU(s) for… “local and remote Queue Rendering”.
For those who don’t know, Superfly is the Poser version of Blender’s Cycles, and more or less the equivalent of iRay in DAZ Studio.