Fave content artist 1971s currently has a big sale at Renderosity, with around 60% to 70% discount.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
i9 release-dates
CPU cores continue to balloon, probably faster than expected due to the renewed level of market competition. Which can only be good news for those for whom “more CPUs” = “faster renders”. I had thought that 8-core would be the next-step for most people, in the next 18 months. But Intel’s i9…
“12-core products will appear as of August 28th. 14-to-18-core kit will go on sale as of September 25th.”
… reports The Register.
Quite a step up from a 4-core PC. Be wary of buying overclocked i9s on snazzy gaming PCs, though, as I read that Vue doesn’t like overclocked CPUs. Possibly other CPU-bound software will encounter the same problems. Best to check that, then, before you splash your $3,000 on a new PC.
New release: Keyshot 7
Keyshot 7 has been released.
* No price-drop, but… “Education licenses of KeyShot 7 will now have all features of KeyShot Pro.”
* New modules titled KeyShot Studios and KeyShot Configurator — enabling easy setup and output of multi-option models (both materials and model states), for your client to then choose their options on a simple touch-screen. They touch the green paint tab on the screen, the 3D car turns green. You get to choose the “interface layout options” for the touch-screen. (Sounds interesting, making Keyshot a sort of simple multimedia authoring tool for touchscreen kiosks).
* VR Headset support, plus Walkthrough Mode for your scenes, with collision detection. (Again, sounds fascinating).
* Yet “more materials and texture types”, including new cloudy plastics and “10 scientifically accurate metal presets”.
* A boost to the Toon Material. “More control over contours and the ability to change shadow color and texture or change the visibility of shadows produced by light materials.” (No mention of adaptive line-inking weights, though, for a more hand-drawn look such as SketchUp can offer).
* Users can now “apply multiple [lighting] environments to a scene” in real-time.
* Can “quickly and easily toggle occlusion ground shadows on or off” and “complete control over the ground material reflection contrast”.
* Customisable ‘tear-off’ UI. “Customize tab appearance and location or dock, undock and stack windows any way you like.” Hide bits you don’t use.
* Custom Hotkeys.
* 4k monitor support.
* They’re “ending support of Windows 32-bit systems and installations” with Keyshot 7. It’s to be 64-bit only.
Poser and DAZ new content survey: July 2017
We’re into August now, so it’s time for a selected survey of what was newly released for Poser / DAZ Studio content in July 2017. Here’s what caught my eye…
Science-fiction:
Insectoid for Michael 4 for Poser. Definitely one for a 1950s B-movie scene or re-creating a cheesy 1980s Doctor Who episode. Your Insectoid could possibly be leading an army of the new The Flies.
Futuristic Glass Elevator and Building Kit from first-time content maker Chanteur-de-Vent. A big scene with props, and MATs for both iRay and 3Delight. I hope we’ll see more sci-fi from her.
A Salvador Dali-style Peeled Orange Skin Shader for Genesis 8 Female. I’m guessing you could also give this a hologram look, for a “teleporter” effect, with the help of the new holgram shaders for iRay?
Alien Place for DAZ Studio. Too expensive for impulse sales (if it had been an introductory $7.95 I’d have purchased it immediately), but it’s obviously very carefully done, and if the base can be stripped back then it could also be re-worked as a seaside rock-pool (aka tide-pool).
H&C Raincoat Outfit for Genesis 3 Male might be suitable for a rain-slicked Blade Runner-type scene, or a sort of Matrix-like picture.
Blade Runners for Genesis 3 Female is another clothing set that works for science-fiction.
Fantasy:
Djinn for Genesis 3 Female, for DAZ Studio.
Coflek-Gnorg’s Choker Necklaces: Snakes for V4, for Poser.
A nice chunky slightly-toonish Fairytale portal from 1971s, for Poser.
I don’t need yet another dragon slumbering in my runtime, but the new Crystal Dragon’s Crystal Dragon Lair seems a useful base for something more elaborate. Some Wild Arums might make the floor look less barren, if re-coloured in suitable colours to match the crystals. A few luminous mushrooms too.
Storybook:
Lepus M4 V4 K4, for Poser. Plus horns. You can probably find and fit your own M4 eye-patches and side-whiskers, to make piratical / steampunk bunnies.
Wow, Genesis 8 really is flexible! V8F can turn into a Mrs Tiggywinkle style Ms Hedgehog, a cute hedgehog. She also has a car to drive to the shops in.
The Poser Meowl is now also available for Daz Studio.
EQ Bambino for Poser 11 and EQ Dwarf for Poser 11. Both freebies with poses and commercial use, which is very generous of Elleque given that these are store-quality characters. EQ Dwarf is somewhat similar to the original Peter Rabbit, but nowhere near close enough (I’ve looked) to cause copyright problems — so long as you’re not calling your rabbit character “Peter Rabbit”. He toons up very nicely in Poser 11’s comic book mode…
Coflek-Gnorg accidentally inhaled some sparkly pixie-dust and made a herd of Fluffy Unicorns for Poser. He’s fine again now.
Historical:
Cybertenko’s Desert Rats, complete Second World War uniforms and hats for the British Army 7th Armoured Division. And Cybertenko also has a Sten Gun Mk II. The hat would also give you a key part of a Moebius-style ‘Major Grubert’ character.
Minoan Era for Genesis 3 Female and Genesis 8 Female. With an unusual sort-of super-baggy trouser-skirt, that could be re-worked in lustrous fabric for science-fiction scenes.
Lovable Nerds Bundle plus Nerdy Girl Outfit textures.
i13 Warehouse Uniform for Genesis 3 Female.
Raine Bundle, late 1950s Hollie Golightly-style accessories for Genesis 3 Female.
Tongues:
Long Chain Rigging Tutorial. Figure rigging too complex? Start to learn the basics of rigging in DAZ Studio with something easier, such as a whip, tail, tentacle, or even a multi-pronged monster-tongue.
The Easy Tongue for Genesis 8 Female has got it licked!
Animals:
Salmon for Poser, lightweight so you can have lots in your scene, and it comes with seven morphs. I don’t remember seeing salmon for Poser before now.
3D Underwater Fauna: African Cichlids for Poser and DAZ Studio (iRay MATs). Light on system resources, so you can have big schools of them swimming through your scene. Also quite a variety of sub-species in the pack.
Giant Monster Spider HD for DAZ Studio. Peek at your peril!
Scenes:
Stonemason’s The Streets Of Venice and Gondola boat, and The Streets of Morocco. I’ve lost track of what’s in Stonemason’s “Streets of …” series, but I think these are new and not just iRay re-releases?
AJ Forgotten Place for Poser. Really simple, but very nicely proportioned and textured, and it seems like one of those highly adaptable scenes that someone might come back to again and again. Lots of space on the outside too, to show multiple monsters peering in at Halloween and suchlike.
You’ll find a few SketchUp-made 17th century English mansions for free, but not likely one that’s in ruins. Quality content maker London224 fills the gap there, with MS17 Moreton Corbet Ruin. Just surround it with a mob of swivel-eyed rustic fanatics waving pitchforks and burning torches, and add leaping flames. Likely to be of interest to Vue users, too.
Stained Glass iRay Shaders. Useful if you have some 1920s and 30s scenes in your runtime.
i13 Warehouse and Office and matching Poses for Genesis 3.
A sub-tropical Golf Course plus poses, caddy-bags and golf-carts. Also, older, a quality set of Golf Clubs. All for DAZ Studio.
Small Abandoned Church for Vue. In a somewhat Scandinavian style, with a detailed worn/abandoned interior.
Poseable Railway Bundle with 50 rail presets, for Vue.
That’s it, more picks next month!
A blocked Vue
A Vue user has to be so careful when logging into Vue, as it’s so easy to get totally locked out of both the E-on site and Cornucopia. It’s way to easy to reflexively hit the button below the logon form, without realising it’s actually the “Forgot Password?” button. Clicking this instantly blanks your password for both the E-on site and Cornucopia. There’s no “are you sure?” message… just instant death for your log-on password. Very annoying. Basic usability principles suggest the “Sign in” and “Forgot password?” buttons should be swopped over on the page, and be different sizes and colours.
Poser 11 SR7 patch released
The SR7 patch is now available for Poser 11 (11.0.7.33999). Load your Smith Micro Download manager to see it.
210Mb of update. I downloaded it quickly, and it installs and loads fine.
Some highlights of SR7:
* Sketch Render: Improved memory handling and stability when exporting sequences [for animations, presumably].
* SuperFly: Improved 3D motion-blur performance.
* SuperFly: Cycles performance improvements.
* FireFly: Enabled toon outline rendering (non-Pro only) [did Poser Standard not have that feature, then?].
* Addressed stability issues associated with rendering in background. [I’ve never noticed any problems, but it’s welcome]
* Improved import for some FBX files [Unicode types, apparently].
* GoZ: Several bug fixes for integration with ZBrush.
* PoserFusion for Maya now supports Maya 2017. [for Pro users who want to render Poser scenes in Maya]
* PoserFusion for Lightwave now supports the Lightwave 2016 Beta. [for Pro users who want to render Poser scenes in Lightwave]
* Content Library indexing now filters out ._ Mac fluff like ._abc.ppz
Those are the bits I noticed on a long list, and the full Changelog is here. As the “Extracting files…” flashed past I also noticed a few updates were being installed for Pauline and Roxie character/clothing files.
Have Vue render on three of four cores
How to have Vue only render on three cores of a 4-core CPU, so that you can also do other work on your home PC:
1. Load Vue.
2. In the Windows Start Menu | type Task | launch Task Manager.
3. Right-click on Vue | Go to Details | Find Vue in the list of active software | right-click and choose Set Affinity.
4. Un-tick one of the four CPU cores | OK | Exit.
This should also work on any other CPU-hogging software. Vue renders slower, but now you can surf the Web, have a music-player running, open a PDF and suchlike.
New sidebar category
I’ve added a new category on this blog’s sidebar Directory, for render farms. I’d be interested in adding a link there for a sturdy/affordable online render farm for DAZ Studio + iRay users, if anyone can suggest one.
Two more Poser/Vue render farms
I’ve been taking a look at some online render farms, other than the market leader Pixelplow which I looked at yesterday. I looked at about twenty. Some have gone bust, some are obviously Germans-only or Chinese-only judging by their lack of English translation. Apart from Pixelplow, the only two I think I’d really want to consider are:
* Renderspell may interest Poser + Reality users. It’s been in 2.0 beta from Latvia (central Europe) since 2015, and offers Poser Pro 11 render support. But not with SuperFly, only with “LUX”, which presumably means Poser + the Reality plugin. Credit cards only, PayPal “coming shortly”, and their pricing information is thoroughly confusing about if it’s recurring monthly payment or a pay-as-you go with a small deposit. Charges “your VAT rate” in Europe, so presumably 20% extra sales tax for UK customers such as myself. But if you’re a Poser 11 Pro + Reality user it might be worth trying, as they seem to be the only one offering it.
* The UK-based GarageFarm.NET has Vue support with Vue xStream 2016. They offer Vue integration in the Vue UI, via their own plugin…
Our Vue plugin is light on memory, and allows you to send scenes to our farm by simply running its script from the Vue interface.
So that’s interesting. They specify “layered multipass for .psd” Photoshop renders, too. Their prices are good too, but that’s defrayed by their wanting a $50 deposit (Pixelplow only wants $10), and being UK-based they have to add 20% sales tax for UK customers such as myself. I did though find a $50-free ‘starter’ coupon-code which might be worth trying: RNTRNDR1
So far as I can tell it’s pay-as-you-go. According to their calculator what, for me, is a 10 hour render would be done by them in 7 minutes for $1. Albeit with 20% sales tax added for the taxman. Their Forum has a handy setup guide for Vue scene files. Definitely one for Vue 2016 users to test against Pixelplow, then.
I see they’ve also just had a $500k investment, so they’re on the up. They also offer Terragen and Cinema 4D. There’s a handy guide to what their price categories mean in terms of time-scale…
Pixelplow render-farm now supports Vue 2016 R2
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Posted in Companion software, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry, Vue
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According to their 20th June 2017 News posting, the popular online render-farm Pixelplow now supports scene files from Vue xStream 2016 R2, which can of course also render files created by the lesser versions of Vue 2016…
Their Vue job upload guidelines are here. By my calculations, it should cost a little under $1 to do a single-frame final scene render that would take 8-10 hours overnight on a modern home PC (Vue is CPU dependent, seeing no benefit from a graphics card on final renders).
Pixelplow also have a polished new Agent software, for uploading and job management…
“The new agent gets rid of the sometimes-confusing agent menu, and instead centralizes all tasks in a tabbed window.”
Those with slow broadband upload speeds might need to factor in an hour to upload the final scene file, which could easily weigh in at from 150Mb to 600Mb or even more. So far as I can tell the new Agent software does not include a bandwidth limiter feature. In which case slow broadband users would need to use NetLimiter 4 ($’s) to cap the Agent’s upload speed, and thus enable you to surf the Web while also uploading. (At summer 2017 there’s no genuine Windows freeware that can throttle uploads, I’ve looked).
The tight integration of Poser 11 with Vue 2016 basically means that Poser has pay-as-you-fo render-farm support from Pixelplow. Pixelplow only supports Vue on a single CPU for still renders, though. I assume that means a fast quad-core CPU, giving four-core rendering.
Pixelplow is the only service I can find that’s pay-as-you-go, and with just a $10 deposit down, and affordable per-render prices too. If you do 30 big scene renders a year, at $3 each (two small tests and a big 4000px final) would give you change from $100 a year. Admittedly, that cost might be higher if you wanted 300dpi and 6000px and most of the quality settings at Max. on all your final renders. In which case you might also have to wait a while for such renders to finish, even with a professional render farm pounding away at them.
Update: two other render farms considered.
Blender-heads may also be interested that their 29th June News posting states…
“… we hope to start working through any issues that exist with our GPU farm by releasing support for Blender Cycles GPU rendering. It’s available now to all customers, if you want to take it for a spin.”
The render-beast has Ryzen
The technical AMD Ryzen 3 review has just landed at the venerable PC Gamer magazine…
“The best thing about Ryzen isn’t just that it’s competitive, but it’s forcing Intel to step up its game after resting on its laurels for much of the past decade. You can make a strong case for the Pentium G4560 with Hyper-Threading, 10-core i9-7900X with up to 18-core coming in October, an unlocked Core i3 part, and the 6-core Coffee Lake planned for Intel’s mainstream LGA1151 platform in early 2018 all being a response to Ryzen’s performance and value.”
That’s good news for those of use who need to ride on the coat-tails of the CPU upgrades, bagging them years down the line when they’ve come down in price. My $600 24-core render-beast PC is on pre-order for the year 2020. 🙂
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – the Locus review
The venerable science fiction magazine Locus sent Gary Westfahl to review the new Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and he was enchanted by it, especially the amazing visuals. Although Westfahl mentions that many of the establishment press reviews have been sniffy — especially disliking some corny comic-book dialogue, a lack of politically-correct preaching, some choppy bits of editing, and apparently there’s also a dire cameo from some U.S. singer called Rihanna (never heard of her…) which is said to bring the whole movie to a grinding halt half-way through. But Westfahl’s long review likes the movie as…
“an enjoyable space adventure, deploying consistently dazzling visuals in support of an involving story that never becomes entirely predictable. … a visual feast”
And he notes favorably…
“… an apparently sincere effort to make his story seem scientifically plausible.” [and that] “the story does not devolve into a trite fable about virtuous nature corrupted by sinister science.”
On Rihanna = Jar Jar Binks…
[After interrupting what sounds like a good movie, Rihanna] “is written out of the story abruptly and unpersuasively, as if Besson recognized her character was an intrusive embarrassment that needed to be excised as quickly as possible.”
So it sounds like she is just there for marketing purposes, a ‘product-placement’ meant to help sell the apparently rather humdrum soundtrack. What a pity. Anyway, apart from that it all sounds like a very fun and stylishly visualised movie, and hopefully we’ll get the ‘Rihanna-free fan-edit’ in due course, in the same way that you can get Star Wars with almost all of Jar-Jar Binks edited away (a vast improvement).
Looking at the other reviews they seem broadly positive when they come from sci-fi people (rather than jaded cynical press journalists, most of whom appear to resent sci-fi and ‘comic book movies’). For instance the Geeks.com review called Valerian…
“a genuinely visionary work of art … a pure-energy delight … There are more ideas in a single chase sequence in this movie than in the entirety of most other films I’ve seen this Summer.”
So it sound like it’s one of those “you either love, or you hate it, depending on your personality type” movies. It’s definitely on my “must see at the cinema” list, while its run lasts. Sadly it seems we’re unlikely to get a sequel, as the industry trade magazine Deadline reports that the early negative reviews killed the movie’s opening at the U.S. box-office. So far as I can tell it opens outside London in the UK on 4th August 2017.
Competition: Observatory Houses
As south Italian hill-villages depopulate rapidly, there’s a need to create new types of attractions to bring in tourists and possibly new caretaker residents. The “Observatory Houses” competition seeks young… “designers will have to create a story composed by stars, silences and landscapes. This story will have to include architectural elements designed to create a place beyond compare” for observation of the stars at the hill-village of Roccascalegna. Deadline: 27th July 2017.
Nice idea, but as you can see there’s a tight deadline and also a hefty entry fee. But note that they have a free public 3D model, albeit only in the difficult .DWG CAD format and not quite the same as they one they’re showing in the promo…
However I’ve snagged it before the competition closes and made a basic .OBJ conversion, import-tested in Vue. Three material zones, soil, buildings and roofs, which all take Vue materials nicely.
Poser 11 SR7 underway
Released: iClone 7
I see that the real-time 3D software iClone 7 has shipped. On an upgrade from iClone 5.5 Pro the store is currently offering me a price of $219, inc. the vital 3DXchange 7 Pro.
7.0 is running on DirectX 11 and requires a “Graphics Card: NVidia Geforce GTX 600 Series/ AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series or higher” compatible with Pixel Shader 3.
There’s a fixed Toon Effect, apparently. Looks like the 7.0 cel shading is now basically ‘what you see is what you get’, whereas before in 6.0 it got a bit washed out on export and lost definition on the inking outlines…
Kind of glad I didn’t spend on a 6.0 upgrade, if that feature was broken and has only just been fixed with 7.0. That’s beside the horrible new UI and the sluggishness that arrived with iClone 6.
Here are the nicely-formatted specs on what’s new in 7.0…
