In the last month the PD Howler software (aka Dogwaffle) has been accompanied by ten new YouTube videos showing the new 3D capabilities in the latest version. The latest one is on working with DAZ Studio exports.
Category Archives: 3D Utilities
Release: Curvy 3D 5.0
Posted on
by
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
The Windows desktop sculpting software Aartform Curvy 3D 5.0 final is now available, having been in beta since November 2020. Cost is $99 (around £92 in the UK), and there are further discounts available if you purchased an earlier version (check your email).
An important new feature in 5.0 is adaptive subdivision on the meshes. There’s no video trailer yet for 5.0, but the YouTube channel will likely have one soon.
Release: Dust3D 1.0 rc7
Posted on
by
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
The open source Dust3D is alive again, after a long hiatus during the Covid years. The 1.0.0 release candidate 7 is now available. Dust3D is a…
“cross-platform 3D modeling software that makes it easy to create low poly 3D models for videogames, 3D printing, and more.”
Relatively easy, free, and under a full MIT open licence. Training Playlist on YouTube.
Release: GMic v3.2.1
Posted on
by
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
A new release for GMic, aka G’Mic as GMic v3.2.1. Changelog. Highlights I noted are…
1) A new 3D handling feature, though possibly command-line only?
Command | extract_textures3d
“This will help you extracting textures from 3D objects directly as 2D images, that you can save or process and remap on the object.”
Probably not a replacement for dedicated tools used to get a texture atlas and/or seam templates, but it may be of interest to some.
In Poser Pro, a FBX or Collada export can also get you a single texture map (a ‘texture atlas’), output alongside the FBX output. The problem with a ‘texture atlas’ is that it then prevents drag-and-drop re-texturing of parts. It’s all or nothing. DAZ Studio also has a ‘texture atlas’ output command somewhere or other, with the location depending on which UI layout you use.
2) Better voxelisation of 3D…
“Improved the triangle voxelization algorithm even more. G’MIC is now really a quite nice tool to voxelize 3D meshes!”
Could be useful if you want to have your OBJ export from DAZ/Poser look like a hologram and, once it’s back on Poser or DAZ, put on transparency and glow? But don’t expect to animate afterwards.
3) Basic subdivision of 3D object meshes. Again, you can do this natively in Poser and DAZ.
4) A new filter, to be found in ‘Testing’…
Garagecoder | Upscale [Recursive2x]
Appears to be a sort of ‘intelligent sharpening’ that preserves details better on low-res images? Again, you’d probably do this with AI Gigapixel or online with Base Ten or SWIN, though perhaps this (I’m guessing) is optimised for low-res images?
As always, beware of updating. Because if someone changed the name of their filter, then that breaks your custom preset. For instance, last summer GMic’s long-standing Artistic | Comic Book filter had its functionality updated and the name changed to Comicbook. All my custom presets based on this filter were gone in a flash, and some of the filter’s needed switches and sliders had also been removed. Filter makers really need to be told: “If you’re going to tinker to that extent, then keep the old filter the same and call your new one Comicbook_2″.
The MiDaS touch
Posted on
by
Posted in 3D Utilities, Automation, Companion software, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in 3D Utilities, Automation, Companion software, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
MiDaS uses trained AI to take a normal 2D image and output a 3D depth-map. In Poser-speak it’s like Poser’s ‘auxiliary Z-depth’ pass or render.
Free and public, no sign-up needed. Just drag-and-drop your image. It can probably also be installed locally, though I haven’t looked at the requirements for that.
Once you have it you can use the usual Photoshop layer inversion/blending-mode tricks to create ‘depth-fog’ in the scene, where there was none before.
A standalone Intel OIDN de-noiser with GUI… Merry Christmas!
I dug up a free Windows GUI version of Intel’s CPU Denoiser, aka the open-source OIDN. This is standalone AI-powered desktop software made by a guy in Japan, and which no-one but some Lightwave guys seem to have ever heard about.
You feed it your partially-completed .PNG render, which has noisy ‘fireflies’ you want to clear. It works back to Windows 7, on SSE4.1 CPUs or better, and with most 64-bit OS’s.
So… no need to worry if Santa didn’t bring you an expensive $800 NVIDIA graphics card, or worry about wrangling with many dependencies on other bits of software such as ImageMagick.
It just works, and beautifully. Merry Christmas!
USE:
1. Download and unzip OIDN-gui from GitHub.
2. Run OIDN.exe and the simple graphical user-interface will appear.
Here you load the same target .PNG render into all three slots, “Beauty”, “Albedo” and “Normal”. Then “Run Denoiser”.
DAZ iRay can do the regular render (here called “Beauty”). But if you did also have additional auxiliary/buffer/canvas renders, then your “Normal” would help preserve subtle bump-mapping, while the “Albedo” would do the same for fine textures. And apparently these two work in tandem, so both would be needed.
But you may have already stripped most bumps with the DAZ Scene Optimiser, and have no complex fine-patterned clothes in the scene. If so, then you’re smiling.
There is however another way to add detail back into a denoised render. In Photoshop you drop the output over the original, as a new layer. Then you ‘paint the detail back in’, by running a soft-edged small Eraser brush over the bits where you need most details (eyes, eyelashes etc). This reveals the detail beneath… and hopefully doesn’t reveal any pesky fireflies.
In tests an old 32-thread Intel workstation took about 2 seconds on a single 1920px render, and gave great results even without having the proper “Albedo” and “Normal” auxiliary/buffer/canvas renders available. The denoised image is saved with the same file extension and type, in the same folder, but the filename will have ‘-denoised’ added.
It seems you can batch process a series of animation frames with this (untested by me). But here you should know that OIDN is not “temporally stable”. Which in plain English means that when the animation is run ‘you may see some slight waver or detail-popping’ across strongly denoised areas.
That’s it. There is a later version by the same maker, re-written for QT. But that has no regular Windows .EXE file, so far as I can see.
There’s another Windows GUI option here, but it’s drag-and-drop with no batch. The above software does batch.
Note: Not needed in Poser 12 and also the latest E-on Vue, as in both cases Intel’s OIDN is built-in. The above advice is mostly for DAZ and Poser 11 users.
Release: Krakatoa
Amazon has open-sourced its Krakatoa VFX particle renderer and the associated shader system. Appears to be Maya focused, so I guess they were/are using this for the Amazon TV VFX. The VFX world has many particle-generators / particle-renderers by now, but this one is said to be especially “fast”. That’s the only claim made for it, at least on the GitHub. Still, if you were looking to plug a fast particle system into Poser 13, I see lots of .PY scripts in the Krakatoa GitHub and it might be something to consider.
Scene shadow blurring scripts for Poser
One-click to improve your scene render in Poser! Poser Python scripts to instantly switch your scene lights to use softer ray-traced shadows, or to switch back again to the default Depth-map shadows. Working in Poser 11 and 12. In just one click, they save you having to fiddle around with each of the lights to turn on softer shadows across a scene.
Note that you can also soften shadow intensity manually, with the dial found on Light / Parameters / Shadow.
In both scripts the shadows are softened from the defaults (defaults = 0.0 for Ray-traced, 2.0 for Depth-map). Here the softening is increased to 6, but you may want to go to 12 or so. The free PASS Poser watercolor shaders on ArtStation Marketplace work best with even higher shadow blurring.
Change the script’s “(6)” to the shadows softness setting you want. If you want a full reset script, just set the “(6)” on the second script to the default (2) setting.
Set Ray-traced Shadows:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 |
# SWITCH TO SOFT RAY-TRACED SHADOWS FOR YOUR POSER SCENE # A small script to have all lights in a Poser scene move from using Depth Map Shadows # over to Ray-traced Shadows (with SOFT shadows set at 6.0). All scene lights are # assumed to be on and casting a shadow of some sort. Script is tested and working in # Poser 11 and Poser 12. # # Also boost sample size when rendering, for less grainy shadows. # You can also soften shadow _intensity_ with the dial on Light / Parameters / Shadow. import poser # Tell Poser we expect a scene to be loaded. scene = poser.Scene() # Get a list of lights in the Poser scene. lights = scene.Lights() #Run the script on all lights in the scene. for light in lights: # For some reason this old line needs to be above SetRayTraceShadows - or the switch over won't work. light.ParameterByCode(poser.kParmCodeDEPTHMAPSTRENGTH).SetValue(1.0) # Ok, now we can set the Light to cast Ray-traced shadows. light.SetRayTraceShadows(1) # Now we can set the amount of softness for the Ray-traced Light's shadows. # Note that here we do not use SetShadowBlurRadius() but rather SetShadowRaytraceSoftness() light.SetShadowRaytraceSoftness(6) scene.DrawAll() |
Set Depth-map Shadows:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 |
# SWITCH TO SOFT DEPTH-MAP SHADOWS FOR YOUR POSER SCENE # A small script to have all lights in a Poser scene move from using Ray-traced Shadows # to using Depth Map Shadows (with shadow softness at 6.0, from normal 2.0). All scene lights # are assumed to be on and casting a shadow of some sort. Script is tested and working in # Poser 11 and Poser 12. Also boost sample size when rendering, for less grainy shadows. # # Also boost sample size when rendering, for less grainy shadows. # You can also soften shadow _intensity_ with the dial on Light / Parameters / Shadow. import poser # Tell Poser we expect a scene to be loaded. scene = poser.Scene() # Get a list of lights in the Poser scene. lights = scene.Lights() #Run the script on all lights in the scene. for light in lights: # For some reason this old line needs to be above SetRayTraceShadows - or the switch over won't work. light.ParameterByCode(poser.kParmCodeDEPTHMAPSTRENGTH).SetValue(1.0) # Ok, now we can turn off Ray-traced shadows, if they are on. light.SetRayTraceShadows(0) # Now we can set the amount of softness for the depth-map shadows. # Note that here we use SetShadowBlurRadius() rather than the ray-traced SetShadowRaytraceSoftness() light.SetShadowBlurRadius(6) scene.DrawAll() |
Especially useful for soft indoor “old masters” type portraits, not so useful for hard-edged sun-baked beach scenes.
BSDF Painter
Posted on
by
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Poser 12, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Freebies, Poser 12, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
A free Blender add-on for layering and painting BSDF materials.
Poser 12 uses Principled BSDF now, so presumably it wouldn’t be too difficult for this Blender add-on to have an “Output straight to a Poser material file” button? I believe the setups are identical to those in Blender, except for being ‘mirror-backwards’ in their direction of node-flow.
Texture Paint Helper for Poser
I was prompted to take a quick look at Texture Paint Helper 1.3 aka texturepainterhelper. Long marked as “Unavailable” at Renderosity. No videos though there is a helpful short user-guide, and the software itself has a step-by-step workflow built in.
If you want to see if you have it archived somewhere, the DAZ Studio installer was DS3_TexturePaintHelperLoader_1.0.0.0_Win64.exe (possibly DAZ 3 only) and it was ps_ap204b_TexPaintHelper.exe for Poser. Windows only. I find I have a copy of the latter installer. Re-installs and runs fine for me. Works with any Poser figure, is not restricted to a base V4 or just DAZ figures.
It doesn’t appear to be a re-texturer / re-painter as such, but an overlay-builder (think ‘tattoos’, ‘body-paint’) which lets you use regular Photoshop to do the painting of the overlay. There may be better tools now. I guess 3D Coat, and I recall many used Blacksmith3D at one time, and a simple node setup in the Material Room can also work with any Poser version, and don’t overlook that Poser 11 had new Material Room features in that regard. But it’s nice to know that ye olde standalone desktop software dedicated to working with a Poser runtime can still run. It only requires the ../content folder and not access to Poser, so does not require a specific Poser version due to scripting etc. It knows about Poser runtime structures and presents these quickly and well.
Pitterbill in Texture Paint Helper, 2022. A fine use of structured workflow with incorporated buttons for the user.
No drag-and-drop from its loader library, over to the Poser stage. Lack of drag-drop or any keyword-search means it can’t be re-purposed for use as an alternative Library. Still, if someone can access the source code today, there seems no reason those features could not be added.
Release: Material Maker 1.0
RodZilla’s Material Maker 1.0 is now available. It’s standalone desktop software for making PBR materials and more, and is a simpler-to-use open-source alternative to Adobe Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter. Version 1.0 (July 2022) adds 13 new nodes (inc. noise: dilate, erode, mask), undo/redo system, animated materials, sprite-sheet output, and more.
Free as ‘name your own price’ as a download on itch.io, but of course donations are encouraged for this very worthy software. For Windows, Mac (now ‘signed’), and Linux.
The nodes display will look familiar to anyone who knows the Poser Material Room.
Video intro at YouTube.
New for Poser / DAZ in July 2022
Welcome to this month’s survey of recent Poser / DAZ content and scripts. Yes, it’s a week early. But I may be busy at the end of the month.
I’m pleased to say that the DAZ Store seems to have fixed their slow loading / no loading problem, which had persisted for over a year. The store is now loading delightfully fast, for me.
As usual there’s no “HD” character stuff here (most people can’t run it) and non-commercial freebies are only mentioned if obvious fan-art.
Science-fiction:
Jepe’s WonderPlantZ 3 for DAZ Studio.
A free Space Girl Outfit for Genesis 8 Female.
The free CyborgHarry for Hivewire Horse. The horse ships free with Poser 12, with both Firefly and SuperFly materials.
A usefully generic DZ G8M ZSuit, though look at Xurge’s future-suits before you buy this.
A free Vorlon Alien. Only for non-commercial Babylon 5 fan-art, obviously.
The free SY Body Sockets for Genesis 8. Cyborg body plugs. Now it just needs someone to make the tangle of fitted pose-able connectors.
The unusual alien HF Prystine for Genesis 8.
Steampunk:
Hat Couture for La Femme & L’Homme, for Poser.
The free Syncope Round Glasses for Genesis 8.
Free Fitted Pipes for Bryce. Ready-made gnarly pipework for a steam-room.
Fantasy:
A free pack, FP Iconic Makeups for Genesis 3 & 8 Males. Non-commercial use, but that’s presumably because most of it is obvious fanart.
A free Sandclock, aka an hourglass. For DAZ Studio, and also an .OBJ version.
La Femme Warrior for La Femme and LF Warrior Poses. Pretty good. I don’t care for the warrior thing, but having a more Aiko 3 look for the flagship Poser female figure can only be a good thing.
Storybook:
Sweet and Sleepy Pillows for DAZ Studio. Probably destined for a cushion-fight in this new room for DAZ Studio.
Dynamic nightie for Diva for Dawn, for Poser.
Free socks for G8M, and textures.
Flink’s Rolling Hills – Daisy, new for Flink’s Rolling Hills base. Likely to be home to the naughty Storybook Mole.
Floppy Beach Vacation Hat for Genesis 8 Females, and a more formal straw boater hat in the new dForce Summer Tourist Set for G8F.
Toon:
Almost nothing in toon this month. But over on ArtStation, 20 Stylized Aircraft Base Mesh with .OBJ and .FBX formats. Free, but $25 gets extended commercial use.
A free Marshmallow Man for GM8. Not sure how close this is to a once-famous 1950s U.S. marketing figure, so beware of commercial use.
Hair and character:
dForce Gentleman Suit for Genesis 8. Looks usefully generic.
The DAZ Store temporary freebies page has updated. Capsces pose sets are always worth having, and here we have Ethereal Lady poses for Ninive 6. Also for G2F is the toony The Girl 6 Hair.
A free Telescopic Walking Stick of the sort given out by modern hospitals.
Free stylish Syncope Sunglasses for Genesis 8.
Lusitana. A free re-release of a universal Poser girl from 2011, made to work in “for all Poser versions”. Presumably if for some reason you have to use Poser 4, she’ll work there.
60 x Low-poly hat and headwear base meshes. With commercial use.
Gaming Poses for G8F, a set useful for those needing poses for tabletop role-playing and card/dice games.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Birds of Prey Vol 6 – Eagles of the World 2. A Spanish eagle, among others. For Poser and DAZ.
Nature’s Wonders Lizards of the World Vol. 5. For Poser and DAZ.
Millennium Dog Motions 2 as AniBlocks. I seem to recall that Millennium dog / cat / sheep / lamb etc motions were cross-figure, so they may also work for other early animals.
Landscapes:
Just Beachy – Underwater Kelp Forest for DAZ Studio.
Underwater Seabed for Blender. I wouldn’t normally mention Blender stuff, but this is especially made to be “very light and easy to manage” by the expert maker RaffyRaffy.
Modular 3D Kits: Craterscape by ShaaraMuse3D. Shallow small crater impacts, lots of photoreal detail. For Poser and DAZ. Cover them with ocean and they could be underwater nests.
Modular 3D Kits: Sandwashed Desert Ruins by ShaaraMuse3D. For Poser and DAZ.
Ancient Ruins – Lost Civilization, a useful set of mixed generic props.
Mega Terrain: Swampland for DAZ Studio. ‘Beware of falling magicians’ (old Morrowind joke).
Historical:
Stonemason’s new Temple Of The Sun, a classical Chinese hilltop town setting.
Yo ho! ho! me harties, it’s free Pirate Treasure for DAZ. See also the older free Beach Cave as a setting to try out your treasure. You’ll also be needing your new free Flintlock Pistol, m’ lad.
The Eiffel Tower for DAZ Studio. Annoy ze French copyright trolls…
Free Pilot for Michael 4 set. Appears to be American, Second World War. For Poser.
A 1950s female office suit, dForce Basic Jacket Outfit for Genesis 8.1 Female.
Utilities:
DAZ to Cinema 4D Bridge, updated. “Improved UI, better GUI”, and “Basic support for earlier versions” in the form of C4D R22 and R21.
Bone Minion for Generation 4 Poses Bundle and and useage video. Apparently a seamless on-demand pose converter. No need to have a script chug through your 15Tb runtime, for a week. The poses get converted one at a time when you try to load to a figure.
Free Node Navigation Tools for DAZ Studio. DAZ has nodes? Who knew?
dFast for DAZ Studio. Jiggling body-bits for animations, done without dForce… apparently. Don’t blame me if you spend $20 on it and then don’t like it.
A free four-layer iRay shader.
My Technical Search for Poser and Daz Studio, a search-engine for those needing technical information. Now drawing on and searching across 173 sources.
Scripts:
P12 – free Python scripts for Poser 12, my new mega-list page. Poser 12 moved to Python 3, so the software needs these new scripts.
The free SnapTo for Poser 12. A simple object-mover script for Poser 12, and should also work on a Mac in Poser 11 (unless Apple’s Weird Foibles Dept. decided to ban Python this week).
A free Poser 12 Script Starter. A neat little panel to pin stuff to, including one-click render-size settings.
Small script demos on how to Load and Render a Sketch Preset in Poser 11 and Store and Restore Render Size Settings for Poser 11 and 12.
A free pack of Poser 12 helper scripts & a perma-palette, and More Poser 12 helper scripts.
Tutorials:
Digital Comics Creative : Volume 1. A new how-to part-work publication for digital comics makers.
How to Master Material Zones webinar recording, for DAZ Studio.
Expert Compositing with DAZ Rendered Backgrounds webinar recording.
Free, the defunct Artzone Wiki 2012 archive – 50 selected pages that could still be useful for Poser / DAZ people in 2022. The Wiki is no longer online.
How to fix the ever-accumulating lights in Poser 12 scenes. A default behaviour that seems likely to be a key show-stopper for new users.
That’s it for this month. As always, please consider becoming my patron on Patreon. Even pledging a few dollars a month is a great help. Thanks.
Release: Kinetix 1.5
The ‘video to mo-cap’ tool Kinetix 1.5 has been released. It’s a free browser-based service. Formerly you used stock figures to transfer the mo-cap from a video of a moving figure. But it appears that with this update your own figures can now be imported in .FBX format. Which may make the service of more interest to DAZ and Poser users. They’ve also removed the ups-selling micro-payments system.
Going Live…
Well, my eBay bargain Asus Xtion Pro depth-sensing 3D camera has turned out to be better than expected. After trudging through an Autumn/Fall storm to pick it up, on opening the box it turns out to be… an Asus Xtion Pro Live. And thus, a later improved model and even more of an absolute bargain. Super.
The first Asus Xtion Pro was out for about a year before it was replaced by the later Live. This added a RGB camera and two microphones either side. It’s the model widely named by 2012-2018 software makers as their supported camera, alongside various early incarnations of the Kinect. It appears to support OpenNI 2.0 without needing to be flashed with new firmware.
Sadly though, this happy discovery means I shall never be able to tell readers if the first generation Xtion works with software X, Y or Z. As I now have no way of testing that.
Pitterbill, re-mapping blendshapes to morphs, in Faceshift…
Export .FBX from Poser, Binary, 2012 spec. Place in the \faceshift\targets working folder, along with any texture .fbm folder.
Open Faceshift. Tracking | Display | Target | Import. Import the .FBX. Pair jointNeck with Neck, and then the other morphs will appear. Align the head (better than seen here). Then match the targets, with the Pitterbill targets on sliders similar to Poser dials. Turn to 1.0 to activate the Pitterbill target.
Above we see the left blink being matched.
Release: MeshLab 2021.10
MeshLab 2021.10 has been released. If you’ve missed the last few releases of this free open-source 3D mesh ‘Swiss Army Knife’, here some of what’s recently new…
* support for *.gltf, *.glb, *.nxs, *.nxz, *.e57.
* a brand-new plugin for exact mesh booleans.
* a new Python library for mesh batch processing (replaces old meshlabserver).
* a new “Texture Map Defragmentation” filter.
* a new Extra plugins for MeshLab GitHub repository.