News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Comics

Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition

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Now on, the Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition. Deadline: 7th January 2025. Prizes, including XP-Pen ‘drawn on the screen’ pen-monitors.

Categories include “Best Use of CTA5”. I read that as “Best Use of Cats” at a glance, which would be a fun category if it existed. But no, CTA5 is version 5.x of the worthy and very well-documented desktop software Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator). All entrants get a two-month free licence for CTA5.

I see the latest CTA 5.3 as a $90 upgrade from CTA3 Pipeline, at the Reallusion software store…

The “first purchase offer” coupon is because I haven’t logged in for a long time, I guess. It takes the price down to $90. The facial mo-cap bundle sounds fun, but knowing Reallusion it’ll only work with new characters which require expensive additional packs to make them work. That’s their long-time business model — low cost for the core software, and then charge like heck for all the additional stuff you need. Though admittedly, as I recall, there’s just the one version (no more ‘Pipeline’) which is something.

Filatoon fail

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DAZ Studio at last has a real-time comic-book mode, somewhat like Poser. ‘Filatoon’ works with the Filament render-engine (I knew there had to be a use for it, eventually). It’s included as standard in DAZ Studio 4.23, and is not restricted to the new subscription DAZ Studio version. Note that the Filament engine can’t run on a Mac.

Judging by user try-outs and the official video trailer, it is definitely not as ‘artistic’ as Poser’s real-time tooning (which was made with the aid of comic-pros like Brian Haberlin). For instance, Poser makes its comic-book inking lines appear thicker as they near the camera. The DAZ real-time is definitely CAD-like, similar to what you can get with plugins at present with DAZ. Absolutely not going to satisfy any regular comic-book reader. Still, we have AI now, so it may be interesting to see what Stable Diffusion can do with the DAZ output, in terms of cohering it and fixing uglification, opacity map snaggles, and same-width outlines.

So, how to get DAZ Studio 4.23 with FilaToon?

On navigating the DAZ website to My Products / search ‘DAZ Studio’ / and then downloading the 756mb DAZStudio_4.23.0.1_Win64.exe — remember to also get the 48Mb IM00013176-42_DefaultResourcesForDAZStudio423.zip file which has the required Filament toon shaders. Copy the “Contents” in this .zip to your main folder path (if you have two paths, it seems it must be the first) and allow it to overwrite the existing Contents folder. Re-start DAZ.

Regrettably, Filament just doesn’t work for me in 4.23. All I get is a grey Viewport, despite doing everything correctly…

NVIDIA Drivers – yes
OpenGL 4.1 or better – yes
Load valid scene – yes
Set Viewport to Filament – yes
Set render to Viewport – yes
Filament Draw Options Node added to Scene – yes
Draw settings to ‘Style: Filament’ and ‘Bounding Box and Surface’ – yes
Distant and spotlight added to Scene – yes
Hardware anti-aliasing off – yes

… and absolutely nothing. Just a totally grey Viewport and a figure-control widget. I’d love to test and refine the new FilaToon, but… I can’t on my main workstation PC.

Filament does work fine for me in the older DAZ 4.21, which I did not allow to be uninstalled on installing 4.23. So it’s not like I can’t run Filament. It’s something in 4.23 that’s the problem.

I can also get the latest 4.23 Filament/ Viewport working fine on my Windows 10 Surface 3. But how then to get the FilaToon effect? Even after applying the shaders to a sample scene… I get nothing that looks like a toon. Nope… Filatoon seems to need a painfully detailed and long step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to set it up and get the effect. Quite the opposite of Poser, which makes the real-time Comic-book mode so simple that a small child can do it instantly.

Poser to AI

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Poser real-time render to Img2Img AI, with a very simple prompt. Just a super-quick demo I made to show someone the absolute basic possibility in terms of quick transformation. Without even getting into ControlNets.

Yes, there’s an icky thumb-shadow in Poser, which has carried over to the AI. I didn’t notice that until it was too late.

Release: Clip Studio 2.3

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I don’t normally notice Clip Studio releases. Sure it’s comics production software (yay!), but it’s also just very annoyingly fiddly and complex. Just not pleasant to use. Yet I see that 2.3 has some changes of possible interest to Poser users…

* Lots of improvement to the ‘dummy’ 3D figure’s movement and user manipulation. More IK-like behaviours, and joint rotation widgets.

* .FBX import of a static 3D model now loads “with applied normal maps”.

Also the usual fixes for the vital things they broke in the last update. Such as… “vector layers are no longer misaligned when pasted”.

SuperFlying Dreamland for Poser

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Poser could be the ‘killer app’ in creative AI, in terms of usable graphics production for storytelling.

Imagine an AI that takes what you see in the Poser viewport, and works on that, giving you 98% consistent character renders which would allow the creation of graphic novels etc.

The aim would be to keep all character details consistent and stable, while also ‘AI rendering’ the viewport into a consistent professional ‘art style’. Auto-analysis of a quick real-time render from the Viewport might be needed (already here, elsewhere) and auto-prompt construction (already here). Perhaps there might be some on-the-fly LoRA training going on too, behind the scenes. Then, the AI image generation would be done.

You can kind of do all this now, outside of Poser, using Poser renders. But what if it was all neatly integrated into Poser, and ran on SDXL? All those royalty-free runtime assets then become super-valuable, since with their aid you can easily get the AI to do exactly what you want. Face, expression, pose, clothes, camera-angle. Hands. All output by the AI to the usual masked .PNG file, ready to drop over a 2D backplate in Photoshop. In three clicks. And all consistent between images, enough to satisfy even the most fersnickety regular comics reader.

The aim would not be to go wild, but to get something very close to the arrangement and content seen in the real-time viewport. It doesn’t necessarily have to be done by Bondware/Reallusion either, since Poser is Python 3 friendly and very extensible. All that would be needed, perhaps, would be to open up PostFX to be able to run a Python plugin that applies its own FX on real-time renders.

So imagine Poser’s Comic Book Preview or Sketch rendering, but done by an AI on a purpose-built ‘AI-native’ PC (coming in 2025 in retail, if not before). With No Drawing Required™ and Character Consistency.™ Let’s call it SuperFlying Dreamland.™ 😉

Renderosity’s SFX packs and Comic Life 3

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Useful information from the Renderosity forum, for superhero comics makers. There are three SFX 2D graphics packs on Renderosity, for the old defunct Comic Book Creator 1.0 and 2.0 software…

Comic Kit #1 SFX & Balloons

Comic Kit #2 More SFX!

Comic Kit #4 50 SFX!

In total, 110 SFX. Turns out, as tested by a user, that these work fine with the current incarnation of Comic Book Creator, which is the ‘currently-developed and sold’ $30 Comic Life 3.x software that we all known and love today. There is also a template pack on Renderosity, which apparently doesn’t work with Comic Life 3.x.

A new Brian Haberlin comic

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I see there’s a new Brian Haberlin comic, since February 2023. Currently in episodic mode. The covers are part- painted, but the interiors are his usual style of art made with the assistance of Poser and highly polished. The Last Barbarians is a high/dark fantasy tale with a D&D vibe and some gore, and is currently up to #4… with #5 announced. I’d guess it might run eight issues, as his series usually do?

Tutorial: Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy

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Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy:

Requires:

Blank Boi base figure.
BlankDolly.
Elf Basics.
Blank Boi Nose freebie prop.
Blank Boi in Space freebie clothing set.

1. Load the Blank Boi base figure in Poser. To be found installed in Poser (totally counter-intiuitively) under Figures ..\3DZToonz\BlankBoi\BlankBoi.cr2

2. Load Elf Basics hood and clothing to head and body. Found under Figures ..\Elf Basics. Conform if needed.

3. Load Pose ..\BlankDolly\ Normal Shader | Dolly body gets you the eyes seen here.

4. Props | Blank Boi Features | Nose. Load to head.

5. Adjust DollyEars morphs on ears (from BlankDolly) for pointiness. Set ears slightly off-centre for added quirkiness. A little postwork clean-up will be needed re: the conjunction of the ears and the hood, when seen at at certain angles.

6. Hide (make ‘not visible’) the end of the elf boots. This makes him less obviously a generic fantasy figure. Set the “Feet swap” morph to “2” for the new ‘toon feet’ seen added below.

7. Props ..\Blank Boi In Space | BB Space Pack for an oxygen backpack. If the .OBJ is lost on loading, it’s to be found in ..\Runtime\Geometries\treasurechest\bboiclothes

8. Apply Aiko 3 poses. V3 also, but those poses will tend to reposition the figure somewhere else on the stage.

9. Change the material diffuse colours to a more space-y colour scheme.

10. Render in flat colour and lineart, and combine these two renders in Photoshop…

Not ideal. The ears are sometimes seen inside the hood. The neck-joint needs more of a spacesuit-like air-seal. The feet are ok, but not great. There are probably better figures with which to make a whimsical space-adventure storybook, but the Boi is fairly cute and it could be done. The lack of a mouth is a great advantage, since you wouldn’t have to be constantly tugging at that to get it to look right, or manually drawing it in.

Release: Poser 13

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Poser 13 has been released for Windows. Available now at Renderosity. There’s also a 21-day free trial.

Upgrade from Poser 12 is $99, full-price for 13 is $250. Poser 12 is still on sale at $150. There doesn’t seem to be an upgrade offer from Poser 11 to 13, curiously. But I imagine that anyone who wants to has already done the Poser 11 to 12 upgrade.

Poser 11 is still on sale thankfully… but is now hiked up to $150 at Renderosity (was $52 for a long time). However, note that Neowin still has it for $80, an ongoing roll-over offer officially approved by Poser’s parent company Bondware.

The “Windows 10” system spec probably doesn’t mean much, since Poser 12 and now 13 run fine on Windows 7. But note that Windows 7 users can’t install Ken’s store-purchased Python utilities due to lacking the encryption needed. Note also that ZBrush 2022.7 or higher is now required for GoZ round-tripping to Poser 13.

A Mac version of 13 is also set for release, soon-ish… “We expect the Mac version to follow the Windows release in a few weeks as a free update for Poser 13 license holders.”

Also due is “an exciting new figure” but this is still “in the works for Poser 13”. The existing free 25Gb content bundle is the same, but it seems it’s now split into more manageable download bundles.

Installers for 11 / 12 / 13 are now all available at the posersoftware.com site.

As usual, expect any new version to break a few Python scripts, because Python “knows nurthing” about any ‘Poser 13’ version. There is one forum report that EZSkin 3 won’t run on Poser 13, for instance. But there’s already a fix for the script. However, the dev team also quickly posted a “new installer” that may fix this without the need for the new fixed script.

Also as usual, new users of a vanilla Poser 13 may have to tweak their rendering settings to get the optimum configuration for their particular hardware setup. There’s a lot to digest there, several things have changed with the new Cycles/SuperFly, and it will pay to study the new settings for a few hours.

Ok, so… new items for Poser 13 which caught my eye in the list were:

* The “latest open source Cycles engine” from Blender, which in Poser is branded as SuperFly. Not all Blender Cycles nodes are present. It’s a slightly cut-down version, plus some Poser-specific nodes. The new version in Poser 13 gives much faster rendering, especially on animations and complex scenes… “GPU renders of complex scenes benchmark at under half the time required for the same scene on Poser 12.” Also works on CPUs, I hear. Also has “Improved adaptive sampling for faster renders” and an “Updated animation rendering system for better productivity [when] rendering movie sequences.” The new “GPU rendering on remote nodes” can speed things up even more, if you have the kit and ability to pay the electricity bills and can wire up a local render farm.

* “Updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer, for better compatibility with all figure types and support of imported libraries.” Again, animators will likely be happy at that.

* New ‘Post FX’ post-render options… “denoise, exposure, saturation, gamma, brightness, contrast, bloom, blur and pixelate.” Nothing you can’t do in Photoshop, but nice to have. Bloom may be interesting. If it looks good, is consistently controllable, and has enough light spillover to become ‘glow’.

* Improved Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) module. One of the best features of Poser 12, and now also in Poser 13. Good to see they’ve integrated a more recent version, though no version number is given. It works wonders on either CPUs or the GPU, which suggests it is indeed the latest version (previous versions were GPU-only).

* “Improved morph and weight-map copying system makes creating clothing easier.” Clothing makers will no doubt welcome that. (Update: Two bug-fix releases to 13.0.287 focused largely on these features). PoserPython scripting now “includes Match Centers to Morph, Joint Order, and Copy Morphs From”.

* Downloadable full PDF manual. Useful for those who locally index and search an archive of PDFs and forum-captures, using full-text desktop search software such as dtSearch or Docfetcher. The manual is not quite up-to-date. For instance, the new Enhanced Shadow Catcher in P13 does work with SuperFly, though the manual says it won’t.

There are unconfirmed forum reports that the Preview viewport / rendering “has improved”, but no comparison screenshots. For this reason, it may be unwise for those in mid-project on a Comic Book Preview rendered animation or comic-book to switch to Poser 13 because they assume that the Viewport / Preview rendering will look exactly the same. It may not.

So, overall it looks like a big must-have upgrade for 3D photoreal animators. It’s also a must-have for those who have a new fast RTX NVIDIA graphics card and want the latest greatest fast software to pair with it. Costly, true, but if the user has the cash for a big shiny new card then they also have the cash to get Poser 13.

I imagine clothing makers may well stick with the workflow they know for now, unless the improvements in 13 are dramatic (I’m not qualified to judge such things).

Overall, the team is to be congratulated. They’ve done enough to justify the version upgrade, and have given 13 a clear focus on animation and a big boost in render speed. There are genuine and useful improvements here.

Of course, it would have been great to see a version that focused on non-photoreal and some Python tweaks to help it (e.g. having Python able to address the Post FX box and plug in any .8BF Photoshop filter at that point in the render process). But that’s a much smaller market than photoreal/animation.

In the meanwhile, don’t worry… the world-leading non-photoreal stuff is still in there: Firefly (with Photoshop auxiliary render layers if required) inc. outlines, real-time Comic Book, Sketch.

Onward to Poser 14!

Install test:

* As expected, Poser 13 installs without overwriting previous Poser versions or runtimes.

* Content directory created at C:\Users\Public\Documents\Poser 13 Content

* No .PDF manual in the install, as that’s now a download.

* Poser 11.x and 12.x still launch after install of the 13 Trial version. Import of a Poser 13 scene to Vue 2016 and the latest Vue both work, is Poser 11 is told where the 12 and 13 runtimes are.

* As usual, the new Poser user will need to fix the ever-accumulating light presets problem by tweaking a setting in Preferences.

* Yes, Blender’s Cycles X (here branded as ‘SuperFly’) happily renders on CPUs. There’s no nonsense at install time about “your graphics card is not worthy, so I’m not even installing”, as there is with Blender.

* The new version of the Intel OIDN Denoiser is packaged as a .DLL, so I can’t find what version number it’s now at in Poser 13.

* Checks how many threads Poser is using on a multi-core PC. Poser 13 defaults to 12 threads for me, but in Edit / Preferences I tell Poser 13 I have 24 threads available for its use (12 Xeon cores = 24 threads) in CPU rendering. And if you have that much power, don’t accept Firefly and Sketch render presets that use the old minimum 32 buckets. Tweak this setting up to 128, for a vastly improved rendering speed. Superfly renders are a whole different ballgame, and you’ll need to study and test to get the best for your PC.

* You add your previous runtime to the Library by targeting ../content/ not the ../content/runtime/ folder. When you’ve done this, your old saved scene files should load fine — because Poser 13 will know where to load the content from.

Release: Clip Studio 2.0

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Clip Studio 2.0 has been released. New features include…

* A new “3D head model” on which the user can adjust “eyes, nose, and mouth” to get a stylised look. Meant for reference, for hand-drawn over-sketching/painting… not iRay-like production rendering.

* A “hand pose scanner”. Scan a live hand pose, via a webcam and some reasonable softbox lighting. The hand pose is (more or less) applied ‘live’ to the 3D dummy’s hand in Clip Studio. I assume only those with specialist hand requirements need this, as there must surely be packs of 100s of organised hand-poses already available for Clip Studio’s generic 3D dummies?

* “Automatic shading” for flats, applying shadows based on your lineart and use of colours. A somewhat uninformative video demo is available, but it looks like it does work and has quick presets. If it can stay completely consistent from panel to panel is another matter.

* The flexible ruler now works with scenes that have a fisheye camera perspective.

* Depth-fogging cameras. “Enable Fog, to add a fog-like effect that expresses depth in 3D space”.

* “Spin blur” effect (e.g. semi-blur a speeding spinning missile, or a bouncing ball). I’m amazed they didn’t have this before.

* Import… “It is now faster to import posable 3D files with a large number of bones and meshes.”

Testing Nursoda’s Chull

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On test, Nursoda’s new standalone figure-character called Chull for Poser and DAZ.

Toons reasonably well in Poser, under Comic Book mode + B&W line-art + different Display Modes.

Real-time Comic Book line-art, Sketch and a filtered colour Sketch render can easily combine in Photoshop for a Storybook look…

Takes poses from Aiko 3 / Hiro 3, Sam & Sadie, more or less. Old default Poser boy ‘Ben’ poses work well and he has a good ranges of generic standing/walking/running/sleeping poses. Chull also takes poses from Nursoda’s long-legged Koit, Fon, Kali, Malini, Pitterbill and even does a bit with poses from the Merpal and Ronk.

Expressions from other Nursoda figures mostly don’t work, but some from Wingen’s set are sort of useable.

Another great figure and outfit. The textures are dark/grungy as usual, but there’s a template pack to make lighter/plain-toony ones. Or you can just lift the gamma across the figure/clothes. Scripts | MaterialMods | Change Gamma | try 0.5 and omit the Transparency. Not undo-able except by running the script again.

Also works out-of-the-box in iRay for photoreal renders. Just make sure your DAZ Library knows where you Poser runtime is, and load from there. Poses and Expressions work in DAZ. No need to adjust textures or suchlike on clothes. You’ll only want to turn down skin-gloss (Surfaces / Specular) in DAZ, as there are hotspots (you can see one on the hand on the right of the picture, below). Take Specular Glossiness from 98% down to 20%, to fix most of this plastic-y shine.

Release: Goo Blender

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Goo Blender, also known as the “Goo Engine”, is a new non-photoreal toon Blender version for Windows (only)…

“our custom build of Blender that was made specifically to our team’s needs. Our team specializes in making 3D anime in Blender”

Goo Engine still seems to involve the usual head-banging wrangling of big node chains in order to get simple tooning done in the viewport.

I haven’t had time to look at the 30 minute intro tutorial and am currently uncertain if it’s real-time Eevee or Cycles rendered? Anyway, it’s available via a Patreon subscription if you want to download and try. I assume it’s a build for the latest Blender, which now has certain graphics-card requirements before it will even let you install. Note also the Goo Engine GitHub, which presumably means you can get it free if you know how to ‘build’ Blender from a code repository.

This new release reminded me to take a look at the progress of the competitor BEER, the free NPR system plugin for regular Blender. The 1.0 engine was all done, and a user-friendly UI was then being made. A magnificent effort by all concerned, and they’re to be congratulated for getting so far with it. However I see there’s been no public progress with the user UI implementation in the last year and it’s stalled at UI Milestone #2 (November 2021). Possibly they could use a volunteer UI expert, to get it finished and polished?

Published: Digital Comics Creative, Volumes 3 & 4

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New and available now on Gumroad, Digital Comics Creative, Volumes 3 & 4 – Secrets of Poser 11 and Line-art Filters. Both volumes are bundled together as a bumper 100-page magazine-style PDF, great value at the introductory price of $15 (will soon be $18).

The earlier Volume 1 (Introduction) and Volume 2 (focused on DAZ Studio for comics) are also available. Volumes 5 and 6 are set for release in 2023.

Haberlin’s Hellcop – made with Poser

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I only just noticed that Brian Haberlin has a new comic, Hellcop. Same style and wild sci-fi as the earlier Sonata and Lighthouse (collected Nov 2021), and I definitely recognise that Poser monowheel, the steampunk rifle etc. So I’m 99% certain the production is still Poser + his usual studio workflow.

Seems to have debuted October 2021 and then raced through the issues, possibly monthly? Hellcop is already in a trade “Vol. 1” which collects issues #1-5, and I see that issue #9 just came out last week. So I’m guessing the title’s second 5-issue story-arc will be finished by the end of the summer. I’m not used to such a fast pace, and often hand-drawn comics issues are glacial in appearing and you wait ages (sometimes years) for an actual concluded story. But I guess that’s what Poser does for you, speeding up production.

Add an overlay on any existing texture

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How to add a simple overlay on top of an existing texture in Poser:

The overlay has not destroyed the original glossy effect, I just took that off manually to make for a simpler demonstration of the nodes.

1. At the top Diffuse node, right-click and disconnect the connector to your current 2D texture. This does not destroy the texture. It’s still there waiting to be re-connected.

2. Right-click the empty Diffuse slot and there plug in a new Math | Color Math node.

3. Set the Color Math node’s Argument to Multiply. Also have both of its values be pure White.

4. Connect the Color Math node’s Value 1 slot to the original texture map.

5. On the Color Math node’s Value 2 slot, right-click and then add a new standard 2D node.

6. On the new 2D node you then load your overlay as a square 2D image source, in the usual way. Pure b&w appears to work best.

Here we have a puny low-res dash-shading overlay for demo purposes. Nor is it even uniform, which it ideally should be…

For dash or hatched-shading of the object you may want to dial this source’s U and V scales down from their 1.0 settings, to something like 0.10 or 0.12, as seen here.

You can save this as a standard material setup, and then just switch the source texture and overlay texture. Obviously you’d use a seamless tiling texture, which I haven’t here.

Of course, it would be nice to have the overlay effect render on its own. There are two ways to do this, that I know of…

1. Also plug the overlay into the Alternate Diffuse, which should be set to white. You then see the change in the Preview. Then render again, in Preview even. In Photoshop, knock white out of the render with an automated Action.

2. Also plug the overlay into the Custom_output_1. There will be no change in the viewport.

But if you render to Firefly with the following settings…

… and save as a Photoshop .PSD then you get a nice Photoshop layer of the effect on its own…

Yes, ugly seams… but this is just a quick demo. The seams could be fixed.

We still don’t have it in a form where the white is transparent, but any good Photoshop Knock Out White Action will do that.

Of course, it may be possible to just leave the whole current material setup alone, and just plug your overlay shading into the Custom_output_1. I’ve yet to investigate that. Though that would limit you to Firefly rendering only. But doing it that way should be simple and reliable enough for a script to handle automatically.