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Category Archives: Companion software
What’s New for Poser and DAZ, April-May 2023
Slightly early this month, but it’s time for another pick of what’s new for Poser and DAZ Studio users.
Science-fiction:
Teleportation Effects VFX for DAZ Studio. 36 of them, with 4K textures.
DZ BSuitZ for G8M & G9. Usefully generic and plain, for when you want the focus on the character and not the suit.
Bomb place set for Poser, and separately for DAZ. A 33 part set. It’s by 1971s, so you know it’ll toon well in Poser’s Comic Book renders.
Need a control unit for the bomb? There’s a new free HX Console for DAZ. A retro 1970s style computer/radar console. Also looks suitable for Doctor Who remakes and suchlike. See also this new GMDSS 6000 Series Communication equipment freebie. If you need the complete caboodle, take a look a this monster control-centre…
The Corridor, a 2001 style corridor. If you enlarged the corridor and stripped out some bits you might even get a 3D roadway for some of the new Luxor Poser Prop flying cars.
Valvepunk:
A ramshackle Radio Watchtower, evocative of Fenton Wood’s Yankee Republic series.
DD PBR Painted Wood Shaders for iRay Vol. 2. Faded, cracked and scuffed.
Fantasy:
Shattered Steel. Breakable sword blades, for Poser.
CW_Michael for Genesis 8 Male, with an interestingly ‘almost semi-toon’ face and head.
Techno-Wizard Weapons SW for G3 and G8.
Fan-art:
Thri-Kreen for Poser. A Dungeons & Dragons creature.
Wanted: Weapons of Fate for Poser. A custom character for the stock ships-with-Poser figure Jessi, based on a game character. The description says “standalone”, but that can’t be if she requires Jessi.
Harrison Ford for Poser for the M3 LowRes figure. Could be useful if you have a big heavy scene, and you don’t want the crash it by adding a high-res figure.
Halloween:
Movie Mummy for G8M. You also get the ancient coffin.
Enakh Outfit for G8M.
Pyrotechnica 2. Burning, black smokes, plus a fireworks burst, for DAZ Studio.
Suds. 3D models of soap suds, for DAZ Studio. Could also be useful for alien landscapes, horror labs, or scenes where nano-technology runs amok.
Photo Props: Candles, with texture that make them suitable for close-ups.
Figures, poses and clothes:
Malikai and Hair for Genesis 8.1 Male.
AMV_Glasses, basic cheap reading-glasses for G2 to G9.
Lina for Antonia, an Eastern European look for the Antonia figure for Poser.
AniBlock animations:
10 x ‘in bed’ AniBlocks for Genesis 9. Couples lying in bed.
21 Action & Gun AniBlocks for Genesis 8/8.1.
Ready To Fight 2 AniBlock animations for the Genesis series. Specifically, ring boxing and kick boxing.
Toon:
Flix for Genesis 8 Male. Might also be used with the free Prof Hair for G8M.
Speaking Dishes and teapots for DAZ Studio.
Chull Clothes 2, for Nursoda’s new Chull figure.
Storybook:
SAMANT Pastry Shop, for Poser and DAZ.
A free DollBox for Poser, with La Femme fit. Also the Pretty Doll Vintage Dress.
Dino 03, a free cute stuffed-fabric toy dinosaur. Plus Food for Dino 03, which might also be used with other rotund beasts of burden.
A free Swimming Ring. Might be made to fit Dino…
Hr-257 hair, suitable for a ‘girl adventurer’ type character. For V4 and others.
FG School Pack Supply plus backpack, for the FG Elementary Classroom.
A free Cheap Fountain Pen for DAZ Studio.
Tuscan Kitchen Accessories set.
Hobby Props Pottery, for all your potter’s wheel needs.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Kingfishers, for Poser and DAZ.
Komodo Dragon by AM, for DAZ Studio.
Arkeno for Moshi The Kitten and Soffancska: Moshi, both material addons for the kitten.
Landscapes:
3D Scenery: Lush Gate from ShaaraMuse3D, for Poser and DAZ. A useful wooded summertime arch, which also has a low-spec PC version. No Autumnal makeover MAT, but I guess you just tweak the colours.
Simple free Railings of the sturdy sort you might see on the sea-front of a coastal town. For Poser and DAZ. Includes old and sea-worn MATs.
Bastion Fortress – Brick Walls for Poser and DAZ. A texture addon for the Bastion Fortress Construction Kit.
Historical:
Very little this month, in Historical.
Second World War Jeep for Poser. 13 figures, poses, props.
Utilities and similar:
A free Mosaic MT5 material for Poser
Formation-X for DAZ Studio. Billed as “Configuration and Alignment Scripts for Large Groups”. Such as spacecraft battle formations. Released summer 2019, but it’s new to me.
Expandable Color Ramp for Poser 12 & 13, for SuperFly. “It will allow between 2 to X number of color points simply by daisy-chaining the nodes together.”
A free Cubic To Linear add-on for MojoWorld 3.11.
30 Realistic Fur & Hair Brushes for Photoshop.
Software:
UVMapper 4.0 for Windows, May 2023.
Blender 3.51 for Windows 7, no installer needed. The installer having been a roadblock before now, when Blender refused to install if your graphics card was unworthy. Now you can install anyway and run it on the CPUs.
At last, a dark mode for Paint Tool SAI 2, aka SAI2.
Poser 13 has had a number of updates since the initial release in March.
Tutorials:
Essential Introduction to Genesis 9 for Content Creators. With Esha.
Toolbox Treasures : Super Scripts for DAZ Studio. With Code 66.
New video tutorials on Poser 13 Installation and Poser 13 : Installing included content.
Making advanced Pixelart in Blender, a tutorial for a free addon. Looks quite effective.
Beginner’s Guide to Texturing in Poser: The Diffuse Node.
VUE scene breakdown: Making of “Fresh Water” with Vue expert Barry Marshall. Also a new Quicktip video: Duplicating Assets in E-on’s Vue.
That’s it. More next month.
Release Blender 3.51 for Windows 7, no installer needed
Blender 3.51 for Windows 7 (early May 2023).
Now needing no installer, it will at last launch for me! Hurrah. Everything works, and it renders to Cycles using 12 CPUs with fair speed… while ignoring my unworthy GPU.
Previously the 3.x installers had decided my graphics card was unworthy, and totally refused to install Blender. Yes… I more than meet the minimum OpenGL 3.3 requirement, having 4.4.
Of course, not really needed now for most people. Since Poser 13 uses the latest Blender Cycles as the photoreal renderer. But still, nice to have it tucked away.
Combo
Hel1x has a new and fine demo picture, showing the effective combination of an AI-generated base + Poser and DAZ for the figure, Vue for added landscape (backdrop and atmosphere?) and Corel Painter.
CodeWhisperer
Possibly interesting for Python-coders who craft Python scripts for Poser, Vue, Blender, and others. The new Amazon CodeWhisperer, a free code-generator from Amazon, that appears to be genuinely free and supposedly “unlimited”. Although you do need an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.
It’s powered by AI, of course. Be warned that the ‘free’ tier of AWS is only a 12 month trial, last I heard. Then you have to pay to keep the AWS account.
Denoising in Photoshop CS6 32-bit in 2023
DAZ’s free Photoshop Bridge only fully works when using 32-bit with a 32-bit Photoshop. Ideally Photoshop CS6. As I’ve explained before here on MyClone, here and here.
But imagine you’ve got it working and are auto-sending renders to a comic-book page that’s set up in Photoshop. Each render drops into a comic-book panel. But, since there’s a lot to render on each page, the renders are quick and grainy and have ‘fireflies’. This grain will not matter so much, if you’re then filtering them using a non-naff artistic Photoshop filter (Mediachance, Sketchmaster 2018, some G’MIC filters).
But what if you’d just like to denoise a photoreal render? Sure you can filter with an NVIDIA-only denoiser, back in DAZ Studio. But that feature has never worked for me, and I guess my NVIDIA graphics card is just not worthy. Or you could lift the shadows and create a flatter and more comic-book look with the Exposure Value and Shutter Speed sliders in DAZ. Less shadows, less noticeable grain and fireflies.
True, there’s a free mcjDenoise plugin for DAZ which actually uses Intel’s OIDN. But it can only be applied to the stack of recent renders. Thus it can’t work to process the render that’s to be automatically sent to Photoshop via the Bridge.
Ideally there would be a Photoshop plugin that uses the open-source Intel OIDN denoiser. Which has a superb AI model especially trained to clear 3D renders. This plugin would speedily fix all the grain and fireflies, in one click. But, rather surprisingly (given the potential market and the very open licence) no-one has made such a thing. There are only two Windows GUI standalones.
What about other AI-powered denoiser plugins for Photoshop? The Topaz AI Denoise plugins were available for CS6, but… only for 64-bit and they were trained for megapixel night photographers, not 3D renders. There were three or four pre-AI denoiser plugins for 32-bit, but they were expensive and (even if still available) are not ideal now.
Thus the fallback in 2023 would be the free and actively developed G’Mic plugin suite. Its 32-bit .8BF is happy to run as a Photoshop CS6 32-bit plugin. Currently in G’Mic, the 2022 filter Testing | Afre | Denoise appears to be the quickest/best on 3D renders. In fact it’s near-instant, which is very nice. But obviously it’s not as good as OIDN. The results are softer than OIDN, and not all noise is cleared. But it’s better than nothing, and if your comic-book page is destined for digital-only… then it may be good enough.
And don’t forget that .PSD is a portable format, so you can do all the render-catching and layout in CS6, and then load the CC 2018 or higher for postwork and filters.
But the ideal for CS6 would be that someone plugs OIDN into G’Mic in the near future.
New 3DCoat manual
Slick new documentation for the 3DCoat 3D painting / texturing / sculpting software. Fully updated, translated and pretty-fied.
What’s New for Poser and DAZ, April 2023
It’s time for another monthly round-up, offering my pick of what’s new for Poser and DAZ users.
As usual, freebies are not noted if they’re ‘non-commercial use’, unless they’re such obvious fan-art that no-one would consider using them commercially. Indeed, there’s a new fan-art sub-category this month.
There’s also a new G8/G9 store, 3D Shards, with some freebies. Takes quite a while to load, but looks great.
Science-fiction:
A generic futuristic Billionaire’s Office. Plus 30 cool hi-tech props.
A free CyborgLuna for Baby Luna, the free creepy baby which ships with Poser. There are some earlier Baby Luna’s Creature Heads morphs, but I see that only two of these might pass muster for a sci-fi look. Probably now needs a pack of cyborg head morphs.
Coflek-Gnorg’s Hostile Surface I and Hostile Surface II. Basic ‘first landers’ pioneer-era surface space-cabins for Poser, with quality interiors.
A big futuristic comic-book style Tank Model-X for DAZ. Needs some “Hulk… SMASH!” punch-blow morphs, I’d suggest.
Colony Control Tower, looking like it could be of use for re-making lost episodes of classic 1970s British TV sci-fi?
Sci-fi Fan Art:
James T. Kirk for Poser, which requires M3 Low Res and the David 3 texures. No hair, but I’m fairly sure there’s some Kirk hair around somewhere for Poser.
Marvel Ultimate Galactus Outfit for Genesis 8 Male. Looking pretty much like the original Kirby Galactus, as far as I can see. Rather cheekily, there’s a Marvel logo and also an Extended Licence for sale.
Desert Spaceport for DAZ, a large Mos Eisley a-like town from Star Wars with lots of angles. Not identical, and there’s clear prior-art, so commercial use as a standard desert town would probably pass the Disney lawyer sniff-test.
A Twi’lek for Genesis 8 Female, and Twi’lek Headpeice for Aiko 4, for non-commercial Star Wars fan-art.
Steampunk and Dieselpunk:
A pleasing retro-look helmet Protective Gear 018 MMKB.
Christmas Steampunk Car for Poser. An old model from Meshbox, but new on Renderosity. Likely to have a single texture-atlas texture, making it difficult to re-texture.
Fantasy:
FireShow, an unusual addition to a circus or medieval hall with jesters and minstrels. Though you’d need some wooden planking to cover the modern struts.
Halloween:
Free Fangs for LaFemme/L’Homme.
Morphing Skull together with Stands for Morphing Skull and Morphing Candle for Morphing Skull.
Leviathan for Daz Studio, a gloopy monster with tentacle sliders for posing.
Figures and poses:
A free pack of sitting and kneeling CRP Floor Poses 1-12 for G8F & G9.
40 x G8 expressions on sliders, in the Ross_Expressions G8 01 pack.
Young Anime Heroes for Genesis 9, stylised manga/anime type morphs.
Storybook:
Coin-Operated Rides Mega Pack for DAZ. You could probably hide bits, such that the plane really takes off and flies the passenger through the clouds.
Smoking Pipe. With smoke and holding poses for G8/G9. For your old-school Tolkien-type storyteller, with a pipe by the fireside.
Toon:
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Bee-eaters of the World, for Poser and DAZ.
Snitch, a strange creature for Poser and DAZ. Likely to appeal to those who have enjoyed playing the videogame Spore.
Landscapes and settings:
City Waterway by Predatron, looking useful for action-movie type scenes.
A2Z SciFi Loading Dock and Warehouse I v1 for Poser. A bit sci-fi, but could also be of use for those who need to make modern-day warehouse worker training videos.
Historical:
A free dForce 1940s Men’s Suit for G8M. Also a tweed trousers and pullover set. Also get the 1940’s inspired suspenders and bowtie for the free G8M men’s suit. “Suspenders” = “braces” in British English.
A free Sniper U.S. Ranger standalone, a low-poly figure for M3 Low Res and Poser, so you can have many soldiers in your scene.
DryJack’s Match Truck and Crane, the sort of thing you might see in a mid 20th century heavy industry rail-yard.
Those who like DryJack’s excellent British railway models and tracks/stations may also want the free Sign 14, the new British ‘Men at Work’ road-sign. Part of a larger free set of such things.
VZ-9 Avrocar Flying Saucer, which was really made (though barely flown) in the 1950s by the U.S. Air Force. Complete with interior, controls, smart-props, poses. For Poser and DAZ.
A free classic mid/late 20th century Cinema Part 1, with iRay textures. Also get Part 2.
A manky Industrial Warehouse Scissor Lift of the sort you might have found in an old abandoned warehouse in the early 1990s.
Utilities, scripts and similar:
A free Simple POV Camera for G3 & G8. Your scene shows what the figure sees.
A Procedural Braid Generator for Blender.
Free AND / OR / XOR Logic Nodes for the Poser Material Room, for Poser 12 and 13. Also an accompanying “Wondering how to use Logic Nodes for Poser material room?” tutorial.
A free Value Viewer for Poser SuperFly, a node for Poser 12 and 13.
A paid MAT Tiler for Poser 12, which… “automates working with seamless textures in Poser”.
A free Poser script ShowLightsInPreview, for Poser 12. I’m not sure I even understand the user problem it’s trying to solve, and I think it may already have been solved by an earlier Poser 12 script (‘Remove Wires in Preview’) which toggles the visibility of the lights wireframes on the scene lights. But you may be interested.
Also, there are now Renderosity gift certificates, starting at a $150 Gift Certificate.
The free script Lock & Unlock them all from here for DAZ Studio. For example, lock everything below the wrist. There’s also a similar Hide & Show parts of a figure below a certain point.
Software:
Poser 13 for Windows, in Early Access. Ignore the “Windows 10” spec, as it runs fine on Windows 7 (although it won’t then load encrypted store-purchased scripts). SuperFly is now the new Cycles 2 for much faster x2 rendering, especially for animations and this can also work on CPUs. The Intel Denoiser is updated, and PostFX is expanded and can now do Glow. An updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer, and more.
The 2D paint software SAI2 has a dark mode at long last. For fast painting with big brushes on a big canvas, there’s SAI2, PaintStorm, and the superb vector brushes in the free Microsoft Expression Design 4.
Tutorials:
How to convert DAZ to Poser – Part 1 Geometry and Part 2 – Materials and lights. But first watch Converting DAZ scenes to Poser the super easy way, which involves going through (shudder) Collada. Don’t forget there’s also the Automatic OBJ Exporter for figures, with poly-reduction in the streamlined semi-automated pipeline.
How to Bring all your Poser 12 scripts to P13 without re-installing.
E-on Vue – controlling materials and EcoSystems with the wetness index node, a new 20 minute video tutorial.
Controlling camera-angles in AI-generated image production, a YouTube playlist.
That’s it for April 2023. More picks next month.
How to use Ocenaudio as a simple ‘video to audio’ extractor
How to use Ocenaudio as a simple ‘video to audio’ extractor. No need for online services or questionable free software from Whereizitagin.
1. Open Ocenaudio (the excellent freeware replacement for Audacity). Drag drop the .MP4 video file on the sidebar.
2. It will be opened as if an audio file.
3. Save it as .MP3. There will be a progress-bar, showing time remaining for conversion. It’s that simple.
Release: Clip Studio 2.0
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.”
Release: Clavicula 0.9.9.5
Clavicula 0.9.9.5, a new release for the free and innovative modelling software.
And in the comments, “export renders with a given screen resolution” may be coming by the end of 2023.
PD Howler’s new 3D capabilities
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.
Release: Curvy 3D 5.0
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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
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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
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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″.