Forgotten about Adobe Substance? ArtStation has a handy one-page 2022 Updates Recap. Who knew there was now an official voxel-based “Substance 3D Modeler”, released in October 2022? Also noted is that coming soon is Adobe Substance 3D Sampler, for real-world scanning of objects. All very nice, but still subscription.
Category Archives: Companion software
RealityScan
Epic has made public its RealityScan beta, which launched in closed form back in April 2022. It’s…
“a free photogrammetry app that turns smartphone photos of real-world objects into textured 3D models”
Only for iPhone and iPad, where it doesn’t appear to have too much free competition. I’m certainly no expert on Mac apps, and I didn’t look very hard, but this is surprising. You might have thought that Apple’s depth-sensing stuff would have cause developers to flock to such things. Or maybe “free” is just a dirty word in iPhone-land? Not being an iPhone or Mac person, I have no clue about such things.
Export is locked to uploading to Epic’s Sketchfab site. Models can’t be directly saved to local files. Also, since the models are said to be geared toward VR, they may well be low-res and perhaps not watertight for 3D printing (just my guess). A free Android version is pencilled in for release sometime in 2023.
Adobe is also gearing up to release its own photogrammetry software.
There’s also something called Polycam 3.0 coming down the pipe in 2023.
Release: Stable Diffusion 2.0
The ‘text prompt to image generating’ AI Stable Diffusion 2.0 has released. 1.4 was the first public release back in summer 2022, and 1.5 was the previous version.
Along other new features, a shape-sensing and shape-preserving model…
It also has a few other nice features such as better in-painting and built in up-scaling. But note that the new 2.0 version is now censored, so some may consider it as effectively no longer open-source. They’ve “removed ability to copy artist styles”. This means 2.0 now ignores popular user prompts such as “in the style of [name]…”. It also refuses to create what is described as “NSFW” images, though how widely that’s defined is unknown.
Release: Clavicula 0.9.9.1
The free Clavicula has released 0.9.9.1, with new features such as “custom shader layers” among other changes. It’s the successor to Neobarok and an innovative way of 3D modelling, completely free for desktops. The YouTube channel is here, and there was a Digital Art Live magazine interview with the maker in Digital Art Live Issue 64 (Christmas 2021).
Tasty Olive
Olive is a new “free, portable, non-linear video editor built to compete with high-end professional video editing software”. Interestingly, it “reminded us a little of Camtasia Studio without the big price tag”, states MajorGeeks, testing the more stable 0.1 alpha. There’s also a nightly build 0.2 alpha as portable or installer, which is likely to be unstable for now.
The MajorGeeks comment about Camtasia was enough to make me test it. I could not get 0.2 working, and I found the 0.1 alpha did not have any Camtasia-like screen capture and annotation features. Still, it looks like a good basic no-nonsense free video editor, and works back to Windows 7.
“Worth having” discounts, starting to appear ahead of Black Friday
Not much sign of “worth having” new discounts ahead of Black Friday (25th November), other than the usual year-round perma-discounts. But I noticed…
* The XPPen Store has discounts on its ‘draw on the screen’ monitors. The XPPen Artist 22 (2nd gen) is probably the target model for most people, and has a nice discount. I have one, and am pleased with it.
* Serif’s Affinity 2.0 bundle continues with its launch discounts. Try before you buy, as the fixed and squinty user interfaces don’t suit everyone.
* E-on has large 45% discounts on the subscriptions for its Vue landscape software. Subscriptions, but… worthy software that can still talk to Poser 11 and 12.
* Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator 5 has a good introductory discount, and all versions are now effectively the Pipeline version. Which makes it bargain if you’re looking for a friendly but powerful 2D animator.
* “Courses from £10.99 until 25th Nov” at Udemy. A nice $10 price on Udemy’s Make Motion Comics video tutorial. Sadly it’s all Adobe software though. Also a $10 price on Poser Pro Game Dev Fundamentals, which may be of interest to those who never moved to Poser 11.
* No discounts on Clip Studio EX (the proper multi-page version of the comics production software), but there is a “get 2.0 free when it appears” flash…
It appears that Clip Studio 2.0 is set for Spring 2023. It’ll be interesting to see if it includes AIs, and if they can make the software less fiddly and annoying to use.
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?
Release: Material Maker 1.1
Material Maker 1.1 has been released. Though only a .1 update there are lots of new changes and improvements to this great free replacement for Adobe’s Substance.
Release: Affinity suite 2.0
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Serif’s Adobe-killer Affinity 2.0 suite has released. A one-time payment for all the desktop software + mobile apps, and the price is currently discounted. It’s a pretty good no-subscription deal for the equivalent of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, if that’s what you need and you have the required OS (2.0 now appears to require Windows 8 or higher). Personally I’d stick with Photoshop for the extensibility and automation, I have no use for an Illustrator clone, and thus the only one wanted would be the Publisher DTP software. Note that each can be had on its own, at a lower price than the bundle.
Try before you buy, as the UI cannot be scaled up and is too small and poky for many.
Cartoon Animator 5 Demo Video
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The worthy 2D Cartoon Animator 5 has been released (formerly CrazyTalk Animator), and there’s now an official Cartoon Animator 5 Demo Video released today.
* SVG support, templates, import. Round-trip to CorelDraw, InkScape etc.
* Spring dynamics and free-form deformation grid.
* Better library, integrated download of the free bits (scripts etc) that you could only get from the site.
* No cheap “Pro” version any more [the former division was Pro (i.e. Standard) and Pipeline (i.e. proper Pro, expensive)] and it appears there is now just one version. Currently a reasonable $129. This appears to include the After Effects scripts that were in Pipeline. So if you can now effectively get Pipeline for $129 that’s quite a bargain. Though, as always, beware that the paid add-on packs and plug-ins will ramp up the overall price considerably over time.
That said, there’s backwards compatibility for those with old character and prop libraries. You can still use characters back to G1, in Cartoon Animator 5, it’s said.
Not sure if it still supports conversion from .SWF to prop. It used to, because it had its own Flash module under the hood.
Filter for Interactive licences at DAZ
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Here’s an unusual one. A free UserScript for your Web browser’s Tampermonkey or similar, and which interacts with the DAZ site. All it appears to do is filter your purchased Interactive licences. So that you can just see those. Kind of useful, I guess, if you’re a developer who just needs to see your available assets… and not the 569 other things you’ve purchased over the years. It’s open-source and the code looks clean.. it’s not doing anything untoward.
Scene Building in Blender
A new community course for beginners to learn Blender by creating a scene via modelling and texturing, Scene Building in Blender : Winter Wonderland. Starts Saturday 19th November 2022, and then runs Saturdays.
The scene is akin to the famous Narnia fantasy books for children: the wardrobe ‘portal’ into the snowy Narnia, with the lamppost as the first thing to be encountered there.
Terragen 4.6 – a big update
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According to the Newsletter, Terragen 4.6 is about to be released. This being the first big update for the advanced 3D landscape desktop software in two years.
* Windows now has .VBD export (was previously Linux only).
* Export clouds in .VBD for use in Blender etc.
* Better sRGB support.
* Better .FBX import, better .FBX export compatibility with Unreal Engine.
* Now with import and export of population caches as XML, as well as binary.
* Rendering speed improvements, faster Preview renders.
* Pro users get an experimental pipeline for RPC integration with other third-party tools.
* An open-source RPC Python module, so you can write Python scripts enabling other software to ‘talk’ to Terragen.
* Geolocation (aka “Georeferencing”) is said to become free in the Terragen 4.6 Free (aka Learning Edition, Non-Commercial). So far as I can tell, this is about aligning tiles side by side, rather than grabbing a DEM landscape tile from a user-friendly Google Earth style world-browser.
Still supports Windows 7+, and the update is free. Terragen 4 Free is free, and then currently Terragen 5 Creative is $299, the Pro is $599. A Mac version is coming soon, and a fun nodes-free ‘sky making’ Terragen Sky tool is also coming in December 2022.
Planetside Software (website has yet to update to 4.6 details/downloads. but should soon) and see also the YouTube channel.
Photoshop Action: Cut-out ‘Dream by Wombo’ AI-pictures
Available now, my $2 Photoshop Action for users of the “Dream by Wombo” AI image generator. It very precisely and automatically cuts the picture out of a standard ‘Dream by Wombo’ AI-generated picture-card. It then auto-heals each of the tiny curved corners, and finally it saves the cut-out as a copy.
It works with the current Wombo output size available to free users. If that output size changes in future, then I’ll update the Action.
Fractal wrangling
An AI image derived from a fractal render as a seed-image + a text-prompt involving architecture / lush forest. Seems like an interesting and fruitful combination for art-gen AIs, in terms of wrangling fractal landscapes into more human/natural shapes. While still retaining something of the fractal-ness.
The combination of fractal and AI desktop software has yet to happen, but surely will. There will also be ‘auto up-detailing enhanced’ fly-throughs, something that both Microsoft and Google already have the code for. Video flythroughs will probably end of being a key use for AI in a year or so, because then the viewer doesn’t stop and notice the telltale signs of AI-ness so much. And there will be AI-generated music and soundscape to accompany.
With thanks to Steve Swayne for the example picture.