News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Companion software

Cosmos Laundromat – First Cycle

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“Cosmos Laundromat – First Cycle”, a 12 minute short made by the Blender Foundation to showcase their Blender software.

The production and final assets are, as usual, Creative Commons and are on Blender Cloud. Though they’re sadly not as open as Blender Foundation assets used to be. A “This content is only available to subscribers” paywall pops up everywhere. Not sure how that move squares with the “Made with the support of the MEDIA Programme of the European Union” credit (translation from EU-speak: “paid for by taxpayers”) on “Cosmos Laundromat”, let alone the old-school open source ethos.

Even the Foundation’s old Big Buck Bunny and Tears of Steel Creative Commons assets repositories are now locked down and ‘subscription only’. Something has gone badly wrong in Blenderland, by the looks of things. What was once accessible to the planet to access and remix now appears to cost 45 Euros for three months, and to be basically limited to hardcore Blender users. Is that even ethical? Given that those who worked on the likes of Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny and Tears of Steel worked under the assumption that they were making genuine open source movies — open as in “accessible to the whole world, forever, always, including all the assets, instantly, and for free”?

Muvizu

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Freebies, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

It’s all happening! A new Poser coming, and now Muvizu wakes up as well. According to their news mailing Muvizu, the very useable and free real-time toon production software from Glasgow, is moving forward again with a new Chief Exec. Also…

“From August we will introduce a market place where we will offer new characters – and content packs as well as expansion packs including multi-layer rendering and key framing.”

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Reality 4.1 will have a 10x speed boost

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Remember when the Reality plugin for DAZ Studio was ummm, well… a little slow? Reality 4.1 will have a 10x speed acceleration, due to acceleration and other tweaks built into the forthcoming LuxRender 1.5 beta. Yup, ten times faster.

“Q: Can I simply install LuxRender 1.5 and reap the benefit of the acceleration?
A: nope, it’s not going to be that easy, we will have to wait for Reality 4.1.”

Paolo is so excited he’s funded a nightly build of LuxRender 1.5!

Quickstart on how to access Garibaldi Express hair plugin in DAZ Studio 4.7

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A friend kindly gave me a personal video demo of the Garibaldi Hair System plugin for DAZ Studio 4.5 and higher. Seems to render rather quickly, which is very encouraging. Overall it looks fairly simple to use, once you work out how to access the editor and control the styling of the hair. There are manuals and videos, of course, but for future reference here’s my step-by-step quickstart for this plugin…

Load the Garibaldi Hair System editor:

1. Load a figure in DAZ Studio. Select the figure.

2. Top Menu Bar: Create | Create New Garibaldi Hair… | Select DAZ Geometry Node | Select Character | Accept.

3. You now have a Garabaldi Hair item listed over in the Scene tab list of scene items. Select this Hair item. Now go to Top Menu Bar: Edit | Edit Garibaldi Hair.

4. The special Garabaldi Editor Window will launch.

5. Setup Room: Select Head / Skin on your character | Paint Room: Paint areas of head skin on which to grow hair | Then work the basic hair through the other Styling Rooms.

Save a finished hair style:

1. Select the Garabaldi Hair item listed over in the Scene tab list. Rename it. Grab it and slide it up so it becomes a child part of your character.

2. Activate Parameters tab: Top Menu | Window | Panes (Tabs) | All | Scroll down to “Fit to”, and ensure the hair is set to “Fit to” your character.

3. In the Scene tab list select the root/main entry for your character. In Top Menu | File | Save As… | Wearable preset… Now DAZ Studio should save the hair into …\My Library\Presets\Wearables. Find it as a clickable preview in: Content Library | DAZ Studio Formats | My Library | Presets | Wearables | (may take a few seconds for the preview icon to appear).

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New Vue! Vue 2015 released

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E-on has just released Vue Infinite 2015 and Vue xStream 2015.

Key new things…

* A new non-photorealistic ‘sketch’ renderer, with 40 presets.
* Render performance has also been improved across the board
* Photometric rendering speed now twice as fast.
* Scene previews up to eight times faster.
* New displacement mapping engine that may reduce render times.
* Pipeline integration – exchange data with ZBrush via GoZ.
* The user interface is more customisable.
* Real-world terrains can be imported in DTED, SDTS/DDF, and GeoTIFF data formats, on top of the existing DEM import.
* New content browser for searching, browsing and previewing large numbers of files.
* Further improvements to the clouds and atmospheres.
* Export Vue scenes to LumenRT for real-time renders.

Epic freebie

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

The leading videogame engine Unreal Engine 4 is now available… “to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free!”…

“You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.”

GeForce GTX 960

Posted on by Posted in 3D Renders, Companion software, DAZ Studio Leave a comment

This is interesting, especially if you were looking at buying Reality 4 because you can’t run Octane with Daz Studio. NVIDIA has released a powerful new GeForce GTX 960 slot-in graphics card (review) that should run Octane, and at an ideal $200 price vs. power point. But before you whip out your credit card, just remember to factor in:

* The probable need to upgrade your PC’s power supply unit. Even a new PC probably only came fitted with a wimpy PSU, unless you have a hardcore gaming PC.

* The electric bills that these graphics card beasts run up, once you slot them into a domestic ‘always on’ PC.

* Do you actually have the space and the correct type of slots in the PC case, so you can fit the card in?

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Those fans are going to make a fair bit of noise, too, if you pride yourself on how quiet your PC runs.

Stock wig cutouts for Daz and Poser renders

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser 2 Comments

It seems that no-one has ever taken a range of realistic wigs, photographed them pin-sharp and hanging from different angles against a good greenscreen, then used the pictures to create a royalty-free stock library of cut-out hair? With no stands, manniquin heads or other elements showing. Just the hair, looking as though it’s actually sitting on a head and not slumped on a desk. I just can’t find anything like that. A search for “wig” on Thinkstock finds only one suitable ‘isolated’ (cut-out) image, on Shutterstock there’s two, and even those have the shadows and highlights too stark…

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In the age of Reality 4, is the ‘bad hair day’ hair we usually have to put up with in 3D renders holding back our art? While also massively boosting the render times, I might add, even if you have software that can ‘grow’ and ‘style’ its own hair. Wouldn’t it be easier for many portrait picture makers to ‘Photoshop on’ some quality hair afterwards, from a good stock collection? And ideally one slanted toward sci-fi and fantasy hair, rather than middle America blow-dry styles taken from the 1977 Hairstylists’ Guide, of the sort that painted stock hair collections seem to favour?

Comic Life 3 – for Windows desktop

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A new version 3 of Comic Life software has been released, and it’s a desktop Windows version. Comic Life aids you in layout out and lettering a comic book page. Sure you can do this with Photoshop, but it’s much more fiddly and will probably take most people about twice as long. You can also do it with Manga Studio, but that’s software for professional comics artists and there’s a bigger cost and a learning curve. So it’s good to see Comic Life back in the game and on Windows desktop again with a fresh version that works on Windows 8.x.