News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Companion software

Miki 4 for Carrara

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Are you a DAZ Carrara user who’s keen to get the new Miki 4 into your runtime? There’s a new plugin from veteran developer Fenric, Poser Weightmap Injector. It shuttles Miki between… “Poser Pro 2012 SR2 and Carrara 8”, and it’s free. It should work on similar official Poser figures, but is… “not guaranteed to work for every dedicated Poser figure”. Presumably it also works with Poser Pro 2012 SR3 and Carrara 8.5, but that’s just my guess.

New free Cinema 4D student edition

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The traditional 3D software Cinema 4D has released a… “free, fully functional, Student Edition of Cinema 4D”. Specifically, the new version 14. Which potentially saves you about $1,000.

Nice, but it’s actually not quite fully functional. There’s no plugin support in the student version (so presumably Poser Pro 2014 users won’t be able to use their official PoserFusion Poser-CD4 bridge plugin with it), and nor is there networked rendering. Oh, and the software expires after 18 months.

Still, if you were thinking of testing it then the student edition might be an option. The results can look rather pretty. Here’s Fredy3D’s “The Defenders of Bast Prime” from his New Egypt sci-fi series…

Fredy’s pipeline between Poser and Cinema 4D is actually via the $75 commercial plugin InterPoser, rather than PoserFusion.

Photoshop Elements 11

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The new Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 is now available at Adobe. The makers Adobe have a special offer on now, offering free shipping on the boxed Adobe Photoshop Elements 11.

Elements is the simplified and streamlined version of the full Photoshop, and it takes far less time to learn. It took me three years to learn Photoshop 3 and 4, over a decade ago. It would have been a lot quicker if I could have started on an easy Elements version first, and then upgraded later.

Amazon USA still have the new Photoshop Elements 11 on pre-order, and Amazon UK don’t even list it yet — so if you want a gift copy early then the Adobe offer seems worth looking at.

Brian Haberlin: creating dynamic poses, and over-painting 3D

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Can you inject dynamism and “life” into a DAZ Studio or Poser character pose, as easily as you can inject a morph? Only if you know the secrets of the pros. Commercial comics artists know more than most about this topic, and American comic-book artist Brian Haberlin (Spawn) has a handy and quality new article on the top 10 ways to bring your 3D character art to life.

Brian also has a cool long article on overpainting 3D renders for comics, using Painter… which comes from the book Secrets of Corel Painter Experts: Tips, Techniques, and Insights for Users of All Abilities…

DAZ 3D Bridge for Photoshop updates, and still free

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I’m very pleased to see that the DAZ 3D Bridge for Photoshop has now been updated to work with DAZ Studio 4, and with the versions of Photoshop Extended that are higher than CS3. The 3D Bridge software connects DAZ Studio directly to Photoshop, and this updated version is currently still free! Go grab the new version now, before DAZ decides to slap a price on it!

New Blender-to-DAZ scene export plugin, free

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Do you have a scene made with the free Blender, that you want to render complete in DAZ Studio? Silvio has written a new Blender plugin that claims to do that…

“I have written a plugin for Blender 2.6.2 bridge, to DAZ Studio 3.1 or up. It exports the 3D geometry to DAZ Studio, via [Blender’s] Collada export, and it exacts camera animation positions, rotation, dolly, zoom, DOF…”

Probably not textures, though, if it’s a Cycles scene. I know from experience that nothing on earth will export one of those with textures.

Here’s his detailed 24-minute video tutorial…

New set of DAZ-to-Blender scripts

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McjTeleblender is a…

“new kit of scripts designed to quickly export DAZ Studio scenes, even animations, and render them in Blender using Blender’s GPU-accelerated ray-trace renderer named Cycles.”

It’s early days, and the scripts are still being patched. But it all appears to work and offers yet another (and free!) option for high-end raytracing from DAZ Studio scenes.