Well, we’re now well into March. But the “February only” free software offer for DAZ Studio and Bryce 7 Pro and Hexagon 2.5 is still available. Grab these now, if you haven’t already got them or upgraded. Some of the valuable plugins, though, such as the DAZ ZBrush plugin and DAZ Studio’s useful 3D Bridge for Photoshop, seem to have gone back to being paid-for.
Update: July 2012… 3D Bridge for Photoshop is back to being free again. It’s also been updated for the new Photoshop and DAZ Studio 4.
This is my fairly comprehensive list for those making stills, comics and animations in Poser or the free DAZ Studio, featuring the personage and mythos of the science fiction / horror author H.P. Lovecraft. I’m assuming that you want to limit yourself to the Mythos created by the man himself, and not the bolt-ons added by his many acolytes.
Everything in this list is royalty-free content.
1. You might want to start with the man himself, who can be found in 3D form at Meshbox/Miyre ($13). Only Poser users get eyes-mouth facial motion capability (there’s a free expression set for Poser), as these features of the model don’t work in DAZ. In DAZ, the figure accepts aniMate animations. Once installed, he’s found under ../figures/HPLovecraft. He looks a bit waxy, but some good Poser skin shaders would probably make quite a difference. (Update: Meshbox also now offer an updated DAZ friendly version from their website).
2. His typewriter, complete with moving platen, can be purchased at Renderosity ($7) and comes with a distressed and aged texture as well as the usual ‘brand new’-look textures. Purists will want to hack the textures, to change the logo to that of a 1906 Remington…
3. A version of Cthulhu, seemingly an early effort by Sixus1, is available at Renderosity ($20)…
4. There’s also Poisen’s Cthulhus ($6) which is well worth having and beautifully modelled and textured…
UPDATE: new high-quality Cthulhu, the DAZ Store’s excellent Cthulhu Rising…
5. There’s an Elder Thing ($20), also at Runtime DNA…
6. A Mi-Go ($8)…
7. Sixus1 has a range of Aquarians ($10) inspired by “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”…
8. And there are also addons for the Aquarians, such as the Priest of Dagon ($7) and Aquarians: Obed’s Clothes ($8)…
There’s also an Aquarians Bundle.
9. Sixus1’s Phibians ($10) would, with a bit of modification, pass as far-gone Deep Ones.
10. Those wanting to digitally sculpt their own Deep One in the ZBrush software, can find a tutorial in the February-March issue of CG Arena…
11. For free over at the Google 3D Warehouse, is a huge collection of Lovecraft items and buildings. These can be saved as OBJ files from the free Google Sketchup, and the collection has already been converted for iClone.
12. You’ll also find a lot of 1910s/1920s props floating around the content stores (see the links over on the sidebar of this blog), such as trucks, buses, and store interiors such as the Old West Mercantile Interior ($17)…
That’s all I know of, as of Spring 2012 October 2012. Most of these DAZ/Poser items can also be converted for iClone fairly easily.
Do you know of any more 3D characters and models, that arise from Lovecraft’s original vision?
Update: Summer 2012. The Spiral Descent Cave Entrance looks nice and could be combined with The Pit.
Update: Summer 2012. The Mantabat for Poser could be textured to be a cool Lovecraftian Night Gaunt.
Update: August 2012. Found Sixus1’s early Night Gaunt. (Now vanished)
Update: October 2012. New quality Cthulhu character for DAZ and Poser.
Update: September 2013. A new free Cave Octopus for DAZ (.duf file).
Update: March 2014. Dead Pool could be a stand in for the working fishing port section of Innsmouth.
Update: January 2019. 24 Expressions for the Lovecraft 3D character from Meshbox.
Update: August 2020: There was a Stonemason item called “Whispering Wall”, which featured a strongly Lovecraft-like face in a wall, with a few expression morphs. I’ve tried it and it’s not worth having, and has been withdrawn from the market. Hopefully Stonemason might one-day remake it in some new form.
I found that Paolo Ciccone, the lighting wizard behind the well-reviewed Reality 2 plugin (it hooks up DAZ with the powerful and free LuxRender), has a free set of improved default lights for DAZ Studio. Plus a handy little tutorial on how to install them…
“The default lighting in DAZ Studio is very unflattering and un-inspiring. Basically it’s one single flood light mounted on top of the camera and it creates very flat, boring lighting. [so] I created a startup file for you that installs a simple but nice three-light system that immediately improves your lighting in Studio. This is not meant to be your final lighting, just the starting point.”
Here’s a preview of the changes that the new lights make…
They work with DAZ Studio 3 and 4.
Cloud-based rendering could be coming to DAZ Studio soon, as Otoy has purchased New Zealand’s Refractive Software. The news from GDC 2012 is that Otoy will now reportedly pair its cloud-gaming power with Refractive’s GPU-rendering software. The result will be Refractive’s Octane plugin presented as a cloud-renderer… “for DAZ 3D Studio”. No time-frame on that yet, but possibly 2012?
Although quite how a home user will send the bundle of data (FBX?) required for the cloud render, is another matter, especially on slow broadband uplink speeds.
The standalone desktop version of Octane costs only $99. So there’s hope that the DAZ Studio version would be at the same affordable cost. Poser users can already use Octane. My guess is perhaps $250 a year with the cloud rendering thrown in? That would certainly be cheaper than that the dual top-end Nvidia graphics cards needed to run Octane optimally on its own. Even then, you might need to scale down your 4000px skin textures on your DAZ exports.
One of the interesting aspects of Octane’s blurb is that…
“Octane Render provides [a] ‘What You See Is What You Get’ rendering environment […] The viewport on the screen IS the final render”
Nice, especially for 32-bit systems. But don’t think it’s going to replace software built on game engines, like Lumion and iClone any time soon. Here’s a real-world Octane user review, just published…
“At work, I use a fairly old quad-core workstation with bags of RAM. A 1080p frame with AO, some reasonably complex geometry and soft shadows will take me around 3 and a half minutes to render in Cinema4D’s native renderer. In Octane I can get much higher quality (including, I might add, working AO) in about 1 and a half minutes.”
Not bad, and no doubt useful for shaving down a commercial production company’s billing times. But what I want is genuine WYSIWYG 1080px in the viewport at 60 frames per second, like a videogame.
Posted in DAZ Studio, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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DAZ 3D is about to finish giving away its major software. DAZ Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro, and Hexagon 2.5 were all available for free for a month. Plus some very valuable plugins. Why did DAZ give away over $1,000 of software, to what might well have been around 250,000 people?
The headline answer is that software vending provides only about twenty percent of the firm’s annual income. The rest comes from sales of royalty-free content for its popular range of DAZ characters and animals. So the move was a drive to increase sales to that user base. Everyone who got the freebies had to sign up to DAZ’s store first, thus paving the way for future casual sales of content. With Carrara 9 (DAZ Studio’s “big sister”) expected to be released in Q2 2013, with Genesis and Victoria 5 support, DAZ’s new mailing-list is certainly going to come in handy for future promotions.
Behind the scenes there are apparently complicating factors. Some key merchants, such as the leading Sixus1, have publicly declared they can no longer support both the DAZ and Poser platforms. He favored supporting Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2014, in future. DAZ was thus seemingly facing a significant move toward the outstandingly excellent Poser Pro 2014. Poser can, of course, load more or less all the same content as DAZ and visa versa, although some Poser-specific texture types don’t travel well. Some of the other dedicated 3D pro and semi-pro creatives were also talking about making the same move to Poser-only content production. By giving away the DAZ range of software for free, if only for a limited time, DAZ perhaps hopes to claw back some of its key content creation merchants.
The inclusion of robust content production tools in DAZ Studio 4 Pro also means that DAZ might be able to grow its content producing merchants as a result of the giveaway, which could make up for any that decide to produce only for Poser.
The promotion will also leave a long-lasting legacy of inbound links and publicity, scattered around the Web, all driving traffic to DAZ. The promotion has possibly widened its hobbyist user-base to the sort of advanced Photoshop and Corel Painter users who read ImagineFX magazine.
The final reason is no doubt to placate the user-base of DAZ. The launch of Studio 4 was not smooth, and might even be said to have been a long drawn-out series of mistakes. Many advanced users were spurred by this sad saga to look seriously at Poser Pro 2014, and they very much liked what they saw. By giving away the top-of-the-line pro version of DAZ Studio now, including the valuable Decimator and several bridge plugins that give access to ZBrush and Photoshop, DAZ has done a lot to restore its reputation and to draw people back. Personally I dislike Studio 4 and I will be sticking with Studio 3 and iClone, while taking another look at Poser in the form of the excellent Poser Pro 2014.
But, free is good. We should welcome anything that draws newcomers and traditional creatives into the world of 3D renders, especially at a time when 2D and 3D creative practices are converging and merging. As for storytelling animation, I suspect that many hobby animators will in future increasingly go to real-time tools, that are based on videogame engines — such as Lumion, iClone 5, Muvizu, and others that will emerge.
“Some sorts of fans, you really don’t want to make angry…” Above: Sanctum Arts’s The Horde werewolf model for Poser (now, sadly, withdrawn from the market along with his other fabulous RD Phenotype monsters — I hear rumors they’re going to be used for a feature-film…?)