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Category Archives: DAZ Studio
Material zones in DAZ
Coming in early/mid June 2022, a two-part webinar on working with material zones in DAZ Studio.
Testing DAZ 4.20.0.17
The DAZ installer 4.20.0.17 (latest installer) has been installed here and the new DAZ has had some testing.
1) I found I had to recreate my Scripts menu and re-assign a custom shortcut. The items were still there (F3 | left panel | Custom | expand) but there was no scripts menu for them and one vital item had lost the keyboard shortcut.
They had all lost their native ‘Scripts’ UI menu, off which they hang. This menu had vanished, despite the UI layout preset being the same.
2) The slightly older 4.20.0.2 had a bug which I found. This prevented it from fully returning to the UI after fullscreen (Shift + F11). This bug appears to have been fixed with the new 4.20.0.17 (latest installer), but for keyboard presses only.
‘Why would you want to fullscreen’, you ask? Because doing so with the Viewport set to iRay means you can save the largest possible iRay ‘File | Save Last Draw…’ render. You already have an iRay render in your Viewport, so why render it again? It’s there, so just save it out in a micro-second. Admittedly it may be far from perfect after maybe eight seconds or so of rendering, but good enough for use in a complex compositing mix over in Photoshop.
So, keyboard fullscreen is fixed with 4.20.0.17. However, the scripted automation is not fixed. Using the script commands…
MainWindow.goFullScreen()
MainWindow.exitFullScreen()
… has the same problem as before. It works, and as if you were pressing keys. But the Viewport is then found to be kaput on return, whereas it was fine for simple key-presses. After the scripted fullscreen the Viewport is found to have lost all its widgets, and the display hangs forever displaying a ‘uniform grey’. DAZ has to be closed to cure the problem.
This script bottleneck is cured in VisNews #30 (April 2022), when the reader is shown how to chain together DAZ scripts, custom keyboard commands, mouse-gesture freeware and a Python script, such that…
I can now draw a simple “N” mouse-gesture in DAZ… and 90 seconds later I automatically have an eight-layer Photoshop .PSD file of quality artwork, ready for further creative compositing work.
This timestamped .PSD, dropped onto the Desktop, also has a Viewport ‘Save Last Draw…’ iRay render in in, made in fullscreen.
I should say however, that the VisNews solution is Windows-only and all renders must be at 1681px by 1141px. The size is due to the impossibility of forcing the Viewport Draw to be larger than the 1200px-height monitor size being used.
What’s new for Poser and DAZ in April 2022?
What’s new for Poser and DAZ in April 2022? Time for another survey of the new items released for Poser and DAZ Studio users. As usual, freebies are only featured if commercial use.
Science fiction:
SpecOps Helmet by Cybertenko, for M4. With various MATs.
Shadow Market. I’m guessing this may be close to fan-art, and looks Star Wars -ish. So check before commercial use in comics etc.
Intercept for Genesis 8, a futuristic fighter-pilot outfit.
Cryo Stasis Deck for DAZ Studio, which might fit well with similar items.
No steampunk this month, but a fab dieselpunk super-villain, Juggernaut for G8M.
Fantasy:
Nursoda has released an unusual one, Servants Of Apollyon. They’re one of the various monsters cryptically mentioned in the Bible, and were probably large flying locusts likened by Near East folk tradition to “little horses” in speech. Here we get an unusual ‘horse-a-locust-a-scorpion’ for Poser.
There are also free Feltlocks For Apollyon, and Poses for Nursoda’s Fehn that fit with Apollyon.
A wolf-man LoboMan for Genesis 8 Male.
Scyllah, a Scorpion Lady for G8F.
RDNA Victoria Bone Armor 1 for V4, currently free on the DAZ Store.
Meshbox’s Dungeon Halls, Walls and Doors construction kit for Poser. Old but new on the store and thus possibly now with a texture makeover?
EV Bonfire for Poser.
Iron Scale Armor for G8M, part of a range. Nicely done.
SWAN Song Violin Kit and SWAN Dance Costume Kit for G8F. Looks good, but I couldn’t get the picture previews to work on this for some reason, and the main promo is impossibly dark.
Storybook:
A free Stork Family for Central European rooftops, where they nest. Low-poly but that won’t matter to those who want to overpaint their picture-book renders.
Simple cute Easter Eggs and Fluffy Chicks.
Hr-250 from Ali, for Poser.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix: Puffins and Auks.
Also from Ken G., Songbird ReMix Australia Vol. 3, Songbird ReMix Pelicans (updated) and Songbird ReMix Jacanas. The latter being South American ‘lily trotter’ birds akin to the English coot.
Anniemation’s Flying Dove Animation for Songbird ReMix Gamebirds Vol. 3. Has a video preview and looks very well done.
Mountain Lion Poses for Big Cat 2 Cougar.
Landscape:
People:
Free L’homme Dark Glasses for Poser’s flagship male figure.
Ghostship Hair Shader System for Poser 12.
Martin Hair for Genesis 8 Males. Usefully generic and modern.
Pose Me Unique Vol.5 for G3F and G8F. Based on classic Japanese manga comic poses, and it’s building into quite a series.
French Horn and Poses for G8. Poses to have your character play the orchestral instrument.
Female Cat Walk Construction Set for fashion catwalks. Also an Animation Set. Jazz up your catwalk with the new Cyber Tunnels.
Generic G8F Walking Poses 21 to 25. Here they’re unusually modelled on idly kicking a ball about in a lacklustre manner.
MoonDust for AS Fable Hair, an unusual release for 2022, as this Aery Soul V4 hair is now totally unavailable. These are just colours. Perhaps the pack was just something someone found in a dusty drawer and decided should be out there?
Props:
Sewing Machine, a complete set for Poser. Could be useful for those who want to make a instruction manual, together with Poser’s Comic Book mode.
Free G8F Hurdles Poses and Sports Ground: Hurdles props.
A free very Low Poly Umbrella Kit for a crowd scene in the rain. One of a number of similar freebies.
Historical:
A free Norman Helmet for Micheal 8.
A free Maciejowski Helmet and Knight armor, and a Helmet Kapalin.
Also free are Helmet Crusader 1 and Helmet Crusader 2.
dForce Seljuk Turkish Princess Outfit and iRay Medieval Fantasy Shaders (Merchant Resource).
Joseon Era Hanbok for G8M and hat. I think this is Korean. South Korea is having a heritage and museum boom, as their middle-classes mature. With a small makeover I guess the hat would also suit ye olde Welsh ladies.
Mr Gibbs Hair, Eybrows and Beard for DAZ Studio, and the earlier Captain Barbossa returns. Not lawyered by the Disney megacorp, after all, but just removed by the maker for a fix. Both are free, and the beard and whiskers alone are worth having for use with other figures.
Vintage Navy Recruiting Poster Outfit for G8F. Probably needs to be paired with a skirt for the proper ‘1938’ feeling.
A complete 1960s Retro Bowling Alley for DAZ Studio.
Scripts:
Pose Me for G8F. “154 Morphs with sliders for total control of your character’s Arms, Shoulders, Hands, Fingers, Legs, Foot and Toes!”
Mesh to Volume… and Back for DAZ. Takes advantage of the volumetrics in the latest iRay, which needs the latest DAZ Studio.
Substance Painter Assistant. Said to help with sending DAZ content to Substance.
A free Collision Target Creation script for DAZ. “In DAZ you can only specify one collision target. But sometimes you want to target both skirts and shirts. Then let’s make the skirt and shirt into one object!”
Ken’s new script Figure to Prop for Poser 12. Also a DUF Morph Converter for Poser 12 (“DAZ Studio 4 DUF props/figures to existing converted PP2 files”).
Unimesh Exporter for Poser 12.
Blender to Poser automatic converter Python script.
That’s it for April. Strange how the trends go… no steampunk or toon this month.
There has been a certain cost in moving this blog from the .org domain to the .link domain, in money as well as time. If you could consider becoming my patron on Patreon then you would be very welcome. Even $1 a month is an encouragement in these difficult times. Thanks.
VDB Animations under CC0
Download Free VDB Animations: Explosions, Fire, Tornado and more. Now that DAZ Studio support .VBD volumetrics files, these should theoretically be loadable and playable there. Licences are CC0, so you’re free to use these VFX your next mega-movie. The front-page takes an age to download, so here’s a screenshot of the effects…
JangaFX is also readying its Embergen 1.0 tool for final release is about a year.
New for Poser and DAZ in March 2022
Script: apply a single shader to multiple surfaces in DAZ
I’ve finally found and hacked a working way to have a script apply a single shader across multiple surfaces in DAZ. Many hours of searching and testing finally surfaced Mcasual’s free mcjSelectTheseMats. This will do the job in DAZ 4.12.x, with a few custom adjustments. I’m amazed no-one has made such a script for this basic task, until now. Here is my working tweak to extend the ‘mcjSelectTheseMats’ script.
SelectTheseMats_ApplyShader.txt (download, rename to be a .DSA script)
This selects the named base figure in the scene, then makes sure he is really selected, then selects and highlights all the non-eye surfaces of the ‘Genesis 2 Male’. Adjust as desired for your likely target figure (e.g ‘Genesis 8 Female’. There is also a naming convention which handles having two or more Genesis figures of the same base type in a scene).
The resulting script auto-selects all the required surfaces. This part works even if something else entirely is selected in the scene, when the script is run, e.g. a light. It also doesn’t matter if the target figure is named ‘Fluffy Bunny’ etc in your runtime, the DAZ scene only sees and knows him as a ‘Genesis 2 Male’.
Then at the end of the script, I added two lines to apply the chosen shader to the selected surfaces. Obviously you will need to adjust the path to your desired shader and file and then save the script.
With this script in hand you can then theoretically build it into a larger multi-pass ‘render, load and repeat’ script. By having the script make an automatic render after each new shader is applied. It would be ‘shader-based’ multi-pass, rather than ‘render-engine based’ multi-pass.
Obviously the script as it stands is not the ‘apply to all surfaces in a scene, except those identified as eyes’ I initially wanted, but it works and goes a long way toward it.
Also, this was the short non-working version that I wrestled with for a long time. Theoretically it should work, but it doesn’t select the surfaces, only applies the shader to any already-selected surfaces…
var figure = Scene.findNodeByLabel( “Genesis 2 Male” );
figure.select( true );
var sPathToFile = “C://my_folder/my_shader.duf”;
App.getContentMgr().openFile( sPathToFile, true );
It may save someone else the trouble in the future.
mcjDropToTerrain 2
mCasual has released the free script mcjDropToTerrain 2 for DAZ Studio 4. Drop 3D objects onto the surface of a 3D mesh/terrain, even if the mesh is bumpy/curvy.
New for DAZ and Poser in February 2022
Post lost in the move, but there’s a PDF backup of it with links…
Release: DAZ Studio Studio 4.20
The new DAZ Studio Studio 4.20 is out of beta and it updates to “the latest version of iRay (2021.1.0)”. Meaning we get the volumetric depth-effects (i.e. lights shining through fogs, hazes, mists etc) that the iRay devs have been working on.
The iRay devs also noted on their tech blog… “dramatically decreased host/CPU texture memory usage” for this iRay version. Which many people doing CPU-only rendering and/or more-or-less real-time viewports on CPUs will welcome. Yes it is possible to run iRay on CPUs alone, if you have enough of them and a streamlined workstation. It’s a myth that it only runs on expensive NVIDIA graphics cards (GPUs).
4.20 is also said to have lots of bug and stability fixes. As with all shiny new software releases, it’s probably best to wait a few weeks before install, to see what problems the early adopters encounter.
Update: No, I can’t recommend it… as it can badly screw up the Viewport. There’s a major bug with the SHIFT + F11 fullscreen, with this current installer version.
What was new for Poser and DAZ in January 2022?
Post lost in the move, but there’s a PDF backup of it with Web links…
What’s New for Poser and DAZ in December 2021
It’s getting toward the end of the month, so… it’s survey time for new Poser and DAZ content. As usual freebies are only noted if they are also commercial use, or are such obvious fan-art that no-one would think of using them commercially.
Also, no ‘HD’ items are covered here since they adjust your render settings without asking (and in ways that are difficult for newbies to reverse), and are only useful for a few people with incredibly powerful PCs.
At risk of sounding like a moaner, I have to say that the DAZ Store is still very slow to browse for me, despite the new smaller thumbnail previews. Even scrolling down the Wishlist too far now stalls loading for 20 seconds or so. This is the only such site that has these problems for me. I try to bypass this problem by bookmarking into my Wish List, but may still have missed a few at the DAZ Store.
Science-fiction:
A useful free tech Display Band for DAZ and with wearable presets for G8. It also seems fairly easy to add your own wording.
A cool super-villain Helmet 048 for G3. Not fan-art, so far as I know.
Dubrock for G8M. Not fan-art, so far as I know. Though it looks a bit Guardians of the Galaxy.
The free Dystopia Props and Dystopia Props 2, good for cluttering the middle-distance of wide and city scenes.
Steampunk:
A free Steampunk Mask for G8.
Add Blimp, a middle-distance cyber-city blimp that could be fairly easily adapted for steampunk. Just replace the advert-hoarding with hydrogen-tanks.
FPE Tentacle Arms for G8M, good for a Captain Nemo-type submarine or airship crew. The crew probably hail from the Pirate Shipping Village.
Toon:
Little Mummy for G8F and poses and expressions. Somewhat similar to the old RDNA toon Ancient Egyptian mummy-boy, but not the same.
A free set of toony String Lights (Christmas Lights) for DAZ.
Storybook:
Christmas Pixie for La Femme for Poser.
Disco Stomp Trainers for G8F. Requires the base Stomp Trainers.
Animals:
3DU Toon Mouse Fur Long, a Look At My Hair preset.
Songbird ReMix Hummingbirds v3 for Poser and DAZ.
Love Kitty, 28 3D cat props of various types (bowl, toy mice, dangler, etc).
Landscape elements:
A free Wooden Cross for DAZ and also in .OBJ, ‘Boot Hill’ style and with Wild West style bootlaces.
A free Hang-Glider for DAZ and G8.
Let’s hope your hang-glider pilot doesn’t land in the Stinging Nettles for DAZ. Definitely not a British stinging-nettle, and so perhaps an American variety? Quality and also in .OBJ, so likely to interest Vue users.
Historical:
Primitive Norse Structures 2 including two ramshackle windmills.
Joseon Era Hair for G8F. What a girl might wear in the 1400s-1900s in Korea. Also a paid dForce Hanbok dress from that era.
The useful and adaptable free medieval Headscarf Outfit for G8F. Not dForce but has some control morphs. Previews suggest it’s capable of turning into a sort of short cape, so may also be of interest to makers of super-heroine comics.
L’HommeHat 2, a sort of German / Austrian / Swiss / Italian hat of the type that might be seen on an Alpine summer guide in the 1920s and 30s. Also L’HommeHat 1 which is more of a classic British workman’s flat-cap.
A free Antique Harbour Telescope in .OBJ format.
A Royal Opera Stage from the early/mid 19th century, with side boxes.
A Fountain Pen Ink Bottle, Pen Accessories, and 1916 Fountain Pen Prop. See also the new Cardboard And Paper Shaders pack.
British vintage 3D railway expert Dryjack has a new Sopwith Pup biplane, a classic British plane.
dForce Aran Sweater Outfit for G8M, of the sort a Scottish crofter or early pilot might have worn.
A somewhat 1960s K-Roller petrol-scooter, free. Also note the helmet which could be used in other types of retro scenes. I guess it may actually be a modern electric scooter, with a retro design?
Figures:
The Corinna La Femme character/skin makeover. Appears to need La Femme Pro, rather than the free La Femme which ships with Poser?
A more basic but free alternative look for Poser’s flagship La Femme, to nudge her away from the Princess Di look, is the new Helena for La Femme.
Still prefer V4? A free SuperFly Skin shader for V4, so V4 can render in SuperFly, and with a bit of automatic ‘sweat gloss’ too.
Genesis Clones (aka ‘Genesis Clones for Genesis 8 and 8.1 and Vice Versa’). Genesis 8 Male and Female Clones for Genesis 1, so you can fit G8 clothes and items to the original Genesis figure. Shows in the fitting list for G1 as ‘Vyusur…’.
Straightforward Catwalk Animations for Clothes Presentation for G8F. It seems this is not the same as last month’s “Runway Animation” pack from the same maker.
Hair:
Free 1950s ‘The Fonz’ style strand based hair for G8M. With front cow-lick.
Free SBHBeards for G8M. Strand-based hair and eyebrows and moustaches. Looks useful.
A simple free Genesis 1 skull cap. Shows up in the Library under My Library | People | Genesis | Hair | Willq, not under People | Genesis as you might expect.
Scripts:
DUF Pose Converter for Poser 12. Convert your DAZ .DUF poses to Poser 12 and apply them “to any figure you may have on stage”, apparently. Not tested by me.
FlockIt for DAZ Studio. Looks similar to ‘Send in the Clones’ and the various Scatter scripts for Poser.
ArchangelFirewolf’s free Pose Control Converter for G3 and G8. Seems to add a set of sliders that allow tweaking for fine adjustment of poses.
Installing PIP in Poser 11. PIP is a package manager for installing further Python packages that have components needed for scripts to run. So… if you had a need for some specialist Python module that doesn’t already ship with Poser, this might get it installed.
Tutorials:
A three-part in-depth Comic Book Creation Kit Bundle of tutorials and guidance, which seems to be aimed at photoreal comics makers using DAZ.
Noted elsewhere:
For Blender, Grease Pencil From Mesh, with an edge-sharpener.
3D maker Sixus1, also a fine digital painter, has a new Platinum Brush Pack for Photoshop and PaintStorm. It appears to be his current working brushes set, honed and weeded over many years.
Ok, that’s it for December 2021 and for 2021. Onward to 2022!
Top of the pops in 2021
So, what are the top items on Renderosity? Rendo provides a page where you can find such things out. The top four are pretty much as you might expect.
Followed by a superstore’s-worth of skimpies and silkies, page after page, and just a couple of other quality G8 female characters. You have to scroll a long way down to get to something like “STZ Cleaning accessories”. It takes a while to puzzle that one out, but then the penny drops: hardware accessories for the maid costumes.
Way way down after many pages you start to see occasional other things, like “Photo Props: Fire Effect Maker” and the “Poser 12 – Upgrade”. Eventually, after a very long time of scrolling the first male item appears. G8M realistic body-hair strips, and then after another few pages another in “Karl for Genesis 8 Male”. Hurrah for Karl, but… he has no other mates down there.
Eventually we start to get a couple of animals, with the HiveWire Horse, Songbird ReMix Corvus (crows). Also a few very scattered sci-fi sets. Even further down up pops La Femme Pro V.2, along with more Hivewive Big Cats, Hivewire Housecat. Also Poser 11 at the Renderosity price.
So basically it seems that if you want to sell to the masses, G3F and G8F is where it’s at. Specifically clothing and the slinkier and more enticing the better. However, it’s obviously a very crowded market. I’m guessing the ‘work to hit product’ ratio might be high, and you could have to produce and shout about twenty or more items of new clothing to get one breakthrough product that sells well. The rest are likely to be lost in the tidal waves of similar items, because back of these best-sellers must be thousands of others that didn’t get the traction.
Hair obviously has to be really really good to make it up the charts. I guess many people already have their favourite go-to hairs. Also, hair is a risky buy, so buyers may be averse.
There’s a surprisingly lack of scripts and add-ons, but I guess such things are beyond the ability of the mass market and so don’t sell a lot.
Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that the kind of stuff that sold twenty years ago is no longer selling. It probably is. It’s just that such things are being drowned out in the charts by the new mass market.
What of the DAZ Store? So far as I can tell the DAZ Store’s “sort by most popular” is not an all-time or yearly tally, and only seems to give you the most popular this week.
Boost for DAZ
DAZ Studio users are set to get a new integrated iRay render-farm service in the Cloud. Infinite-Compute’s “Boost for DAZ” will presumably become available as a free plugin soon. Nothing there yet, I just looked. According to the press-release on the partnership the new service will offer the ability to first configure… “a custom NVIDIA iRay Server within minutes” by budget / time / complexity. Then once that has spun up, users quickly render the project on it and “only pay for what they use.” No need for expensive graphics cards, then, just a fast Internet uplink to get the file and any relevant folders uploaded.
Looks good, and it may be especially welcomed by those who are shut out of the NVIDIA ecosystem, either because of Apple or the simple lack of fast cards to buy at their supposed ‘budget’ prices.
Presumably you can also still run things like Scene Optimizer in DAZ first, and thus make the upload / cloud rendering faster and thus save cash? But that’s just my guess.
Said to be “affordable”, and judging by the current prices on the Infinite Compute site it is and is pay-as-you-go.
Top of the range is a professional studio NVIDIA Quadro RTX4000 aided by 8 CPUs. But you can also render iRay on 12 x CPUs alone if you want. Yes, iRay can run on CPUs alone, as it’s a myth that it needs an NVIDIA card. That’s what I’ve actually got under the desk: 12 CPUs / 24 render threads, and with a little help from Scene Optimizer and a couple of tweaks it can push the Viewport into something approaching real-time. A bit grainy for a few seconds when the camera moves, but perfectly acceptable in giving a ‘what you see is what you get’ view of the scene.
I assume that what you won’t get from Infinite-Compute is some kind of hook into powering your DAZ Viewport, whereby their server also helps render your Viewport in iRay while you set up the scene and test angles, lighting etc. As such I expect Infinite-Compute will mostly be used for big 6k final ‘beauty’ renders and by animators. You’ll still need some kind of hefty local computing power to help with the scene setup.
DAZ freebies page updates
The DAZ Store Freebies page has updated. Michael 6 / The Girl 6 / Gia 6 Starter Bundles, all for Genesis 2, including some hairs; a 1970s-style sci-fi ‘Wicked Date Night Genesis’ dress; and a retro early-1960s outfit ‘Ordinarily One for Genesis 2’.
If you go to the Store and sort by price you’ll also currently find the freebies ‘Gingerbread Set’; ‘Ivy Plants’ and a ‘Holiday Lucky Bag’. Which is a bag, not a surprise freebie.