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.
Category Archives: Freebies
Release: MeshLab update
A new version of the free MeshLab was released, just before Halloween.
Mostly used for poly-reduction of 3D meshes, for many. “Quadric Edge Decimation” is what you want there.
Bear in mind that the two new versions in 2021 have bjorked every Meshlab tutorial ever written on smoothing, as all the relevant filters are either removed or differently-named or put somewhere else. The solution is to go get Meshlab 2016 which is still available and is what the old tutorials were written for.
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.
Renderosity’s Advent Calendar freebies
Renderosity now has an official Christmas Advent Calendar. Each day, with download links active for ‘one day only’, leading vendors give away Poser / DAZ content as an open download. A new cumulative post each day, and the list is currently on the third day.
Blender 3.0 lands
Blender 3.0 stable is out, and there’s also a 3.1 alpha. Mostly 3.0 seems to be about speed/performance, UI changes, and the new Asset Browser. The multipage changelog for 3.0 is big and techie enough to stun a charging rhino, but here are some highlights I spotted…
* Faster rendering on Cycles, “rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.” If… you have a hefty RTX graphics card. (That sounds like very good news for Poser 12, if it can be plugged in any time soon. Poser uses Cycles, but there it’s re-branded as SuperFly).
* Auto tile-tweaking. This is about the tile-size that gets rendered when rendering. e.g. 128 pixels. “Previously tweaking tile size was important for maximizing CPU and GPU performance. Now this is mostly automated.”
* Faster hair curves (not ribbons), but again only if… you have a fast NVIDIA OptiX card.
* A less laggy viewport, and again… I suspect that having a fast shiny new graphics card will help there.
* For the overall UI “the default theme got a refresh” and various changes.
* It’s now faster to work with the UI, which is good because Blender needs a lot of clicky-clicky work. The speed is due to things like faster text rendering, as panels spring into existence.
* Not much this time around for Eevee, but… “Performance when editing a huge mesh is improved.”
* New GreasePencil abilities with some new line modifiers (dashes, wiggles etc), and thus expanded lineart possibilities.
* A major rework of the UI layout for Freestyle. I hear elsewhere that it’s a bit quicker now to load a previous set of lines.
* .USD files can now be imported into Blender. This is the Pixar Universal Scene Description format.
* AMD GPUs are now supported.
* OpenCL rendering is removed. So is Branched Path Tracing. And the Rigify Legacy Mode is gone.
* A new Asset Browser for: Objects; Materials; Poses and Expressions; Worlds. I assume it’s drag-and-drop.
Blender 2.93 portable could run on Windows 7 with a small workaround. I assume there will also be enough demand to fix 3.0 for Windows 7. But until then, 3.0 is officially Windows 8 or higher. It will also refuse to install unless you have a sufficiently powerful graphics card.
Update: Blender 3.51 for Windows 7 (early May 2023). Needing no installer, it will now launch! Hurrah.
Fantasy Attic’s 2021 Advent Calendar
Fantasy Attic’s 2021 Christmas Advent Calendar page is now online, for a month of Poser and DAZ freebies. Day 1 should be opening today.
New for Poser and DAZ in November 2021
Time for another survey and pick of what was new for Poser and DAZ, in November 2021. As usual, freebies are only noted if the renders can be used commercially.
Science-fiction:
Grounds Add-On 1 and Grounds Add-On 2, both for Flinks Space 2 backgrounds + props set. A range of grounds for ‘moon landing’-type scenes and vignettes.
Wasteland Shop for Poser by 1971s, and there is also a DAZ version.
The Wasteland Shop is probably home to the guy who builds the Racing Cheetah robot NE-10-O. In OBJ, though, which is likely to only be good for static scenes. Still… good robot cats are rare, so I’ll mention it here.
Cyberpunk backstreet by 1971s, and there is also a DAZ version.
AJ Another World by AppleJack. Various useful additions to someone’s ‘alien foliage’ collection.
Sci-fi Desert Portals scene, in .OBJ on ArtStation so also good for Vue. Could be paired with the new Pharaonic Relics set for DAZ. Note also the excellent ‘tall ancient wall’ in the latter.
Fantasy:
Free Anime Slanted Eyebrows, also useful for faeries and Vulcans. These are LIE overlay images only, for the Layered Image Editor. Most people (including me until recently) have never heard of LIE, but it lurks within the Surfaces tab and for things like tattoos can be used as an alternative to a geoshell.
Head Monster for G8M, seven merchant-resource head-shape morphs.
Halloween:
The free OsoS Hulking Horror for DAZ. I assume it’s not fan-art.
MortemVetus has his Ultima Mortis M4 back online at Renderosity.
Christmas:
Happy Holideer for the HiveWire Mule Deer
A free Xmas Roof setting with iced-up chimmney.
Clothing:
A free Nutcracker Hat, also likely to be useful for Moebius-style sci-fi character uniforms.
Related to clothing, a pack of Fashion Catwalk Animations for G8.
Storybook:
A free Zottelchen and Zottel.
A free Inflatable Dolphin.
Toddler – Ginger Outfit, a ‘gingerbread man’ toddler costume.
Fallen Leaves – Scatters and Drifts also seems useful for storybook-type scenes.
History:
Burial Sites: Mound for Poser, an Ancient British style burial mound from Cybertenko. The grass is removable, so you could add Flink’s or take it to Vue as a Poser scene and use an ecosystem on it.
The new Corbelled Stone Hut might serve as a mound interior.
Reed Huts 2 for DAZ Studio. ‘Laketown’ style primitive stilt-huts and fishing platforms.
Stranded Pirate Ship scene.
A Dutch 19th century Wooden Rowing Kubboat, which would also have been seen in the waterlands around New York City until the 1920s.
dForce Victorian Gentleman Outfit for G8 and textures.
Free 1950s room-sized computers for Poser.
A 1990s type Urban Skatepark. Might also match with the new Dynamic Destruction Vol. 1 for DAZ, an abandoned building with Dynamic Destruction morphs.
Animals:
Cat Zeus, a chunky ginger grimalkin or ‘top cat’, with poses and dForce hair.
Songbird ReMix: Hummingbirds of North America pack.
Animations and Still Poses for Woolly Mammoth. There’s a video demo at YouTube.
Prehistoric Amphibian Diplocaulus and Dragonfly Prey for DAZ.
Shaders and textures:
A free body/face Cycles shaders for A3. In Poser, Blender’s Cycles renderer is renamed SuperFly, so it might have been named as ‘SuperFly Shaders for Aiko 3’.
A set of Handmade Textures for Use with G’MIC’s ‘Artistic Stylize’ filter.
Useful scripts:
Blender to Poser automatic converter, a Blender Python script to quickly extract just the content-asset from a Blender .blend file, and nothing else. Also uses Poser-friendly settings. (For Poser only, as the results are not DAZ-friendly).
Chain Control for Poser 12, for flexible/animated tails, whips and suchlike. Note that Poser 12 has Windows OS requirements for downloading scripts from Renderosity. Windows 7 users may not be able to get the script, even if they purchased it.
Copy Dynamic Hair Room Settings now has a Poser 12 version of the script. Scroll down the freestuff page to see the link.
Tutorials:
Mandelbulb 3D : Power Tips for Creating Fractal Worlds. With Scappin Matteo who’s an expert in the free Mandelbulb3D.
That’s it for November, more after Christmas! Please consider keeping a little bit of your Black Friday spend back, to go toward my Patreon instead. Even a few extra dollars a month is a great encouragement and a help with my many different projects. Many thanks.
DAZ freebies page updates
The DAZ freebies page has updated. Three Genesis 2 everyday outfits, some pose packs, one Genesis 2 hair.
Sacked!
Sacked! was made with DAZ’s Cookie and Chip figures. It’s a “Christmas movie” in the form of a 3D graphic novel. Recently released free on the ArtStation Marketplace.
The maker is interviewed in VisNews #23.
Poly Haven
From South Africa, the new Poly Haven. A library website of free CC-Zero Blender assets with, at present, what appears to be some quality-control. A test of a small oil-can gave me an open public download (no sign-up needed). The polished and roomy new site seems to be from a small group of young Blender enthusiasts, who plan to run on a mix of crowdfunding and ads. It’s crowdfunding now.
Opening my test file failed in Blender 2.76, but succeeded in 2.83. Automatic Blender to Poser conversion then succeeded nicely, and the can was inside Poser in seconds and looking good.
Winging it…
I stumbled on a couple of interesting alternative possibilities re: curing the DAZ-to-Poser ‘butterfly wing’ eyelash problem, at least for Genesis 1 and 3. Get rid of the lashes altogether in DAZ, first.
1) A free set of G3F Morphs. One of which is…
‘No Lashes’ – embeds the lashes deep inside the head and scales them to a near microscopic size
Once loaded, found under: Parameters: Actor : Head : Face : “Eyelashes Hide”.
2) A free ‘No Eyelashes’ morph for Genesis 1. G1 is still useful for comic makers due to its great many creature and other morphs, and the ability to easily go to Poser 11 via DSON.
Once loaded, found under: Parameters: Actor : Head : Face : Eyes : “No Lashes”.
Works on a test Poser 11 import via DSON, and no “Sub-division OFF” is then needed there to fix the eyelashes.
Release: MeshLab 2021.10
MeshLab 2021.10 has been released. If you’ve missed the last few releases of this free open-source 3D mesh ‘Swiss Army Knife’, here some of what’s recently new…
* support for *.gltf, *.glb, *.nxs, *.nxz, *.e57.
* a brand-new plugin for exact mesh booleans.
* a new Python library for mesh batch processing (replaces old meshlabserver).
* a new “Texture Map Defragmentation” filter.
* a new Extra plugins for MeshLab GitHub repository.
Clavicula 0.9
Lucian Stanculescu, maker of Neobarok, has released v.0.9 for his equally free 3D modeller Clavicula. “Clavicula supersedes Neobarok, with more functionality and PCVR support”. As innovative and open source and stylish as Neobarok.
ArmorPaint 0.8
Out now, a new version of ArmorPaint, the PBR materials maker and 3D paint-on-the-mesh painter. Think of it as ‘Substance Painter for $20, without the subscription shackle’.
0.8 is described as “a major update” and it apparently also now runs on Android and the iPad, and has a new Cloud-based assets library. It’s sort-of-free. Free to compile from source code, or buy it ready-to-install for $20.
Movmi
On the sidebar ‘directory’ of this blog, there’s now a new “motion capture” set of eight links. All in some way Poser/DAZ friendly. Some of this software has been around a while, in fact so long that it’s vanished from sale (mocap software tends to do that).
But the latest software is Movmi V1.2.4 (October 2021), which is freeware. From one-man developer Ahmed Askar, making a free AI-powered 2D video-based motion detector software for Windows 7. Movmi has had mocap extraction capabilities added in the last few weeks. Export appears to be to .FBX for now?
It’s AI, so the download is hefty at 1.1Gb. He probably needs to get it on a torrent, in time for when the masses arrive, but for now it downloads fast. The lad’s got the right idea: Windows 7 support, free, no sign-up required and ‘just download it’.