News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Freebies

Santa drops a .8BF

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Would you like the free G’MIC filters running in Photoshop, for Christmas? And in PhotoLine, Serif Affinity Photo and IrfanView too? Santa has visited early, on that one!

Yes, the latest G’MIC has been successfully ported to the old Photoshop .8bf plugin format. It’s been a year of work, in an official project, and is stable in 64-bit.

Be aware that if you have saved custom “Favorite” presets, some may no longer work after installing this. This is because this G’MIC is incomplete, and this incompleteness will affect presets on all your other G’MIC installs (Krita, Paint.NET etc). The solution is to tick the “Internet” check-box and run the “Update filters” inside G’MIC. This will give you the extra super-secret “Testing” folder of filters (and perhaps others in other folders) that you didn’t have before. G’MIC is now complete and all your custom “Favorite” presets will now work.

Poser 11: ramped

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If you were somehow thinking of doing ramped toons with Poser 11’s Cycles-based SuperFly rendering, rather than in the fast real-time Comic Book mode, there’s now a new free .MT5 Poser Cycles Color-Ramp to help with that.

But, as Poser’s own Charles Taylor advised in the recent Poser 12 Early Access webinar, basically… don’t try to use SuperFly for toon. I agree, learn to use the Comic Book mode properly instead. Real-time, fast, great results if handled correctly.

Still, I guess the ramp might be useful in other complex node setups that you need to port from Blender to Poser.

24 Days Of Christmas Freebies at Renderosity

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24 Days Of Christmas at Renderosity, a fun Advent Calendar that is now slowly filling with freebies. I’m not sure the bloody Guillotine Props Set is really suitable for Christmas, though it’s from RPublishing and thus it perhaps wryly symbolises the Poser 12 developer workload and its shipping-date deadlines.

Amazingly, I had somehow managed to miss getting Powerage’s Pacificator for Poser, over the years, but it’s an Advent Calendar freebie and I have it now…

There’s also a free Textures Pack for Pacificator if you want to make it look jazzier than my quick real-time Comic Book render shown here.

Also note the new free preset to Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings for DAZ Studio 4. Very useful if something you loaded as an experiment (such as HD morphs) has messed with your settings, or you’ve been fiddling with the settings and things have not gone as planned.

For some reason, under any version of DAZ Studio and across different PCs, I have never ever been able to get anything at all to show up in the “Presets” render panel…

I can only assume it’s an un-fixable perma-bug. This freebie is exactly the same in this respect. Nothing shows up there after install.

The clunky workaround is then to drag-drop the “Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings” .DUF file to the DAZ Studio Viewport. This will reset the iRay settings to their defaults, and also sets a 1600px render setting.

DAZ Store freestuff – updated

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The DAZ 3D Store’s Freestuff page has updated. In terms of stuff without dependencies, the old $38 Runtime DNA Ultimate Lights And Backgrounds bundle may be of interest to Poser users using FireFly. There are also some sky sets with matching lights, which require the RDNA Terradome uber-environment as a base dependency in Poser.

While you’re there, don’t miss the free toon Lil Gnome which is new.

Hide all “out of stock” items on Amazon

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Searching for a new graphics card on Amazon? 98% of what you want will be “out of stock”, so there’s a handy new UserScript that shows “Amazon in-stock only”. I’ve looked at the code and it’s clean.

For those using their national Amazon rather than the main .com it needs some slight tweaks to work. It’s easy to run it on my Amazon UK, but there you change the detection-phrase from the capitalised “Out of Stock” to “out of stock”.

Release: Blender 2.91

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Another release for the fast-moving Blender, now Blender 2.91. What are the main new items?

* Most interesting for NPR renders and comics makers is more development of Grease Pencil. Antonio Vazquez’s automated “Trace Images into Grease Pencil” feature is now in there and you can apparently drag in a 2D image and convert it “with one click”. B&W only. The next release of Blender is likely to expand this to cope with importing image sequences and have PDF export (important for studios where designs need ‘sign-off’ from studio managers). You can now also re-order in the modifier stack for Grease Pencil, but I thought you could already do that. You also now open holes (“hold outs”) in filled areas.

* For modellers, you can now trim a 3D mesh “just by drawing lines in the viewport”. Super. I was astounded recently to see a demo which included fiddly multi-step / multi-panel / multi-button operations just to do something as simple as cutting the top off a 3D mesh. But it sounds like that particular fiddle has now been squashed.

* Better search, now with new “fuzzy matching” and abbreviation-awareness, for finding stuff in Blender’s labyrinthine interface. Although that assumes you can remember what the desired tool is being called this week, and how its naming differs from the 50,000 others. However, the placement of the search does look excellent, static and right at the top of the most used panel.

* For modellers and sculptors, lots of new sculpting brush improvements in things like edge brushes, cloth sculpting. More refined bevelling of mesh edges, and better Boolean intersections of meshes when modelling.

* ‘Volume to mesh’, so for example you can turn a volumetric cloud into a 3D mesh, then apply procedural textures. You can also go the other way, making a mesh into a volumetric cloud.

* New simulations for things like making a linked metal chain, and then being able to animate the chain swinging around.

* Simultaneously released, Radeon ProRender 3.0 for Blender, offering “hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs”, matching NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing and opening up some welcome competition there which should help to trim graphics-card prices in due course. Also (most interestingly) ProRender 3 has “a new contour rendering option for non-photorealistic renders”. Poser 12 uses the latest Blender Cycles, but apparently ProRender is a plugin for that and also has its own materials system. It is thus not likely to be supported in Poser just to aid the Poser Comic Book makers. Adding it would apparently require content makers to make and test yet another new set of materials for their store content.

Old AMD GPUs based on TeraScale 2 and 3 are totally kaput in terms of use with Blender 2.91, and Blender will refuse to load. Some integrated AMD GPUs that have numbers that should be fine (if big cards) were actually built on TeraScale 3. Graphics card upgrades will thus be needed.

Take the five-minute YouTube tour here.

Release: Diffeomorphic DAZ-to-Blender 1.5.1

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There was an important release that I overlooked, back in the summer. The free DAZ-Blender bridge plugin by Diffeomorphic, Thomas Larsson,was released as v1.5. This is in active development and at November 2020 is now at version 1.5.1. Apparently it does a good job, and is quicker and in some ways better than the free official DAZ 2.0 script. Since it doesn’t need to convert via an .FBX or Collada conversion and instead reads the DAZ files directly. Said to support polyline hair, but not strand hair. Worth a look, if you’re getting into Blender and its real-time Eevee engine.

Interestingly, I recently noticed that Eevee is actually OpenGL + PBR materials. I hadn’t known that before. It explains why my OpenGL upgrade fixed Blender. It just shows how far OpenGL can be pushed.

Update December 2020: diffeomorphic.blogspot.com totally dead. Fixed links by sending to WayBack and I’ve directly linked the repository.

Yet more Black Friday items

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More new discounts, spotted this afternoon.

* XfrogPlants, various packs and bundles are now at 50% off. Yes they sell 3D plants, not frogs.

* HitFilm Pro is 40% off, £185 for perpetual software. What is it? It’s a supercharged video editor with advanced FX and more, and has often been called “the poor man’s Adobe After Effects”.

* The galaxy-spanning science-fiction space game Elite Dangerous is now completely free at Epic in its latest version, ahead of a big paid update in early 2021 that will add a more social/diplomatic side to the game.

Release: MakeHuman 1.2 final

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The open source figure-creation software MakeHuman 1.2.0 final has been released. It’s now Windows 64-bit only, and it appears that it still integrates closely with Blender, and indeed now has… “completely new Blender integration, MPFB, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect.” Lots of other improvements and changes, and a move to the new Python version.

Service packs and patches for Poser

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Un-noticed by me in late summer 2020, the expert Python coder ‘Structure’ kindly uploaded most of the official ‘Service Release’ or ‘SR’ patches for Smith Micro’s Poser, which is now the legacy version. The various service pack installers for older Poser versions are now to be found via these links which lead to a handy Dropbox cache.

Be sure to check version numbers and make sure you’re not actually downgrading. For instance, 2014 had an SR5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 and yet only the SR4 is available from the above links.

Why would a Poser user want to still run such antiques, when we have Poser 11? Partly because we can — they don’t “phone home” and don’t expire and will run as long as Windows can. This also means they can run offline. Partly because they can run old PoserPython scripts which have since become defunct, even as far back as GlowWorm which required Poser 6 SR3 (you may need to switch from OpenGL to SreeD to be able to operate Poser 6 these days). Sometimes they’re required to load certain legacy content, which can then often be exported for a more modern version or at least to an .OBJ file. Sometimes related creative software requires a certain version present in order to import 3D models from Poser, such as MojoWorld (Poser 6) and MotionArtist (Poser 2014) and the old Vue Complete (for export/import it apparently needs Poser Pro 2014). Also, some people run the Smith Micro PoserFusion plugins that let Poser send scenes to Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Lightwave etc.

Webinars: Clip Studio Paint

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Official, free, booking now…

“Clip Studio Paint Demo: Drawing Digital Comics” will be hosted on 11th October 2020 from 7-8 p.m. EDT. …. will show tons of tips and tricks for translating traditional techniques into the digital environment. … including turning thumbnails and roughs into pencilled artwork, digital inking … [then] “Clip Studio Paint II” will take place on Sunday, 18th October 2020 from 7-8 p.m.”

Part of the “Month of Mice”.

Free ecosystem spawner for Unity

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Take a big square landscape terrain into the free Unity game engine, automatically cover the ground with vegetation based on slope height etc. It’s not Vue’s ecosystems. But it is as free as Unity is, and on the Unity Store now.

If Poser 12 does indeed support ‘export to Unity’ with decimation, this could be a quick “background generator” for an imported Poser scene with posed characters.