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.
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.
The new free “All Purpose Strand” is a SuperFly ‘universal shader’ for Poser 11’s Hair Room strand hair and fur.
My saved PDF copy of the instructions. New textures can be easily plugged into the shader.
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”.
Fantasy Attic’s Halloween Freebies 2020. 31 days of freebies, one per day to Halloween, starting on the 1st of October.
Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News
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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.
Blender has record-able Actions, like Photoshop. Who knew? It’s a free third-party add-on, now in v.3.3.1 (August 2020).
I found gnuThumbnailer 1.2. It’s a free thumbnail generator and batch image-processing tool from 2015, in English and German.
What can it automatically apply to a batch of thumbnail renders?
Images can be stained (sepia effect, grayscale, user-defined color).
The colors of images can be overlaid.
Can make images lighter or darker.
You can add a colored or a transparent border to your images.
You can add a watermark to your pictures.
Very nice, especially since I can’t get the Netherworks Thumbnail Designer to work, which I bought a couple of years ago. gnuThumbnailer appears to do more or less the same thing as Designer, albeit working outside of Poser.
gnuThumbnailer is free for non-commercial use, and is pay-what-you-want if you use it for commercial work. It’s for Windows and Linux and requires Java, but it has a portable version (which means, if a future Java upgrade breaks the software, as can happen, the Portable should still keep running because it bundled the required Java runtimes).
So, Poser content makers reading the above description will see the options here, for helping to automate the making of standard 91 x 91 pixel Poser thumbnails in 16-bit .PNG, but… with your own border and brand overlay easily added via an automated batch process.
Ah, but how to get a nice set of uniform thumbnails for gnuThumbnailer to work on? What you want there is D3D’s batch “Render Content” script that ships for free with Poser 11, as an ‘official partner’ script. This is found at… Top Menu | Script | Partners | Dimension3D.
This script appears to be a expansion of what used to be his “Batch render poses” script (which no longer loads for me in Poser 11, even with AVfix). The new “Render Content” can make batch renders from a set of Poser poses, and there’s also a slot to load a reset pose in…
There’s no Help or entry in the Poser PDF manual for this, but it’s fairly easy once you’ve spend 20 minutes figuring out what the buttons do and testing it. Your Poser pose sets should be found down on the folder path…
..\content\Runtime\Libraries\Pose
… though a few freebie makers may have used ..\Poses But I guess if you’re a maker you have have saved out the finished poses saved out elsewhere, in a production folder.
The script does not also move the camera to frame the applied pose, which means some poses may fling the figure out of view of the camera. You might want to hack it, so that the figure is placed back at the scene origin before rendering.
The batch “Render Content” script then uses your current render settings, so be sure you don’t set it running on 100 SuperFly renders at 4000px, or your PC will be running through that for days. The script has no QUIT! option, once the renders are underway.
Posted in Automation, Companion software, Freebies, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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EBSynth has moved into beta. 10x faster, and batch auto re-naming of files when you drag-and-drop. Still free.
It’s style transfer for video frames. You first extract a still keyframe from a video, and give it a nice manual artistic paintover. Then you use the resulting painting as a style-source in EBSynth for processing all the other frames. Once done, the whole video clip should have taken on the same painterly style.
Obviously you have to work ‘per sequence’ of the video. For instance, you can’t just take a frame out of an exploding tropical volcano scene, overpaint it, and then also expect the same painted frame to work on the next scene… which may show James Bond in a speedboat racing over the sea.
Thus the way EBSynth works is a bit different than just running an entire video through an automated paint-emulation filter. One of the advantages may be, judging from the test footage, that the resulting ‘art emulated’ video is less flickery, depending on how wild your paintover was.
With a bit of careful work it seems it can also be used to remove or add wrinkles, and thus change age. It’s still at the “interesting tech-demos” and “light-show hippies getting freaky with footage of Terence McKenna” stage, but it’s one of several free and relatively easy style-transfer options worth keeping an eye on. Though it looks like we’re still a long way from “grab a Jack Kirby comics frame, apply the style to my basic lineart”.
There’s an official tutorial here (starts at 4:54, once the introductory guff is out the way).
There’s a useful new Poser script, “Change Shadow Intensity of Selected Lights”. It doesn’t change the brightness intensity of the lights, only their shadow intensity when rendering…
In plain English, it adjusts “how dark or faint the cast shadow is” in the final render. It doesn’t affect the Preview shadows.
To use, copy out the script from the forum and save it as a text file, re-name that from .TXT to .PY and then install as you usually would for a Python script.
Theoretically it should also be possible to hack the script so the user can also input a number that controls the dial located above Shadow, “Map Size”…
Over on the Preview tab of each Light there’s also a “Preview Shadow Maps Size” dial, and this is independent of the rendering “Shadow Map” dial. “Preview Shadow Maps Size” only affects shadows as seen in Preview.
The larger the “Preview Shadow Maps Size”, the better the quality, and lowering light intensity can also help to soften shadow-edges. However, this dial defaults to the lowest value of 512, while Comic Book Preview users would like to have this up at 1024 — so as to get better shadows on Preview renders. You can have it even higher, and if you’ve heard the Brian Haberlin webinars on Poser comics then you’ll know the ideal for Preview shadows is actually 2048 or 4096 and he wishes it could go ever higher than that. Possibly it can, if you have a ninja graphics card but for me it tops out at 4096. But… you should know that Poser will reliably have a fatal crash if it’s over 1024, and you then try a Firefly render from the same scene.
Unfortunately there’s no possible way in Poser 11 to control this particular “Preview Shadow Maps Size” with a Python script. There’s just no parameter ‘hook’ or ‘command’ for doing that. But you can save light presets to the Library which remember their “Preview Shadow Maps Size”, and Comic Book Preview users are probably only using two or three lights anyway, so it’s no great hardship.
“Dragonspace (Poser props)” added to Freebie downloads, over on the Directory sidebar of this blog. I already recently linked his Logan’s Run fan-art freebies there.
This blog’s “Stuff for free” page has had its download links updated. The three main free models are now together in a master .ZIP file, which is on Dropbox. This .ZIP should be operating in ‘shared’ mode, and thus be downloadable for anyone who follows the link.
DAZ now has a new open-source DAZ to Cinema 4D Bridge, and it’s free. It transfers “Genesis 8 and 3 content” from DAZ 4.10 onwards, into seemingly any version of Cinema 4D from R15 onwards. It will also “Transfer Figures/Props/Environments”, but judging by the description it sounds like the poses don’t get sent. Facial morphs do, though. With the Poser equivalent, the whole scene is sent to C4D, poses and all.
Scrolling down the page a bit reveals a family of such plugins, also free. Maya, Blender, 3DS Max.
The Blender one is interesting, potentially making a DAZ figure real-time in Eevee? Yes, it seems so…
“Supported Blender Render Engines: Eevee …”
There’s no manual download of these new Bridge plugins, and the install has to be done through the DAZ Install Manager. Once installed they’re then found under: Scripts > Bridges. YouTube has new tutorials on their use.
Ronk Aednik, Nursoda’s free add-on pack for his new Ronk figure. Commercial use.
Two unique animation packs for DAZ’s Millennium Cat are currently discounted by 55% at Renderosity. Both packs have a .ZIP of Poser .CR2s and a .ZIP of AniBlocks for DAZ Studio.
Animations for Millennium Cat for Poser and DAZ. Video demo.
There’s also more dramatic animations (prance, a jump up, an arch back and arch back and walk away) as Animations and aniBlocks for Millennium Cat 2. Meaning the second such pack, not that there was a version 2 of Millennium Cat.
Even if you don’t want to do animations, there are effectively hundred of static poses to be had here, currently for just $9 for the two packs.
Lots more animated animal pack-demos at AnnieMation’s YourTube channel.
The latter pack is also stated to be “Also compatible with DAZ House Cat with dForce Hair”. I wonder if the first is also? I’ll have to test that, and also see what else can take these animations.
It appears that DAZ have removed the original Millennium Cat from sale in favour of the DAZ House Cat, but I see that the Millennium Cat LE is still listed as being in the 3D Starter Pack. LE offered the same cat but without so many morphs embedded. Many will however already have the original Millennium Cat in the runtimes. While now somewhat superseded for close-ups by the DAZ House Cat and the Hivewire House Cat, Millennium Cat is still useful for artist reference, painterly Sketch renders and Poser Comic Book renders, and it can of course also take Poser dynamic fur and has two Look At My Hair presets. Incidentally, this LAMH presets link also has presets for House Mouse, Squirrel, Lyne’s Fox, an Arctic Rabbit for Lyne’s Domestic Rabbits, Silverkey’s Giraffe and others. All free.
MilCat with LAMH preset, 3Delight render.