Out now, Issue 5 of the free Digital Art LIVE magazine. This issue’s theme is “Cosmos”…
Category Archives: Freebies
Free online: 2hr Poser comics webinar
Now online for free at YouTube, the recent 2-hour official Poser webinar on using Poser for making comics. There’s a very poor microphone being used by the initial tutor, but you can’t sniff at free + two hours long. You might want to start at 27:30 mins then loop back to the starting section later on, to avoid getting bogged down right away in the first 25 minutes of fiddly animation timeline wrangling.
Littledragon’s freebies
List of SuperFly shader packs for Poser 11
Poser 11 is only just out recently, but here’s a list of the known packs of SuperFly shaders presets / materials presets, at January 2016:
* Node-god Seachnasaigh’s “misc Sfly MATs” pack. Including a very useful and fine glass preset in both plain and volumetrics versions. Make sure you get all his .zip files. Update: This appears to be one of the items which vanished with the demise of the RuntimeDNA store.
* 8 Speciality materials. Including glowing alien gloop! (free)
* Superfly Metals Basics (free)
* Glass pack. Just made for fun, not super-realistic. (free)
* D3D SuperFly Materials. Cloth, glass, metals, textures such as cork, settled snow. This is also labeled as a Merchant Resource. ($12)
* Zoe’s SuperFly Satin Shaders (free)
We’ll no doubt see more in 2016, since it’s fairly easy to port over the zillions of free Blender Cycles shaders into Poser 11.
Anyone reading this will probably also want the free EZSkin 3, which enables older SSS or more-complex DAZ SSS skin shaders to work in Poser 11 SuperFly, in just a few clicks.
EZ Skin 3 released
Got some troublesome, flaky old SSS skin in Poser 11? Simply rub on a handy squirt of SnarlyGribbly’s EZSkin 3, and all your itchy skin problems are solved!
In a few clicks EZSkin 3 cooks up a neat little SuperFly and Firefly materials combo, using the original textures, and has your character’s skin looking right for rendering in Poser’s new SuperFly. SnarlyGribbly has kindly released it free as a robust beta, via Snarly’s Space: EZSkin. There’s also a ‘latest build’, if you want to trawl the thread on the official forums and scroll through to pinpoint the latest .zip for that.
Very simple to use, once you install:
1. You load EZSkin 3 and its set of Figure Definitions. These are found in the un-zipped folders…
For Poser 12 there are now two zips, and you need both for the presets and definitions.
In the definitions “DAZ Gen 4” = V4 / M4 / K4. These and many others are in the Figure definitions / Legacy figure defintions.defs file that ships with the script or can be found in the second download .zip file.
Poser’s flagship La Femme female figure is regrettably unsupported, but there is a third-party EZ Skin 3 Definitions for La Femme. Note also that the new La Femme figure has a different eye set-up.
2. Tell EZSkin 3 what the figure/character type is, if it can’t auto-detect that.
3. Select either Firefly or SuperFly rendering (the target renderer).
4. Click ‘Apply’.
5. Render.
That’s it. Took about two seconds and four clicks for Dr. Pitterbill. Most popular figures are automatically supported for this, including the various DAZ Genesis variants.
Not working? It should not need AVfix, but that’s worth a try first. You may have an old EZSkin that requires it. You may also need to fiddle with EZskin a bit, for instance if it’s a V4 with a ‘Unsupported’ character and MAT already applied. Even then you may not have success. Ideally the vendor of the character will supply SuperFly materials.
If you have the ‘black skin’ problem in renders, it may not be the Vendor. First check your SuperFly render preset. If Subsurface Samples is zero (often used for a very quick test render), then the skin will render black in SuperFly. Increase this setting to at least 1.
White eye pupils are fixed by going: Material Room | Pupil | Alternate Diffuse node | follow the wire to the Scatter node | turn colour there to a very dark grey. This does not apply to La Femme, which has a different eye setup.
Practical hints for art students
Newly available for free on the Hathi Trust archive: Practical hints for art students (1910), a delightfully clear and abundantly-illustrated primer, from an era when the human figure and its posing and lighting were at the heart of art-school practice.
Digital Art LIVE magazine – issue 4, out now
Available now, the free Digital Art Live, issue 4. 96 pages of in-depth interviews on the new advanced render-engines (Poser’s new SuperFly, plus the Octane and Reality plugins). Plus an in-depth 7,000-word review of Poser 11 Pro, and a concise survey of the best space sci-fi of 2015. Here’s a preview…
Freebie: Star! in space
An Xmas Day present, found for readers, Dragon’s Breath has a free sci-fi outfit for Star! for Poser…
Freebie: V4, she grows on you…
Want to test your new Superfly render engine in Poser 11? There’s a fabulous new freebie for V4 lovers. V4 Dryad conforming figure for Poser…
“Dryad is a new figure that works inside a standard V4 model. Combined with the V4 materials, it produces a unique character for all your fantasy/nature renders. Includes Dryad Conforming figure, and V4 leafy textures.”
Poser freebies – the monsters of D&D
Poser set of the best Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game creatures. Currently being created, the last addition was a few days ago. For non-commercial use only, obviously, but good for making some fun fan art — especially with Poser 11’s excellent new graphic-novel / comic book mode.
If you look in ‘Characters’ there’s also a Stormtrooper for M4…
Digital Art LIVE #3
Ahead of the release of the big sci-fi movie, the special “Galaxy far away…” themed issue of the free Digital Art LIVE is now available. This IS the magazine you’re looking for!
Also, there’s the Digital Art LIVE Xmas Party (online), book now!
Digital Art LIVE: second issue
Issue 2 of the free Digital Art LIVE magazine is now available. The 84-page issue’s theme is ‘alien flora and fauna’, and there’s also a ‘future humans’ gallery showing possible future human evolution…
Digital Art LIVE magazine – free sci-fi art magazine
The new monthly Digital Art LIVE magazine featuring in-depth interviews with 3D and 2D sci-fi artists. Available now, for free! The first issue is a special themed issue on ‘future cities’.
Microsoft’s Project Spark – now free
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Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Microsoft’s Project Spark is now free. It’s a successful 3d game-making engine for advanced beginners, intended to nudge sparky young game developers toward Windows and the Xbox.
DAZ and Poser: summer content survey
Gosh, is it September already? Time for another monthly survey of the most interesting scenes and props for Poser and DAZ Studio.
Are you back from your summer holidays? Then slip on the ol’ fuzzy slippers and relax with the Cosy Kitsch Living Room Props for the new A Cozy Kitsch Living Room…
Want to quickly fake some summer holiday photos, showing yourself in amazing locations? You might need some new exotic Poser/DAZ settings, then. Aurelio’s new Venice for instance, puts you in a gondola on the lagoon at Venice…
His Venice might be used with a hazy background made with 1971s’s new Coastal Pier set.
Or how about a trip to Chinatown? Only this is Stonemason’s fantastic new Chinatown, done in the same high-rise style as his classic early sci-fi cityscapes.
A depth-fogging tool is going to be a ‘must’ for this sort of big scene. A new one for Daz Studio 4 + iRay + a powerful PC is AtmoCam for Iray. Likely to be a whole lot quicker, provided you have and know Adobe Photoshop, is making multiple pass renders with Light Dome PRO (Dreamlight’s successor to the very useful old Mood Master II) and then compositing them together using the Screen blend mode in Photoshop.
Need to give Chinatown some aerial anti-gravity powered traffic, like in Blade Runner? The AntFarm has a fine new Floating Junk…
If you have a graphics card that lets you use DAZ Studio’s iRay rendering with any kind of speed, and you want to get a Blade Runner style ‘rain look’ on your Chinatown scene, then Dreamlight has some new DAZ Studio iRay Rain Look Tutorials…
Ground level in Chinatown? 1971s’s new Old town houses kit might serve for that…
Or what about Coflek-Gnorg’s new Cyberpunk Corner for a Chinatown ground level scene? Coflek-Gnorg also has Street Shops…
What about taking your characters underneath the new Chinatown? The new Subway Train is a subway train/carriage that looks like a useful stock prop for your runtime, highly detailed on the exterior and interior. See also the new Ruined Subway Tunnel scene.
Need a new character to roam Chinatown? I love JerryJang’s new CosHero for M4 suit, it looks like something out a 1980s Bilal comic in Heavy Metal. It’s a touch expensive at present, but even so I suspect we’ll see more than a few texture-set add-ons for this one…
And your hero’s cypherpunk underworld contact in Chinatown? Sixus1’s new Outlanders Stalker might work…
Stonemason’s new interior nicely blends together sci-fi and nature, in NWX Section 18…
Some of the exotic plants from Dinoraul, such as his Pandanus tree might look interesting in the NWX Section 18 terrarium…
3DA Stella and eDarlyn for Victoria 4.2 also both look like they might be at home in Stonemason’s new NWX Section 18 scene…
Could NWX Section 18 be a room inside the Deep Core Explorer, a new deep-sea drilling/mining rig?
Need futuristic submersibles floating around your Deep Core Explorer? The new MMRship looks like it would work in a sub-sea situation…
Vue users also have a new realistic two-person submersible this month…
Anyone doing fan art or comics for The Witcher is going to feel right at home in the AJ Northern Citadel…
Also rather Witcher-esque is Dante78’s new Medieval Fisherman’s Hut, with his usual fine levels of detail…
Decorative Easel Set is currently free at DAZ…
The Easel Set could be useful for showing your characters making a painting from the deck of the new Summer Tree House Deluxe, which has a modern design that looks like it’ll suit adult characters more than a small brood of DAZ/Poser kids.
Also very pastoral is the new Portals – The Shire. This makes the fine (though rather gothic) 3 Gate Pass scene into a lush portal suitable for the furry feet of hobbit folk.
Not much steampunk/dieselpunk, this month. But Rosemill Astrometry has some nice instruments that would suit any era between about 1750 and 1900.
Oskarsson’s new Diesel Punk Clothes for Genesis 3 Females is unusual, and nicely designed. A sort of hybrid between 1930s ‘jolly hockey sticks’ girls and 1940s air cadets.
If you have Second World War / World War II uniforms in your runtime, then Predatron’s detailed new miniature set Beach Barricade may well interest…
New semi-toon standalone characters are always welcome, and this month we get several of them. NeftOoN Gal comes complete with hair and clothes. Possibly not new? Possibly just a new bundle of character + extras? Anyway, she also has a Neftoon Pal…
I’m thinking that the above two characters might be especially useful for a comic book artist making a domestic gag-strip, and looking to over-paint and/or toon their renders in Photoshop?
Packy the Toon Elephant is another toon standalone, for Poser 9+ only…
Another fine character from the same maker is Tiny, a sort of aquatic ‘fire newt’ , for Poser 10+ only…
Finally, available now is iClone 6 PRO + 3DXchange Bundle + DAZ Genesis (1 & 2 only) import, currently at a 40% discount. iClone is the mature and speedy real-time animation tool, with some excellent model and character conversion tools. Those looking to make 5-minute YouTube-size 640px animations will probably find that iClone is a better option for making animations than DAZ or Poser.
That’s it, more next month!