News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Natural media emulation

What use is Carrara in 2022?

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What would one use Carrara for in 2022? After a few hours with it again, I’d say it still has some appeal for those interest in non-animating NPR / stylised renders…

* Relatively light on system resources, uses multiple cores, stable, 64-bit. Doesn’t demand Windows 10 etc.

* Works with older Poser content, albeit from a very clunky and un-searchable Library.

* Nice NPR rendering on older Poser content, both line-art and painterly. Different and a bit more controllable than Poser line-art / painterly Sketch. Repeatable painterly and line-art renders are not render-size dependent, as they are with Poser Sketch.

* Has toon plugins and native tooning capabilities, and several toon plugins now free including YAToon and Toon! Pro. Neither seem to give very “pro” looking results. For a more CAD-style line-art there’s the Vector Style 2 for Carrara plugin which ships with Carrara. The Carrara 5 Pro Handbook has a chapter on using it. Can export to .SVG for vector packages, via File | Save as… but I had no success at all with it.

* Relatively easy to hide eyelashes for NPR / toon renders. Though, without any automation, such fiddly processes can’t be automated.

* Still has some nice bits in its default content bundle, such as easy-start pre-lit rooms, some nice Solar System planets.

* ‘Make anything glow’, albeit with a bit of fiddliness in setup.

* Can grow / groom fur and hair, and a bit more easily than in Poser or DAZ.

* Has a true Isometric camera / grid (which DAZ and Poser don’t have). Can also export depth data. (I discover Vue also has Isometric, and can import from Poser).

* Multi-pass rendering to Photoshop .PSD output, though it seems odd that NPR “outlines” line-art can’t be sent to its own layer? I would have thought that was vital. Though with a day of work you could probably brew several good NPR render presets that would bypass the need for Photoshop.

* Can apparently import old Bryce .DFX files.

* Has Mimic Pro for lip-sync, built in. I assume it still works.

* Has a ‘3D text extrusion’ tool, which Poser and DAZ don’t.

Difficult to think of things beyond that, things which other software doesn’t do better. You can’t do useful things like make new Poser content in it, or ‘live 3D’ paint a mesh of a Poser prop, as the needed Poser-native export and packaging options are not there. It’s all meant to go from Poser to Carrara, it seems, and not the other way around.

How to remove eyelashes for non-photoreal rendering in Carrara

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1. Load a standard figure. Here we have Aiko 3.

As you can see, horrid blocky eyelashes appear in non-photoreal line-art rendering…

2. To fix, enter Carrara’s Model Room. Use the camera to get a good view of the figure’s head. Her ten-trillion control points look confusing, but there’s an easy way to select just the eyelashes.

3. Top menu | Selection | Select by… | Shading Domain.

4. Choose “Eyelashes”. They are then highlighted in red.

5. Select the Scale tool (the ‘twin triangles’ icon), and make them really small. Then select the Move tool, and slightly push them back into the head.

That’s it. Line renders will now appear to omit the eyelashes. You could probably do the same with fat (rather than thin line) geometry eyebrows.

Incidentally, another problem discovered with Carrara. A bit of a deal-breaker, even for occasional work. No drag-and-drop of clothes / poses from PzDB onto the scene/figure, as can be done with Poser and DAZ. Since getting Carrara to see / interact with / load from a Content Library is such a nightmare, then if PzDB can’t be used… Carrara can’t be used either.

And Poser 11, as you can see here, effortlessly gives line-art that is just so much better. And does so in WYSIWYG real-time, and with no need to fix eyelashes…

Raw Poser real-time render, Aiko 3.

The only drawback of Poser is that for best results you need to render line-art, colour flats and shadows, and then composite the three real-time renders in Photoshop. Still, not bad for what now costs $53.

Carrara for line-art

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Just a quick look at DAZ Carrara 8.5, so that I know a little more about its line-art features and to be sure I’m not missing anything.

One way of doing it is…

1. New scene | Load figure.

2. Edit | ‘Edit Scene Effects’.

3. Effects Panel, add ‘Filters’ | ‘Toon Part III’ | and edit the settings thus…

It’s now white on black, which you then render and invert in Photoshop.

You can also render normally but with Carrara’s native “Non-Photoreal” engine, after there ticking “Outline” and turning off rendering of Diffuse etc. It seems the better option and the nicer look for line-art. A painterly or charcoal look can be done this way too.

Both are quick. The results of the latter are quite reasonable, in terms of instantly getting a ‘hand inked’ look without needing to then use a Photoshop filter on the lines. It’s quite controllable, though the opacity slider is unbalanced and way too sensitive at the top end. Shadows can be controlled separately from the diffuse. This is a raw NPR render…

What you can’t seem to do is output “Outline” as a multi-pass render layer into Photoshop, along with a ‘Diffuse’ layer beneath it, for further work in Photoshop. You’d need to get them out as .PNGs and then stack them in Photoshop.

It seems you’d probably do better to work up a ‘look’ all done in Carrara itself, and if you spent a day at it you probably could. Sadly there are no NPR render preset freebies floating around the web, offering a quickstart on that.

The ability to work with old Poser assets is good, though Carrara seems to have great difficulty with loading / conforming from a DAZ runtime.

The software’s lack of automation would be a big drawback in production. No recordable/replayable Actions, no ability to write “do this, then that” Python scripts.

Also, as usual, trans-mapped eyelashes are a pain in terms of rendering to line-art. They become black blodges or ‘wings’. No-one else has done so, so I wrote a quick tutorial on How to remove eyelashes for non-photoreal rendering in Carrara.

Sketch Master 2018

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Redfield Sketch Master, aka Sketchmaster, now in 2018 (v19.01, January 2019). Who knew?

* Still affordable at $40.

* Windows only. I expect it would not be flummoxed by anything back to Windows XP, but that’s just my guess.

* Now multi-core and with a far bigger preview window (and thus slower than before for previews, about on a par with G’MIC). But much faster at 1000px to actually render a preset to your final image, due to the multi-core support. Not so much faster at 3600px, though… maybe 40% faster. But worth having.

* Ships with wholly new presets. Also appears to have a different or more advanced or canvas-scaled engine, but keeps a very similar UI.

* Installs and runs alongside your old 3.3x version. Does not inherit the old custom presets.

* The new version’s engine is no good for humanising 3D line-art, and for that you need the old 3.3x.

* Requires standard 8-bit images (“Last Draw” save-renders from DAZ are 16-bit, and thus require downsampling before filtering).

* Backup and restore of your saved custom presets is done by the same method. They’re stored in the registry, so you save out a Windows .reg file, thus…

If you’re upgrading your PC to a new one, or a new OS, this is how you transfer your Sketch Master presets.

On Predatron’s Goblin figure

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I’m pleased to discover Predaton’s original Goblin figure for Poser, with Goblin Cleric outfit and staff. Still available at DAZ, along with an armour pack. Old, but works fine in Poser 11.

The Comic Book mode is ‘on’ in Poser, then a 20-second Poser Sketch render (painterly) is made from this at 1800px…

The Sketch render is filtered in Photoshop and Smart Blurred a bit to remove some remaining frosting on the clothing textures. A Firefly ‘Lineart only’ render is added to add the fine pen lines. Another Poser Sketch render (hairy inks) is applied, and the eraser manually removes all ‘hairs’ except for those on the skin. A SuperFly render could have been added at the top of the layer-stack (set to colour blend to restore the original colours) but in this case it wasn’t and I went with a warmer look. As usual, belts and buckles have problems taking inking lines even in Firefly.

Technical notes:

The robes are misleading when loading, in that they will appear not to conform after loading. However, if you slightly move the base figure after manually conforming the robes, they do snap into place and will then follow the figure’s poses. This problem will potentially cause compositing registration problems if using renders from different sessions. The robes have their own poses which match the lower parts with those that come with the Goblin.

If you have a Poser 7 expressions folder, then the face can be randomised. And there are so many head morphs that all the randoms look good.

The Cleric Robes have non-rendering drape-control boxes that show up in Sketch and Firefly renders, if not made invisible in the scene. Here we see a box I missed, appearing in an old-school lineart render from Firefly.

In the above, the bump-maps are auto-removed with a script to get rid of ‘the speckles’.

The Goblin also renders fine in SuperFly, though the eye pupils are reflective-white if light is shining into them. As you can see in this 20-second raw SuperFly (Cycles) render…

The Goblin accepts poses for older short figures such as Little Mummy, Sam and Sadie, NearMe, and the wealth of generics from Poser 1-8. So far as I recall, the latter still ship with the Poser native freebies bundle, so you won’t be short of poses.

The headcap of the robes can be removed, to test hair. Here we see that the free Troll Hair finally finds a use…

… and this hair also shows up in Comic Book mode. You can also add three such hairs for extra bulk. Or you could make some Poser strand hair as a simple mohawk.

No freebies, no Crossdresser licence. So the expansion possibilities are limited. But it’s a great little semi-toon figure with a ton of morphs, and a good story-opponent for some of the Nursoda figures. Predatron also has a matching and larger Troglodyte figure.

New Enterprise Licensing plans at DAZ

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DAZ Studio has new Enterprise Licensing plans for studios creating major productions with the help of DAZ Studio and “large scale” use of the software’s various plugins and content. So far as I can see this changes nothing in the current and long-standing royalty-free arrangement. It just provides “world-class” support to studios using DAZ assets, in a busy work setting where time-is-money. The first such client enjoying the service is Canada’s…

Wind Sun Sky Entertainment [which] has seen exceptional success this year including their […] hit Amazon Prime Original series Invincible.

Invincible has been such a hit, that in May 2021 Amazon renewed the show for another two seasons. Nice to be able to show it to the pros who disdain DAZ and Poser and say… “yup, that’s made with DAZ that is…”.

A recent job ad for a new series suggest their key tools are DAZ Studio and Adobe After Effects.

Get a bigger Sketch Designer in Poser 11

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Here’s how to get a bigger Sketch Designer window in Poser 11, on a big widescreen desktop. The Sketch Designer default window and its internal preview window-size has not increased since the old days. You can of course, drag the corner…

…and thus enlarge the window. But you have to do that every time. And it doesn’t ‘stick’ between sessions. It’s not ideal.

Let’s fix that, with a perma-fix for those with PCs fast enough to run the larger real-time Sketch preview window.

1. Close Poser 11, if open.

2. In Windows Explorer open the path C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Roaming\Poser Pro\11

3. Find there the file Poser UI PrefMap.xml and copy a backup somewhere safe. Open the original file with Notepad++ and you will see the section…

This is fairly self-explanatory. Set the x and y screen co-ordinates where the Sketch Designer window first pops into existence. Then set how wide and high it draws out onto the screen.

4. Now take a look at how wide your current Sketch Designer window actually is. Here I have 958 x 720…

… but that’s not the XML’s default 799 x 600 settings. Ah, but I have a general UI scaling set in Poser Preferences to 1.2. Therefore you will want take this scaling into account, as most users with large desktop monitors will have scaling on. The easiest way to work it out is to grab your calculator and x 1.2 or whatever the scaling you have set. With a 1.2 UI scaling, 1000px becomes 1200px, for instance.

5. But that’s not all. Now we have a larger window opening, the initial window-loading location co-ordinates also need to be changed to re-centre it. In practice, Poser can do this for you. Open Poser with your new settings and position the larger window where you want it on the screen. Close and re-open Poser 11. You will then see that Poser UI PrefMap.xml has changed and Poser has done the added calculations for you…

With 1.2 scaling, the above gives you nearly full screen on a 1920 x 1200px monitor. But not too much, and nicely centred. But you can have it whatever larger size you want. I guess you could even have it smaller, and appearing in a corner of the monitor. Those with an ‘extended’ desktop in Windows, and two monitors, might even be able to get it to appear on the second monitor. But that’s just my guess.

The re-sizing you set in the XML is persistent across sessions. Or it is if…

i) you never try to manually resize by dragging on the corner. In which case the magic mega-size sketch window goes “pooot!”, and the factory defaults on the Sketch Designer will be automatically re-instated by Poser.

ii) if you re-run a Sketch preset via Top Menu | Render or Crtl + R, without going back into Sketch Designer first. Not sure why you would want to run the same Sketch preset twice on the same scene, though.

iii) if Poser crashes, then the same thing will happen. It reverts to the old size.

Sadly a Python script cannot re-write the Poser UI PrefMap.xml with the big settings while Poser is running. Once the software has reverted to its hidden internal defaults for Sketch Designer, due to one of the above conditions, no scripted rewrite of the relevant XML block can persuade it to go back to the big window for that session.

So there you go. No more peering into a relatively small Sketch Designer preview window, or having to manually drag and re-size it every time. Just be careful not to revert it. If you do you need to close Poser and fix up the XML again. I now have a Windows .BAT which calls a script that patches the XML automatically.

The other trick to know is to make a quick Preview render and then go straight into Sketch Designer. You then get a Sketch Designer Preview mini-window which ‘looks into’ the render size you just rendered to, which is what you need for designing custom Sketch presets. Because the Sketch effect is render-size dependent. What looks great at 800px wide will look quite different at 1800px, and may have a cut-off edge on the render. Thus you need to design presets at the size you want to render to, and then note the target render size in your saved custom preset (e.g. 1800px_fast__painterly001_run_on_smooth_shaded_with low_lights). As you can see here, it’s also useful to note the speed on your PC, veryfast, fast, 1min, slow, and so on.

Realistic Paint Studio 1.2

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One software I had overlooked during all the Black Friday bliffle, because it’s so new…. Realistic Paint Studio 1.2. Still on offer for just $25 all-in, including the VIP brush set and with local sales tax not added. If you’re a digital painter — and even if you think you’d happy with Rebelle or Krita or Clip Studio or Photoshop — you’ll soon be kicking yourself that you didn’t get this unique one-time purchase software at this price. No fiddly labyrinthine menus, just a simple “real-world” UI with “real” tools you can pick up and use. Vibrant LAB-based colour and superb natural blending. Worth $25 for the “paint-along-with-me” built-in interactive tutorials, alone, I’d say.

Ignore the “NVIDIA” requirement in the specs, it runs fine for me on an AMD GPU.

Talking of bargains… it’s the last day of the 40% DAZ Studio sale today. Here’s a useful tip: make sure to always look down under a manual “Low Price” re-sorting of the Store, before you Checkout. There’s often a fleeting one-day high-value freebie to be found there these days, that doesn’t show on the main Freebies page. You’re welcome.

More Jack

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Another “Jack Kirby in 3D” experiment. I probably should have spent longer picking the pose, something more “biff! bang! pow!” Kirby. But I just grabbed a classic statue pose to test the look of a 20mm lens and a “stretched” perspective camera.

Here I’ve also added vintage paper as a background, some light halftoning via VanDerLee’s fine Halftone plugin, still available and in some ways still the best for Photoshop. My tests show that 2.2.13 runs fine as a plugin in PhotoLine and its serial “sticks”. However in Photoshop it must still be run inside a 32-bit wrapper, via the $25 AlphaPlugins LaunchBox. It will appear to run fine once its serial is input that way, and it does — but registration will not “stick” after the LaunchBox and Photoshop quit.

Then some subtle finishing from a module found in the more recent Nik Collection.

The 3D figure and suit are not optimised at all for tooning. Again, the head is not ideal (too cluttered), and for production a lot of work would need to be done on it to have it work well with the filter.

Before you go buying a halftone filter, note that the free Paint.NET has a free Ed Harvey Effects v 4.0. This has a fine fast Halftone, found under: Effects | Stylize | Halftone.

The main drawback is that, like most Paint.NET plugins, it can’t save repeatable presets. And it can’t also be run in Photoshop.

G’MIC has a free Halftone filter, but it’s difficult to control, slow, and is not always WYSIWYG. Photoshop also has one built-in, and while fast it’s also quite basic.

BEER fizzes

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And… it’s a wrap. Or rather, it’s a BEER. As reported here in early August, there’s been a long period of fund-raising to get some serious NPR tooning capabilities into Blender. This goes under the name of BEER, and the fundraiser recently went kerr-ching! and raised enough for 10 weeks of hard development work this summer. Week 10 has just reported. After intensive line-weight research and refinements they have produced the first really ‘worth-having’ Poser-comparable automatic lineart I’ve seen from Blender…

The eye is mean to to be missing, as the model wears an eye-patch.

Good work, chaps, those lines look very usable. The eventual BEER plugin will also aim to be seriously artist-friendly too. If you’d like to contribute to their fund and help raise the cash for the final 10 weeks (of 20 weeks) needed to actually make the finished plugin, you can donate $5 on Gumroad and get fab toon .blend files featuring bunny-girls and kitties under CC-BY. Those with ninja coding skillz can also offer their services to the project.

Release: EBSynth moves to beta

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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).

Releases: AKVIS Decorator 8.0 and Charcoal 5.0

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There’s some interesting movement from AKVIS, makers of rather over-priced but robust single-purpose graphics plugins.

1) Their AKVIS Decorator 8.0 is now finally ready for prime-time, having introduced a 3x speed boost with version 7.0 just before Christmas 2019, and their version 8.0 in early 2020 polished that up even further. It works as a Photoshop plugin and replaces clothing and wallpaper while retaining shadows, folds etc…

I’ve given the Photoshop plugin version a good test in PhotoLine, and it now works fine and fast, having previously been very slow. It can now take only seven seconds to replace a dress at 2400px, compared to many minutes before. Just remember to tweak your material scaling up to 150% or above, for a huge speed boost. The higher the scaling, the faster it runs.

2) Their AKVIS Charcoal 5.0, which I’ve not been impressed with in the past, now runs on a completely “new photo-to-drawing conversion algorithm” as of the new 5.0 (29th July 2020) version. A change which kind of confirms my feeling that previous versions were lacking something. Again, I’ve tested the latest version, since they have ten-day demos. As you’d expect from the name, it tries to convert your cute cat / boyfriend / selfie photo etc into a mixed charcoal/chalk drawing. It’s fast and on my test Poser comic-book render I found a few of the thirty or so presets that I could just about imagine making a stylised horror comic with. Most were too scribbly and the scribbles had no respect for the eyes, though, and did little better than the free G’MIC. AKVIS needs a “detect and partly protect the eyes” module in the algorithm, I’d suggest. Still, I was able to brew a pleasing custom preset fairly quickly…

…and I like the software far more than before. This picture is still sharp at the edges, because Charcoal was running on a masked PNG render. Provided you want heavily ‘smudged and gauzy’, with a little work it could give you a style that could work for a Halloween ghost tale. There may also be some potential for hatching into shadows, but I didn’t immediately see it other than in some promisingly-labelled sliders. Otherwise, for charcoal also look at the free G’MIC plugins before you spend $50 to buy this. The only drawback there is that, last time I heard, the G’MIC suite is for Krita, GIMP, Paint.NET… but not for Photoshop. G’MIC for Photoshop will likely happen, but it could be a while yet.

The cost is the main drawback with AKVIS, with each plugin costing around $50. $49 for Charcoal, and $54 for Decorator. And even at that price, neither are commercial-use and amazingly they’re feature-restricted unless you go for the even more expensive Business version. For example, the $49 standard version of Charcoal won’t let you select an earlier frame unless you have the $89 Business version.

It’ll be interesting to see if AKVIS Watercolor gets the overhaul treatment next, as the February 2020 changelog suggests it’s about where Decorator and Charcoal’s changelogs were a while back.

Skin and G’MiC

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I’d forgotten that the G’MIC filters have a “Colors: Detect Skin” filter, in my recent quest for a skin-extractor. I’d never saved a preset for it, so I’d rather forgotten about that particular filter among the long list. Here it’s tested using the free Paint.NET, which now runs the G’MIC filters and loads up far more quickly than Krita (which also runs them). Once installed they’re found under “Effects”.

The filter’s method of targeting of the skin is fairly clunky, by sliders than move a green target patch about. There’s no “one click to set”. It’s clumsy at best, but simple and relatively quick.

Once your target is set, you then have three sliders with which to try to capture the mask…

Here’s my first quick preset. If this will work well on other Poser Comic Book renders… I’m not sure. But it’s likely to be a reasonable starting point.

Above we see the mask returned by G’MIC to the Paint.NET canvas. We’d only be using the layer colour-blending mode with this, to bring colour back to a filtered Poser render. Thus the clunkiness of the cut-out is not really all that important. It’s an interesting alternative to know about, but if you’re in Paint.NET then its free Color to Alpha v2.2 plugin is preferable, faster, and a bit neater (less fringing) and seems the overall best solution. It’s also nice that it’s totally free.

That said, it would still be nice to have a native real-time Poser solution, for automation purposes. While you could theoretically plug the skin into an auxiliary render node in Firefly, you would not get the masking of the skin by the hair, etc.