News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Natural media emulation

Open the hatch

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This is for Tom, showing one of my custom Sketch presets at work in Poser’s Sketch Designer, biting into the shadows of the Smooth Shaded display mode. In the comments, Tom asked about what MotionArtist’s 3D auto-hatching looked like, and I said a render from Poser’s Sketch Designer would be more acceptable to regular comics readers.

It was a bit more faint on the actual 6 second Sketch render at 1800px, and here I’ve tweaked contrast for clarity. In Smooth Shaded you don’t get the eyes, but you’d be compositing those in via a line-art render. The problem with this kind of fine hatching is that as soon as you start to reduce it in size, it smushes down into a smudgy haze. For a comic one would have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning it and making it consistent for, say, a 10″ Kindle screen. Still, nice for one-off illustrations, and a bit of smart blur gets you a pencil-smudged effect without damaging the linart.

Here’s an earlier attempt, with a more Bernie Wrightson look. This was on a straightforward figure, so it can also be done on normal display modes.

These are a bit hatched or whorled, but Sketch Designer will also emulate cross-hatching.

Some ideas on quick-sketch ‘explainer videos’ with Poser

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You remember those “whiteboard animation” videos, in which a hand super-quickly drew a sketch, words get laid down, while there’s a voiceover? They were the ‘hot new thing’ circa 2014, and generally now go by the name of “explainer videos”.

Production of them is now a Cloud or tightly Cloud-locked subscription thing, and there appears to be no desktop-only software worth having for making them quickly and easily. The leading $40+ a month names are Sparkol VideoScribe Pro and Easy Sketch Pro, among others. There’s obviously a lot of money in such services, and the Web is very intensively astro-turfed with page after page of spam and misleading marketing on such things. It’s almost impossible to find reliable information. Anyway, they exist, and the market leader VideoScribe has impressive capabilities, yet is fairly simple to use.

Their lustre has faded, as a media form. ‘Explainer videos’ were very hot in 2015-16 as we came out of the Great Recession, but they became over-used for mundane purposes — often purchased off the shelf for $20 from quickie providers in the back-streets of India, via Fivver. Such indifferent use has turned them into the humdrum Powerpoint slides of 2020. Meaning a superficially fancy presentation of fuzzy or half-baked ideas, done in a manner that’s then difficult to question or challenge. Thus making the format one that people now wince at, when they see it hove into view in a business meeting, teachers’ meeting or in a marketing context.

But that doesn’t have to be the case, and with a good story to tell and some creative flair they still have a place in education, especially for children and in lower-level work training. That set me wondering about how one would get a Poser line-art render to animate as if it was being drawn line-by-line by a human hand. Being able to output such a thing might be an attractive feature for Poser 12.

The basic method is fairly simple. Lineart as a vector .SVG is just a bunch of vector paths, usually laid down by hand in a certain order. A good .SVG keeps note of the order in which the ink lines were laid down, and apparently it then embeds this information in the file. Javascript can then be run on each vector line to “dash” it. Make these dashes long enough, then cycle through them with a bit of maths so that the dashes appear to “slide along the line”, and that’s the basic way you can give the illusion of lines being revealed. That, apparently, is how the trick is done.

As first I wondered if Smith Micro’s MotionArtist could do this sort of “reveal a drawing effect”. Nope, seems not. Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator? Nope. You’d think that such a sales-worthy feature would be a natural one to add, but it’s not.

What about the vector tools? Surely there’s an Inkscape plugin? Nope. Clip Studio? Nope, seems not. Paint.NET? Nope.

Then I thought about Poser’s ability to output a Corel Painter script, for playback in Painter. But my in-depth look at that nearly forgotten Poser feature shows… that it does not actually lay down “strokes and lines”, whatever the end result may appear to be. Like I said above, a lot of this stuff is in the realm of “smoke and mirrors”, in terms of how it’s actually done vs. what it actually looks like.

But could a Python script in Poser go through a figure and selectively turn off the Geometric Edge line, stepping through the body parts according to a set “feet to head” list, and saving to each step to a movie-frame as it went along? That would give a certain effect, but it might look a little weird in terms of not looking “hand drawn” when played back. For instance, the long leg lines would be drawn in “all at once”. One would have to also have the script generate shaped white geometry at certain co-ordinates (placed in front of the leg) to prevent the complete line from being seen all at once. It’s a very complicated possibility, for someone with a few weeks to spare and ninja Python coding skillz, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen.

Perhaps then what’s needed is for Poser 12 to whip up some maths that saves Comic Book Preview edge-inking lineart to SVG, and have that SVG embed pseudo “pen stroke” information based on mesh names. For instance, tell the SVG that: this set of ink line come from the head mesh | therefore when drawing = reveal main head outline first | then eyes, nose, mouth | then neck | then reveal hair and hat lines. Or: this leg line is a long line from the leg mesh | therefore drawn it bit by bit | first to that on one side of the leg and then the other. It would probably still not look convincing.

The other way might be an AI that “knows” about the order of head, hands feet, eyes, etc. It would look at any vectorised Poser lineart and identify the body parts and it then “knows” the order in which a human would draw them, and how. It then saves a new SVG with that drawing information embedded it it. Clip Studio already has AI pose recognition, which transfers the pose from a photo to a 3d figure, so it’s not going to be impossible in future. It’s probably the future of this sort of thing, but it’s still some way off.

Alternatively, if you like the Poser Comic Book inking/rendering style and want to keep it, the best option can be simply to import your lineart to VideoScribe. It will actually automatically vectorize and you then choose the reveal style…

The bottom-left one is the best. It might appear that VideoScribe is preparing to draw ugly blodgy lines over your lovely lineart, but that is not the case. What it’s showing is where your lines will be revealed, not drawn.

What appeared to work best for this import was a 600px PNG with a plain background. On playback the hand and pen darts about all over, since there is no “order of laid-down lines” to follow, but if you set the draw time to sub 5-seconds then the flickeriness is not going to be too wearing on the audience (though a few may be on the floor having a flicker-induced epileptic fit). It’s also possible to remove the ‘drawing hand’ or just use a pen-nib instead. For reveal times, the best VideoScribe scene/video settings are said to be…

Another possibility is that you vectorise in Inkscape, set a new top layer, then quickly paint over it with a brush in an approximation of hand sketching. You then make these drawn lines fat enough to cover the lower drawing, and set the top layer to have an opacity of zero. When brought into VideoScribe, you can apparently tell the reveal “hand” to follow only the lines on the top layer, thus cunningly revealing the already-done layer beneath. That would given you a more realistic “drawing by hand” effect, on playback. Like I said, it’s all “smoke and mirrors” in this corner of graphics-world.

Skin and eyes-only render from Poser

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Following on from my recent “How to extract skin and eyes for colour blending” post, I think I’ve now successfully cracked the ‘skin and eyes-only render’ problem for Poser 11. The extreme use-case is: how is your graphics software going to select just the skin on this render, by colour, without complex fiddling around in Poser with setting Toon_IDs for each material, setting up a Firefly render and masking?

Instead of trying to render just the skin from Poser, which does not seem possible in a form partly masked by clothes and hair, there’s another option. I instead have Poser render everything except the skin as black or dark grey.

To do this my Python script scampers through the Poser scene in a few seconds and looks for hair, props, conforming clothing. For anything that isn’t the figure itself. For what it finds, the script sets the diffuse colour nodes to black. A preview render is then made. As this is obviously a destructive script, after running the script the user is prompted to revert the scene to the last saved state.

The resulting real-time Preview render then has skin that can be easily selected and masked in a graphics programme, even if in the original scene the figure had red hair and was wearing a red outfit. Which would have confused the heck out of the software’s skintone selection process.

In PhotoLine (which I now prefer to Photoshop) an Action can automate the ‘Channel to Selection’ process and in a microsecond it has whisked out the skintones and eyewhites to their own layer…

Her eyes have also been selected, but that was because they were a soft skin-like hazel colour to match the outfit. This layer can then be used to restore colour to the skin after a render has been run through several filters and plugins to make it look hand-painted.

Photo.Net can also extract the skintones, using the Color to Alpha v2.2 plugin. Which is probably better if you need fine control over the eye-white selection. It’s very likely Photoshop also has such selection capabilities in its newer subscription version, though readers will have to discover those elsewhere.

Your (only) choice for a third-party Photoshop plugin appears to be Imagenomic Portraiture 3, which has automask of skintones, but which doesn’t return a selection mask (it all happens inside the plugin). It also fails on dramatically-lit pictures such as this…

The advantage of a scripted Poser render is that even if you have a dramatically lit ‘sunset forest’ scene like this, you’re still going to get a relatively easy mask. Because you’d just tweak the colour in the script from black to bright green, and render against a bright green plain background (hide all other elements). The masking out of the bright green should then be very easy, leaving only the skin and eyes.

How to extract skin and eyes for colour blending

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Ideally Poser 12 would have the ability to render only those parts of the skin and eye materials that are visible to the camera, and nothing else in the scene. And to do so in a real-time Preview render.

However I don’t think this is possible, due to the limitations of the current Preview and Firefly engines. I can’t find any script “to render just materials X and Y, as visible to the camera”.

Why would one need to do this?

In post-work a render may be filtered through a Photoshop plugin to get an artistic effect (see below), and the colours will thus shift or wash out. The general colour and contrast shift may be pleasing, but the skin and eyes may then look “off”. Skin can look yellow and jaundiced, and eye-whites less than white. By laying in a render-pass layer containing only skin and eyes, the correct colours can be restored — the layer is blended using a Colour or Saturation blend-mode.

There are several possible workaround solutions to get something like such a useful ‘skin and eyes only’ render.

1. Create a Python script to temporarily hide hair and clothes and props from the Poser figure, auto-remove any Comic Book inking lines, auto-render to Preview, then have the screen restore all visibility. It can be done, and I now have such a script working. The results are not ideal when you’re pasting over a picture which has hair and collars, and where the eyes have become better than what you’re pasting in. But a few dabs with an eraser can just about blend in the new layer. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best in-Poser option and is quick and mostly automatic.

All we want from this is the colour, blended as a layer in Colour blending-mode

2. Extract skin with the free paint.NET graphics software and its rather nice Color to Alpha v2.2 plugin. Imperfect, and may need a wide Gaussian Blur to fill holes and soften raggedy edges. Might be good if you don’t need precision or eyes. Update: it’s capable of far neater work. More useful if your graphics software can ’round trip’ to Paint.NET and back, such as you can do in PhotoLine.

Set the skin tone, and the skin is extracted while the rest is sent to transparency. Adjustable via sliders. This example was run on a Poser Sketch render, and its’s not the extraction that’s caused the artistic effect.

3. Render each and every figure / hair / hat / prop in the Poser scene separately and then assemble them in the graphics software as aligned masking layers. Again, I now have a Python script to do this in Poser. But in practice it’s not viable, since hats, helmets and hair etc don’t mask. Meaning that you see the back of them, when there’s no head in them. If you only have scenes full of bald and hat-less monsters and robots, you’re fine. Otherwise, not so much. That said, it’s quite possible that some makers of comics and storybooks will want to manually draw on the hair afterwards, along with brows and mouth-lines.

4. In the Materials room set a bright green colour (it’s found under ‘Math’, perversely) as the Firefly auxiliary render ‘option one’, repeat for all the fiddly bits of skin and eyes you want masked. Render in Firefly with the ‘option one’ Auxiliary switch thrown, save to .PSD. Select colour, extract, use as a mask. Fiddly, slow, and clunky as hell. Best avoided.

Voice controlled comics software

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Worried about your fingers getting creaky? By the time they do, software will likely be stuffed with AI-enhanced voice assistants and the old mouse and keyboard may be gathering dust in a drawer. This is suggested by a new article from Maxon, maker of Cinema 4D, which profiles Kye Young and her use of the software. She Makes Comics in C4D Using Voice Controls…

“after developing degenerative arthritis in her fingers … she figured out how to use voice commands to control C4D, dramatically reducing the need for her mouse and keyboard.”

Enlightening the dense

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A promising new 2020 paper, “Generating Digital Painting Lighting Effects via RGB-space Geometry”. Along with the paper are Python scripts that inspect your digital painting, detect where “the density of strokes” are, and then intelligently re-light the painting accordingly.

It’s ‘early days’ for this and similar experimental re-lighting techniques. But one wonders if it could be used on 3D renders, perhaps if they were output along with a quickly-calculated data-file that served as a proxy for “density of strokes”. That would perhaps be the equivalent of Poser’s Sketch rendering, but without the rendering — only the stroke density data would be saved, as a text file. Poser can already save its stroke data for export to Corel Painter.

Another watercolour demo with Koit

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Nursoda’s Koit character, straight from Poser 11 with unaltered grungy textures and Poser’s Comic Book mode active…

The same Koit was then passed through my custom Sketch preset in Poser 11. 10 seconds at 1800px. The resulting Sketch render then had basic blur and treatment in Photoshop, an alt. inks layer blended in, and some manual fixes to clean up eyes and a few broken or missing lines. Two different watercolour looks…

Yes, I know… “but where are the shadows?” wail some readers. Very easily blended in from another render, with Photoshop, on both body and ground, comes the answer. But this is just a quick demo.

Also, it can be observed that the above pictures are a graphic novel ‘lite’ idea of what watercolour is, which would likely be quite a bit messier if done for real…

Koit

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A quick test of Nursoda’s Koit for Poser, picked up in the Renderosity Black Friday sale a week ago for about $3.50 (or thereabouts).

Default textures under a simple IBL light. Poser’s Comic Book mode, which was then Sketch rendered with my custom “Incredulize” Sketch preset at 1800px (ten seconds). In Photoshop, some Surface Blur and then Smart Blur, to get much but not all of the grain off. Then some finishing touches with toning and paper-effect in Photoshop.

Cartoon w/ Line for hard shadows

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In Poser 11, the “Cartoon with Line” real-time display mode is another possible way of getting shadows. I’ve usually avoided using it as a shadows layer, because it doesn’t handle eyes or transparency well (e.g. trans-mapped eyelashes appear as oblong blocks), even though it can be rendered to a Preview render in a fraction of a second. But then I wondered… can its problems be lessened in Photoshop, if the layer-blending is subtle and if I find the right blend-mode?

As you can see here, in Photoshop it can be made to blend nicely into my new Poser custom Sketch preset (‘Flat Oils’ at 1800px, flattening and ‘painting-erizing’ while retaining most detail), and it provides shadows that look like part of the artwork. They are also colourised to match the base, while retaining hardness (though a slight blur help them to blend in further). Laying and blending the ink lines from the Comic Book mode completes the hand-done effect, and adding to the hand-made feel is that the inks don’t quite fit the Sketch-rendered colour base layer.

So it’s another way of getting a ‘hard’ shadows layer, rather than a soft AO or similarly fuzzier shadows render. But note that one would need to manually erase trans-mapped sections, such as eye-lashes, or more likely just remove them entirely from the base model.

The light here is the un-altered “Dusk by Ocean” IBL AO light that ships with Poser 11.

Lumion 10 and NPR

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Lumion 10.0 has released, it’s a $1,500 – $3,000 “real-time architectural visualisation software”, and I wouldn’t normally bother mentioning such things here. But 10.0 adds new arty NPR presets…

“an experimental new Artist Styles feature, which uses AI techniques to stylise renders to look like the work of famous painters.”

Albeit which what appears to be a hefty render time. It’s not ‘NPR in real-time’, even on the sort of render rigs that architects have access to.

De-grunge 3

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Another quick way to de-grunge default Poser/DAZ renders. This could be for when you just want a quick-and-meh kind-of watercolour look, and you don’t care that the look is a bit too ‘Photoshop filtered’ and thus unconvincing.

Of course, on top of this you’d then lay in Poser’s comic-books inks or pencil lines from Poser’s Sketch, and lightly blend in shadows.

De-grunge 2

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I’ve found another way to quickly de-grunge default textures in Poser 11. It’s not as colour-faithful as the Topaz Clean 3 workflow, but is quicker and lends itself nicely to a ‘storybook watercolour’ rather than a ‘comic-book flats’ workflow. It’s built right in to Poser, in the “changeGamma” Python utility script that ships with Poser…

It’s very easily and quickly applied, and you can even control which bit of the character or scene it gets applied to. It shows up in Preview, though takes a moment to appear. One can also just apply the gamma lift on certain bits of dark clothing.

Below you can see what a simple setting of “1.0” does when applied to the whole character + clothing. Dark grunginess is strongly lifted, without having to change the lights. Here I’m using a flat toon IBL light, pointed straight at the Puntik character, to get a flat toon effect. This light has not changed between the “default” and “after” examples. (A setting of 0.8 would be too light, 1.5 is not so light as 1.0).

Speckling from the grungy textures is still there, but it becomes much easier to burn nearly all of it off with the real-time Comic-Book control-dial. I can also run a couple of my custom Sketch presets in Poser, and get quick Sketch renders than look like hand-painting, and the lightness enables a nice watercolour effect.

Those desperate to have it ‘look 3D’ could, of course, subtly blend in a shadow / highlights render to give a more rounded form. This would also serve to darken the character back down a little.

Character is Puntik Kaalkopje by Nursoda.

Test: Poser 11 Sketch Designer to Painter 2019

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Perhaps the least-documented feature of Poser is the ability to send your Sketch Designer sketch over to the Corel Painter software, and have Painter re-paint it stroke-by-stroke. The script runs in Painter with whatever Painter brush and brush-size is currently selected.

The Poser 11 PDF Manual merely says that this feature has been ‘tested with Painter 6, but is not guaranteed to run in later versions’.

Does it still work? Yes. As a test I exported a script from Poser 11.2.x and tried it on a handy copy of Painter 2019.1. It still works fine.

Here’s how to do it. Turns out it’s remarkably easy to get running, and is potentially very powerful.

In Poser:

First make a Preview render at about 1800px. Doing this will ‘set’ the Sketch Designer’s internal real-time Preview window to the correct dimensions.

Then go to: Top Menu | Render Settings, and open the Sketch Tab. Click the “Sketch Designer” button. Find a saved custom Sketch preset you’d like to try and preview it. Suitable? Then save your Sketch to a Painter .txt file rather than a render. Here I tried a more painterly sketch preset.

When you do this Poser’s Sketch Designer will run the Sketch again in its internal Preview window, then save the script for that out as a .TXT file. This file will embed the size of the picture the sketch is intended for, in its header. If you want to see what the lines of the script look like, just open it with Notepad.

In Painter:

Open a new document, ideally at the same size as the Poser Sketch Designer was using.

Select and size a suitable brush. Go: Top menu | Window | Brush Palette. I found that Pastels | Real Soft Conte | 25 size worked nicely for the first test. Digital Watercolour | Fine Tip 2 | 10 size also worked nicely.

Go: Top Menu | Scripts. This opens Painter’s Scripts panel. The panel is very simple and obvious to use. Importing the script is then very easy, and playing the script back is simply a matter of choosing a suitable brush and pressing “Play”.

The drawback is that the painting/sketching process will be far slower than it is in Poser, and what took 10 seconds in Poser may take 30 minutes or more in Painter. Yet Painter is no longer the circa-2003 ‘Hog-beast That Ate Your PC’, and as such a script can paint lightly in the background… while you do other stuff on the PC with ease. Note also that newer versions of Painter have significantly boosted their script-running speed.

I found that a Poser Painter Script cannot be paused or stopped once playing, despite the Stop | Pause | Play controls on the Script panel. The manual’s suggestion of using ‘Ctlr Alt .’ to force a script to stop did not work either. So, on an overly-long playback, your only option is to Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows and kill Painter. Possibly this is a problem only with Poser scripts?

Despite the lack of speed in playback, the advantage of using Painter is that it is possible to replay the script with different Painter brushes and on different ‘paper’ type. For instance, here is the ‘Blumi and Onats’ picture in several brush-types and tip-sizes on plain paper.

The Poser script plays back with whatever Painter brush is currently in use. Above are several examples of using different brushes on plain paper.

There is no indication that a script has finished running through its painting process, other than that the brush-tip icon returns to the screen and is ready for you to do manual painting or inking.

It appears that there is no way to control playback speed of the script, and I assume it’s locked to how fast the chosen brush can go on your PC. It seems that some types and sizes of Painter brush will run through the script slightly faster than others, but the difference is not great. Changing DPI does not affect speed. Expect a 25 minute ‘paint’ on a couple of simple figures.

The Poser script ‘knows’ what colours to use, since these are specified in the script along with the brush-tip position and direction of stroke. Some brush/pen types, such as Mechanical Pens, obviously have just black colour (because they use black ink).

A strong advantage of Painter is that one can run the same script on different layers with different Painter brushes, and thus can “build up” a more complex painting or ink drawing. Its layer stacking and blending system is standard, much like Photoshop, with a few Painter-specific blending modes.

Painter can apparently ‘scale up’ its scripts on the canvas, by up to 4x. It seems that one can’t simply use a larger canvas size, and have script’s brush-strokes scale themselves accordingly. It looks like you have to edit the pixel width and height values in the script itself, to scale.

Conclusion:

Thus, on test I find that the Poser Sketch Designer to Painter workflow is still useful, and is simple to manage. The work will come in your initial testing of Painter brushes, to find a couple of good ones that Poser can’t do natively. Mostly that’s going to mean soft bleed-over watercolours, as tried on the demo-picture above, or perhaps even thick gloopy ‘impasto’ paint. One could probably nail down a workflow for something quite impressively ‘hand-made’ in watercolours, given a day of experiments. But for speed leave it to Poser to do the super-quick pencil sketching, graphic charcoals and inks, fine dash-shading, and basic under-painting for manual over-painting of digital oil-paintings. Also consider if you can get something similar and faster with a real-time Preview render in Poser, by pushing it through either: i) the excellent G-Mic filters in the free Krita 4; or ii) the painting presets in the paid-for Dynamic Auto-painter 6 (DAP).

Poser: a tip on Sketch and Comic Book Preview

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A small point, but useful for some Poser 11 users to know. When designing Sketch Designer presets, they sketch differently depending on if the Comic Book Preview’s “Colour” filter is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ (“None”). Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between ‘on’ and ‘off’, when working in Preview, with flat ‘toon’ lighting.