Coming soon and booking now, Mastering Animation for Poser 12 webinars with Charles Taylor. Also relevant for Poser 11, of course, it’s just that 11 users won’t have such swift SuperFly rendering or some of the new Cycles nodes. But that won’t matter much if you’re using Firefly, Sketch, Comic Book, or Preview PNG sequence + Photoshop filters/actions.
Poser 12 Early Access has updated again. Now at 12.0.421 (2nd March 2021). The main thing is the Manual.
* “Major updates to Poser Manual to cover Cycles updates and other new features”. Related to this is “Several Help menu commands are correctly linked” in the software.
Beyond that, more tweaks to SuperFly, which is Poser’s implementation of Blender’s main Cycles renderer…
* “SuperFly using Infinite lights [now] consistently renders specularity on sequenced images”. Which appears to be a useful fix for animators.
* “Fixed HDRI background images corruption, no longer previews or renders red or black.” Also, SuperFly render size was being constrained in size by a 4095 pixel limit on background images. This limit has been removed.
And some Python scripting things fixed, presumably ahead of a big update for the bundled scripts and more (said to be due in mid-March), such as…
* “Bundled Python command-line tools and apps now have the correct library load path attributes.”
A few Poser tech-demo renders for some of the items picked up back on Black Friday or thereabouts.
Vintage Robot.
EV6 Europa for V4, A4. Afflicted with grungy ‘swamp-soup’ textures, but you can see here the potential for a texture makeover.
1971s Indoor area. Nice as always, from 1971s.
Mechanical Sandworm. Looks awesome when Comic Book inked in Smooth Shaded Display mode. Its basic textures are not great, but would provides a surface to colorize later. The “eyes” (not really visible here) can be hidden.
Cybertenko Spy Hood. Grungy textures again but a nice addition to the steampunkery collection. The whacky ‘earpipes’ can be made invisible, for a more straightfoward helmet.
1971 Techno Interior. Toons nicely, but like most corridors it’s difficult to control the lighting unless you want either ‘dark shadows and glows’ or ‘a uniform spread’.
A Moebius style helmet from the Helmet-Z3 set by Poisen. The curve at the base of the sides looks more low-poly than I would like, without fixing. But otherwise, a fine design. Real-time lineart run through a quick Sketch render in Poser…
Lots more, but these were some of the ones I picked.
What’s new for DAZ Studio and Poser, in February 2021? Here’s my monthly pick.
Science-fiction:
Need to recreate Marvel Comic’s Deathlok? The DIY Cyborg Outfit for Genesis 8 Males will help get you started in the right direction.
Free RoboFish which might also make for interesting headwear.
Angel Heart Outfit for Genesis 8 Females. Possibly similar to a Chinese superhero, though, so check that before any commercial use. If it’s an original, then it would also suit a Moebius-style comic.
Frankenstein’s Lab, modelled on the 1931 Universal movie, which I think is now in the public domain.
Also a Cosmic Ray Diffuser from the same movie.
WarTech beast pack as Poser/DAZ standalones, presumably for WarTech fan-art only. Still, it looks like a content developer might learn a lot about “looks like it was painted” figure textures from these.
Moon Bug and extra Textures for DAZ Studio.
Soviet Snow Tank, which might perhaps be adapted to a sci-fi hover-tank.
Steampunk and dieselpunk:
CyberSteampunk Accessories – The Mask for Genesis 8 Female. Various mask models.
Victorian Bath Chair for Poser, by railway specialist Dryjack.
Futuristic Vintage Car in FBX. Meant for games, so may be low-poly. On the other hand that may be good, as you could then have a road of them in different colours, animated.
Technomage Prison Cell. Five parts, which can be detached. Also for DAZ Studio, on another page.
dForce Unusual Hat for G8F. Definitely unusual. Though before commercial use I’d want to check it isn’t inspired by The Handmaiden’s Tale TV series, the new Dune movie etc.
dForce Business Woman Dress for G8F. With a few added accessories, it looks just as suited to an early-1920s dieselpunk environment. Perhaps an airship passenger or attendant.
YesterYears II for La Femme, with a nice looking 1926-1946 style.
Usefully generic Steampunk Wings, made for La Femme but presumably they can be fitted to any figure. They don’t convince you that they work, which is kind of important with steampunk stuff, but they do look like they would toon well in Poser’s Comic Book mode.
Steampunk or fantasy scissors for DAZ Studio.
Fantasy:
A free Scroll Throne.
A Hobbit house, though I’m not sure I’d want to use this commercially as it feels a touch too close to the movie versions. For authenticity the Ikea-style cushion-covers and the chintzy Celtic knotwork would need to be removed. There appears to be no front-door. Still, very nicely done otherwise.
Ye Olde Library Props Add-on would add suitable clutter for a Bilbo/Frodo ‘scholar hobbit’ hole.
There are also a variety of demon-people currently going through the DAZ Store, which I assume are closely akin to some new TV series that has passed me by?
Storybook:
Party Props. That’s all this month, for this category.
Toon:
A TB Toon Picnic Camper for Poser.
Grizelda for the HiveWire House Cat. I seem to recall that Grumpy Cat has a copyright troll, so beware of commercial use.
DAZ Aniblocks for Moshi the toon kitten.
Little PuddyTat Poses for the HiveWire Kitten.
Animals:
Woolly Mammoth for Poser. Also for DAZ Studio, on another listing. Just be sure to reduce the textures in size, otherwise you’ll be loading huge PNGs as 8k texures and crashing Poser.
A free Nautilus belauensis shell for Mandelbulb3D. Takes a while to render though.
There’s also a big new range of British bulldogs on the DAZ Store, and various dog accessories.
Landscapes and gardens:
Meditation Gardens from Stonemason. A classic Japanese garden.
This new Stonemason garden should fit well with ShaaraMuse3D’s Wild Mossy Bamboo Forest which now supports DAZ Studio as well as Poser. It appears there is no extra charge for past purchasers of the Poser version, to get the updated DAZ expansion.
A free Tropical Beach for DAZ Studio.
Vehicles:
Need to pack up your business and haul it from California to Texas? You’ll be needing the AJ Trailer and Tanker for Futuristic Truck.
Historical:
1920s Ziegfeld Follies Head-dress & Collar Set for G8F.
Hermes the Greek god outfit, in dForce for G8M.
Ukulele Collection for Genesis 8 and poses, for all your George Formby strumming needs.
The DAZ store also has more Egyptian pharaoh war/battle items this month.
Figures:
The Kiara for Genesis 1 is a useful way to quickly get away from the stock G1 ‘puffy potato’ look.
Not keen on old Genesis? There’s a new free CE Expressions for Genesis 8 Female set.
HF Underwater Action Poses for Genesis 8 Female. Unusual, and potentially very useful for someone with an Aquaman-like or all-action mermaids graphic novel to make.
LF Soft Expressions for La Femme. Relatively subtle expressions and eye-looks, and a reset.
Software, scripts and add-ons:
NebulaFX – Modular Effects for Genesis 8. Probably should have been called “Blob-attack on Planet X18!”, but this this is your go-to FX panel for weird deadly encrustations of various types.
LockMaster for Poser 12, useful for figure setup and animation and making feet stay put. Note this is Poser 12 only.
MARSA Anaglyph3D. ‘Red-blue glasses’ 3D scene maker for DAZ Studio, said to be easy to use.
FormatSwap for Blender. Seems to be a sort of equivalent of Scene Optimizer for Blender. I guess they have their ‘crazy texture-sizes bloat’ problem too.
Tutorials:
Reflections and Light for DAZ Studio. Mirrors, etc.
Render Engine and Scene Optimizations for older PCs running DAZ Studio.
Portrait Character Lighting Tutorial, for a more painterly look from DAZ Studio.
That’s all for now. I couldn’t get fully through the DAZ Store’s new ‘continuous scrolling’ as it slows the Web browser to an impossible crawl after the first fifteen pages or so, and thus I may have missed a few. I got back as far as the new ‘halftone dots guy’ before giving up. Update: Thanks to Kevin M. I’ve solved my problem with the infinite scrolling on the DAZ Store, which after a while causes the thumbnail loading to freeze. This had caused me to have to skip some DAZ Store items that were too far back in time. Setting “Items Per Page” to 60 brings back the paginated browsing.
Many buyers of the new Wooly Mammoth (available at Renderosity) will find Poser totally crashes when making either SuperFly or Firefly renders. The main culprit is the size of the many skin materials — 8192px and 20Mb for one Skin_Normal.jpg for instance. And the same size again for just the Mouth Normal map, too. There are 15 other skin materials of comparable size to load. Groan.
My solution was manually resizing the 15 materials found in the “dull” folder, which is where the various skins materials live. Saving Skin_Normal.jpg at 2048px and 65% JPG compression resulted in a mere 465kb normal map (down from 20Mb), for instance. The others were similarly resized. With these lightweight skin materials loaded to the Mammoth the SuperFly rendering was then fine, and the fur looks much as it does in the Store preview — very nice indeed and with no loss I could detect. What can be seen of the skin still has nice detailing. A FireFly render still crashed Poser, though.
So… it doesn’t toon well (which is to be expected), Firefly may be iffy for you, but SuperFly is OK and most people will want to manually reduce the texture sizes down from 8k.
The subscription VUE R6 is out, and it’s a big update. I hadn’t realised that the new subscription Vue now includes major compatibility with…
* 3D Studio Max 2016 to 2021
* Maya 2015 to 2020
* Cinema4D R20 to R23
* Lightwave 11.6 to 2020
Or, if it didn’t before, then it does now with the new R6. Therefore, since Vue still has excellent Poser scene import… this could be a way to get your Poser scene over to those big beasts, if either: i) you can no longer get the PoserFusion plugins; or ii) your PoserFusion variety can’t support the very latest edition of Cinema 4D, Maya etc and your boss needs you to.
Poser to the forthcoming Omniverse modules too, via Vue…
* “We’ve also included a direct export preset for Nvidia’s Omniverse.”
Other changes:
* Export via Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (.usda, .usdz, .usdc).
* Control clouds based on their altitude in the scene.
* Support for “non-photorealistic rendering” in the Path Tracer, and supports for the Substance GPU engine in the viewport. It’ll be interesting to see demos of those.
* Python 3 since R5. Therefore those relying on Python 2 scripts either need to get them updated or stick to R4.
* Terragen .TER import is back, from R5. Had been broken.
* I see that “SkinVue fixed and added to VUE” since R2, which is important for Poser scene imports with figures.
* Vue’s developer are obviously spending a lot of time aligning the software with NVIDIA’s doomed Omniverse project.
All in all, I still don’t see a big need for a hobbyist to move from the old Vue 2016.
Blender 2.92 is around the corner. What’s new and key?
* Geometry nodes, scatter and instancing.
“Nodes can be used to change an object’s geometry in a more complex way than regular modifiers.” There’s a new node-based system for this, which “lays the groundwork” for the future but for now it has “object scattering and instancing” already enabled. Could be useful for DAZ and Poser… scatter in Blender, save and use in Poser or DAZ.
* Primitives in a click.
“Create primitives with two clicks.” Nice. It’s now probably a bit easier to set up a Synthwave picture by loading simple primitives to an Eevee scene, and then (see below) to get mattes for later compositing.
* Eevee Cryptomatte
Create mattes from the scene, for compositing. This was already in Cycles, is now also in Eevee. A “new compositor node was also added to adjust the exposure of images”.
* Grease pencil
Edit grease pencil strokes using Bezier curves. Also a rather vital Grease Pencil menu, that was accidentally totally bjorked by 2.91, is back again. Nice for the NPR crowd, but grease pencil is obviously one of Blender’s many ‘moving targets’ with features and menus popping into and out of existence.
* Cycles
Faster rendering on complex scenes. “Multithreaded export of geometry, to improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many mesh, hair and volume objects.” Also faster hybrid rendering. “GPU devices can now take over rendering of tiles that are currently being rendered by CPU threads, to improve hybrid rendering performance”. This looks like the main thing.
Cycles getting power-ups is important, because these may well feed into Poser 12 at some point. In Poser, Cycles is ‘SuperFly’.
* Fluids
Viscosity, so you can now do things like ice-cream cone twirls. Or er… doggie doings. Yum.
Want to make your fave 3D characters into cute sewn-fabric plushies? Thomas Kole’s Seams to Sewing Pattern promises to as least get you a viable sewing pattern from a 3D model. Theoretically, it appears that the DAZ and Poser to-Blender scripts should give your figure access to the script in Blender. Relatively simple toon figures will probably work best.
The Poser 12 Early Access installer yesterday moved forward a month, and is now public in the latest version 12.0.386 (28th January 2021) for both Windows and Mac.
The very latest version has two key fixes… “Alpha channel from Cycles image-node renders correctly in SuperFly” and “SuperFly motion blur fixed for background rendering and the queue”.
Before that there were slightly earlier iterations, unreleased until now, which fixed shadow-blur and unsightly ‘seams’ on figures… “Shadow Blur Radius fixed and now working in SuperFly” and “Body part seams [which used to show] in SSS no longer appear, when traditional skinning is used”, and the “Diffuse Value on Poser Surface now correctly functions in Superfly renders.”
Actually the seams do still appear on some figures. The simple fix is to switch the figure to use Unimesh…
It looks like these should fix most of the forum gripes, re: photoreal rendering in Poser 12 Early Access. To aid newer users there are also newly tweaked render presets… “Updated SuperFly presets with improved consistency between threshold value on medium and high adaptive settings, and GPU and non-GPU settings.”
Other notable items are several fixes for CUDA/Optix and other hardware-related glitches, and “Render in Background, with GPU or on CPU, no longer crashes.”
Elsewhere it’s stated that SuperFly now does background transparency and shadow catching, making compositing renders together in a graphics editor easier.
The full technical Changelogs are here along with the installers.
It’s near enough the end of the month, so it’s time for my regular survey of this month’s new and eye-catching DAZ and Poser items.
Science fiction:
A free Obalisk for DAZ Studio. Simple, but effective.
A free Tank Body with a sci-fi Syd Mead feel to it.
Bonefish as a static .OBJ and .FBX. Low-poly so you could presumably scatter and flock them in a large underwater scene.
Pick it Up G8F poses, which could be useful for action superheroes. Likewise the Look at That G8F pose set.
Steampunk:
Possibly also useful for the bike, the GrossArts Air-Propeller for additional lifting power. Need a map-case for a trip on the flying bike? Take a look at the free Cartable. I seem to recall this does not install well.
A free Steampunk Bike in Collada format.
The Watchmaker and the Automaton for DAZ Studio.
Allan Quatermain Adventurer suit for V3, now free. And in a similar old-school mode, a new free set of Michael 2 Expressions. While almost no-one now uses M2, some other old figure might be able to use them.
Fantasy:
Library of Wizardry, a nice variant on the setting that ships free with DAZ. Which I think is called Alchemy Chasm or something similar.
DA Sword and Shield Poses for Genesis 8. These are for round-shield fighting.
A curious Tree hut.
Historical:
Prohibition Alcohol Bottles and Barrels, Tommy Gun, Prohibition Delivery Truck and and Sedan. Also Prohibition Decals including bullet-shattered windows. All for DAZ Studio.
MS20 Country Store for DAZ. I’m fairly sure this used to be for Vue. Useful for use with the Prohibition-era items.
A Mississipi River-boat of the old paddle-steamer variety.
18th century Bicorne French hats in the Napoleon style.
FG Bluson Library, a 1900s-20s U.S. library, suitable for Lovecraftian scenes.
A Second World War Japanese Pillbox and accessories. Possibly also useful for a science-fiction comic, kind of like something you might see in a 1970s Moebius comic, with a sci-fi crystal glint to it.
A Soviet Tank Maintenance Station, which might also serve for other types of tank or even for sci-fi mecha servicing scenes.
Toon:
The Boneyard, a toony take on a stone-age setting and suitable for toon cave-men.
Ronk Artist – Clothing Add-on for Ronk, and Jeloda, both from Nursoda himself.
Also for Nursoda figures, Zlata Fashion, a free addon for Nursoda’s Zlata, and a new Space Pilot PigZZCommander outfit for Frankie.
The Puppet Company, suitable for use with DAZ’s Lenore and the Raven gothic toon figures.
Also suitable as addons for Lenore and the Raven, a free Medieval chair and Stool.
Storybook:
Bugga Boo for Genesis 8 and Morphs.
Victorian-era Housemaid outfits.
Emmy Lou and Her Dress for Genesis 8 Female, a ball-joint doll like character. With the hair being Untamed Curls.
A free Punch and Judy Theater for DAZ Studio.
Scuffed up Hi-Topz Sneakers for Genesis 8 Female.
Wooden Float for DAZ Studio. A classic small castaway raft for small adventurers.
If your storybook’s lead character is on this raft, you may also need the new HF Powerful Swimming Poses for Genesis 8 Male.
Animals:
The HiveWire animal texture sets and their LAMH presets are now on Renderosity. Their creatures will presumably follow in due course. Some of Ken Gilliland’s bird packs are also starting to appear on Renderosity, having previously been at HiveWire.
AM’s new Wolverine. You just know that some wag is going to make a miniature spandex superhero outfit for this one.
Ladybug, aka a Ladybird.
A free dinosaur-friendly Tropical Rainforest as a .DAE (Collada) file. A bit of a tricky format, but better than his previous format, in terms of ‘import -> save as native scene-format’.
African Acacia Tree, for use with African animal scenes.
Casual Cat for DAZ House Cat, a pose set.
I guess this one sort of belongs with the animals. A free Shaman Hat for L’Homme. For those mushroom-munching moments when you think the buffalo are telling you the secrets of the cosmos…
But let’s not forget that modern humans are also prone to the need to wear crazy hats and see visions… in which case you’ll be needing the free Tin Foil Hats.
Scripts and related helpers:
La Eyebrows Gone, to hide La Femme’s eyebrows. Useful if you want to manually draw them on later, perhaps for a graphic novel.
Find it – three Python scripts to help you automatically find the folder for the figure’s .CR2 files, .OBJ files, or the .MATs and/or Poses. Works like the Poser 11 Library’s “Find with Explorer” right-click, but after you’ve put a figure in the Scene.
Alienator Pro for DAZ Studio. Replace all instances with other types of props.
Hand Gestures Pose Collection 1 For Genesis 8. They end up in an utterly stupid folder name, “windfield”, where you would never look for hands in a million years. You may want to rename the folder “hands”.
Tutorials and learning demo-files:
Tutorials for Poser 12, a new YouTube playlist.
Digital Art Live has launched the free STUDIO forum, a virtual artists’ studio to hang out in and learn from others.
A 3Delight Render-engine Tutorial Workshop, as a webinar recording.
That’s it, more picks next month.
Posted in 3D Utilities, Comics, Companion software, Freebies, Poser, Spotted in the News
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ArmorPaint (aka Armor Paint or Armour Paint) is an open-source standalone for painting on 3D models, including with PBR. Very like Substance Painter, but free and with no subscription shackle. Or… sort-of-free. It’s 16 Euros on GumRoad, where your $20 also gets you the latest builds dropped into your GumRoad Library. Or you can compile an .EXE yourself for free from the source-code — if you have a few hours to spare, a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio (free, when last heard of) and a YouTube tutorial handy.
ArmorPaint has had a couple of big updates, and the latest is now 0.8 (19th January 2021). There was another big update you may have missed hearing about, this time last year. There’s a YouTube video for ArmorPaint: Four key new features, January 2021…
“Added Viewport cel-shader plugin”.
Nice. It’s ‘two-clicks’ instant too, and it appears there’s no need to fiddle about with setting up special toon materials. No lineart on the edges, though you might paint along the seams. For the huge list of fixes and changes, including new .SVG import, see the Changelog.
There’s a Blender bridge, but as yet not ones for Poser or DAZ.
Apparently the freeware Materialize, from Bounding Box Software, is said to work well with ArmorPaint as a flanking ‘assistant’ software. Materialize can “create an entire material from a single image”…
The DAZ Store builds a handy Library of your purchases, and very usefully allows re-downloads of .ZIP files, for manual installs. Sometimes for stuff you purchased years ago. It’s a good system. But in the last few days or weeks all the old Poser .ZIPs have been re-labelled as “DAZ Studio”, and here’s an example…
Good luck getting ‘Send in the Clones for Poser’ running in DAZ Studio 🙂 Thankfully the actual sales page still says only “Compatible Software: Poser”, so the Helpdesk team shouldn’t be seeing too many confused customers.
Other tests suggest the Poser installers are still in there, but they’re now mis-labelled. You thus have to squint at the filename and hope it has “Poser” in it, or see if the sales page states ‘Poser only’. Otherwise you have to download all the ZIPs and then open them locally to determine which would need to go in the Poser runtime and which in the DAZ content folder. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference… if it has a “data” folder, then it’s for DAZ.
Update: “Send in the Clones” is said to need Poser Pro 2012 with its service release SR3 patch. But I could not get it working even then, in a 64-bit Poser.
A translated report from the German forums…
The import of scenes from Poser 12 Early Access does not seem to work so well with the current Vue version. According to Walther Beck, from Vue Support, there are apparently inconsistencies.
Vue import of Poser scenes has always been excellent, something that was honed and crafted and aligned over many years. There was a minor glitch with the Vue 2016 R4 patch (Poser 11.2 scene saves may not open correctly in Vue 2016 R4), but this bug was fixed in Vue 2016 R5. But after that, the compatibility has so far continued under the new ownerships.
Let’s hope the problems are not too difficult to fix, and that Vue keeps the ability to nicely import Poser scenes. Vue R6 should be out relatively soon, and that should hopefully fix it.
Poser 11 Pro is now newly discounted down to $99.99 at Renderosity, until 31st January 2021. I assume it must be the latest Poser 11.3, which now makes the old ‘Pro only’ features available to everyone.
But the offer’s a bit moot, when parent company Bondware are still selling Poser 11 Pro over at NeoWin for $20 less. That $80 offer has just rolled over again, and now has 5 days left.
But the new Renderosity price and date is useful information, of a kind. It seems to imply we’re not going to see the release of the long-awaited Poser 12 Final before the end of January 2021. It had been slated for December 2020. Update: the Mac version of Poser 12 is now due at the end of January.
I hear that users of some older versions of Poser are finding their Content Library has gone “phut!” They were still running their Poser Library with Flash, and it’s reported that Adobe has officially stopped all Flash code from running. Some Poser Pro users can apparently toggle some settings, and have their Library run on Adobe Air instead. That was a Pro-only feature and Air is still safe for now, or as safe as it can be.
But some may be looking for a new way to run a Content Library. In which case you may be pleased to learn that the PzDB 1.2 sale is still continuing.
Still $21… if you buy via the Store page. Elsewhere on the site it still has its more expensive price, perhaps on a page that has been overlooked for updating. In my opinion it’s still the best Poser content library and wrangler addon for those with very large runtimes. There’s also a version 1.3 which tried to add the newer DAZ formats, but the cheaper 1.2 may well suit the needs of someone who mostly uses the old Poser 10. Also, neither version will blow up in Poser 12… as PzDB doesn’t use any Python code.
There’s also the P3DO Library, as an alternative. I have this, picked up during a sale, but it’s rather baffling and I have never been able to fathom how it’s meant to work.