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.
I’m just leaving this here for my future reference, as the HiveWire closing sale finishes in a few days. It’s the last items remaining on my HiveWire Wishlist.
Beautiful work that it would be ‘nice to have’, but these were ‘$38 too far’ and will now have to wait for another day. I assume Ken G. will be moving his packs to Renderosity.
* Ken G’s Nature’s Wonders Turtles, with the vol. 1 expansion which gets tortoises.
* Both volumes of Nature’s Wonders Dragonflies & Damselflies.
Time for another monthly survey of the recent goodies released for DAZ Studio and Poser.
As usual, freebies are not covered here unless they have “commercial-use”, or are scripts which the maker doesn’t want sold by others, or are such obvious fan-art that everyone should know they can’t be used commercially.
Science-fiction:
All the sci-fi energy went into cyberpunk on the DAZ Store this month but — while they’re pretty — I assume they’re all ‘near fan-art’ for the big new 2077 mega-game. Which I hear flopped so badly it was taken off sale and buyers were refunded. Ouch.
Is your G8F working late at the lab, trying to get the new 2077 game working? She may be needing the free CyberGlasses 1 and 2.
Sci-Fi Debris Field. A simple foreground vignette scene, ideally for a vast structure looming in the fog behind. But effective and detailed.
Steampunk:
v176 Iray Cobblestone Textures for DAZ.
A Steampunk Ostrich and Cart Bundle.
Need a rest after your ostrich ride? Slump down in a free Armchair.
A free Steampunk Hat for Genesis 8 Female.
A free Drinking Fountain, of the sort you might find in the old streets of continental Europe. Useful street clutter for your steampunk scenes.
Not a Human Skull Morphs, which look ideal for unusual display-cases in your steampunk museum.
Fantasy:
The Living Doll Bonnet. I assume the pins, dollheads and candy could be removed, to allow it to be given it a more sci-fi / Moebius makeover. I also assume it’s not fan-art, but I guess it might be similar to something from a game or movie. As usual, do your research before you commit to using renders from a Poser/DAZ item for a commercial project like a graphic novel.
A new addition to the fine riverine / island props of 1971s, a Pirate watchtower.
And swimming beneath the watchtower? Definitely the new Fishsnakes.
When the Fishsnakes attack, you’ll be needing the new Archery Animations for Genesis.
Animals:
It’s plain Sparrows vs. fancy Pet Shop birds at HiveWire. The closing-down sale ends 4th January, when they load up the Ark and sail many of the animals over to Renderosity.
The Philosopher’s Egg store, that I haven’t been ignoring, just lost track of. Foxes, Wolves and Dog Breeds, all for the HiveWire Big Dog.
My Furry Friend Poses. Cat meets human, cat wins every time…
Storybook:
dForce Petite Style Dress and Scarf Set for toddlers.
A new Hr-240 hair by quality hair-maker Ali.
Cuddly Pillows and dForce Blanket.
Toon and semi-toon:
Race Car for Blender. Obviously only for Whacky Races fan-art.
Free Fancy Cats for Melody and Micah.
Mighty Mite’s Mega-Kitbashers’ Freebies 2020 for Daz Studio. With “stick-on” geometry that may be useful for those who use DAZ to produce “trace-over” renders for comics production.
Christmas:
Mix-n-Match Nativity Poses for Genesis 8.
Free Decorating the Christmas Tree poses for G8F and G8M. And a free Mistletoe prop.
Waiting for Santa, a free Christmas doggie-house.
New from quality scene-maker Raffy Raffy, a $10 Polar pack-ice mega-environment for Blender.
To get your shivering scientists across that lot you’ll be needing the new free Wooden Sledge. Possibly a new DAZ conversion from Bryce?
Historical:
dForce Rabari Tribe Outfit for Genesis 8 Male.
A Carrara Nightshirt for Genesis. DAZ Carrara can load the early Genesis figures.
Nonesuch Court 2 for DAZ.
A free Windmill of the farm water-pumping variety.
A worn Painting workbench for Blender.
dForce Sophisticoat Outfit for Genesis 8 Males and textures. By changing some of the fancy threading on the ties, it could probably become more of an 18th century seaman’s coat.
Textures for Snub-nosed P-40 Warhawk, for Poser.
Light Armored Vehicle Poses for Genesis 8 and Tank Crew Pose for Genesis 8.
Characters and figures:
Realistic Skin Shader for Keyshot. The latest Keyshot 10 apparently now handles hair/eyelash transmaps properly (I still haven’t had time to test that), and so some may want this for their DAZ-to-Keyshot experiments with figure imports.
Passiflora V4 by Tempesta3d, noted here because it’s a now-rare V4 offering and has a high quality skin MAT.
Copper Twinklefoot, a ‘late Michael Jackson’ a-like for DAZ, with a dash of Woebegone Alley for some of the morphs.
Free Spurs for Genesis 8 Female.
A simple free Mini-dress for La Femme. Possibly useful for recording YouTube tutorials where she needs to be covered up, but without looking either a frump or a floozie.
Scene addons, utilities and scripts:
Dreamlight’s Instant Fog for DAZ.
The free NVIDIA vMaterials 1.7 conversion set for DAZ Studio.
Feet Lock/Unlock script for ALL Genesis Figures. With a handy menu.
Three working scripts to load Poser’s saved render presets. For the first time, Poser’s Sketch .PZS presets can also be loaded by a script.
Restore Default iRay Engine Render-settings for DAZ Studio 4. It already has a “Defaults” button, but this may be of use for scripting-of-scripts.
Tutorials:
Eye Catching : A Tutorial on Character Eye Expression.
dForce Complete : Tutorial Bundle.
Tutorials for Poser 12 Early Access.
Ok, that’s it for 2020. Onward to 2021!
Smith Micro has very recently effectively deleted their Poser webinars and tutorial videos on YouTube by making them all private and inaccessible. For now, their Moho / Anime Studio ones remain. Accordingly, curators should check their YouTube playlists for tube-rot.
What’s been lost, for Poser? Two Brian Haberlin webinars, in which he generously gave good tips on making digital comics with Poser, and which were not also available on his own channel. These being…
* “Poser Webinar: Poser Pro Game Dev Essentials with Artist and Innovator Brian Haberlin”. One hour. November 2014.
* “Poser Webinar: Using Poser 3D Software to Create the Ground-Breaking Graphic Novel Anomaly” with Brian Haberlin. One hour. Late 2016?
Three others were done with Digital Art Live — and thus probably remain available that way. “How to Import and Render Genesis 3 into Poser 11”, “Master the Rigging Process”, presented by Teyon Alexander, and “How to Create Graphic novels and Anime Art in Poser”, presented by Tasos Anastasiades on Poser comics. There are a number of other Tasos/Poser webinars at the DAL store.
Here’s a list of other non-comics webinars that still appear relevant in 2020 and which, until recently, Smith Micro listed on their main Poser site. These are now lost, it seems…
* “Discovering Poser Python Tools and Wardrobe Wizard”, with Phil Cooke. 2012. (I’m guessing Phil may have a copy?)
* “How to Get the Best Results from Poser’s SuperFly Render Engine”, presented by Stefan Werner. (On which I wrote “this video is a highly technical look at the innards of SuperFly, and is not ‘pretty pictures of space babes and a half-dozen hot rendering tips'”).
* “Rigging and Vertex Weight Mapping: A Primer”, presented by Larry Weinberg. (Poser Pro 2012. “Larry will demonstrate the tools and techniques he uses to create and fine tune character rigs and vertex weight maps. This is a great opportunity to learn more about rigging from Poser’s creator”).
* “More Little Known Secrets of Poser”, presented by Jason Cozy. (“Save time by creating groupings within Poser, by using the pre-sets in the Sketch Designer, and use simple Morph Tool fixes and Dependent Parameters”).
* “Rendering Tips and Tricks”, presented by Stefan Werner. (Using Poser Pro 2012, looking at “depth of field, indirect light, and ambient occlusion, and SSS”).
As for any shorter tutorials that might have been on the official Smith Micro channel, it’s not a great loss. Most of the best Poser tutorials were on other YouTube channels, such as Renderosity, Preta3D (Reality plugin), O’Reilly training videos, DAZ, Clip Studio, etc. I see no such short-video losses from any of my playlists.
Freeware that makes 3D extruded text as a mesh? Back in the day, everyone was doing it. And their chimp, too. Actually I’m fairly sure I once saw Michael Jackson’s pet chimp in a 1980s pop video, and it was coding a ‘3D spinning text’ app on an Amiga 6000. But most such freeware has gone the way of… poor Michael and his chimp.
Poser 11 has a basic “type text, turn it into a 3D mesh” tool, built in, for easy labelling of 3D diagrams, cutaways and suchlike. But the resulting text is a flat mesh and cannot be extruded or “fattened up” into full 3D.
Are you then going to load up DAZ Hexagon or Photoshop, just to do make some fat extruded 3D lettering? Or wrestle with SketchUp (which generally hates OBJs, without a lot more wrestling). Or Blender, which would be like using an atom bomb to swat a fly.
Nope, you’re going to dig up Armin Muller’s kewl bit of Windows freeware that’s dedicated to just this one task. It’s called Elefont 1.4. It’s not pretty, but it still does the job.
Brycemania still has Elefont 1.4 in its freeware offerings for public download, along with a mfc42.dll some users of older Windows OS’s may need to run it. I ran Elefont fine from Windows 8 without the DLL. Update: the files page is there at October 2021 but these particular .ZIPs are gone. Thankfully Archive.org had saved Elefont 1.4 and also mfc42.zip.
If these links fail then go to the WayBack Machine, paste in http://www.armanisoft.ch:80/elefont14.zip and http://www.armanisoft.ch/mfc42.zip then choose the save for each that was made in the year 2000. This should give you a viable .ZIP file.
It’s a simple 3D text maker used by Bryce users. You type in text, choose a font from your PC, choose a bevel type from a list of about a dozen, get a real-time preview. 3D text is created and saved out as a mesh. Though sadly it never exported to OBJ. Just to the Bryce .DFX format, and the PovRay/Moray .UDO format. But there is an easy way to get .OBJ in 2020.
Here are the controls, labelled. Q and E are both controlled by mouse, hold + drag, then you get a sort of “invisible slider” and real-time feedback from the mesh on the window as the slider adds more faces or the mesh is extruded out.
Here you see extrusion in action…
And the basic level of exported mesh…
And the choice of bevel edges…
Ok, so you have your .DFX file. Poser 11 can import .DFX directly, but not it seems the ones written by Elefont. Pity.
The current Bryce can still open Elefont’s .DFX fine, although they come in laying on the ground and need to be rotated to face the camera. DAZ’s Carrara can also apparently import them. Both can then export to .OBJ format. The problem there is not everyone has an old copy of Bryce or Carrara installed.
Thus a free conversion utility is needed. Meshlab? No, surprisingly it ‘knows nuuurthing’ about importing .DFX files, though apparently can write them.
The solution is to use the freeware PoseRay utility from the old POV-Ray crowd, who back in the day were working with Bryce and Poser. As such this utility handles both .DFX and .UDO and is very simple to use. Just remember to uncheck “Reorient” before you import the .DFX file.
It’s a simple Windows freeware file-conversion utility, and as such doesn’t require you to either have or launch DAZ or Poser.
Your OBJ then outputs with a MTL file. This loads to Poser fine and is correctly oriented on import to Poser and other software. It can then be made to spin. Possibly by a toon chimp.
So the quick workflow is:
1. Elefont. Type in your text. Set high quality, font, extrusion, bevelling.
2. Export to .DFX file.
3. Load PoseRay, turn off “Reorient” checkbox. Then import the .DFX file.
4. Export to OBJ. Load to Poser or other software with default settings. Poser will stand the lettering up in the correct way, and I assume DAZ Studio will too.
Poser 12 Early Access for Windows has moved forward another iteration. It had been at “Poser 12.0.322” for about a week, and as of yesterday moved forward to “12.0.340“.
Minor polishing, buffing of the Japanese version, and it has obviously been well-tested with the free Included Content because small fixes have been made there. But the most important fix for advanced users appears to be…
“Reduce Polygons has been added back to the Object menu”.
Renderosity’s 24 Days Of Christmas Advent Calendar is popping up some curiously un-seasonal selections, but I’m not complaining when it makes old content such as ‘Battlefields: The Ridge’ available for free.
Long unavailable, this is Coflek-Gnorg’s superbly-made First World War ridge trench emplacement for Poser. Grab it while it’s available. Also today, we get an “Alien Organics” materials packs for Poser and iRay.
A 1971s tree and a Nursoda figure, in the test-scene for my forthcoming Poser script.
