A simple fix for the DOF (Depth of Field) PoserPython script (dof_p5.py) in Poser 12.
Category Archives: Poser
Christmas is on the (graphics) cards
Christmas and the January sales approach, and the fabled NVIDIA RTX 3070 super-beast graphics card is… nowhere to be seen. In fact it looks like almost no-one will be able to buy it at the stated $499 price, and until perhaps January 2022.
What of rival card-maker AMD? Well, since you were asking, they have a shiny new Radeon RX 6700 announcing any day now and shipping in January. It might even be as good as the RTX 3070 and yet available in volume. It has not been priced, but its big brother the 6800 = $649. My guess would be the Radeon RX 6700 will pitched around $499.
Yet if the aim is to use it to get a smooth real-time iRay viewport in DAZ Studio, then it’s as useless as the invisible RTX 3070. Because an AMD card just won’t run iRay.
Both cards are then pointless in different ways. In which case, what is the next step down to a “budget” RTX ray-tracing card? That’s said to be the NVIDIA RTX 2060 (not Super) at about £320-£360 inc. tax in the UK. This is apparently just enough to get a real-time WYSIWYG viewport, even with hair and large complex scenes.
Will an NVIDIA RTX 2060 also run Poser? Yes… both NVIDIA RTX and the equivalent AMD RX cards are supported in Poser 11.3 and 12, so an NVIDIA RTX card would be a safe bet, if you can actually find one at the £320-£360 price-point in January. Or better still in the sales at £299.
Possibly a big AMD release would also dip prices on the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, currently at around £280-£340 and more or less the price equivalent of the NVIDIA RTX 2060. The problem there for Poser appears to be that hardware-accelerated rendering requires CUDA cores, and Poser 12 needs RTX. Thus for Poser it really has to be NVIDIA.
But assuming you were a DAZ Studio user and you wanted to go to AMD at either price, and give up iRay… what are the options?
1. Use the Reality plugin. It still runs fine in both DAZ Studio and Poser, and its Lux renderer is just as good as Octane if not as fast. It’s graphics-card agnostic and indeed even runs nicely on CPUs alone. It’s still available for $50, as Reality 4.3 for DAZ Studio. Again, it doesn’t give you a real-time viewport. But, once you have it running it will run as long as Windows runs and never expire — or ask you for a monthly payment.
(While you can apparently now run Reality’s rival Octane on an AMD Mac, you can’t yet run it on AMD Windows).
2. Use the Scene Optimizer, switch the viewport to Interactive iRay and then throw CPU cores at it. It’s a myth that iRay can only run on an NVIDIA graphics card. I can run a real-time viewport in DAZ on Xeon CPUs alone, albeit for a relatively simple scene with no hair or water. Imagine what it might do with a Ryzen 9 5900X CPU.
3. Switch to Poser 11, albeit at the cost of giving up on DAZ’s G3-G8 figures (except as OBJs or billboard renders) and any dream of a real-time WYSIWYG viewport. Even if you don’t care for Blender’s Cycles renderer, which in Poser is called SuperFly, there’s always the Reality 4.3 Poser edition which should run with AMD. Or, there is if you grab the Poser 11 Pro on sale for $80 at NeoWin Deals, and Reality 4.3 for Poser for $50. Also SnarlyGribbly’s free AVfix, a tiny tweaker needed to run Reality in Poser 11.x.
4. Use DAZ Studio and Poser mostly as figure/scene exporters to Blender, and its real-time Eevee engine. But expect to spend hours either fiddling around with texture fixes or learning to do postwork on your pictures. And spend a decade of frustratingly learning Blender, and a day a week just researching and keeping up with Blender-world. It’s a lot of hassle just to get a real-time WYSIWYG viewport. But if you do go that route then the new AMD 6000 series will be what you want, for Blender 2.91. Most likely the forthcoming Radeon RX 6700. Such a 6000 series card will also run AMD’s Prorender 3 plugin for Blender.
So all-in-all, even if AMD ship millions of $299 and $499 mega-cards in January, the all-round best just-about-affordable budget card on Windows seems to be the NVIDIA RTX 2060 at about £320-£360 in the UK, sometimes seen as low as £290. And if you can afford another £200, its big brother the NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super at around £500. Or you could wait for two years and save up that price for the RTX 3070 — when it eventually ships. By that time Poser 12 support for the RTX 3070 and RTX 3090s should be quite firm (it’s a bit shaky at present, as Renderosity have not been able to get a RTX 30 series test-card) (Update: now supported).
One slight drawback of an NVIDIA RTX 20 series card for Poser users is that you then need the Poser 11.3 patch installed to support the card. But that means you lose DSON import, as the same 11.3 patch bjorked the DSON importer, and it’s not coming back in Poser 12. (Update: I’m told that DSON is now supported on all Poser 11.x version, but never will be on Poser 12).
Finally keep in mind the physical size of the card (RTX is a different size than a GTX) and if it will even fit in your PC, and if you have the right connector slots and plugs. Also check if your PC’s Power Supply Unit can run the new card as well as everything else it needs to.
Update: in early December NVIDIA launched the “RTX 3060 Ti, a $399 8GB card that outperforms the old RTX 2080 Super”. But again, it’s just price-hype like it was for the RTX 3070, and no-one can buy them except at three times the list price (£700-£850 in the UK) from a few nearly-sold-out stockists.
Update: September 2021. AMD have apparently “dropped the ball” on OpenCL development and thus the only card choice now for Poser 11 or 12 is NVIDIA with RTX and at least 8Gb of memory, ideally a new 30 series card. The same would also run DAZ iRay well, and the coming AI image makers.
Black Friday: Renderosity Store / AKVIS / Tranmutr / CG Trader Store / ArtStation Store
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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The Black Friday Store sales are opening up, plus more software.
* AKVIS has announced quite a nice offer, up to 50% off everything including their latest improved/speeded-up Decorator and Charcoal (together, $61 with 40% off). They have a Sketch too, but I don’t rate it highly in the scale of such things. The discounts are coupon based, see the page for details. Sadly their payment system is nation-aware and they thus charge an extra 20% sales tax in the UK, which rather wipes out most of the discount!
* 50% off the entire Renderosity Store, except software and out-of-contact vendors. Many will want the La Femme 2.0 Pro edition (the standard ships free with Poser, but Pro adds naughty bits and more) and perhaps also her La Femme CrossDresser License for the free CrossDresser clothing conversion software to expand her wardrobe. Some older Poser scripts are on sale, such as f68 Poser Crowd Generator (scatter and auto-pose figures) and f68 Easy Environment (a non-people scatter tool), but who can say if they’ll be updated for Poser 12? Note there’s also a new Scatter tool at HiveWire, far more likely to go to Poser 12, though it’s $20 and there’s as yet no sale there. There are HiveWire items on sale at Renderosity though, such as the new Tiger and the Egyptian Cat. DAZ and Poser users fond of the old Genesis 1 may be interested in the Renderosity Store’s Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis, which lets the original Genesis wear G8 stuff. Now I have this and the original Poke-away! for Genesis to remove poke-through, I can have “One Genesis to Rule Them All”: a DAZ Studio Genesis figure can wear any outfit from A3/V3 to G8 and everything in between.
* SketchUp plugin Transmutr is on a 30% discount at 55 euros. It imports common formats such as OBJ into SketchUp, poly-reduces and adds other fixes.
* DxO (Nik) have discounts but, just as I was starting to peruse these, a giant screen-blocker appeared and blocked my view. First rule of marketing, guys: Don’t. Block. The. “Buy”. Buttons.
* Smith Micro still lives. Had an email offer on Moho, now effectively defunct but it seems still available.
* The CGTrader store has a five-day sale on now. Sadly the Vue creator Raffy Raffy recently moved from the store to ArtStation, wiping out my CG Trader Wishlist. There are still some nice models down at the $2.50 mark, and you may find a few that can’t be had elsewhere. Of special interest may be the Poser stuff, DAZ stuff (the large numbers of Age of Empires-style ancient warrior and soldier outfits are not discounted), and some Vue content. Many of the detailed science-fiction scenes are expensive, but not all. One can also find quirky things like this Eastern European / Soviet flying van for $10…
* The ArtStation Marketplace sale is also on. There’s a whole lot of fluff in the store, but a key attraction is the Raffy Raffy store with expert Vue and Blender scenes at affordable prices. Raffy knows what he’s doing and the scenes are relatively lightweight despite their size.
There are also a couple of preset packs there, made back when Zbrush introduced NPR, such as BPR Sketch/Cartoon Shaders for ZBrush 2019 and BPR Filters + 3D Skull. If you pick these up you may want a Realtime Viewport Anti-Aliasing script, though be warned that getting a big anti-aliased render from ZBrush is an utter pain-in-the-neck, and even then is only 72dpi — so far as I can recall the recent updates have not solved this show-stopping problem with trying to use Zbrush’s NPR/BPR for comics and illustrated books.
If you’re signing up with the ArtStation Marketplace for the first time, watch out for this nasty little privacy-invader which is not checked by default…
* And finally, advance news that the Blender Market is set to start its sale tomorrow.
Poser 12: SuperFly flies
Poser 12 Early Access has had another incremental update, on the way to the full release. The main change is that the ability to use multiple graphics-cards has been opened up, and for Queue rendering too…
* Poser’s SuperFly render settings… “now allow user to select multiple GPUs for hardware render”.
* The Poser SuperFly user can now use the GPU(s) for… “local and remote Queue Rendering”.
For those who don’t know, Superfly is the Poser version of Blender’s Cycles, and more or less the equivalent of iRay in DAZ Studio.
Fix: P3DO Organizer update for Poser 12
The third-party P3DO Organizer Poser library (May 2020) now has a November 2020 fix for use with Poser 12 Early Access.
Black Friday: 1971s sale and X-Pen
* At Renderosity, 1971s’s Store on Renderosity is now on a big sale, 60-70% discounts. The prices are unlikely to get much better than this, even on a store-wide Black Friday sale. 48 hours only. Nightshift3D’s Steampunk props and NoMuse’s Steam Props are also on sale. I picked up a nice mix of 1971s, Nightshift3D and NoMuse which, with a little Store Credit applied to defray the cost, cost me only $14. Nice.
* A substantial sale is on now at the XP-Pen Official Store. Formerly Ugee, maker of affordable “draw on the screen” pen-monitors with (when last looked at) very sturdy tilt-adjustable stands. You can see the stand-type here and it’s what to look for if buying for a desk-based studio (i.e. where you don’t need to travel out to show work to clients in-person)…
I’ve been pleased with mine, purchased back when Amazon was shipping a 1440px Ugee 1910b at a bargain price, and I’m hoping in the New Year or early Spring that I might get a larger and more colour-faithful review-model, perhaps the current XP-Pen Artist 22E seen above.
* Meanwhile, over in France… ” The French government on Friday declared it was cancelling Black Friday”. Durh…
Black Friday: PzDB and Udemy courses
Yet more discounts, as we head toward Black Friday (next Friday)…
* 50% off PzDB, the Poser external library. The offer has been around for a while now, since the summer in fact, but as I recall it’s only going to last until Cyber Monday. PzDB is not Python-based, so won’t break with Poser 12. It is still the best external Library for big runtimes, in my view. Especially so if you have two monitors and want your Library over on monitor #2, which you haven’t been able to have with Poser since Adobe Flash / AIR became insecure and was abandoned. If you only use Poser, note that you only really need the PzDB 1.2 at its discounted price of $20.95, rather that the more expensive 1.3. Try the free trial first, if you need to re-assure yourself it will work for you.
* Udemy has a big Black Friday sale on, with heavy discounting. They front-load their site with expensive programmer and IT techie courses, but if you dig you can find some creative ones. Some of which seem to be one hour only, which hardly qualifies them as a “course”, so watch out for that as they’re no cheaper than longer ones. Noted by me, usually at £9.99, were…
How to use MotionArtist (the only dedicated motion-comics software)
Complete Clothes Drawing Course – Folds, Wrinkles And Outfits. With a focus on realistic wrinkles. Something you don’t get taught on any comics course, but kind of important if your cast isn’t entirely hard-metal robots.
Cel Shading for Animation in Photoshop and Cartoon Animator 3.2. Looks like a bit of a quickie course, but it may interest some.
Concept Environment Art Using Krita. Looks excellent. He appears to be talking about painting a set of matching 2D environment assets or elements, not painting a full scene or backplates.
3D Coat Sculpture Modelling, Retopo, UVs and Paint. A big, popular introductory course. Better than “Introduction to 3D Coat” which suffers from a very rushed presenter and a giant spider for the vital 3D mesh painting section.
Learn iClone 7 | Character Creator | Unreal Engine Pipeline. Probably a bit out of date by now, and also overtaken by Reallusion’s own excellent free video training.
Poser Pro Game Dev Fundamentals. Poser to the Unity game-engine, an Infinite Skills training course. Not discounted, but interesting that it’s still available. Its subject-matter may be made moot by Poser 12, if there’s to be an easy Unity exporter. If you were wondering, there are no other Infinite Skills Poser courses on there.
A few more details on Poser 12
Here are just a few main details from the many given in Sunday’s key Poser 12 webinar. It went very well, and the upgraded “500 capacity” room was required as people continued to pour in.
Poser 12 SuperFly, based on Blender’s Cycles render engine:
“Adaptive Sampling” means that SuperFly is now stated to be “almost twice as fast on a CPU render”, provided you’re willing to do slight and fairly-easy tweaking of bucket sizes and other render settings (as was shown in the webinar. Doubtless there will soon be shared “ideal” render presets for CPU-only and cards on the forums, if there are not already). CPU users of adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will paradoxically see better results from quite small bucket sizes.
As is well-known from the forums, for GPU’s and for a further 2x speed boost in SuperFly you’ll need an NVIDIA 20 series RTX graphics card, or a NVIDIA Quadro card that supports RTX. Poser 12 should work with the new 30 series RTX, but they’re so rare that Renderosity has not yet been able to get hold of one to officially test.
The new SuperFly now supports Ambient Occlusion, and it was said that it can also render to a set of render-pass layers much like the Firefly renderer can.
The new Cycles also makes it “really, really easy” to set up a PBR material for Poser 12’s new SuperFly. Just export three layers from Substance Designer (or, presumably, 3D-Coat), and plug them in to the simple node setup (as shown in the webinar) inside Poser. Also, these PBR materials “will just look right” in Poser renders without much tweaking needed. Other Blender’s Cycles node setups can be easily ported over, once you know that Blender’s direction of node flow is a “mirror-reverse” of that used in Poser. However, it was highly recommended not to try to toon in SuperFly, and to instead use Poser’s excellent and real-time Comic Book mode.
The new SuperFly also has a Hair node, deceptively simple-looking but actually very complex in its own right, which can produce complex and “amazing” results. More neat new shader nodes for Cycles/SuperFly will be exposed in Poser 12 in due course.
Intel OIDN Denoising of quick renders is software based, and is not graphics card dependent.
Scripts:
As is very well-known from the forums, the move to Python 3 has broken many old PoserPython scripts, but these are getting fixed. DAZ’s DSON importer for DAZ Genesis 1 and 2 is broken, but such old Genesis figures can still be imported as .CR2 (or, I would add, poly-reduced static posed .OBJ for more wieldiness and which can also do Genesis 3 and 8).
Runtimes:
Also well-known from the forums, there’s a new integrated method of installing purchases via the Library, but you can still do it the old way via .ZIP files. And downloadable .ZIP files for content will still be available on the Renderosity Store.
Yes, you can still have all sorts of weird and wonderful locations for your Runtime. If your Poser Runtime is safely stored in a cave on the Moon, and you access it via infra-red radar pulses, just so long as it has a mapped drive-letter on your network… then Poser is sure to see it.
Windows/Mac:
Yes, it’s common knowledge now that you can run Poser 12 and Poser 11 side-by-side. Yes, it can install and run fine on Windows 7 and 8, even though the official store specs are for “Windows 10”. Yes, the Mac version is coming.
Update: Yes, forum reports say Poser 11 and 12 have been tested on the new ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS and both run fine.
Others:
There were also a lot of special “reveals” and hints about what’s set to be added to Poser 12 in due course, but it’s not fair to list those here. Of those I’ll only note that Bloom is to be added to the Post Effects tab, thus enabling Glow. Glow can already be done natively in Poser Firefly with an atmosphere and a point light, even with an emulated emissive spillover, but has severe limitations. There are also SuperFly glow materials. But I’m guessing this Cycles node may be more controllable and have less need to interact with other stuff?
Renderosity’s trailer-page for the webinar had mentioned “new Geometric Edge Lines for Comic mode” and “new lighting: area lights and caustics”, but those were not shown this time around.
Poser can still “speak Vue” and thus presumably send a scene to Vue. The currently subscription Vue still supports Poser scene imports.
Nearly all of the new stuff other than the new SuperFly update appears to be “as well as” rather than “a replacement for”. Check out the free Trial version of Poser 12 Early Access to re-assure yourself that your favourite bit is still in there.
So, steady progress and it’s looking very positive for the probable December release on Windows and Mac, and even now looks especially nice on photoreal render speeds. Congratulations to the team for more or less sticking to the schedule, even during the lockdowns and changes re: Macs and Python.
Service packs and patches for Poser
Un-noticed by me in late summer 2020, the expert Python coder ‘Structure’ kindly uploaded most of the official ‘Service Release’ or ‘SR’ patches for Smith Micro’s Poser, which is now the legacy version. The various service pack installers for older Poser versions are now to be found via these links which lead to a handy Dropbox cache.
Be sure to check version numbers and make sure you’re not actually downgrading. For instance, 2014 had an SR5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 and yet only the SR4 is available from the above links.
Why would a Poser user want to still run such antiques, when we have Poser 11? Partly because we can — they don’t “phone home” and don’t expire and will run as long as Windows can. This also means they can run offline. Partly because they can run old PoserPython scripts which have since become defunct, even as far back as GlowWorm which required Poser 6 SR3 (you may need to switch from OpenGL to SreeD to be able to operate Poser 6 these days). Sometimes they’re required to load certain legacy content, which can then often be exported for a more modern version or at least to an .OBJ file. Sometimes related creative software requires a certain version present in order to import 3D models from Poser, such as MojoWorld (Poser 6) and MotionArtist (Poser 2014) and the old Vue Complete (for export/import it apparently needs Poser Pro 2014). Also, some people run the Smith Micro PoserFusion plugins that let Poser send scenes to Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Lightwave etc.
Webinar: Poser 12
“Poser 12 : with new features demonstrated”, a webinar with Charles Taylor happening this coming Sunday. Will we also get some hints about what will be coming in the full December version of Poser 12? I guess we have to wait and see. Booking now.
Release: Poser 12 Early Access is available
Poser 12 Early Access is now available on Windows, here, as a Trial and a purchase for Poser 11 owners. The Trial can apparently run happily alongside your existing Poser 11.x.
New items of information on the new pages are:
* SuperFly rendering (the Poser equivalent of iRay) is now based on Blender’s Cycles 1.12 (it’s possible they mean 1.2?) Forum chat suggests this upgrade breaks some of the materials in old Superfly materials/shaders sets and skins.
* Inclusion of “Intel OIDN, an A.I. based image denoising system” for SuperFly. The SuperFly ray tracing support and Adaptive Sampling had already been announced. It appears that the denoising is located in the UI on the… “New post effects palette for denoise and more.” The palette’s other ‘post’ effects are said to be only basic items like Saturation, at present, though there will presumably be more and more artistic ones in due course. Though I suspect we’re not going to get a full in-Poser multipass compositing engine, working in tandem with repeatable automation.
* New Material Management tab, which had previously been announced but for which we now have a screenshot…
* “HiveWire3D’s Dawn, Dusk, Baby Luna, Gorilla, and HiveWire3D’s Horse all feature SuperFly materials.” Which I assume they didn’t have before. They’re found in the freebies bundle. No news of any additions of new figures to this freebies bundle. There is also a new automated content-installer feature, but you can still install the old way via manually unpacking .ZIP files and then a careful cut-paste into your runtime. I assume that the L’Femme and L’Homme base figures are also still in the big freebie bundle, and that their skin renders fine in the new SuperFly version. Presumably these flagship figures will still be the base versions of L’Femme and L’Homme, and not the paid-for Pro versions.
* “21-day full feature, free trial.” Windows 10 is specified, but forum talk suggests Poser 12 can run on Windows back to Windows 7.
* Importantly, note that this release is only Early Access and thus… “You must currently own a copy of Poser 11 to upgrade to Poser 12. Only valid licensed copies of Poser 11 are eligible for upgrade.” I assume this also applies to the Early Access Trial.
* Update: Apparently Poser 12 Early Access broke DAZ Hexagon export for Poser, re: the scale setting being a bit different than it was. TSoren on the forums suggests the following conversion numbers should work with Hexagon for Poser 12: “Poser [12] to Hexagon, export % value 26212.8 Hexagon to Poser [12], import % value 0.381493011048”.
So… version 12 is not getting me to stump up $130, at least as it stands in Early Access. Perhaps it will when “features are finalized” in December 2020, or at the first patch early in the New Year. At present it has some nice tweaks for the SuperFly photoreal and raytracing crowd, but nothing new for anyone who wants to use Poser’s unique non-photoreal features. Indeed the broken SuperFly skin/material shaders and the script-breaking move to Python 3 are active disincentives to upgrade, until things are fixed.
There are some good things though, simply by their absence — there’s been no big UI “makeover” and no move to a subscription payment basis.
New for Poser and DAZ, October 2020
Welcome to another survey of the new releases for Poser, DAZ Studio and related software, in October 2020.
Science-fiction:
Pulp SciFi Chair and KX Gateway.
Mobil Drone Gunner for Poser, with a faintly Moebius look that I like.
London224’s MS20 MicroWave Canon for Vue 9.
Space Station Solar Array in .FBX and .OBJ. See also the new Orbital Suit for Genesis 8 Females and Easy Snap Space Habitat.
1970s NASA style Space Colony in Blender from Raffy Raffy, although it appears to be too huge to export.
Coflek-gnorg’s Colony Reactor for Poser and DAZ.
Oso Alien Scenery for Earth-like terraformed worlds.
The Awful Emperor HD for Genesis 8 Male. Possibly Dune fan-art? The fuzzy renders don’t inspire confidence that the suit is as HD as the figure.
PW Power Trimaran for DAZ Studio, with detailed interiors.
Pit Lane Poses and Props for Genesis 8 Male. Meant for grand-prix motor-racing, but could equally well serve for scenes showing the servicing of sci-fi speeders and one-man spaceships.
Electron City Scenes, a Tron-like ‘digital city’.
Steampunk:
dForce Ichabod Outfit for Genesis 8 Males.
Observatory, low-poly and Blender only. Might be difficult to extract to OBJ, but is only $10.
The Zephyr, a Japanese style fantasy steampunk train engine.
Meshbox are releasing their old Steampunk series as Poser standalones on Renderosity. The modelling is excellent, but in 2020 the Meshbox textures often leave something to be desired. Being either fuzzy (fixable with Gigapixel AI) or a texture atlas that prevents drag-and-drop re-texturing. Clockwork Steampunk Spaceship; Clockwork Steampunk Airplane; Clockwork Steampunk Trolley (tram); Clockwork Steampunk Car; Clockwork Steampunk Zeppelin and Clockwork Steampunk Digger.
Storybook:
Little Ones Winter. dForce outfit and textures for 3D Universe’s Little Ones for Genesis 3 Female.
Just Kids Halloween Pose 01 for G8.
dForce Time For School for Genesis 8 Females, a classic British school uniform.
dForce Sunshine Girl Outfit for Genesis 8 Female with straw flip-brim hat.
Eat Cake Poses and Props for Genesis 8 Female.
Broken Picket Fence with Vines for Poser.
Acorns, a $16 set for Blender, but export should not be too difficult. Also at ArtStation.
Toon:
The free CreepyJack Lanterns for Poser.
The free Cat Disguise for Poser and DAZ.
Moshi The Kitten and Poses for Moshi the kitten.
Fireflies, simple stylized toon fireflies. Free. Could also be used as inking guides for hand-drawn toons.
The free G8 Toon Fantasy Characters 1, with toony features at the lower heights. The Halfling is confusingly named, as it’s not LOTR. “Fae” would have been better.
The Current Daz Freebies page has updated, and has toon unicorn horns and other accessories.
4 Elements for Fehn, for the Nursoda figure, plus free male facemorph and headmorphs. Difficult to find, among the out-of-control ‘PNG tubes’ and ‘holiday snaps’ problem on Renderosity Freestuff, but I tracked them down.
Weathermans Home, a free fantasy home with accessories, possible props for your male Fehn.
Also, Madam Shapoklyak for Poser is on sale again. Similar is the new Bruja for G8F.
Plants and landscape:
TruForm’s fine new Greenhouse.
Australia Botanica packs for DAZ Studio.
Animals:
Not much in realistic animals this month, just the Dire Wolf for Daz Dog 8, with DAZ hair and a several coats.
Historical:
Any release from Dante78 is a treat and Medieval Small Village Castle is excellent and also affordable. Poser, and can be used in DAZ with some “minor modifications”.
The free Valiant Crusaders: Knights Templar for M4 Valiant. There’s also a Valiant Crusaders: Crusader Megapack with other variants, albeit at a mighty 500Mb. it’s getting very good reviews.
Death Sentence Bundle For DAZ, being guillotines, hangman’s platform etc. Also separately, as for instance the fully-featured French Guillotine.
Lots of new Viking Raider clothes and characters at DAZ, this month. Also Viking Shores Scene and Props.
Citroen Kegresse for Poser, a detailed model of a tracked desert expeditions vehicle of circa 1920s-1950s.
Vintage Server Props, perhaps also suitable for your steel-eyed missile-men of the 1960s.
Old Train Interior, done by HD specialist ShaaraMuse3D. For Poser and DAZ. It’s not just the compartment, you also get a washroom and the complete carriage.
A detailed GWR Mica B Refrigerated Van for British goods trains. Given a weathered and rusting re-texture this may also interest Vue users, re: an ‘old rusting van in a flowery field’ picture.
Precinct Props is yet another 1940s style Private Eye office, though the ceiling light is too modern and would need to be replaced.
Boho: Dynamic Dress and Vest for La Femme. Believable Fall/Autumn wear for La Femme, with a retro 1940s feel.
Winter Outfit for Genesis 8 Female. Believable Fall/Autumn wear for G8F. Free.
Tattered Kiplenut for Genesis 8 Male, a classic Autumnal scarecrow.
A free The Fisherman Outfit for G8F, which could be retextured for more of an “old-time trawlerman” type of look. See also the new paid dForce Wet Weather Gear.
Now-Crowd Billboards – Romans, for populating vast Roman Empire scenes.
Characters:
FullHead for G8M, full strand fiber matching hair, eyebrows and beard. Could be good for Biblical characters.
A re-release of The Professor for M4. I’m fairly sure this used to be at RDNA.
Plugins and scripts:
A free Genesis 3 eye blink Aniblock (looping animation to provide natural blinking). See also the new Eyelashes Morphs for G8F.
Instant Fog for DAZ Studio from Dreamlight, said to be light-reactive. Impact on render times unknown.
HeadShop 13 for Genesis 8 has been released. Improved texture blending and a new wrinkle map.
Mesh Grabber Bundle for DAZ Studio on Windows.
Genesis 8 Male for Genesis 2 Male clones. Easily fit G8M clothing onto a G2M figure.
Tutorials and learning:
“MATRIX” : Tutorials on Managing DAZ Studio Content.
Currently on FastGrab at just $6, the key introductory Flowcape tutorial by the maker of the software. Flowscape is the $10 real-time landscape maker.
Ok, that’s my picks for another month. Note that Poser 12 will be released on Monday 2nd November in its Windows Early Access form (Mac is due in December). Also note that the Teknology3d store is now back online.
More official news on Poser 12
A bit more official news on Poser 12 has been released.
* Poser 12’s SuperFly render-engine has had its Cycles render engine updated from Poser 11, to a more recent (unspecified) version of Blender’s Cycles. It’s still called SuperFly.
* Several new GPU rendering options have been added to SuperFly, and it will now support the NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine (for which you’ll need a suitable NVIDIA graphics card and a PC capable of running it — the entry-point graphics-card averages about £350 here in the UK). Some forum trolls will no doubt jump on this and use it to insinuate that users are being ‘forced’ to make expensive upgrades. That’s not the case, as SuperFly users can easily switch it over to use normal graphics-cards (NVIDIA or AMD) or to CPU-only rendering, like you can with DAZ’s equivalent iRay renderer.1.
* Improved image quality via SuperFly integrating Cycles’s new “shadow catching and background transparency” features (with or without OptiX Ray Tracing, it seems). Plus “adaptive sampling” (i.e. it automatically detects ‘noisy’ areas of the picture, such as shadows-in-haze, and does a bit more rendering in those bits — so they’re less noisy on the final render).
* And there’s a firm release date for Poser 12 on Windows (Early Access version): Monday 2nd November 2020. At which point we’ll presumably get the full itemised feature-list and (hopefully) a complete detailed technical changelog.
1. There is a misleading claim made in the linked page, that DAZ iRay “only functions with NVIDIA hardware.” Not true, though NVIDIA do their very best to make you think that. I can run it quite happily on an AMD PC via CPU, or on a CPU-only Xeon workstation. The latter is fast enough, running only on the CPUs, to even give me a real-time main viewport of reasonable size and responsiveness.
Poser 12 release-window announced
There’s a bit more specific news on Poser 12, and an official announcement of a release-window in the first week of November. So they’ve only slipped by a week, from the expected 31st October, which is pretty good for a big software package and a small team.
“The Windows version of [Poser 12] will be available to Early Access customers in the first week of November. The Mac version of Poser 12 will be released in early December.”
“Early Access” presumably being (this is just my guess) some sort of download sign-up gate for existing users, that may warn with something like… “I am an experienced Poser user and understand that this is a .0 release barely out of beta, and some features may be incomplete or missing, and old scripts may not work, and I promise not to moan and rant in the forums…” etc.
My further guess would be that an ‘all-comers’ public Windows version would be out and ready a week before Black Friday, which in 2020 is 27th November. It looks to me like the sensible in-depth reviewer should hold off until January or even February 2021, and ideally wait on the first patch.
Now there’s a fairly firm release-window, even if a bit staggered, I’d imagine that we should have the complete feature-list announced by next week?
On the public marketing, I do hope they have decent demo pictures/video for the Comic Book Mode this time. Smith Micro used to choose the most awful possible figure choices. Such as the rather naff Barney with his black hair and a grungy plaid shirt, representative of a very rough patch in Smith Micro’s stock character design. Or the earlier and even more horribly grungy Creature from the Black Lagoon figure. Even on the back of the retail box they made it look crap. What were they thinking of?
Show the public the free-with-Poser SAK Robo-kitty figure being tooned in relatively flat lighting, would be my suggestion, or the old Poser Star! figure might be an attractive toon choice, or some of the Nursoda figures. The free-with-Poser Maisie can also toon up surprisingly well and pleasingly, with a bit of work, once you abandon the photoreal in which she looks so ugly. She’s obviously not meant for photoreal.
What about the Python scripting language, which is vital to many scripts? The new post focuses on this and we get a version number: Python 3.7.9 is what will be in Poser 12, which will update from the old PoserPython 2.7 version. We also learn that the important EZSkin is being fixed for Poser 12 by the author, and that…
The dev team is working on a way to easily download, install and protect Python scripts that are purchased from the Renderosity Marketplace. We are also looking for vendor partners to create new scripts for Poser 12.
Interesting. You can already create a .PRC encrypted Python script, or at least you could in the previous version of Python and Poser. That’s not ideal, though, as it makes fixing old un-maintained scripts impossible.
So it sounds to me like Poser 12.1.x may have a built-in secure script ‘encrypter/decrypter’ module. I can see how that could encourage commercial $20 script-makers and thus boost the Renderosity Marketplace. It would also enable easy ‘unlocking’ by the owner of Poser, if the family of a deceased coder wished to give away the scripts for free, or sell them on to another developer.
Also, it’s now known there will be a “free trial up to 21 days”, as before with Poser 11. And… “We do not plan to invalidate Poser 11 licenses that are used to upgrade to Poser 12.” It sounds like you should be able to run both on the same PC, meaning you can try a trial version of 12 alongside an existing install of 11. That said, you should probably back up vital presets before installing 12.
Vue Solutions webinar
Vue Solutions Community Workshop, as a group webinar for users of the E-on Vue software. Sunday 1st November 2020 and booking now.
Still a great bit of software and able to load full textured Poser scenes (not just T-posed figures) with extreme ease, especially if you have the ‘last good’ non-subscription version at 2016 R5. As I wrote here earlier…
A small bug introduced in R4 meant that Poser 11.2 scene saves may not open correctly in Vue 2016 R4, but this bug was fixed in R5