“Create a Signature Line Art Style with Poser”. A live webinar with Mike Mitchell in which he steps through his techniques, and shows how the renders are then worked up in the comics production software Clip Studio (formerly Manga Studio). Sunday 16th February 2020.
News today from the Poser developer team. The Poser 11.3 free update is officially dated as due at the end of March 2020, and it will also support RTX-capable graphics cards.
In the UK you’d currently be looking at around £400 for a good new RTX card, although it may also require a new power-supply unit too.
It’ll be interesting to see if this new feature can ‘drive’ the main scene-view window in real-time, thus optionally replacing OpenGL and making Poser 11.3 into a “what you see is what you get” software.
It’s the end of January 2020 and time for another survey of new content and scripts for DAZ Studio and Poser. What goodies have slipped out in this quiet time of the year? Read on and find out…
Science fiction:
Entertainment Studio in .OBJ format. The same maker has more in a $99 pack, including a somewhat futuristic one.
10 Drones Orchid Pack, organic alien spaceships in .OBJ format.
Luminous Monster in .FBX with animations. From Invasion Studio who is producing a series of such things. They appear to be unique and not fan-art.
Fantasy:
Where do the inn’s deep cellars lead to? Why, to the PW Underworld of course…
Mrs Evil HD for Victoria 8 and Genesis 8 Female.
Historical:
Modular 3D Kits: Fantasy Library from ShaaraMuse3D. HD books, bookcases, tables and scrolls.
Ancient Greco-Roman Crowd Generator, as billboards.
RP Salty Scarlett for Genesis 8 Female.
Poser Hair ‘Em2 – Just Four Men. Dynamic Hair Room hair for M4 and Poser.
dForce Viking Maiden Outfit for G8F
Wild West Horse And Rider Poses for G8M and Horse 2, including wielding six-guns while riding.
Characters and poses:
Matilde for La Femme for Poser.
A usefully generic free ‘surfing’ pose for Genesis 8.
Toon and storybook:
Fairy hut for Poser by 1971s.
Swing Poses For Genesis 8 Female.
Noor Toolbox for Nursoda’s Noor baby (part of the Fehn bundle).
Free Fehn Eyes, for Fehn, ten of them, the default ones being very dark.
Klia for G8F, a free semi-toon character suited to storybooks.
Some nice Retro brushes for Photoshop.
Vehicles:
A classic French Citroen for Poser, likely to interest those with French style toons such as Muggie and Nos by Nursoda.
Animals:
Hivewire Kitten LAMH Preset. Requires the DAZ Studio Look At My Hair plugin.
A free Hivewire Kitten Pose, and another.
Multi-species WolfPack for Poser, with animations. They appear to be suitable for large pack scenes, once you reduce the textures a bit.
Scenery:
DGV Miniature Gardens Vol.1 TeaCups and TinCans.
Old Town Alley for DAZ Studio.
A wind-scoured canyon system for Vue, for $2.
18Gb of vegetation and waterfall and related assets for Vue, including localised mists.
Photo Props: Electric Poles from ShaaraMuse3D, with HD textures so presumably suitable for closeups of a linesman working on the wires. Also likely to interest Vue artists.
New tutorials:
Painting Over 3D Renders with Wootha.
Artbreeder: Generating new Characters with Artificial Intelligence.
Utilities and scripts:
Last month I said I wouldn’t cover any more of the burgeoning range of Genesis converter packs, but Cross Figure 0002 Character Morph and Cross Figure 0001 Character Morph look very useful and long-term. What the difference is between the two packs I just can’t figure out, though. Which is a huge barrier to a potential purchase.
HeadShop 12 for Poser La Femme and HeadShop 12 for Genesis 8.
Perspective Control for DAZ Studio. I’m fairly sure Poser already does this as standard, if this add-on is the same as Poser’s Perspective dial.
Reveal Node Type for Poser.
Finally, be aware that your CG Trader ‘Wish List’ appears to be public. I can access mine while logged out, and its not coming from the browser’s cache.
That’s it for this month. More picks next month!
P3DO Explorer Pro has updated to a 17th January 2020 release, and…
“As promised this version contains Poser additions: lights and cameras have been added to the Poser formats supported.”
This again brings P3DO into parity with its competitor PzDB, following the recent addition of DAZ .DUF content indexing. Lights appear to have been done in quite a robust way, and search hits…
“shows the lights list with the light type (infinite, spot, point, diffuse IBL, area light) and image references for IBL.”
And for an unspecified future release in 2020 the maker plans to…
“add the ability to load only one light/spot from a given set into Poser.”
There will be a P3DO 2.8 ’20th anniversary edition’ in April 2020, so the Easter store-wide sales may be the time you’ll want to bag a copy on Renderosity.
One of the items of software mentioned by Nerd3D (see previous post), was called PoserEd. I’d never heard of it before. Turns out it’s for hand-editing Poser saved files. I knew there were several free .CR2 editors, and sometimes you can also just use Notepad++ to take a peek.
However, Nerd3D was re-purposing PoserEd into something closer to my heart — a where-the-heck-is-it content finder, as you can have it show the linked file paths and suchlike.
Where to get it? Seems to me that PoserEd must actually be short for Poser File Editor 3… which unfortunately is no longer sold. A comment elsewhere appears to indicate that 3.3 was the last update.
However, a demo version and manual are still online for the present. [Archive.org backup].
I also found a comment that said that Netherworks’ Creator’s ToyBox does something very similar, re: how Nerd3D was using PoserEd.
Poser 11 Webinar Series: Meeting 1 January 2020 is a welcome new webinar from Poser expert Nerd3D. Here’s the handy contents-list from the front of the video recording which is archived on YouTube…
I’ve added three red dots on those items likely to interest those who are not store content-developers.
Perhaps, in future, the show might get an even bigger audience if the producers were to front-end it with such general items, and then follow those with the more content-developer-ish items?
Posted in Lighting, Natural media emulation, Poser, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
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.
New at Renderosity, a brief post on What’s planned for their Poser 11.3 ahead of Poser 12 (“We’re saving the big things for Poser 12”, they say).
Due at the end of March 2020…
* “improved local library search experience by using “AND” versus “OR” logic.”
Nice, but I’d ideally also want “NOT”, to be able to knock out unwanted items.
* Software helper “wizards and alerts of potential setting problems”.
Sounds useful, especially for new users. Perhaps even for advanced users, if the wizards can double-up as time-savers (e.g. one click to turn off all background sketching sliders, after loading a default Sketch preset), and if the alerts can be told to tone down the nagging (as an alternative to turning them off).
* Easier content installation for store purchases.
Sounds good, but you would need to be able to specify the runtime location, as many users have their main mega-runtime located outside the official runtime folders.
* Small bug-fixes.
So it all looks good, and we’ll also benefit from the small tweaks that appear to have been ongoing, re: the dating of the installers, since 11.2 was released. For instance I have 11.2.x, but I think I’m a few small increments behind on having the very latest build.
A custom Sketch demo in Poser 11. V4 wears “Steambot” from the SteamBetty pack. A two-second Poser 11 Sketch Render at 1800px, into the real-time Comic Book inks…
… and the same with Smooth Shaded, for those desperate to see some 3D shape and shadow…
The above driven by real-time OpenGL inking in Comic Book mode…
There are quite a few new Poser 11 users since Black Friday 2019, and by now they may be wanting to get their first small handful of helper Python scripts. I’d suggest the following are the “top five” for new users…
1. “Scene Toy Pro” (2016 version), available paid at Renderosity and Hivewire. An absolutely vital scene helper, in a slick user interface.
2. “Eye-target” in the Poser Python tools with source code pack, also paid at Renderosity. A non-rendering cube that the character looks at. The cube can be moved, and the eyes follow it. An advanced user can manually set up such a ‘eye-target’ for a character, but this script hooks it all up automatically in a micro-second and saves some tedium. Does not work with all characters, but works with many. (*)
3. Ockham’s “SnapTo” mover. Free at Ockham’s site. Move the just-loaded item from Wheretheheckizit to somewhere in the scene where it’s visible/useful. He also has a variant that moves the current camera to the clicked location, useful for large scenes. Note that this uses Tkinter as part of the script, which means Mac users cannot run it (take it up with Apple and their fickle support-policies dept., not Poser).
4. The DAZ “DSON Importer” for Poser. Free. I assume this is Python, though I’ve never looked — it just works. Auto-loads older DAZ Studio content into Poser, which means Genesis 1 and 2 and props of the same era, if you also downloaded and installed that content’s PoserCF files.
5. “ChangeGamma”. Free, and it ships with Poser 11. Find it under: Top Menu | Scripts | Material Mods. For quickly making grungy dark textures lighter in tone, without actually replacing them. “1” is a good initial setting to use it with, when it asks for user input, though the photoreal rendering crowd may prefer a more subtle ‘lift’ than that.
* Are you a Python coder with a large runtime stuffed with characters, and are you looking for a nice project? Note that Posers users would benefit greatly from a more sophisticated version of this script, with the addition of a per-character drop-down menu. Each drop-down line in the menu would call some character-specific code and math to adjust the eye-tracking for eye-size and other per-character foibles, thus giving perfect eye-target tracking.
See also my larger page on Python Scripts for Poser 11, including installation location advice.
Here’s a quick Poser 11 toon demo of Nursoda’s new Fehn, and the Noor baby, which I picked up via the launch discount. The character(s) toon fairly well, but not perfectly…
A little re-inking would be needed, e.g. on the bottom of the skirt. The only other problem is that the eyes on both mother and baby are very dark. So you may want to make sure you also get the templates .ZIP file…
… as you’re likely to want it, re: making new or slightly tweaked eyes.
Even on a Firefly render you’d want to dab some highlights on the eyes, at least.
Also, as you can see here, the Noor baby can be detached from the sling…
I’ve had some time to test my newly purchased Mr Happy for Michael 3 and Mutant Add-On Pack for Mr. Happy, both bagged for $15 on the recent Renderosity all-store sale. They would normally have been $32 together and never seemed to ever go on sale, so I was very pleased to find them finally doing so.
Although still pricey (by my standards) even at the sale price of $15, as you can see it’s been worth it. I’ve got a great retro M3 toon alien character and he toons nicely in Poser 11’s real-time Comic Book mode. Plus I also have the base Mr Happy skeleton character as well. The LARVA for M3 spacesuit works fine with the Mutant, with a little adjustment of a neck morph dial. I see the suit is currently on sale from the maker for just $4. You do of course need M3 to run all this.
It’s finally official, AMD is set to ship its long-teased “world’s first 64-core, 128-thread” CPU early next month. It’s a consumer unit, not a server unit. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X will be $4,000 and will ship on 7th February 2020. By all accounts AMD generally now has total supremacy in the marketplace, beating Intel by a mile on both price and speed in both the server and the consumer markets. Their new CPU would be like having a 128-thread render-farm under your desk, crunching on your CPU dependent rendering (i.e. from Vue XStream, Poser’s Firefly, Keyshot etc). I imagine it would also probably be rather handy for capturing and streaming HD video while you run demanding software.
Of course it would need your other PC components to be able to keep up with it, so you’d really want it in a new PC. Thus the most important question is, what’s the likely cost of that? I can’t immediately find anyone set to ship such a thing in February, but I suspect you’re probably looking at $7,000 for such a PC by summer 2020. That’s a hefty dent in your wallet, but it’s not an impossible sum for a small studio looking for a tax write-off. Yet if AMD can get some sort of 64-core into mass production and thus drop the price, it would be nice to imagine that a 64-core could be in a $4,999 content-maker workstation by late 2021.
The obvious step down appears to be the new $800 AMD Ryzen 3950X, at 16 cores and offering a mere 32 render threads. That’s for the CPU alone.
Below that is the $500 AMD Ryzen 3900X at 12 cores and 24 threads, again for the CPU alone. A somewhat future-proofed self-build list in summer 2019 used this CPU and quality components and topped out at $3,400. However I see that the same CPU is now in UK gaming rigs at around £1,300 all-in. I assume the graphics card in one of those would also make light work of iRay renders from DAZ Studio, though at that relatively cheap price it probably wouldn’t be capable of fast real-time ray-tracing.
Below that, in terms of pre-built PCs, the cheapest gaming PC with a AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (8 Cores, 16 render threads) can be had in the UK for around £480 from Fierce, but it may be just as cheap to custom-build up your own 3D-focused PC from a motherboard + CPU bundle. Note that 2700 is the energy-efficient 65w version, and the 2700x is the more power-hungry and slightly faster version. It’s apparently a trade-off there, slightly more power from the 2700x… but noiser fans. The 2700 is said on the Smith Micro forum to be in 2019 about the equivalent of 2 x Xeon X5690 CPUs (24 render threads) in a old refurbished workstation.
Avoid the pre-Ryzen AMD FX-8320 PC, which can be found at about the same price as the 2700’s. Supposedly “8-core” circa 2012, and nice to have at that point in time. But apparently the 8320 was really 8 threads-pretending-to-be-cores sitting in 4-cores, done via some fancy cache workarounds. So far as I can tell that means you won’t get it to show 16 render threads to the likes of Vue in 2020, since it’s wasn’t a real 8-core. However, if you can pick one up for £100 it could be used as a fairly fast render-node for Vue.
The $100 HeadShop 12 plugin is “coming soon” for Poser 11. With its ‘Lovechild’ feature which seamlessly morphs between two photos, under the control of simple sliders, before producing the 3D head.
The blurb on the announcement page says the Poser version will work with “Poser LaBelle”. But I suspect that must be a translation error, and he actually means La Femme — which is Poser 11’s flagship female base figure.
HeadShop 12 is already available for DAZ Studio, at $100, and works with Genesis 2, 3 and 8.
Time for a pick from the many items newly released for DAZ Studio and Poser in December 2019. As usual, freebies are only featured here if they have “commercial use” or are obvious fan-art.
Science Fiction:
Greetings and Gestures for Genesis 8. Usefully generic, and especially useful for military / diplomatic type sci-fi tales.
Detail Lighting for DAZ, which appears to be ‘stick and render’. Used scaled-up, it looks useful for enhancing many types of dark sci-fi scenes.
A free David Tennant for G8M including the Hair of Awesomeness, albeit with a large number of dependencies even before you go in search of suitable Tennant-era Doctor Who clothes.
A free Robin Starfighter. It’s a bit ‘Jar Jar Binks-era Star Wars‘, but I don’t think it’s fan-art.
Also a generic but detailed Sci-Fi Landing Platform for your Starfighter craft, if textured to match.
The free U.S.S. Enterprise 1701-D for Poser Pro. Vanishing Point has being doing some saucer-sep and di-lithium crystal buffing on this, and it was updated December 2019 for Poser 11. Non-commercial use, as it’s obvious Star Trek fan-art.
Moonbeam34, a fun retro sci-fi car.
Sci-Fi Scorpion Mecha. They look like toys in the previews, but scale them up to 50ft high and they’d look more impressive.
Orchid Bio-Spaceship in .OBJ format. Original design, and not game-art, it seems.
Carrier for Poser, a sci-fi creature. Spotted last month on another site, and now on Renderosity. From a number of years ago and so you’d probably want to cover up most of the unconvincing legs via some work in the Poser Hair Room. Or you could have them as the sort of creatures that live in a semi-aquatic lakeside environment, and thus have their lower legs below the water.
Fantasy:
Red chair, free in .3DS format.
Time Princess Outfit for G8F. Doesn’t appear to be dForce.
Free Touchable Furry Tail Hair Colors for the Furry Tail, although the latter now seems to have been withdrawn from sale?
Storybook:
A free dForce Wish-List scroll.
A free “Let it Snow” Xmas Bundle, being a dForce Outfit for Paige.
Nursoda’s Fehn, made with his usual quality and value-for-money.
Nursoda’s free Folomb wormy character. Commercial use, unlike some of his earlier freebies, so you could use it in a webcomic.
Bell island for Poser by 1971s. Suitable for enhancing his various floating sky-islands.
Guardian Angel Shape and Poses for Genesis 8 Female. Called a “shape” because it has multiple dependencies including Morning Star Wings, so you’d have to do a bit of shopping and work to build the full character.
A free Swing.
The free Ice Palace set for DAZ Studio.
Innocence for the dForce G8FT Dress for G8F. Which could be paired with Household Chores – Cooking for Genesis 8, being traditional kitchen cooking poses.
Historical:
Hovel for Daz and Poser, an Iron Age hut, basically. Appears to be low-poly, so you could presumably build a village or use it add variety to an existing Iron Age scene.
dForce Classic Fur Cape and Textures Bundle.
Marmara Boat, a jaunty little 16th century coastal trading ship.
Yussef Hair Beard and Eyebrows for Genesis 8 Male.
Archaeology materials for Keyshot, and the same seller also has Ancient Stone.
Landscapes, landscape structures and plants:
MS19 Thorncrown Chapel, an unusual 21st century rural chapel.
The free Plant Collection 1 for Poser.
ShaaraMuse3D’s Modular Photo Props: Old Pier.
Easy Environments: Frozen Lake for DAZ Studio.
Flinks Snowflakes. Cold crystal fluff for your snowy scenes.
Pine Bark material, in a format that looks suitable for DAZ/Poser, with a little tweaking.
ShaaraMuse3D’s Tangle World. A spooky post-fire landscape on sandy heathland, with washed out roots.
Animals:
Deepsea’s Eagle plus Aniblocks and Texture Add-On and Poses and Fish.
CWRW Calicos for the HiveWire House Cat. Nice textures, but it would be useful for the seller to say exactly how the hair was done for the main preview render. Turns out it’s the CWRW HW House Cat LAMH Preset 1, new over at the HiveWire store. So I guess they’re not allowed to say “HiveWire” on Renderosity. The HiveWire LAMH preset is free. Which is very nice of them, and that means hair on Catula too. Though of course you’d need the Look At My Hair plugin (currently 50% off, as DAZ seems to have another large sale on now).
CWRW Exotics 1 for the HiveWire House Cat. Desert / Ancient Egyptian type cats.
DA Dragonling HD for DAZ Dragon 3. Shown here without textures so you can see what you’re getting in the model.
Multiple Cattle Breeds – a figure set for Poser. 12 distinctive cattle breeds, with animations and poses. They appear to be low-poly, so you can presumably have an animated herd in the scene.
Multiple species of Fox, with what appears to be the guide-hairs for Poser Hair Room hair.
Characters:
Combined Horse And Rider Poses for G8M.
L’Homme Male Base figure for Poser Pro 11. The new official flagship male base for Poser.
SJ Hair for Genesis 8 Female, with an interesting floaty sci-fi look and also looks like it should be fast to render.
Silent Fright Set, potentially a Christmas add-on for Lenore & the Raven if you de-saturated the textures.
Fantasy Attic’s 2019 Annual Community Christmas Gifts are still online. Includes a K4 elf outfit…
And lastly Elizabeth 2 Banana Costume for Poser. Who or what was Elizabeth 2? Turns out she’s yet another new free base figure, unofficial and launched a few weeks ago. Do we really need another female base figure? Why not just tweak the perfectly good La Femme instead?
Utilities, add-ons:
There are too many converter systems for Genesis variants now, to keep up with. Check the DAZ Store if you’re interested in converting from/to all the different Genesis types, props and poses. The next edition of DAZ Studio might usefully bypass them all, by including its own auto mega-verter plugin. Wasn’t that the original point of the Genesis system, that everything was supposed to work seamlessly with everything?
The P.A.S.S. Watercolour Shaders for Poser have turned up on the ArtStation store. For free. Suitable for Poser 10 / 2014 onward, and likely to suit advanced Poser users only. Formerly sold at RuntimeDNA.
Poser – Rule of Thirds. A simple free geometry (.OBZ) that replaces the standard Poser Depth-of-Field guide with a new version that also shows the rule-of-thirds.
FLUIDOS II for DAZ Studio. Fluids simulation plugin, faster than the first version. Windows and Mac.
Tutorials:
Visual Story Writing : From Inception to Production.
That’s it, more picks next month!