News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Poser

3D content survey: ‘bad hair day’ for Poser and DAZ Studio

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Tired of ‘Barbie and Ken hair’ for your characters? Need a ‘bad hair day’? Here’s my survey of some of the wilder and weirder hair types available for Poser and DAZ Studio. I’ve left out the anime-style mega-bunches, the flower-strewn faery braids, and the neon punk-rock mohawks.

April YSH’s Calais Hair and Morphing Ruff…

Chrystalline Hair…

Lady Emiko Hair…

Steampunk Jana Hair…

One at Renderosity and Fire Goddess’s ShoXoloR MAT sets…

Feather Hawk…

Nightflower Hair seems good for a 1950s high-camp Vampirella-style character…

Also look at the free Upside Down Hair and the free wild cat-woman hair.

Need a snake-haired Medusa, the “turn you to stone” woman from ancient myth? There’s Naga Hair, although it looks a little old now.

The same can be said of

Looking much better and with fully posable snakes is the more recent The Gorgon Medusa for V4…

Weird fantasy hair for men seems much less common than for women. There are a few ‘bandana and pseudo-dreadlocks’ hippies, but the male hair I liked the most was Volg for M4 (although it’s rather Wolverine-like, as most sci-fi/comics people will spot instantly)…

Surreal Esidor Hair for Esidor Hair would go well with Venetian or feather masks…

Need something sparse and troll-like? MOST’s free Troll for V3 comes complete with hair…

That’s it! Hope you found your hair to dye for!

$4 feast at Poser World

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts Leave a comment

A very generous special offer from Poser 3D content specialist Poser World. To get full access to their huge library of 2,300+ items, simply…

  1. register at the website.
  2. then donate just $4 by PayPal (or more, if you’re feeling rich).
  3. open the email with a password for one month’s full access to the content library.

If you want a second month of access, just donate another $4+ when your initial access expires. A very nice offer! Here are just a few of the goodies I downloaded…

Above: Poser World’s standalone “Evil Keeper” Poser character.

Above: Wizard Master for M3.

Above: Victorian-era hearse.

Above: Authentic Anglo-Saxon Warrior outfit for M3.

BioLight for free

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“BioLight” is currently free on the DAZ Store…

It’s a Poser-only set of special glow MATs for the Terrors of the Deep: Jellyfish pack. It only works in Poser / Poser Pro 2014, and then only with “IDL/Raytracing enabled” activated in your render settings.

One of the things I love about iClone is that glow can be applied incredibly easily and quickly (like, one second). It can be applied to any object, and the glow realistically floods outside the boundaries of the object geometry. By comparison, a similar glow in DAZ Studio or Poser is usually either almost impossible or just a complete chore to achieve. It can be done in Carrara, but it’s a very convoluted set of fiddly steps to get it working. And even if you can get it to work, it increases render times exponentially. Whereas iClone just gives you the glow effect in real-time.

Renderosity Autumn/Fall Sale

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Renderosity’s “Fall into Savings” sale of DAZ Studio or Poser content is underway. The sale ends 21st October 2012.

I found about a third of my 48 ‘Wish List’ items have a $ sign against them. Some are just 15% off, but I did find a few that had cut prices by 50%. Nothing has gone down below the $5 mark, though. Certainly tempting, but coming so soon after the big DAZ sale means… I only have $10 left in my PayPal… /sobs into hankie/

Incidentally, the Renderosity Wish List icons are a bit cryptic, but — for the benefit of newcomers — a “$” sign against your item means it’s Discounted. “R” just means it’s Exclusive to Renderosity, and the “B” means it’s also available in a discounted Bundle Offer…

Poser and DAZ content survey: Autumn / Fall content

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Here’s my new 3D content survey, for DAZ Studio or Poser. All things “Autumn”, except for Halloween freebies (which I covered in my previous survey). These are all 3D:

Autumn/Fall gourds are abundant and nicely textured in Pixelharbor’s Gourds… Was at RuntimeDNA, now appears to be lost.

Harvest fruits…

Need a Cornucopia Horn to have all your 3D goodies tumbling out of? Cornucopias for Poser is free…

Flink’s items…

OBJ dead leaves are available in the free Scattered Fall Leaves pack…

Note that ‘dead leaves around the base of a tree’ are also available in Meshbox’s Haunted House 2010.

Transpond’s Fern Pack has an autumn fern in it…

Need animated leaves? Have a look at Falling Leaves Dynamic Prop for Poser…

Scattering maple (sycamore) seeds for Poser are available in Modualz Scatters Vol 7 – MapleSeeds…

And the trees these seeds are scattering off are available in the Modualz WildWood Vol 1 — Autumn Maples pack…

Need vines? Have a look at Modualz Autumn Vines Texture Expansion for the RDNA Vines Megapack…

Fogs are tricky and are probably best added later in Photoshop. Poser/DAZ plugins like Fog Tool Deluxe III send render times through the roof, in my experience, and can’t really be recommended unless you have a render farm or three tucked under your desk.

What Poser users might use for a basic Vue-like hazy distance is Oskarsson’s Add Fog tool, which is a set of simple OBJs.

To get a depth haze with DAZ 3 and plugins, see my tutorial.

I’m not going to delve too far into the thousand-and-one character textures sets and their dependencies. But I’d just note that there is a superb Nouveau autumn set which requires you have DAZ’s Elfin for V4…

A character wearing this dress might work nicely with the Forest Elf set which requires Nursoda’s standalone character Gosha…

Also have a look at the Autumnal Robin Goodfellow (which requires Puck for M4 and of course Michael 4 himself)…

Animals? The squirrel scampering about after the abundant season’s nuts is of course a classic visual motif of early Autumn. DAZ has the best looking 3d squirrel, although sadly I’ve yet to find a “red squirrel” morphs/texture set for it.

The best 3D woodland nuts that I’ve yet found are the sweet chestnut and the acorn available in the Gnome’s House set…

What’s an autumn scene without some fungi, toadstools and mushrooms? Traveller’s excellent three Mushroomz sets are worth having…

… and he also has a set of the more exotic woodland funghi — although I thought the textures on some of these were a little blurry (which perhaps explains why they’re on a fixed heavy discount)…

Nursoda used to have some very nice freebie ‘shrooms on his website, but sadly his site mysteriously vanished into the electro-smog in summer 2012.

That’s it! Enjoy your mellow and fruitful renderings!

$30,000 3D Environment Competition

Posted on by Posted in Carrara, Competitions, DAZ Studio, Poser, Vue Leave a comment

The makers of the landscape software Vue have a new 3D Environment Competition 2012. They’re lined up $30,000 in prizes, a waggon-load of 3D VIPs, the CG Society, and 3D World magazine, among others.

Competition categories are:

* 3D Environment

* Character Rendering

* Architectural Visualization

They say that…

“Judging will be based solely on the quality, realism and artistic merit of the entries, not on the application used to create them.”

Although that’s not quite true. Since you have to use at least one E-on product (such as Vue or their Lumen real-time architectural software), if only in part, to make your picture.

Deadline: 16th December 2012.

Miki 4 for Carrara

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Are you a DAZ Carrara user who’s keen to get the new Miki 4 into your runtime? There’s a new plugin from veteran developer Fenric, Poser Weightmap Injector. It shuttles Miki between… “Poser Pro 2012 SR2 and Carrara 8”, and it’s free. It should work on similar official Poser figures, but is… “not guaranteed to work for every dedicated Poser figure”. Presumably it also works with Poser Pro 2012 SR3 and Carrara 8.5, but that’s just my guess.

DAZ Store’s big PA Sale “catch-up”

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It’s your last chance to catch up on the recent big sale of almost everything at the DAZ Store. 50% off, so the Store’s web servers are definitely slowing down under the pressure! It all ends Friday. Update: now extended!

Every major DAZ Store content artist appears to be in the “50% or more off” game, until Friday only. Some of the fleeting ‘Fast Grab’ items go… “up to 70% off”. I found all but two items on my Wishlist were heavily discounted.

New free Cinema 4D student edition

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The traditional 3D software Cinema 4D has released a… “free, fully functional, Student Edition of Cinema 4D”. Specifically, the new version 14. Which potentially saves you about $1,000.

Nice, but it’s actually not quite fully functional. There’s no plugin support in the student version (so presumably Poser Pro 2014 users won’t be able to use their official PoserFusion Poser-CD4 bridge plugin with it), and nor is there networked rendering. Oh, and the software expires after 18 months.

Still, if you were thinking of testing it then the student edition might be an option. The results can look rather pretty. Here’s Fredy3D’s “The Defenders of Bast Prime” from his New Egypt sci-fi series…

Fredy’s pipeline between Poser and Cinema 4D is actually via the $75 commercial plugin InterPoser, rather than PoserFusion.