News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

ClipDrop

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An interesting new re-lighting service, ClipDrop – Relight. Requires a 2D picture-upload, and you then get “as-if 3D” real-time relighting.


Animated demo:


Click here to replay

I’m not sure how well it would work with a picture that doesn’t look like a head-and-shoulders passport photo.

I’m guessing it may also be flummoxed by wild Poser/DAZ stuff, such as an all-action hero cyber-elephant wearing goggles, posed against a complex cyber-city background.

Doubtless this sort of capability is coming to desktop software in a month or two, if it isn’t here already in something I haven’t heard about yet. But this is a nice online demo of the capabilities.

By the way, here is the “Click to replay” code, for the above demo. A few lines of simple HTML for Web pages. I’m surprised people go overboard with massive javascripts just to add a simple animated .PNG control…

Working in Opera (Chrome), Brave (Chrome) and Pale Moon (Firefox). You’re welcome.

Release: AccuRIG 1.0, free

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Reallusion have a new free “automatic rigging tool” for 3D characters. Equivalent to Miximo, AccuRIG 1.0 users load a T-pose or A-pose figure and apparently get back a 19-joint .FBX with…

“full-body and finger rigs for biped characters”

Seems to be genuinely free, and independent of the rest of the costly suite of Reallusion software (although it can interface with Reallusion’s ActorCore system).

No mention of face or toes rigging though. So I guess mostly aimed at quick auto-rigging of “low-poly NPCs”, of the sort needed for games. I’m uncertain how many auto-riggers gamer developers already have, but I’d guess it’s not zero. Also, I don’t see any mention that the rig can take standard .BVH mo-cap motions, or your existing iClone motions. But I guess Reallusion will hope to sell new motion packs for the figures.

It’s Windows desktop software that you download, and then ActorCore “free registration” is needed for any sort of export from it. Might be worth trying, to see how well it can do, say… the free Big Buck Bunny rabbit figure from Blender. And then how well that moves in DAZ / Poser, and if .BVH motions work.

But otherwise Poser and DAZ people probably have enough in their runtimes to provide the standard extras needed for a large scene, without having to go all around-about via the .FBX format.

Soon, a free ‘temporally stable’ AI denoiser

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Pixar’s RenderMan 25 will for the first time feature its in-house AI denoiser, and this is “temporally stable”. Translation: when run on animation frames, this de-noiser is stable from frame to frame. When the frames are run as an animation, there’s no strange wavyness, jitter, or edges popping from sharp to blurred and back.

The devs and artist at Pixar report this feature reduces render times “two to four” times, and it also “has CPU and GPU implementations”.

But ‘what use is this to hobbyists’, you might ask. Ah, well… there will be a free non-commercial edition of RenderMan 25 by the end of 2022. The free version is reported to lack only RenderMan’s “XPU” feature — which is Pixar’s “new hybrid CPU + GPU rendering engine” that many are calling the future of high-end rendering.

Thus it sounds to me like hobbyists could have a pro-level ‘temporally stable’ AI denoiser, free and highly trained on 3D CG frames, by the end of the year. And presumably it will be able to process a folder of animation frames produced with other software. Poser 12, for instance, which has a superb Intel denoiser for stills — but this is apparently not “temporally stable” for animation.

Google is also reported to be working on an AI image denoiser, but it’s still in the Labs. Presumably this will be free and open source when it appears. Part of the larger NeRF from Google, a one-click quick image enhancer.

15-year burns

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Useful new systematic test figures on durability for your old CD-Rs and DVD-R burned-media archive discs.

“Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I’m getting good data from CD-Rs more than 18 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 16 years old. Your mileage may vary.”

So it looks like 15 years can be more or less counted on, provided they’re stored out of sunlight and in a dry place. Still, it might be best to get the stack out and then systematically go through and copy off still-wanted items onto an external hard-drive.

BSDF Painter

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A free Blender add-on for layering and painting BSDF materials.

Poser 12 uses Principled BSDF now, so presumably it wouldn’t be too difficult for this Blender add-on to have an “Output straight to a Poser material file” button? I believe the setups are identical to those in Blender, except for being ‘mirror-backwards’ in their direction of node-flow.

It’s Crazy

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This week, NVIDIA finally catches up with the old $50 CrazyTalk Pro…

Before you get all excited about hobbyist potential… it appears to be an Omniverse thing for small production studios with $3,000 graphics cards and workstations. Lots of NVIDIA stuff is individually free, true, but you have to ask the price of such a production setup then you can’t afford it.

Also new this week for the ‘build it and they will come’ Omniverse system, auto-lipsync for 3D faces from an audio file. Again, playing catch-up with Poser and Mimic.

Haberlin’s Hellcop – made with Poser

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I only just noticed that Brian Haberlin has a new comic, Hellcop. Same style and wild sci-fi as the earlier Sonata and Lighthouse (collected Nov 2021), and I definitely recognise that Poser monowheel, the steampunk rifle etc. So I’m 99% certain the production is still Poser + his usual studio workflow.

Seems to have debuted October 2021 and then raced through the issues, possibly monthly? Hellcop is already in a trade “Vol. 1” which collects issues #1-5, and I see that issue #9 just came out last week. So I’m guessing the title’s second 5-issue story-arc will be finished by the end of the summer. I’m not used to such a fast pace, and often hand-drawn comics issues are glacial in appearing and you wait ages (sometimes years) for an actual concluded story. But I guess that’s what Poser does for you, speeding up production.

Disco Elysium wants sci-fi artists

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The developers of the latest ‘hot thing’ in art generating AIs, Disco Elysium, are seeking sci-fi artists with a love of outer space. The lads at ZA/UM are at the starting process of making their first game, presumably incorporating AI-gen art elements. The game news site DualShockers and magazine PC Gamer report the game will use Unreal Engine 5 rather than Disco Elysium’s Unity engine, so familiarity with both Unity and Unreal will probably be needed by applicants.

Changes at ShareCG

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A new annoying behaviour on the popular freebies site ShareCG today. Once you click “download” the site won’t let you do anything else with it, until the download has completed. Not even click through to another page. So be wary of casually starting a long download, because the rest of the site will then be frozen.

Launch: Dall.E 2

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DALL.E 2. has launched in beta. $15 effectively buys you three or four text prompts per day, across a month. The lucky beta “users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create”. There’s also a bung for those around the world who can’t afford that… “Artists who are in need of financial assistance will be able to apply for subsidized access.”