A useful new UserScript for your Web browser. YouTube: expand description and long comments. No more clicking on “See more…”. With this installed, everything below the video is already open, and you just scroll down and cast your eye through it. Tested, and can be used alongside a UserScript that serves as a YouTube Comments Blocker.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Photoshop Action: Cut-out ‘Dream by Wombo’ AI-pictures
Available now, my $2 Photoshop Action for users of the “Dream by Wombo” AI image generator. It very precisely and automatically cuts the picture out of a standard ‘Dream by Wombo’ AI-generated picture-card. It then auto-heals each of the tiny curved corners, and finally it saves the cut-out as a copy.
It works with the current Wombo output size available to free users. If that output size changes in future, then I’ll update the Action.
Published: Digital Comics Creative, Volumes 3 & 4
New and available now on Gumroad, Digital Comics Creative, Volumes 3 & 4 – Secrets of Poser 11 and Line-art Filters. Both volumes are bundled together as a bumper 100-page magazine-style PDF, great value at the introductory price of $15 (will soon be $18).
The earlier Volume 1 (Introduction) and Volume 2 (focused on DAZ Studio for comics) are also available. Volumes 5 and 6 are set for release in 2023.
Changes at ShareCG
Changes at ShareCG. Mostly a home for freebies, but some also try to sell there. For content sellers…
“Due to the high cost of sales processing, the minimum price of a new (or updated) upload[ed product] will be set to $5.00. In addition the maximum discount was reduced to 50%.”
“The above change will set the minimum selling price, at the highest discount, to $2.50”
Seems fair enough. But they go on to say that even $2.50 “is too low to our opinion”. So presumably they would like to see a discounted minimum-price being set higher, in order to cover their processing costs.
Changes for Vue creator edition
Changes for the Vue landscape software.
The more affordable ‘Creator’ Vue now gets many of the Pro and Enterprise features. Cinema 4D and Maya integrations will be the addition that most will be interested in, since that will offer an easy Poser -> Vue -> C4D / Maya export workflow. Also added to Creator are “unlimited render size”, Python scripts, Multipass and G-buffer renders, among others. Nice. See the link for full details.
However, there’s a kicker… ‘Creator’ Vue will now be for “Personal non-commercial use only”. But that shouldn’t affect most hobbyists and students. At the most, it would affect those who pick up a few prints-sales each year from DeviantArt or ArtStation.
And… “starting today, any VUE and PlantFactory legacy licenses (versions 2016 and below) re-activation request will be contingent to a service order.” In other words it seems you’ll pay a small unspecified ‘servicing fee’ to have E-On re-activate an ancient Vue licence. Seems fair enough, as long as it’s a fair price. I believe you can also ask them to restore your old Cornucopia content purchases.
Tesla-bot
The first look at Elon Musk’s humanoid Tesla-bot, early version. Can’t be long before someone produces a DAZ Studio version…
Blender movies wanted
The Amsterdam Blender Conference, set for late October 2022, is calling for Blender-made films. No deadline that I can see, but… “The list of nominees will be published a few days before the Blender Conference.”
Cartoon Animator 5
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Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator 5 desktop cartoon production software is coming soon, and there are offers in the emails such as ‘buy an upgrade and get version 5 free when it appears’. It’s good software for making that kind of animation, especially for a small studio. Professional, fairly easy to use, very well documented and supported. Though you to be aware that you probably need to budget four times the initial ‘sticker price’, if you’re going to fully get into the expensive Reallusion ecosystem with motion add-ons and expansion packs and suchlike.
Six-week coaching course, AI for your art
Starting soon, a six-week coaching course on AI for your art, with Vladimir Chopine.
Careers at DAZ – recruiting now
ClipDrop
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:
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.
A.I. Generated Art : Community Workshop
A fun, relaxed A.I. Generated Art : Community Workshop with Digital Art Live, this weekend. Free and booking now.
Poser 12 has updated
Poser 12 has updated. Now at version 12.0.1029 in Windows. The Mac version stays as it was before, for now. The forthcoming Digital Art Live magazine #71 (Sept 2022) has a detailed install guide and guide to what Poser 12 has that Poser 11 doesn’t.
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.