The ‘video to mo-cap’ tool Kinetix 1.5 has been released. It’s a free browser-based service. Formerly you used stock figures to transfer the mo-cap from a video of a moving figure. But it appears that with this update your own figures can now be imported in .FBX format. Which may make the service of more interest to DAZ and Poser users. They’ve also removed the ups-selling micro-payments system.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Release: KeyShot 11.2
Last noticed here as KeyShot 10.2 in June 2021, a year later KeyShot 11.2 is out. 11.x’s bugs are fixed and there are some nice new features…
* “a new 3D Paint system, making it possible to texture assets within KeyShot by painting directly onto the surface of the model”. Plus Layers, Material Management.
* the ability to “import animations in .FBX” will also please many.
* and “a Python 3-based scripting console” for scripted automation.
The bad news is that “sales of perpetual licences are discontinued” for this nice and relative easy-to-use software. All versions are now “subscription-only”. Even the entry-level version now costs $588 per year. It’s now “Windows 10 only”, too. Sigh.
Digital Art Live #69 / PlantCatalog’s new ‘English oak forest’
The latest Digital Art Live magazine is now available as issue 69. Free, but small donations are now encouraged via Gumroad to help keep it going. This month’s theme for the midsummer issue is “The Misty Isles”, loosely based around mythic and mystical ideas of our own British Isles.
In related ‘British landscape’ news, which sadly came just too late for inclusion in Digital Art Live #69, Vue’s grand English oak forest official pack is now available…
“This PlantCatalog update adds everything you need to create a full English oak forest, including trees, mushrooms, ferns, dead undergrowth and more.”
Brilliant, just add Robin Hood. Also in the pack are native lichen, moss, and even ‘pollarded’ willows (they grow alongside English rivers and large streams, and are harvested for their withies)…
Accessed for Vue via E-on’s standalone sister-software PlantCatalog. The PlantCatalog plants… “can be used both within [the subscription] VUE as procedural files and within any other 3D application as baked polygon meshes, with or without wind animation.”
Also interesting is that with this update to the software, all… “existing PlantCatalog species files are now up to 60% smaller than before.” Thus saving hard-drive space.
SIGGRAPH 2022
Noticed in the official SIGGRAPH 2022 Technical Papers Preview…
A 3D figure’s bone-movements drive momentary natural ‘swing-flicks’ in the dynamic clothing, e.g. a skirt flicking outward while dancing.
Have an AI take a single animation sequence, and automatically create new similar sequences that fit the same rig.
Add very realistic ‘white froth’ running on top of a stream of water, as an animation.
Take a product designer’s 2D concept sketch and automatically build and extrapolate a fully rotating 3D mesh for it.
Also a new AI to… “train primitives in seconds and render them in milliseconds, allowing their use in the inner loops of graphics algorithms”. Not 3D primitives, but Z-depths, “light fields, textures”. Sounds like a new type of ‘on-the-fly’ intelligent adaptive shader?
And a tool to “sketch objects at different levels of abstraction”. It’s “semantically aware”. So it sounds like an AI art-gen where you type “a cat sat on a mat”, and you get a picture of a cat on a mat. My guess is that here you’d get eight sketchy pictures of a cat on a mat, each more abstract than the next?
Finally, an interesting tool in which a five-year old child appears to ‘battle’ with an AI art-gen tool which has a robot drawing arm. They go through “a series of translational stages between humans and non-humans” in drawing, while presumably learning from each other along the way.
3D G’MIC
3D .OBJ import and lit manipulation in the free G’MIC, developing nicely and coming soon in version 3.1.3. And since G’MIC for Photoshop also works as a standard .8BF plugin in other graphics software, then they’ll also get the same 3D import capabilities.
Of course, older versions of Photoshop have 3D, but G’MIC will be able to provide simple 3D import for all current versions. From which, for some rather murky reasons, Adobe has ripped out all the 3D features.
Update: now released. Rather clunky at present, and .OBJ only (i.e. missing textures are likely). Experienced 3D users will be best to render in DAZ, Poser, KeyShot etc and export as a masked .PNG file.
Freebie competition for Poser 12
Craft some 3D or scripted freestuff for Poser 12, pop it on Renderosity, win stuff. Deadline is 2nd August 2022.
Release: Blender 3.2
Release: Blender 3.2 final has been released. Among the many changes:
* new tools for polygon painting,
* ability to paint in sculpting mode,
* sculpting mode can “paint on millions of polys”,
* improved smooth algorithm for Grease Pencil, with ‘keep shape’ option,
* users can make “asset collections” in the new assets browser, and “thumbnails are automatically generated”,
* in-out improvements for .FBX files,
* and shader improvements for Eevee.
Over at DAZ, the DAZ to Blender Bridge has also updated. “Support for Blender 3.x”.
ShareCG re-opens new account registration
ShareCG has re-opened new-account registration, after being hit by a wave of spam-bot sign-ups.
Digital Compositing with DAZ Studio and Photoshop – mentoring course
Digital Compositing with DAZ Studio and Photoshop, an eight-week one-to-one group mentoring course led by Vladimir Chopine. It’s a re-run of the longer course he did a while ago, but this one is shorter. Booking now, starts on 4th June 2022.
Sketch Master 2018
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Posted in Comics, Companion software, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, Tutorials
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Posted in Comics, Companion software, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, Tutorials
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Redfield Sketch Master, aka Sketchmaster, now in 2018 (v19.01, January 2019). Who knew?
* Still affordable at $40.
* Windows only. I expect it would not be flummoxed by anything back to Windows XP, but that’s just my guess.
* Now multi-core and with a far bigger preview window (and thus slower than before for previews, about on a par with G’MIC). But much faster at 1000px to actually render a preset to your final image, due to the multi-core support. Not so much faster at 3600px, though… maybe 40% faster. But worth having.
* Ships with wholly new presets. Also appears to have a different or more advanced or canvas-scaled engine, but keeps a very similar UI.
* Installs and runs alongside your old 3.3x version. Does not inherit the old custom presets.
* The new version’s engine is no good for humanising 3D line-art, and for that you need the old 3.3x.
* Requires standard 8-bit images (“Last Draw” save-renders from DAZ are 16-bit, and thus require downsampling before filtering).
* Backup and restore of your saved custom presets is done by the same method. They’re stored in the registry, so you save out a Windows .reg file, thus…
If you’re upgrading your PC to a new one, or a new OS, this is how you transfer your Sketch Master presets.
Fiber Shop 2, now perpetual-licence
Fiber Shop 2 is a standalone real-time 3D hair creator, with export to .FBX as strands or ‘cards’. Version 2.2 is now available on a perpetual licence (it had been subscription) and at a reasonable $120 at present. There is a free non-commercial version which restricts the resolution of the texture-map exports and you don’t get things like the gradiated root-to-tip textures. Windows only.
What you don’t appear to get is a real-time “on the head’ view on a showroom-dummy head, it’s just the hair-cards that are previewing in real-time. You need to be able to round-trip to some 3D software that has actually built the hair mesh, so far as I can tell. I’m not sure if such round-tripping is possible with DAZ or Poser. Though it is with ZBrush and suchlike.
As for an art-AI to ‘add hair to a bald 2D render’ from DAZ or Poser, that’s still at the level of academic research papers so far as I can tell. But it’s doubtless coming soon.
Presenter wanted
Become a regular webinar tutorial presenter on DAZ Studio topics. Details at the Digital Art Live STUDIO forum.
Release: Storyboarder 3.0
Release: Storyboarder 3.0 slipped out at the end of March 2022, with almost no-one noticing. It’s a bit sad that those with the biggest and slickest marketing hog all the attention, when there’s so much fine software around these days.
Free and open-source, for movie storyboarding but also possibly useful for figuring out the flow of comics. Especially a comic that is likely to be viewed in reader apps that offer ‘Panel View’ (one panel at a time, filling the screen) or scrolling formats.
Among other changes…
* Shot Generator: Insert Image via Drag/Drop or Paste.
* Storyboarder: Video Export fixed.
FurMark
An unusual bit of Windows freeware. FurMark will give your graphics-card a furry stress-test…
“FurMark OpenGL benchmark test will accurately measure the performance of the graphics card using fur rendering algorithms.”
Material zones in DAZ
Coming in early/mid June 2022, a two-part webinar on working with material zones in DAZ Studio.
