The latest U-Render 2022.4 plugin is available for Cinema 4D. Think of it as the equivalent of Blender’s Eevee for C4D, a realtime “what you see is what you get” viewport. Sadly it’s now subscription only though, so it probably won’t be getting much attention here in the future.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Manta-rays vs. flying lama-taxis
The next version of the G’MIC Photoshop plugin will have the filter ‘Rendering / Generate Random Portrait’ to create a picture of a person who doesn’t exist…
Now if only the AI could also do alien flying manta-rays firing sci-fi ray guns, in pitched battle against a fleet of flying lama-taxis. Oh, wait, there’s DALL.E 2 now…
Release: 3DCoat 2022
3DCoat 2022 has shipped as a stable version. Among other things, it’s a more logical alternative to ZBrush for sculpting. 2022 brings…
* “Bevel tool and an Inflate modifier” in the brushes.
* Automated decimation of a 3D sculpt to lower-res mesh.
* New clay shaders and “created by a leading concept artist” no less.
But the main thing is a new…
“Core API which lets users customise the software at the ‘speed of C++’”
Still supports Windows 7, apparently.
Some highlights from 2021
Some highlights from 2021.
The good:
Poser 12 Early Access ended the year with its new Manual completed. Now available not only in HTML, but also in a free PDF. Ghostship shipped his Poser 12 Materials, which those who used them on Poser 11 will know are a key enhancement for Poser SuperFly users. Various useful scripts, including those by Snarlygribbly continued to be updated for Poser 12. Also, Poser 12 can now be snail-mailed to you if you live out in the wilds.
NeoWin Deals continued with their great offer of Poser Pro 11 for $80, and this can co-exist alongside Poser 12. Mac Poser users now have an equivalent of the must-have ‘Snap To’ mover script, working on both Poser 11 and 12. There were many other new Poser 11 scripts, including an automated Blender to Poser conversion script for free Blender assets.
DAZ ended the year by announcing a new integrated iRay render-farm service in the Cloud, Infinite-Compute’s “Boost for DAZ”.
Of course the year saw lots of great new Poser/DAZ content and freebies released, with the picks being covered here in my monthly round-ups. 300 game-ready DAZ figure conversions were officially added by Tafi to the Unity Store.
Redeye Cat retired in May and kindly gave away her stuff for free — now safely archived as a 500Mb mega-bundle archive on Archive.org. Cage’s Loop and Chain-making Poser scripts were likewise saved. Wootha also retired and kindly gave away his brushes, concept art etc as public domain (he’s not to be confused with the Wolthera who works on Krita).
Another year of free magazines from Digital Art Live, and the Digital Art Live STUDIO forum is also working well.
Renderosity finally made it possible to paste nicely formatted and coloured code in the Python Scripting forums, though only from proper editors such as the free Microsoft Visual Studio Code and PyCharm.
The ArtStation Marketplace grew and thrived, and though very crowded becomes a useful place once you start to build a judicious wishlist.
The new G’MIC 3.0 for Photoshop version added AI-powered de-noising. This does not need NVIDIA, and can even be done on CPUs.
XP-Pen produced and shipped even better budget ‘draw on the screen’ pen-monitors.
The bad:
On the DAZ Store all the old Poser .ZIPs have been re-labelled as “DAZ Studio”. But it’s pretty easy to tell the difference, once you know how. Just download all the .ZIPs, and if there’s a ‘data’ folder inside then it’s for DAZ.
The Poser-friendly Hivewire store closed down. But on the bright side, they eventually moved most items to Renderosity. The lively and friendly Hivewire forums remain.
We lost the excellent third-party Poser library PzDB (still working, but can no longer be purchased); Topaz Clean (but I showed how to use G’MIC as a very close if slower replacement); and the tooning plugin pwToon for DAZ Studio (no longer for sale).
The enforced removal of the Flash Player from PCs caused a bit of confusion, as ancient Poser Library systems stopped working for a few. But people found workarounds.
Several big VR painting tools were killed off.
The venerable free audio-editor Audacity was bjorked. Audacity 2.4 became ‘the last good version’, but there is now a safer fork called Audacium 1.0.
Adobe completely killed 3D in Photoshop, for rather murky reasons.
The graphics-card drought / price-gouging continued. There were also other tech shortages.
The latest OS upgrades and patches became a very dangerous game of Russian Roulette for both Mac and Windows, likely to cause the sudden death of much-loved and mission-critical software. Some people sensibly told the OS makers to stuff it, and went back to good old Windows 7.
NFTs. Evil incarnate.
The soft:
PD Howler 2020 was given away free in the summer then heavily-discounted at the end of the year, and as a consequence was positively reviewed in Digital Art Live. I worked out how to remove white (white to transparency) in PD Howler. Since that’s not a thing it can do ‘one click’, like you can in Rebelle or Clip Studio or Photoshop (with an Action).
In other painting software, someone invented a great free Lasso colour-autofill script for Photoshop (like Clip Studio has) but sadly no-one noticed. The free Krita 5 went through five betas and is due for final release in a few days. The excellent $20 Realistic Paint Studio had a new version 2.0, and the free Paint.NET also had a substantial release. Escape Motions released Rebelle 5, but effectively put the price up. Corel Painter 2022 was apparently (according to Boro) an outstanding move forward for the venerable software.
The free G’MIC for Photoshop plugin added useful support for recording G’MIC in Photoshop Actions, among other new features.
In 3D painting software we had the excellent 3DCoat 2021, and the budget 3DCoatTextura. The budget-priced ArmorPaint 0.8 appeared, and has made good progress as a Substance Designer competitor.
Blender 3.0 stable landed in December, with many Freestyle and Grease Pencil improvements. BEER for Blender is due in final in early 2022, offering even better NPR and lineart. Blender also now has a basic Assets Browser, at long last. Blender’s main Cycles renderer had big speed boosts, which should filter through to Poser 12 in due course (Poser’s SuperFly renderer is a slightly tweaked Cycles).
Software we nearly lost included DAZ on a Mac, totally bjorked by the OS Big Sur update for many months… until it was fixed by a huge effort in September. Vue was also fixed for Big Sur. Scatter for Poser 11 was lost for a while in the Hivewire-Renderosity transfer. But it’s also back now. The free abandonware Microsoft ICE 2.0 seemed to vanish, but popped up again on Archive.org.
Software we ‘might have lost, but kept’ included Moho (aka Smith Micro’s Anime Studio), now back with its original developers and with new features in a new release (20% off for Xmas and New Year, with code: HOLIDAYS). The subscription VUE R6 (not to be confused with the old Vue 2016 R6) has so far kept easy import of Poser scenes, thus offering a way to port Poser to big-beast 3D software like Maya, Lightwave etc. Effectively Vue now replaces the PoserFusion plugins for studio pipeline work, although of course it is not free like the plugins were.
Various bits of software updated as usual, including KeyShot 10.2 which apparently fixed the ‘butterfly-wing eyelashes’ problem on DAZ figure imports. In unusual or niche software VRoid Studio 1.0 came out of beta; Clavicula superseded Neobarok; and Movmi pointed the way to AI-powered mo-cap from video clips.
The bleeding edge:
A slick Metahuman demo caused a moment’s “DAZ is doooommed!” panic in April, then everyone forgot about it.
Worthy AI designers Deep AI are training their new Zendo AI to locate and mask the edges of multiple objects in images. Auto-masking that works perfectly and precisely every time would certainly be something worth having. I mean here the accurate object-aware segmentation of an entire complex picture with lost-edges, not just ‘mask that easy-to-isolate shape there’.
Several interesting technical papers appeared on auto-inking, promising much for the future. Autocomplete for inking artists, i.e. ‘making several short curves to form a longer one’. And an AI that can autotrace your rough sketch in inks.
Here:
I discovered a basic de-grunging Matcap-like method for Poser 11 materials, useful for making comics flats. Also a new way to remove the speckles from Poser’s Firefly lineart renders (Vextractor 7.x). I realised in tests that the 25 year-old default bucket sizes, used when rendering, may now be out-of-date on many fast PCs. I discovered an interesting way to consistently get a partial silhouette in Poser. My on-off work on several Poser scripts continued, and I learned a good deal more about Python and automation on a PC.
My blog’s Poser/DAZ Technical Search engine is now exponentially more useful than when first launched. It now also covers Vue, motion capture, and a few other useful topics. I undertook the annual overhaul of the blog in the summer, doing things like checking and fixing all the sidebar links by hand.
Elsewhere, there was further taming of my YouTube and DeviantArt experiences by use of UserScripts and other addons. Both are now somewhat bearable. Likewise fixed are the Google Doodle and many other small annoyances scattered around the Web.
Top of the pops in 2021
So, what are the top items on Renderosity? Rendo provides a page where you can find such things out. The top four are pretty much as you might expect.
Followed by a superstore’s-worth of skimpies and silkies, page after page, and just a couple of other quality G8 female characters. You have to scroll a long way down to get to something like “STZ Cleaning accessories”. It takes a while to puzzle that one out, but then the penny drops: hardware accessories for the maid costumes.
Way way down after many pages you start to see occasional other things, like “Photo Props: Fire Effect Maker” and the “Poser 12 – Upgrade”. Eventually, after a very long time of scrolling the first male item appears. G8M realistic body-hair strips, and then after another few pages another in “Karl for Genesis 8 Male”. Hurrah for Karl, but… he has no other mates down there.
Eventually we start to get a couple of animals, with the HiveWire Horse, Songbird ReMix Corvus (crows). Also a few very scattered sci-fi sets. Even further down up pops La Femme Pro V.2, along with more Hivewive Big Cats, Hivewire Housecat. Also Poser 11 at the Renderosity price.
So basically it seems that if you want to sell to the masses, G3F and G8F is where it’s at. Specifically clothing and the slinkier and more enticing the better. However, it’s obviously a very crowded market. I’m guessing the ‘work to hit product’ ratio might be high, and you could have to produce and shout about twenty or more items of new clothing to get one breakthrough product that sells well. The rest are likely to be lost in the tidal waves of similar items, because back of these best-sellers must be thousands of others that didn’t get the traction.
Hair obviously has to be really really good to make it up the charts. I guess many people already have their favourite go-to hairs. Also, hair is a risky buy, so buyers may be averse.
There’s a surprisingly lack of scripts and add-ons, but I guess such things are beyond the ability of the mass market and so don’t sell a lot.
Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that the kind of stuff that sold twenty years ago is no longer selling. It probably is. It’s just that such things are being drowned out in the charts by the new mass market.
What of the DAZ Store? So far as I can tell the DAZ Store’s “sort by most popular” is not an all-time or yearly tally, and only seems to give you the most popular this week.
Boost for DAZ
DAZ Studio users are set to get a new integrated iRay render-farm service in the Cloud. Infinite-Compute’s “Boost for DAZ” will presumably become available as a free plugin soon. Nothing there yet, I just looked. According to the press-release on the partnership the new service will offer the ability to first configure… “a custom NVIDIA iRay Server within minutes” by budget / time / complexity. Then once that has spun up, users quickly render the project on it and “only pay for what they use.” No need for expensive graphics cards, then, just a fast Internet uplink to get the file and any relevant folders uploaded.
Looks good, and it may be especially welcomed by those who are shut out of the NVIDIA ecosystem, either because of Apple or the simple lack of fast cards to buy at their supposed ‘budget’ prices.
Presumably you can also still run things like Scene Optimizer in DAZ first, and thus make the upload / cloud rendering faster and thus save cash? But that’s just my guess.
Said to be “affordable”, and judging by the current prices on the Infinite Compute site it is and is pay-as-you-go.
Top of the range is a professional studio NVIDIA Quadro RTX4000 aided by 8 CPUs. But you can also render iRay on 12 x CPUs alone if you want. Yes, iRay can run on CPUs alone, as it’s a myth that it needs an NVIDIA card. That’s what I’ve actually got under the desk: 12 CPUs / 24 render threads, and with a little help from Scene Optimizer and a couple of tweaks it can push the Viewport into something approaching real-time. A bit grainy for a few seconds when the camera moves, but perfectly acceptable in giving a ‘what you see is what you get’ view of the scene.
I assume that what you won’t get from Infinite-Compute is some kind of hook into powering your DAZ Viewport, whereby their server also helps render your Viewport in iRay while you set up the scene and test angles, lighting etc. As such I expect Infinite-Compute will mostly be used for big 6k final ‘beauty’ renders and by animators. You’ll still need some kind of hefty local computing power to help with the scene setup.
C4D acquires ZBrush
So the news is that Cinema 4D (Maxon) has purchased ZBrush outright and is getting the main dev team along with it. Makes sense, as ZBrush has now been dangerously flanked. On one side by the one-time purchase 3DCoat 2021, offering quality sculpting to newcomers and studio bosses who want to avoid the mind-bending ‘thrown together by mad monkeys’ interface of ZBrush. And flanked on the other side by the free Blender 3.0 (and eventually a Blender 4.0 in a few years, possibly with a focus on sculpting). Of course Blender also has its own UI difficulties, but is far better than it was a few years back.
Auto inking
At SIGGRAPH 2021, a demo of an automated AI to ink vector lines over a loose lineart sketch. PDF examples.
Release: MeshLab update
A new version of the free MeshLab was released, just before Halloween.
Mostly used for poly-reduction of 3D meshes, for many. “Quadric Edge Decimation” is what you want there.
Bear in mind that the two new versions in 2021 have bjorked every Meshlab tutorial ever written on smoothing, as all the relevant filters are either removed or differently-named or put somewhere else. The solution is to go get Meshlab 2016 which is still available and is what the old tutorials were written for.
Renderosity’s Advent Calendar freebies
Renderosity now has an official Christmas Advent Calendar. Each day, with download links active for ‘one day only’, leading vendors give away Poser / DAZ content as an open download. A new cumulative post each day, and the list is currently on the third day.
Blender 3.0 lands
Blender 3.0 stable is out, and there’s also a 3.1 alpha. Mostly 3.0 seems to be about speed/performance, UI changes, and the new Asset Browser. The multipage changelog for 3.0 is big and techie enough to stun a charging rhino, but here are some highlights I spotted…
* Faster rendering on Cycles, “rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.” If… you have a hefty RTX graphics card. (That sounds like very good news for Poser 12, if it can be plugged in any time soon. Poser uses Cycles, but there it’s re-branded as SuperFly).
* Auto tile-tweaking. This is about the tile-size that gets rendered when rendering. e.g. 128 pixels. “Previously tweaking tile size was important for maximizing CPU and GPU performance. Now this is mostly automated.”
* Faster hair curves (not ribbons), but again only if… you have a fast NVIDIA OptiX card.
* A less laggy viewport, and again… I suspect that having a fast shiny new graphics card will help there.
* For the overall UI “the default theme got a refresh” and various changes.
* It’s now faster to work with the UI, which is good because Blender needs a lot of clicky-clicky work. The speed is due to things like faster text rendering, as panels spring into existence.
* Not much this time around for Eevee, but… “Performance when editing a huge mesh is improved.”
* New GreasePencil abilities with some new line modifiers (dashes, wiggles etc), and thus expanded lineart possibilities.
* A major rework of the UI layout for Freestyle. I hear elsewhere that it’s a bit quicker now to load a previous set of lines.
* .USD files can now be imported into Blender. This is the Pixar Universal Scene Description format.
* AMD GPUs are now supported.
* OpenCL rendering is removed. So is Branched Path Tracing. And the Rigify Legacy Mode is gone.
* A new Asset Browser for: Objects; Materials; Poses and Expressions; Worlds. I assume it’s drag-and-drop.
Blender 2.93 portable could run on Windows 7 with a small workaround. I assume there will also be enough demand to fix 3.0 for Windows 7. But until then, 3.0 is officially Windows 8 or higher. It will also refuse to install unless you have a sufficiently powerful graphics card.
Update: Blender 3.51 for Windows 7 (early May 2023). Needing no installer, it will now launch! Hurrah.
Release: Poser 12 Early Access 12.0.752
Update: new directory page for free Poser 12 scripts.
‘Tis the merry season of releases. Blender 3.0 tomorrow, Rebelle 5.0 on the 15th, and probably more to come as the various dev teams steam toward their Christmas deadlines.
Poser 12 Early Access also has a new version online today. 12.0.752 (24th November) is ready for download.
The last version noted here was 12.0.703 in October, so there have been four internal updates since then, and now this public release. There’s a full changelog on the download page, but here’s my digestion of the highlights. There were three broad areas of focus this time around: general Library and UI usability; the PDF manual and Python documentation; and some tweaks to get ready for unimesh.
* The Poser 12 manual now documents new features in 12.x, and a handy 108Mb PDF version is newly available here. Here’s how to get the PDF downloading for you.
* “Pydoc browsing for Python developers” (see the PDF manual). It appears that Poser 12 users can go to the Python console within the software, from there get a browser-list of modules and then click on the poser module in the list. I could be wrong but it seems that this then lists all the other Python modules currently available under poser and that a Python 3 script can run in Poser 12. Also other Python items.
* Fixes for the drag dock option in the UI.
* Various Content Library palette fixes, including “Content Library search/locate feature now jumps to selected item so the user no longer needs to scroll for it”.
* Various Hierarchy Editor usability fixes.
PzDB no longer sold
I see that the third-party Poser Library software PzDB is currently in the ‘no longer sold’ category. The Payloadz payment system refuses. The software’s ‘ping’ server is still working though, the ‘ping’ being required on loading the software. My installed 1.3 version is thus still working. So there’s hope that the problem may just be with the payment processor.
The problem may be…
1) the Payloadz payment system is kaput for PzDB and other items too, for some reason;
2) that the hefty monthly PayLoadz seller’s account payment of $29 (!) has somehow ceased, and the maker of PzDb hasn’t yet noticed;
3) the maker has turned off purchases because his MS Access reseller licence (PzDB is build on MS Access) doesn’t support the latest Windows 11. However, that is unlikely, since I read that…
“MS Access database can be sold as a standalone [custom] application with a runtime edition of Access which is licence free, if you have Developers edition of the Access/Office”.
Which was what was happening with the back-end of PzDB. However it’s said that Microsoft does not love Access and that it becomes more and more difficult to run Access on newer versions of Windows. One user of the 60-day trial (still available) reports crashes with PzDB on Windows 10, but he also has the full MS Access installed, so there might be conflicts.
Anyway, just my guesses. Let’s hope it’s just a payment system problem and that sales processing can be easily switched to Gumroad instead.
On the other hand, if it is to become abandonware then I’d suggest that perhaps what’s needed first is a small crowdfunder to raise enough to unlock the ‘ping’ and make it free + charity-ware. Even as freeware for Windows 7 and 8, it might help raise some money for charity — perhaps especially if it ran a discreet banner ad and a link inside the UI.
What are the alternatives?
1) There’s the affordable P3DO Explorer, but I find that’s impossibly slow on searches (eight minutes for a simple search for the Pitterbill keyword). Results are then mediocre. I can’t see any way, in the utterly confusing and labyrinthine interface, to speed it up.
2) There’s the native Poser 11 Library interface, which is far better than it was. It’s now reasonably fast, but still very far from ideal in terms of the UI or triggering of indexing. The Search over in DAZ is not much better or faster on a large runtime. Poser 2012 users may be able to bypass the loss of Flash and use Air instead. There was apparently a Service Release for 2012 Pro that added the ability to set “Library Launch Behaviour to External”, and then if Adobe Air was installed that would be used for the Library.
The main drawback for Poser 11 (and now Poser 12) is that the Library feature “Show Folder Thumbnails: When checked, a thumbnail of the first item in the selected folder will appear on the folder” has never worked. This often leaves you looking at a wall of grey identical folders in the search results.
In contrast PzDB just finds so much more stuff, and shows everything individually. For instance try a search for Aiko 3 in Poses. PzDB just finds more, presumably because of the character-based cross-referencing and clustering it does on initial indexing of the runtime. It can also show you just what you just installed. The difference is not because Poser’s indexing is set to Shallow or Full.
3) Everything is free and useful for quick searches, when set to Large Thumbnails / View By Path / Search for Picture. It’s lightning fast because it builds an index first, and as such it’s probably the best sort-of substitute for PzDB for casual Poser users, in combination with RSR to PNG and the native Poser Library. It can sort by Date Created in the latest 1.4 but this needs to be manually turned on. Yet Everything is still not ideal, because you then still need to open the likely folder in Windows Explorer, and find the non-picture Poser file that can be dragged and dropped to Poser. You thus need to know what you’re looking at and the difference between your .MT5s and your .PZ2s etc. Ideally the makers of Everything would add a half-dozen features geared for Poser and DAZ content discovery.
4) If you have it, then Semideu’s Shaderworks Library Manager 2.6 still works in Poser 11, including drag-and-drop from the search results. It’s abandonware from circa 2016 and Semideu (often mis-spelled as Semidue) has long departed the scene following the closure of the RDNA store. But it searches quickly and elegantly on a large runtime. A few seconds longer than PzDB perhaps, but quite bearable. Or, it does when it doesn’t crash. It’s very unstable on Poser 2014, and iffy on Poser 11. Good results though, once you puzzle it out in the very cryptic interface. It may need the free AVfix on some iterations of Poser 11.x. Library Manager itself doesn’t like to be run at startup of Poser 11, so you need to manually start it each session. It’s ‘all Python’, so can dock with the Poser 11 UI (also Python) and replace the Library. If docked you may also need to close it before closing Poser, and return to the normal Library. There’s no Python Tkinter being used in it, so I guess it should theoretically run on a Mac. The PDF manual is here, but the software is currently unavailable unless you can dig it out of an old backup drive or DVD-r. Useful to have as a backup for when (if) PzDB dies, and you find it’s stable for you.
5) There’s also the old Advanced Library for Poser standalone freeware, in version 1.9.2.x. Nice but it totally lacks drag-and-drop to the Poser stage (it used the old defunct PRPC method involving scripts and server .exes). It is however a quick finder tool, with full image thumbnails and easy filtering.
6) The best and most stable solution in the event of a PzDB failure might actually be the Adobe AIR Library that officially shipped with Poser Pro 2014. It can drag and drop to Poser 11 and 12, and can run as an external Library on a second monitor (though Poser 2014 does need to be running). It also knows about DAZ folders and can filter for just the Poser-friendly content there. Presentation is simple but effective. Search is fast, perhaps slightly faster than PzDB. Give it a try if you have 2014.
7) From Poser 13 you can also drag-and-drop Library content to older versions of Poser, if running at the same time. For instance, click and drag from Poser 13 and drop onto the Poser Pro 2014 stage.
DAZ-ling romance
“Writing Romance and Relationships for Visual Narratives”, a two-part webinar with Drew Spence on getting ‘the feel’ right for convincing DAZ-rendered relationship stories in comics, storybooks, slideshows, animation storyboards etc. Booking now.
Fantasy Attic’s Christmas page
Fantasy Attic’s Christmas Gift Page for 2021 is seeking nice donated Poser/DAZ freebies to give away, in the ‘Advent Calendar’ style page (one reveal per day, through to Christmas). Also 2D backgrounds etc.