Lucian Stanculescu, maker of Neobarok, has released v.0.9 for his equally free 3D modeller Clavicula. “Clavicula supersedes Neobarok, with more functionality and PCVR support”. As innovative and open source and stylish as Neobarok.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
ICC Magazine
Great to see 3D comics maker Drew Spence on the cover of the latest ICC Magazine #16 (October 2021), Interview inside!
ICC is the magazine for indie comics makers, and should fit nicely alongside your monthly VisNews for digital comics makers.
ArmorPaint 0.8
Out now, a new version of ArmorPaint, the PBR materials maker and 3D paint-on-the-mesh painter. Think of it as ‘Substance Painter for $20, without the subscription shackle’.
0.8 is described as “a major update” and it apparently also now runs on Android and the iPad, and has a new Cloud-based assets library. It’s sort-of-free. Free to compile from source code, or buy it ready-to-install for $20.
Poser 12 Early Access 12.0.703
Poser 12 Early Access has a new version, 12.0.703 (13th October 2021) for download. The last one noticed here was 12.0.617 (early August 2021). According to the Changelog / Release Notes it’s been through seven unreleased iterations since then, with this current public release being the eighth such.
This time around Python has been a clear focus of the hard work. Various PoserPython fixes, and some nice extensions of Python’s capabilities in Poser 12:
– Python API method poser.PrefsLocation() now returns full path including filename of Poser prefs file.
– Python: Provided an easier way to identify a library “prop”.
– Python: Now accesses some of the Material Room context menu commands.
– Added material.SpecularMapFileName() function to Poser Python API.
– Added support for addons-style third-party Python scripts that load at start-up.
– Added method to find a parameter specifically by internal name.
– Python API event now recognises when user has switched to another room.
Many more Python changes are detailed in the full Changelog / Release Notes.
I also see notes of various work done on Animation Sets/AnimSets and also the Material Room. Collapsible hierarchy. Also some small UI fixes, and the Japanese translation of Poser gets another tweak.
Lots of fixes for installing downloaded purchased content and scripts, too.
Jack’s Poser Pro Manual updates
Jack’s Poser Pro Manual (unofficial) has updated. A personal organised manual, useful to have indexed in your local keyword search option (e.g. the ‘last good’ Copernic Desktop Search 2.3 build 30 etc).
Renderosity Forums URL changes
Renderosity has a new format for Forum URLs. Was…
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?forum_id=12589
or
https://www.renderosity.com//forums/?forum_id=10139
Now…
https://www.renderosity.com/forums/12589
The redirect is automatic, but a bit sticky and often fails. Thus manual fixing of bookmarked URLs is best.
Delete…
mod/forumpro/?
and replace
_id=
with
s/
Sadly the change appears to has bjorked the Python forum. Hopefully a proper code-display module will be plugged into the new forum software, soon.
Update: Copy-and-paste from a proper code editor (not Notepad++) now works. Suggested code editors are Microsoft Visual Studio Code, and PyCharm. Digital Art Live magazine has a two-page guide on how to install and set up the free Visual Studio Code.
Fix the DNS ‘not found’ problem
I’m currently experiencing severe website-lookup problems, effectively blocking my access to about 20% of sites. Especially smaller sites such as David Revoy, HiveWire Forum, GreasyFork, Blender Nation, eTools, Major Geeks, Stack Overflow, Nitter and many others, completely ‘not found’ seemingly due to patchy DNS on all DNS servers. Some are complaining about being unable to register Corel software.
Users of commercial services such as Slack have been very annoyed about being locked out…
It appears to affect Chrome-based browsers only, and is continuing for many sites. So… installing a Firefox based browser (I recommend Pale Moon) should at least get you to the missing sites. No amount of jiggering about with clearing DNS caches and adding new public-DNS addresses will cure the problem, I’ve spent the whole of Saturday morning trying to fix it for the Chrome-based Opera browser.
Update: It’s due to dodgy free root SSL certificates on the sites. Firefox has its own store of these at my end, so it was unaffected. Fixed by installing fresh root certificates. (The Slack outage mentioned above actually appears to have been down to its own stupid DNS jiggering-about, rather than SSL certificates).
Poser to Blender
New version of ADP’s free Poser to Blender script, with new fixes to run in Poser 12. Scroll down to 10th September 2021 post and install notes…
There is also now an automatic Blender to Poser conversion script, that goes the other way. Quickly liberating the wealth of Blender content locked in .blend files, for use in Poser.
Z800
A very nicely spec’d HP Z800 with “2x Xeon X5670@2.93GHz, 96GB DDR3, 400GB SSD + 9TB, Quadro K620, W10Pro”. Reputable UK refurbisher (I’ve purchased there in the past) and 29 bids. Bidding just ended at a touch under £360, which seems about right — and sets a fair benchmark for future pricing of such a Poser/Vue-friendly budget-behemoth.
Same Xeons as a well-spec’d HP Z600, but otherwise much better specs and a Win 7 serial on the case (because you don’t want to run Windows 10 on an HP Z.., unless you just want a cheap gaming PC — which would be a criminal waste of such a machine).
Freestuff update
The Renderosity Store has updated the ‘Freestuff Upload’ rules page.
Blender 3.0 release date
Blender 3.0 now has an official release-date, 1st December 2021. This will bring its asset browser, aka a Content Library. It will also have many Freestyle and Grease Pencil improvements nailed down (as much as anything ever can be, in Blender), and the new Cycles X renderer. “X-what?”. Think normal Cycles but…
* 2 to 7 times faster
* apparently gets faster with the complexity of the scene
* works like iRay, the speckled complete scene pops in and then the speckles are progressively refined. No more tiling squares running across the screen.
* it overhauls the underlying render architecture, which should lead to further advances in the future.
Poser 11 and 12 use Cycles (branded as ‘SuperFly’), and thus Cycles X seems likely in Poser at some point in the years to come.
But I’m guessing Cycles X is probably not going to be CPU / GPU agnostic, like iRay is. Contrary to all the NVIDIA marketing ra-raa, any recent version of iRay will run perfectly well on CPUs alone. If you have enough CPU cores/threads for it. But it sounds to me like Cycles X will need a hefty and expensive GPU / graphics card.
Report From the Ghooric Zone
If H.P. Lovecraft had lived to write The Clangers… the new Report From the Ghooric Zone (2021)…
Now with a long “making of” post with detailed pictures of the monsters.
DAZ Studio 4.15.0.30
After being totally bjorked for a while by an unexpected Mac OS upgrade, today sees the official news of the release of the DAZ Studio Update for Big Sur…
The Daz Studio team is pleased to announce […] Mac compatibility to include macOS Big Sur and all previously supported Mac operating systems. The new [v 4.15.0.30] includes a handful of bug fixes and scripting updates for both Mac and Windows operating systems in anticipation of the future Daz Studio 5 upgrade.
No mention of scripts and plugins breaking, for 4.15.0.30 on a Mac. There’s also a new Windows version for 4.15.0.30. Well done to the devs and managers, who must have worked very hard on the Mac fix. Hopefully Apple will give DAZ a bit of warning before their next Mac OS update.
New Enterprise Licensing plans at DAZ
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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DAZ Studio has new Enterprise Licensing plans for studios creating major productions with the help of DAZ Studio and “large scale” use of the software’s various plugins and content. So far as I can see this changes nothing in the current and long-standing royalty-free arrangement. It just provides “world-class” support to studios using DAZ assets, in a busy work setting where time-is-money. The first such client enjoying the service is Canada’s…
Wind Sun Sky Entertainment [which] has seen exceptional success this year including their […] hit Amazon Prime Original series Invincible.
Invincible has been such a hit, that in May 2021 Amazon renewed the show for another two seasons. Nice to be able to show it to the pros who disdain DAZ and Poser and say… “yup, that’s made with DAZ that is…”.
A recent job ad for a new series suggest their key tools are DAZ Studio and Adobe After Effects.
Cartoon Animator 4.5
I missed the news on Reallusion’s excellent Cartoon Animator 4.5, which had an update in July.
Version 4.5 supports export of transparent-background video (.MOV as ProRes 4444) and alpha-masked image sequence (.PNG, lossless, cropped to visible pixels). This means you can just layer the exported animation over your existing video footage, and it should blend in nicely. No green-screening needed, no ugly fringing of pixels at the edges. There’s a new video tutorial on YouTube…
