News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

Monkeying with Moho

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The venerable indie animation software Moho, now back with its original developers, has released a YouTube preview of a new CrazyTalk-like ‘Live Mesh’ feature. Apparently this is…

coming with the free Moho 13.5.2 update for Moho 13.5 owners

Looks like you can relatively easily add face-rigging to a 2D image, for a 2.5D animatable look, something other software can also do. Though here it looks nicely professional, is integrated into the all-in $400 software (i.e. no $1,000+ of extra plugins to buy), and it obviously gives good results.

Sadly it’s probably not an alternative way to rig a Poser face, and thus perhaps have an older Poser figure fake the look of having ‘real stretchy muscles’ under the skin. Other than as a 2D rendered from Poser. That’s because Moho (formerly Anime Studio) had licencing problems with the Smith Micro / Renderosity switchover, and that caused the drop of the Poser import feature with Moho 13. My guess would be that there was a big script doing the work and that was by Smith Micro and had not been labelled as public domain (as DAZ tends to do with key scripts, presumably to prevent such future problems). So far as I know 12.5.x was the last Moho to officially support Poser import, and there have as yet been no experiments to see if the following is possible:

Poser 11 -> Moho 12.5 -> save file -> open in Moho 13.5.

Poly Haven

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From South Africa, the new Poly Haven. A library website of free CC-Zero Blender assets with, at present, what appears to be some quality-control. A test of a small oil-can gave me an open public download (no sign-up needed). The polished and roomy new site seems to be from a small group of young Blender enthusiasts, who plan to run on a mix of crowdfunding and ads. It’s crowdfunding now.

Opening my test file failed in Blender 2.76, but succeeded in 2.83. Automatic Blender to Poser conversion then succeeded nicely, and the can was inside Poser in seconds and looking good.

Learn from top DAZ Store maker and vendor Esha

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A new tutoring group, with top DAZ Store maker and vendor Esha, offering ‘in person’ a full up-to-date…

guide for texturing props and clothing, without the usual headaches and hurdles. … we’ve had repeated requests for Esha to teach this topic, so we are starting on Sunday the 28th of November 2021.

Small numbers in the group, for the personal coaching touch. Booking now.

If you can’t afford Substance Painter for this, I imagine that the translation of that part of the tutoring to the similar tool $20 ArmorPaint would not be too difficult.

iClone 8 – new features reveal

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Just in today, iClone 8 New Features Introduction. Some of the highlights…

* extended animated .FBX support (“Drag and drop! Any FBX motion data format is compatible, which largely removes platform barriers for motion data and makes it all compatible”);

* many improvements to animation editing and figure controls;

* a new look for the figure Control Rig;

* Hotkey Manager and Collection Manager (“freely categorize objects in the Scene Manager”);

* simulated volumetric lighting in real-time (by adding “visible volume to directional, spot and point lights”);

* mirrors (“simulate realistic mirror reflection, with various control settings like opacity and blur”);

* NVIDIA Omniverse connection (requires RTX graphics card);

* performance optimization (such as “hidden objects will not be processed in the background” for large scenes).

iClone 8 is not out yet. The official take from the Forum is… ”

“iClone 8 … not scheduled for release until at least Spring 2022”

Since the downloads of purchased versions are limited to the last three versions, now might be a good time to go get and archive the installers for iClone 5 — just in case you ever need it for backwards compatability.

VRoid Studio 1.0

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Japanese avatar creation software VRoid Studio is out of beta (launched August 2018), and has released its stable 1.0 version. They write… “we rebuilt it from scratch”. Commercial use of the results, summed up as “Your models are yours to use freely”.

Easy to use, and while limited to a generic manga/anime look it does have pointy-ears and suchlike.

Designed characters are low-poly (designed for VR, chat) and export to .VRM format. There are ways to get .VRM to .FBX files and into other 3D software. There is also software such as VSeeFace for facial motion-capture for .VRM figures.

For DAZ and Poser users it would probably be better to get the right shapes/eyes/morphs and build the character natively. You would then have a high-poly model that could also take accessories, motions, face mo-cap and lip-sync etc. Though admittedly the toon texturing and getting the lines looking right would present problems for many. But Poser users have the Comic Book mode and now my discovery of blur + overlay.

ArmorPaint 0.8

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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

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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.

Renderosity Forums URL changes

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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

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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).