Blender 3.0 will apparently enable users to have a Pose Library and save presets to it…
It’s still in development and looks very far from making Blender a drop-in replacement for DAZ / Poser, but it should be useful for some.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Release: new version of MeshLab
MeshLab 2021.05 has been released. Installer downloads are here. The leading free 3D mesh-wrangler can now do ‘pretty’…
“MeshLab now allows to load custom GL shaders”
And texture-map defragmentation, and multi-layer support on .3DS files. Plugins, too.
The fab new stuff we might get… in a few years
Coming up at SIGGRAPH 2021…
StyleCariGAN… “a caricature generation framework based on StyleGAN, which automatically creates a realistic and detailed caricature from an input photo, with optional controls on shape exaggeration and color stylization.”
AgileGAN, apparently an instant cartoon-ifer, less twisted than StyleCariGAN.
Auto-dance timed to the music beats and speed etc. Doesn’t the MikuMiku type software do this already? Well, if it doesn’t, it will soon.
Autocomplete for inking artists, ‘making several short curves to form a longer one’.
Smoke-ring fractal generation. Not exactly Gandalf-quality, but perhaps they can add modifiers for more complexity.
Realistic melting wax animation simulator.
Loose-mesh fabrics that behave realistically and can be ‘pulled’ onto a figure-part, like knitted socks being pulled onto feet.
Generate “real-world” ecosystems with balanced ecologies. Not sure if the animals get to eat each other.
Identify “internal structures” in a picture, auto-animate them as loops.
Better automatic pallette re-sorting.
Seamless manga inpainting, seemingly “for the first time”. Apparently to be used for auto-removal of speech-bubbles from old paper comics that are not in digital format. Not sure it’s that useful though, as mostly you’d just want to blank rather than remove the bubbles.
No advances in auto-coloring of greyscale paintings, by the look of it.
Changes at the ArtStation Marketplace
ArtStation Marketplace has effectively won the race to make a new one-stop online mega-mall, I’d say. Other software-specific stores will still thrive, but ArtStation has beaten out CGTrader and several similar one-stop sites. And now there are some nice changes on the Marketplace, following the takeover by Epic (Unreal)…
* Seller feeds reduced from 30% to 12%, at least for now.
* Sellers can now make bundles of related products.
* Sellers can offer freebies or reviewer copies, via new 100% discount coupons.
All welcome changes. I’ve built up a small but nice WishList there as a customer, and the 12% commission would be enticing if I had anything to sell in future. The main problem is the vast size and overcrowding, though at least they don’t seem to allow the “I’ll just upload 1,000 variants of 3D bathroom taps” shovelware merchants to hog space. There was a time when that threatened to become a problem, but they seem to be on top of it now. You still have to watch out for fan-art though, that you don’t realise is fan-art. It’s “buyer beware” in that respect.
But there is still a lot to sift through. Unless you check it daily or every two days, and WishList items, you’re likely to miss stuff. And there is nicely-priced stuff in there that is useful for DAZ and Poser people because it’s .OBJ or .FBX, and even some Vue ecosystem landscapes from Raffy Raffy and a couple of others. A few brush-sets too for software like Paintstorm. The licences and prices are right, and you only occasionally see the sort of silly $100-200 prices you often encounter elsewhere for 3D models at sites like Turbosquid. I see that even Tafi has started uploading part of the DAZ catalogue there, at their Marketplace Store, and this is ongoing with new items arriving daily.
UI, load speed and scrolling are all fine.
So, all in all, provided Epic don’t ruin it with a UI makeover led by the office tea-boy (i.e. like DeviantArt), it’s now a welcome addition to the 3D content landscape.
What else would improve the Marketplace?
* It would be nice if you could elegantly block sellers from appearing in results. For instance, while I appreciate that “Zhanfeng” (current ongoing upload of what appear to be 30,000 individual landscape videogame plants and rocks) has products that are very pretty, well-made and useful to game-makers, I’d still rather not have them cluttering the pages of “New” items.
* Share your WishList in public, or create a new Public variant of it. WishLists could also be re-sortable and have personal comments added alongside.
* Block items if only supplied in a certain format. For instance, I have no interest in 3DS Max files, with no .FBX or .OBJ versions. Models that are not textured I would not want to block, as they may still have their uses in developing the base layer for a digital painting. For instance…
First thoughts on MetaHuman
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Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
Leave a comment
Hmmm… MetaHuman. First thoughts.
It’s obviously destined for semi-pro and small-studio videogames makers who want to shave a few days or weeks off a too-tight production schedule. It appears to output very good starting points for your hundreds of NPCs, that will later be optimised in-game for 60 frames per second. However, flip through the latest PC Gamer magazine for a second. Do you see any “uncanny valley” hyper-real characters, that look like the standard AAA humans MetaHuman is pushing? Very few, these days. In fact, the new U.S. edition has a manga/anime girl on the cover. She runs real-time in the latest hit game.
That said, the head-and-shoulders MetaHuman demo shows obvious superiority to previous “quickie avatar/NPC makers” for games, of the sort that now litter the bankruptcy registers. As such there’s also obvious potential for real-time motion-capture movie-making use, if (and it’s a big if) the mo-cap and AI-aided tweaking in postwork can get the footage past the “uncanny valley”. The average screen entertainment viewer wants Marilyn Monroe, not the 2020s equivalent of a Thunderbirds puppet. But 98% of digital art hobbyists have no interest in making storytelling movies, nor in the full-body motion-capture rigs needed to make that happen.
The MetaHuman tech-demo is set to evolve into a free ongoing cloud service, if the early reports are correct. As such I’d say they have two money making options which will dictate their add-ons…
1) make the exporter modules a paid item, if you’re not sending your figure to the Unreal engine. Exporters to push your 12Gb’s of .FBX figure to Blender, Cinema 4D etc, maybe even to DAZ. But, most likely, never directly to their competitors such as Unity, NVIDIA Omniverse etc. Since their build-a-human service is in the cloud, the exporters cannot be pirated. That sounds steadily lucrative, and for not much ongoing effort.
2) or build a vast sprawling content eco-system on this, complete with ‘anatomically-correct’ figures, skimpy frillies, ankle-bracelets etc. Then promise not to look at the ‘megaboobs’ and other naughty figures that people make and download. But that would damage their brand, and also be a big hassle to admin and do PR for. Why bother, when you have the money coming in via option one? For that reason, I can’t see that DAZ or Renderosity will have a great deal to worry about. The ‘silent majority’ of their users will not want to use cloud services, and will be content with clothes-swopping, kit-bashing and morph-tweaking in privacy. Even if it means staying a step below the current state-of-the-art in hyper-realism. Much the same is true of those who want the wealth of creative science-fiction and fantasy content that DAZ and Poser now provide, royalty-free. Not to mention toon, animals and monsters.
It also seems to me that the average dedicated DAZ user will fairly soon just say… “I got a new PC and a 30-series NVIDIA card, so I run DAZ iRay in realtime now”. True, there’s still a damnable graphics-card drought but that surely can’t last forever. This means the “ooh… it works in real-time” thing is a bit of a red-herring. The only caveat there is the hair. Adding 3D hair has always caused a huge drop in scene pliability, and it’s just possible that MetaHuman has done more than create awesome-looking ‘helmet hair’. Real-time hairs that are true ‘stranded grooms’ and which can be easily re-styled… that would be quite something.
Finally, the ‘elephant in the room’ is AI. We’ve recently seen the Deep Nostalgia service very ably auto-animate a still 2D vintage photo with head-turns and eye-blinks. How much further will that go in the next few years? We may yet see Reallusion popping out a ‘CrazyTalk AI’, so don’t count them out yet either.
Darkseal un-sealed
Of interest to comics-maker using Poser, Darkseal now has stuff on the DAZ Store that I’ve not seen before, or which I assumed had vanished along with Content Paradise. He also has a sale on, right now.
Sadly no Neo Navigator or Rift Guardian, but we do get Rift Walker and Boon. His Boon toons reasonably well and takes M4 poses. Quite possibly Warframe, so think twice about commercial use of either. Also, the Rift Walker is vaguely similar to a Warhammer Genestealer, so commercial use in a comic etc could also be iffy.
Bugboy is even better in terms of tooning, although… you need to manually remove the eye-catching nipples and other distracting tackle that he loads with. But this is easily done, just make them invisible.
I never purchased the matching female version, as the megaboob-iness is a bit naff and I can’t think where I might use the figure. But I assume it toons to lineart in Poser 11 Smooth Shaded + Comic Book B&W just as nicely. I assume both BugBoy and Girl are original characters, and so could be used commercially?
Frye can toon reasonably well, but is more of a cartoonists’ aid for overdrawing. Probably best not to make him a flame-creature though, re: Howl’s Moving Castle. He comes with an additional ‘ice’ MAT.
Be warned that Darkseal’s Alien Podz don’t toon at all well in lineart, because they have few edges, and I recall I was also disappointed with his BioSkin series for tooning too. Painted details, rather than geometry.
No NearMe outfits or Cherry, or Squiddy. I’m fairly sure they’re all off the market now. On DAZ is one I’ve never seen before, though. There’s a ChupacabraP8Dog MAT for Stonemason’s Poser 8 Dog, a base animal figure which shipped free with Poser way back. As it was a flagship figure it has masses of morphs and dials.
He toons surprisingly nicely and has an expressive face. I’d always assumed he was just an old Poser Doberman. He can take DAZ sheep and pig poses, though not all that well. ChupacabraP8Dog is just the useful “ghost-dog” skin, and also note that CG Bytes has a Dalmatian skin and possibly some additional posing morphs.
Of the Space Bugs trio I only have the Drone, and it toons fairly well. Good for background decoration in big sci-fi scenes, and it doesn’t appear to be from Warhammer, Warframe etc. You could probably fit a saddle to it for a spaceport scene…
No poses but the Drone will take poses for the old DAZ Sheep, Pig etc very nicely.
Zulaynear for Cookie is also on the Store, though under a different vendor name.
Cycles gets a big animation rendering boost
Very interesting news for Poser, via Blender’s Cycles…
Cycles has just got a massive performance boost when rendering animations and re-rendering images thanks to Brecht Van Lommel’s latest patch adding persistent data functionality to the render engine.
Poser’s SuperFly is Blender’s Cycles re-branded and slightly tweaked, so there seems no reason this improvement won’t be coming to Poser in due course. More system memory appears to be assumed, in order to make this work. No actual benchmark yet, in terms of what “massive” means in time-saving.
But apparently Blender’s Eevee also benefits. It was supposedly “real-time” anyway, but now is said to be twice as real-time. Erm…
Apparently the big Cycles push forward — with a whole new turbo-charged NVIDIA-only ‘Cycles X’ engine set for Blender 3.1 — is being funded by a major Facebook partnership. Not sure what Facebook get out of that? Perhaps something related to games running in their VR headsets.
Poser 12 Early Access – new version released
A new iteration has been released for Poser 12 Early Access.
The last public update was 12.0.421 (public on 2nd March 2021). It’s now at 12.0.469 (public on 7th April 2021), so there are six behind-the-scenes updates included in the new release.
Notable items in the Changelog:
* “OpenGL Comic Book Preview: Last Draw checkbox option added to improve quality of geometric edge lines”. Hurrah, this is the first non-photoreal tweak for Poser 12, and hopefully the first of many. I wonder if this change is related to my discovery of ‘how to fill in the chips’ in Poser 11 lineart?
* “Material Room: added ‘Replace All’ button in Texture Manager. Gives the ability to replace all occurrences of a texture map with a newly selected texture map in a single action. The ‘Replace All’ button opens a drop down list to replace all occurrences of a texture map in a material, object, or the entire scene.”
* “Material Room: Implemented drag/drop of an image map, to replace an existing image map node”.
* A number of improvements and fixes to the Japanese and German translated versions, which at a guess possibly also led to the “FBX Export texture map improvements” which fix “missing text characters”. Possibly Japanese and the German ‘dotted-letter’-type characters were not being passed into the FBX, at a guess?
* Some OPTIX rendering tweaks and fixes.
* “Added PoserPython actor locking functions”. At a guess, this may be related to the new commercial script LockMaster for Poser 12.
* Python API now “has the ability to delete morphTarget”, and “remove a morph from an actor”. Sounds useful, to be able to clear some or all morphs with a click.
And some ‘store-purchased content install’ additions and tweaks, which I don’t intend to use. I’ll still be downloading and installing manually. Some of it will be unavoidable though… “Added ability to present dynamic promotional images as background to splash screen on launch”.
Free the squid…
OnlyFreeTurboSquid. A handy UserScript for your Web browser, that…
“makes it so you only see free things on TurboSquid.”
Mastering Animation in Poser
Coming soon and booking now, Mastering Animation for Poser 12 webinars with Charles Taylor. Also relevant for Poser 11, of course, it’s just that 11 users won’t have such swift SuperFly rendering or some of the new Cycles nodes. But that won’t matter much if you’re using Firefly, Sketch, Comic Book, or Preview PNG sequence + Photoshop filters/actions.
Poser 12 Early Access updates again – now has new PDF Manual
Poser 12 Early Access has updated again. Now at 12.0.421 (2nd March 2021). The main thing is the Manual.
* “Major updates to Poser Manual to cover Cycles updates and other new features”. Related to this is “Several Help menu commands are correctly linked” in the software.
Beyond that, more tweaks to SuperFly, which is Poser’s implementation of Blender’s main Cycles renderer…
* “SuperFly using Infinite lights [now] consistently renders specularity on sequenced images”. Which appears to be a useful fix for animators.
* “Fixed HDRI background images corruption, no longer previews or renders red or black.” Also, SuperFly render size was being constrained in size by a 4095 pixel limit on background images. This limit has been removed.
And some Python scripting things fixed, presumably ahead of a big update for the bundled scripts and more (said to be due in mid-March), such as…
* “Bundled Python command-line tools and apps now have the correct library load path attributes.”
Release: VUE R6 provides a Poser to 3DSMax / Maya / C4D / Lightwave route.
The subscription VUE R6 is out, and it’s a big update. I hadn’t realised that the new subscription Vue now includes major compatibility with…
* 3D Studio Max 2016 to 2021
* Maya 2015 to 2020
* Cinema4D R20 to R23
* Lightwave 11.6 to 2020
Or, if it didn’t before, then it does now with the new R6. Therefore, since Vue still has excellent Poser scene import… this could be a way to get your Poser scene over to those big beasts, if either: i) you can no longer get the PoserFusion plugins; or ii) your PoserFusion variety can’t support the very latest edition of Cinema 4D, Maya etc and your boss needs you to.
Poser to the forthcoming Omniverse modules too, via Vue…
* “We’ve also included a direct export preset for Nvidia’s Omniverse.”
Other changes:
* Export via Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (.usda, .usdz, .usdc).
* Control clouds based on their altitude in the scene.
* Support for “non-photorealistic rendering” in the Path Tracer, and supports for the Substance GPU engine in the viewport. It’ll be interesting to see demos of those.
* Python 3 since R5. Therefore those relying on Python 2 scripts either need to get them updated or stick to R4.
* Terragen .TER import is back, from R5. Had been broken.
* I see that “SkinVue fixed and added to VUE” since R2, which is important for Poser scene imports with figures.
* Vue’s developer are obviously spending a lot of time aligning the software with NVIDIA’s doomed Omniverse project.
All in all, I still don’t see a big need for a hobbyist to move from the old Vue 2016.
Blender 2.92 – key new stuff
Blender 2.92 is around the corner. What’s new and key?
* Geometry nodes, scatter and instancing.
“Nodes can be used to change an object’s geometry in a more complex way than regular modifiers.” There’s a new node-based system for this, which “lays the groundwork” for the future but for now it has “object scattering and instancing” already enabled. Could be useful for DAZ and Poser… scatter in Blender, save and use in Poser or DAZ.
* Primitives in a click.
“Create primitives with two clicks.” Nice. It’s now probably a bit easier to set up a Synthwave picture by loading simple primitives to an Eevee scene, and then (see below) to get mattes for later compositing.
* Eevee Cryptomatte
Create mattes from the scene, for compositing. This was already in Cycles, is now also in Eevee. A “new compositor node was also added to adjust the exposure of images”.
* Grease pencil
Edit grease pencil strokes using Bezier curves. Also a rather vital Grease Pencil menu, that was accidentally totally bjorked by 2.91, is back again. Nice for the NPR crowd, but grease pencil is obviously one of Blender’s many ‘moving targets’ with features and menus popping into and out of existence.
* Cycles
Faster rendering on complex scenes. “Multithreaded export of geometry, to improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many mesh, hair and volume objects.” Also faster hybrid rendering. “GPU devices can now take over rendering of tiles that are currently being rendered by CPU threads, to improve hybrid rendering performance”. This looks like the main thing.
Cycles getting power-ups is important, because these may well feed into Poser 12 at some point. In Poser, Cycles is ‘SuperFly’.
* Fluids
Viscosity, so you can now do things like ice-cream cone twirls. Or er… doggie doings. Yum.
World explodes
Old 3D World magazine PDF scans have been taken down from Archive.org. They can still show up in search results there and at Google Search, from circa the 2008-2012 era, when it was taking notice of Poser in a real way (some tutorials from Brian Haberlin, some letters-page advice, freebies and an occasional review). But they are gone once you click through. So far as I can tell from search, the only way to get issues from that era now is to buy them in print from eBay when they come up. A pity, as it was quite fun to browse them occasionally and chuckle at what the oldware looked like. Or what a (now puny) PC £2,300 would buy you, back in the day. And sometimes they could yield up a useful nugget of obscure information.
I’d like to think that 3D World are preparing a $25 DVD with all their 2000-2015 back-issues as good digital scans on it, but such things do not tend to happen from big publishers. Being beholden to advertisers they view their complete set of back-issues as a liability that would distract attention from the current issue and its ads, rather than as an asset.
Though a couple of issues from even earlier in time are still online there, to give you a taste of what we once enjoyed each month circa 2006. Also most of the free cover-CDs as ISOs. I produced a survey of the 3D models on the latter, a few years ago. You may want to grab them now, just in case they go too.
Tasty Tafi
Tafi has taken on the task of making game-ready DAZ conversions for the Unity Game Engine, and to a level that will satisfy real game-makers. Around 300 of them are on the Unity Store now. The prices are right, especially as it seems they can be put into commercial games royalty-free. Though I’m not 100% certain of that. The licence info is rather basic on the page. Perhaps there’s a big legal agreement in the download?
