Based on what I hear about NVIDIA drivers and OpenGL, and also the ‘death’ of DAZ Studio and Vue on the ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS, it seems to me that the Mac can no longer be considered a serious and stable platform for 3D graphics production work. As such I will no longer be wasting time on this blog in also trying to note or consider the tedious “Mac issues” in my posts. I’ll simply assume that all readers are running Windows.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
OctaneRender 2021
OctaneRender 2021 has moved up to a closed beta, with the forthcoming OctaneRender 2020.2 as its release-candidate engine. Octane is interesting because DAZ Studio already has it, currently via a Free tier in the subscription rates, and because Poser 12 is to get a current-version Octane plugin in 2021.
OctaneRender 2021 is said to add…
* Improved volumetrics.
* Improved performance for scenes too large for the GPU’s memory.
* Updates to the AI Light algorithm, said to accelerate final renders by “2x or more”.
* Octane can now also work as a host for other renders such as “Arnold, RenderMan, Radeon ProRender, and Blender Cycles”.
* There’s hazy talk of something called “Brigade” which will offer real-time Eevee-like rendering via Octane, but ray-traced rather than OpenGL. But if you have the horse-power to do that then why not just use real-time iRay instead, and for free?
* There’s also an even hazier mention that OctaneRender 2021 could introduce Octane’s own “AnimeRender” rendering engine.
AnimeRender? It’s said to have been in development since 2018 but is not yet released. But let’s assume that AnimeRender does what it sounds like, an NPR toon render that is i) not fiddly to set up or use; ii) can be used with just a few clicks without having to manually re-texture figures with toon materials; iii) has a quality and style that would be commercially-viable in terms of appealing to regular comics readers.
If then available via Octane in DAZ at the Free tier (doubtful, but possible) then AnimeRender might open up easy comics rendering from DAZ Studio, and with more or less the same ease as Poser 11’s existing real-time Comic Book mode. I’m making a lots of guesses and assumptions there, though. AnimeRender might turn out to be be just another naff attempt at a few cheesy NPR filters and some ugly hatching. Poser’s easy real-time Comic Book mode remains the gold-standard for now.
The HiveWire store is closing
Sad news, the HiveWire store is to close…
“We will have a final, FINAL storewide sale beginning the first of December and will run til the first week in January 2021”.
So, you may want to hold back some PayPal from your Black Friday/Cyber Monday purchases for that, with the date to mark being Tuesday 1st December. Especially if items such as the new Poser Scatter Tool (likely to make the move to Poser 12) and Ken G’s superb creature packs have substantial discounts then.
They’ll be moving the store into the Renderosity Store, which makes a lot of sense in terms of going where the traffic and buyers are…
“Renderosity is excited to receive content that has been published at HiveWire” and there “our impact as a HiveWire brand will continue”.
I’d suggest they’ll also be able to cross-sell better there, and create bundles that only involve purchase from one store. For instance, the new HiveWire Tiger is currently also on Renderosity, but if you also wanted its paid LAMH fur preset then you could only buy that from HiveWire.
However, their content sellers are not obliged to make the move to Renderosity and some may perhaps go elsewhere. After the move HiveWire will get access into Poser 12’s new in-software Store purchase/download tabs, though, which may encourage many to go to Renderosity.
It’s said that the HiveWire Community Forums will not be combining with the Renderosity forums and will be staying online at community.hivewire3d.com. If you’re going over there to take a look, note that the per-software forums there are not immediately obvious to the visitor, and are found under “Using 3D Software”.
The Vue from Big Sur
Oh dear, like DAZ Studio, Vue is the latest software to have been totally bjorked by the new Mac OS. E-on’s Black Friday page states of the new subscription version…
“VUE and PlantFactory R5 will not run in MacOS 11 (Big Sur)”
I’m not sure if previous versions will still run, but that was not the case with DAZ Studio. Which suggests that older Vue versions may also be dead, and like DAZ Studio will require nine months to fix. Reports on DAZ also say the fixes will break many plugins and scripts? Again, one wonders if that will also be true for Vue?
What’s next to break on the Mac? Well, at least it won’t be Poser. Forum reports say that Poser 11 and 12 are apparently running fine on Big Sur, if you were wondering. The final Poser 12 Mac version may of course have extra stuff that changes that picture.
Black Friday: Renderosity Store / AKVIS / Tranmutr / CG Trader Store / ArtStation Store
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The Black Friday Store sales are opening up, plus more software.
* AKVIS has announced quite a nice offer, up to 50% off everything including their latest improved/speeded-up Decorator and Charcoal (together, $61 with 40% off). They have a Sketch too, but I don’t rate it highly in the scale of such things. The discounts are coupon based, see the page for details. Sadly their payment system is nation-aware and they thus charge an extra 20% sales tax in the UK, which rather wipes out most of the discount!
* 50% off the entire Renderosity Store, except software and out-of-contact vendors. Many will want the La Femme 2.0 Pro edition (the standard ships free with Poser, but Pro adds naughty bits and more) and perhaps also her La Femme CrossDresser License for the free CrossDresser clothing conversion software to expand her wardrobe. Some older Poser scripts are on sale, such as f68 Poser Crowd Generator (scatter and auto-pose figures) and f68 Easy Environment (a non-people scatter tool), but who can say if they’ll be updated for Poser 12? Note there’s also a new Scatter tool at HiveWire, far more likely to go to Poser 12, though it’s $20 and there’s as yet no sale there. There are HiveWire items on sale at Renderosity though, such as the new Tiger and the Egyptian Cat. DAZ and Poser users fond of the old Genesis 1 may be interested in the Renderosity Store’s Genesis 8 Clones for Genesis, which lets the original Genesis wear G8 stuff. Now I have this and the original Poke-away! for Genesis to remove poke-through, I can have “One Genesis to Rule Them All”: a DAZ Studio Genesis figure can wear any outfit from A3/V3 to G8 and everything in between.
* SketchUp plugin Transmutr is on a 30% discount at 55 euros. It imports common formats such as OBJ into SketchUp, poly-reduces and adds other fixes.
* DxO (Nik) have discounts but, just as I was starting to peruse these, a giant screen-blocker appeared and blocked my view. First rule of marketing, guys: Don’t. Block. The. “Buy”. Buttons.
* Smith Micro still lives. Had an email offer on Moho, now effectively defunct but it seems still available.
* The CGTrader store has a five-day sale on now. Sadly the Vue creator Raffy Raffy recently moved from the store to ArtStation, wiping out my CG Trader Wishlist. There are still some nice models down at the $2.50 mark, and you may find a few that can’t be had elsewhere. Of special interest may be the Poser stuff, DAZ stuff (the large numbers of Age of Empires-style ancient warrior and soldier outfits are not discounted), and some Vue content. Many of the detailed science-fiction scenes are expensive, but not all. One can also find quirky things like this Eastern European / Soviet flying van for $10…
* The ArtStation Marketplace sale is also on. There’s a whole lot of fluff in the store, but a key attraction is the Raffy Raffy store with expert Vue and Blender scenes at affordable prices. Raffy knows what he’s doing and the scenes are relatively lightweight despite their size.
There are also a couple of preset packs there, made back when Zbrush introduced NPR, such as BPR Sketch/Cartoon Shaders for ZBrush 2019 and BPR Filters + 3D Skull. If you pick these up you may want a Realtime Viewport Anti-Aliasing script, though be warned that getting a big anti-aliased render from ZBrush is an utter pain-in-the-neck, and even then is only 72dpi — so far as I can recall the recent updates have not solved this show-stopping problem with trying to use Zbrush’s NPR/BPR for comics and illustrated books.
If you’re signing up with the ArtStation Marketplace for the first time, watch out for this nasty little privacy-invader which is not checked by default…
* And finally, advance news that the Blender Market is set to start its sale tomorrow.
Release: Blender 2.91
Another release for the fast-moving Blender, now Blender 2.91. What are the main new items?
* Most interesting for NPR renders and comics makers is more development of Grease Pencil. Antonio Vazquez’s automated “Trace Images into Grease Pencil” feature is now in there and you can apparently drag in a 2D image and convert it “with one click”. B&W only. The next release of Blender is likely to expand this to cope with importing image sequences and have PDF export (important for studios where designs need ‘sign-off’ from studio managers). You can now also re-order in the modifier stack for Grease Pencil, but I thought you could already do that. You also now open holes (“hold outs”) in filled areas.
* For modellers, you can now trim a 3D mesh “just by drawing lines in the viewport”. Super. I was astounded recently to see a demo which included fiddly multi-step / multi-panel / multi-button operations just to do something as simple as cutting the top off a 3D mesh. But it sounds like that particular fiddle has now been squashed.
* Better search, now with new “fuzzy matching” and abbreviation-awareness, for finding stuff in Blender’s labyrinthine interface. Although that assumes you can remember what the desired tool is being called this week, and how its naming differs from the 50,000 others. However, the placement of the search does look excellent, static and right at the top of the most used panel.
* For modellers and sculptors, lots of new sculpting brush improvements in things like edge brushes, cloth sculpting. More refined bevelling of mesh edges, and better Boolean intersections of meshes when modelling.
* ‘Volume to mesh’, so for example you can turn a volumetric cloud into a 3D mesh, then apply procedural textures. You can also go the other way, making a mesh into a volumetric cloud.
* New simulations for things like making a linked metal chain, and then being able to animate the chain swinging around.
* Simultaneously released, Radeon ProRender 3.0 for Blender, offering “hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs”, matching NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing and opening up some welcome competition there which should help to trim graphics-card prices in due course. Also (most interestingly) ProRender 3 has “a new contour rendering option for non-photorealistic renders”. Poser 12 uses the latest Blender Cycles, but apparently ProRender is a plugin for that and also has its own materials system. It is thus not likely to be supported in Poser just to aid the Poser Comic Book makers. Adding it would apparently require content makers to make and test yet another new set of materials for their store content.
Old AMD GPUs based on TeraScale 2 and 3 are totally kaput in terms of use with Blender 2.91, and Blender will refuse to load. Some integrated AMD GPUs that have numbers that should be fine (if big cards) were actually built on TeraScale 3. Graphics card upgrades will thus be needed.
Take the five-minute YouTube tour here.
Release: Marvelous Designer 10
Digital clothes maker Marvelous Designer 10 has swished down the catwalk today. Sadly this leading software is now subscription only, but still somewhat accessible for semi-pro hobbyist content-makers at $39 a month, though I guess there may be an annual deal on that come Cyber Monday. I’m not keen on covering subscription software here, but in this case it’s still worth a very quick look at what’s new…
* New manga-babe 3D avatars, with erm… customisable chests and other body parts. Big in Japan, I’d imagine.
* Autofit clothes made for one figure to another. Especially useful for fitting frilly maid outfits to dogs, it seems.
* Better UV mapping and now supports the Substance Designer .sbsar format.
* “Sculpt realistic folds and wrinkles” with a new Wrinkle and Release bush.
* Pen-pressure support, when using a pen monitor.
Fix: P3DO Organizer update for Poser 12
The third-party P3DO Organizer Poser library (May 2020) now has a November 2020 fix for use with Poser 12 Early Access.
DAZ Studio on the latest Mac OS
I’ve just had a quick look into the DAZ Studio problem on Macs. I’d glanced at it when I looked at what the new Filament renderer is, and had then spotted that DAZ Studio 4.14.0.8.. was Windows 64-bit only — as I told my readers here.
But being a dedicated Windows users I don’t take much notice of Mac stuff, so I left it at that. It now seems that the new Mac OS update simply broke DAZ Studio on the Mac altogether. There’s no simple ‘rollback DAZ to 4.12.1.117, and all you lose is Filament’. Richard Haseltine on the forums states, of older DAZ Studio versions that…
“I would very much doubt that older versions [of DAZ Studio] would work any better”
Wow. So I guess Mac users will now have to run DAZ Studio under Windows, since I get the impression that having the latest OS is effectively required by Apple. Most modern Mac users can run a Windows install on a Mac with a free utility called Boot Camp. Doing that is said to be fine re: the DAZ viewport and rendering. Which is not the case with the Mac user’s other “virtualisation” option in which both the viewport and rendering are far from ideal.
Apparently a fix for the show-stopping problem on Macs is “not due until mid-2021”, again according to DAZ forum guy Richard Haseltine.
I’m told that DAZ Hexagon, the modelling sister of DAZ Studio, has not been able to run on the Mac OS for many years now.
Release: Diffeomorphic DAZ-to-Blender 1.5.1
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There was an important release that I overlooked, back in the summer. The free DAZ-Blender bridge plugin by Diffeomorphic, Thomas Larsson,was released as v1.5. This is in active development and at November 2020 is now at version 1.5.1. Apparently it does a good job, and is quicker and in some ways better than the free official DAZ 2.0 script. Since it doesn’t need to convert via an .FBX or Collada conversion and instead reads the DAZ files directly. Said to support polyline hair, but not strand hair. Worth a look, if you’re getting into Blender and its real-time Eevee engine.
Interestingly, I recently noticed that Eevee is actually OpenGL + PBR materials. I hadn’t known that before. It explains why my OpenGL upgrade fixed Blender. It just shows how far OpenGL can be pushed.
Update December 2020: diffeomorphic.blogspot.com totally dead. Fixed links by sending to WayBack and I’ve directly linked the repository.
Black Friday: Instant Terra software and the Kindle Fire 10″
* Instant Terra goes to a 50% discount for Black Friday. It’s now standalone perpetual desktop software, as it was recently switched away from subscription. It offers fast procedural terrain generation and real-time preview, with a new World Browser module to “download elevation data for any region of the world and generate a corresponding terrain” with isolines. I’ve been unable to find out how easily the output integrates with Vue, though the output looks fairly standard. I doubt it gives access to high-res terrains here in the UK, though at guess it may in the USA.
Might be worth $75 just to have a really easy hassle-free way to grab any terrain mesh from the real-world, though overlaying satellite imagery is not due until 2.2. The very latest version offers “a simple way to automatically refine the [downloaded] terrains and transform low-resolution terrains to high-resolution terrains”, via the addition of a new “up-scaling node”. I’m not sure how well this removes ‘stepping’ aka ‘zipper’ lines.
* Amazon’s flagship Kindle Fire 10″ tablets are now a healthy 40% off at Amazon UK. One of the most affordable ways to read digital comics, and I find it will also run Nomad Sculpt.
* Also, keep in mind that there should be a few good ‘Amazon Warehouse deals’ soon, perhaps around 9th-10th December, as hardware returned by perfectionist techies is graded and re-packed for re-sale. Some of these deals can be excellent, when something like a scratched casing or a tiny defect on a big monitor screen triggers a hefty discount.
3DCoat 2021
Good news, I’ve just heard that a “new 3DCoat will ship within Q4 this year as 3DCoat 2021 … including the new user interface”. Most people think of 3D-Coat (now “3DCoat”) as model texturing software. But its relatively easy 3D sculpting also makes it one of the few viable alternatives to ZBrush. The drawback there is that it suffers from a poor sculpting UI. Not “thrown together by mad imps” like ZBrush or Blender, but rather too off-puttingly stolid and a bit too fiddly and cluttered for the new user.
So a new UI sounds enticing. However, a little research discovers it’s actually going to be a tweaked and slightly tidied-up UI according to the official preview video. Not a “new” UI in terms of being a radical replacement. What a pity.
However knowing about this relative lack-of-makeover means that if 4.9.x Amateur comes up in the Black Friday sales at 50% off (i.e. $50) it should probably be grabbed, because it’ll be no use hanging around in the hope of a shiny new wholesale UI makeover. The current Amateur licence limits you to 2048px textures and 7 layers, which will be fine for most users. Non-commercial use too, but apparently that means ‘earning more than $10k a year from it’. Again, fine for most people.
Also, so far as I can tell from the 2021 announcement, prices will go up and not down for the new 2021 version. The new version will stay as a perpetual licence. It may even be possible to get a free upgrade via a Black Friday offer on 4.9.x Amateur, but it may not…
It can also do PBR materials, which also makes it interesting re: the new SuperFly in Poser 12, and how easy it is to plug a PBR material in there.
Release: MakeHuman 1.2 final
The open source figure-creation software MakeHuman 1.2.0 final has been released. It’s now Windows 64-bit only, and it appears that it still integrates closely with Blender, and indeed now has… “completely new Blender integration, MPFB, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect.” Lots of other improvements and changes, and a move to the new Python version.
A few more details on Poser 12
Here are just a few main details from the many given in Sunday’s key Poser 12 webinar. It went very well, and the upgraded “500 capacity” room was required as people continued to pour in.
Poser 12 SuperFly, based on Blender’s Cycles render engine:
“Adaptive Sampling” means that SuperFly is now stated to be “almost twice as fast on a CPU render”, provided you’re willing to do slight and fairly-easy tweaking of bucket sizes and other render settings (as was shown in the webinar. Doubtless there will soon be shared “ideal” render presets for CPU-only and cards on the forums, if there are not already). CPU users of adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will paradoxically see better results from quite small bucket sizes.
As is well-known from the forums, for GPU’s and for a further 2x speed boost in SuperFly you’ll need an NVIDIA 20 series RTX graphics card, or a NVIDIA Quadro card that supports RTX. Poser 12 should work with the new 30 series RTX, but they’re so rare that Renderosity has not yet been able to get hold of one to officially test.
The new SuperFly now supports Ambient Occlusion, and it was said that it can also render to a set of render-pass layers much like the Firefly renderer can.
The new Cycles also makes it “really, really easy” to set up a PBR material for Poser 12’s new SuperFly. Just export three layers from Substance Designer (or, presumably, 3D-Coat), and plug them in to the simple node setup (as shown in the webinar) inside Poser. Also, these PBR materials “will just look right” in Poser renders without much tweaking needed. Other Blender’s Cycles node setups can be easily ported over, once you know that Blender’s direction of node flow is a “mirror-reverse” of that used in Poser. However, it was highly recommended not to try to toon in SuperFly, and to instead use Poser’s excellent and real-time Comic Book mode.
The new SuperFly also has a Hair node, deceptively simple-looking but actually very complex in its own right, which can produce complex and “amazing” results. More neat new shader nodes for Cycles/SuperFly will be exposed in Poser 12 in due course.
Intel OIDN Denoising of quick renders is software based, and is not graphics card dependent.
Scripts:
As is very well-known from the forums, the move to Python 3 has broken many old PoserPython scripts, but these are getting fixed. DAZ’s DSON importer for DAZ Genesis 1 and 2 is broken, but such old Genesis figures can still be imported as .CR2 (or, I would add, poly-reduced static posed .OBJ for more wieldiness and which can also do Genesis 3 and 8).
Runtimes:
Also well-known from the forums, there’s a new integrated method of installing purchases via the Library, but you can still do it the old way via .ZIP files. And downloadable .ZIP files for content will still be available on the Renderosity Store.
Yes, you can still have all sorts of weird and wonderful locations for your Runtime. If your Poser Runtime is safely stored in a cave on the Moon, and you access it via infra-red radar pulses, just so long as it has a mapped drive-letter on your network… then Poser is sure to see it.
Windows/Mac:
Yes, it’s common knowledge now that you can run Poser 12 and Poser 11 side-by-side. Yes, it can install and run fine on Windows 7 and 8, even though the official store specs are for “Windows 10”. Yes, the Mac version is coming.
Update: Yes, forum reports say Poser 11 and 12 have been tested on the new ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS and both run fine.
Others:
There were also a lot of special “reveals” and hints about what’s set to be added to Poser 12 in due course, but it’s not fair to list those here. Of those I’ll only note that Bloom is to be added to the Post Effects tab, thus enabling Glow. Glow can already be done natively in Poser Firefly with an atmosphere and a point light, even with an emulated emissive spillover, but has severe limitations. There are also SuperFly glow materials. But I’m guessing this Cycles node may be more controllable and have less need to interact with other stuff?
Renderosity’s trailer-page for the webinar had mentioned “new Geometric Edge Lines for Comic mode” and “new lighting: area lights and caustics”, but those were not shown this time around.
Poser can still “speak Vue” and thus presumably send a scene to Vue. The currently subscription Vue still supports Poser scene imports.
Nearly all of the new stuff other than the new SuperFly update appears to be “as well as” rather than “a replacement for”. Check out the free Trial version of Poser 12 Early Access to re-assure yourself that your favourite bit is still in there.
So, steady progress and it’s looking very positive for the probable December release on Windows and Mac, and even now looks especially nice on photoreal render speeds. Congratulations to the team for more or less sticking to the schedule, even during the lockdowns and changes re: Macs and Python.
Release: KeyShot 10.0
KeyShot 10.0 has been released. What’s new and important for people in the DAZ/Poser world?
* KeyShot “now respects alpha channels when importing FBX”. That’s interesting. So, does that mean trans-mapped eyelashes/hair from DAZ/Poser figures finally work properly in KeyShot without a whole lot of fiddling and prodding? Worth testing, I’d say.
* “A new Light Manager and Light Gizmos to control individual lights.” Colour, power, size, beam-angle and spread, etc. Which makes it more like Poser and DAZ, but you can still slap on the usual type of light if you’re feeling lazy.
* “Visually identical results in the real-time view and in final-quality output.” I thought they basically had that already, bar a bit of grain and gloss/texture and a few fireflies? I’ve never noticed very much difference.
* “Can now hide all of the objects in a scene, except the one you want to work with.” Again, making it more like DAZ or Poser or iClone, and opening up possibly interesting compositing possibilities re: Photoshop layers and automated filtering.
* “A revamped UI for the Move tool.” Chunkier (or at least size-adjustable) is probably better, in these days of huge monitors.
All the above are in the Standard version, still $995. No changes to the new bristles/fur, or to the NPR rendering capabilities. No native render-speed improvements, as far as I can tell. By which I mean, optimisations that are independent of what graphics card you’re using.