AI for hair. HAAR creates 3D strand hair from text prompts. Evidently rather clunky at present, and still at the technical paper stage, but promising. Wouldn’t it be easier to just sketch a few flowing waves on the screen, rather than use text?
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Release: Poser 13.2
The latest iteration of Poser 13 has been released. The new Poser 13.2. Appears to be mostly a bugfix, error fix and a UI clean-up release. But two things that did catch my eye in the changelog…
* “Render Presets now include PostFX settings”.
* “Saving to Library with ‘Keep Thumbnails enabled’ now correctly creates a thumbnail on the first save.”
Apparently new features are being saved for Poser 14, and the developers anticipate a…
“version 14 in the new year”.
DiffusionLight
DiffusionLight. An AI looks at a 2D photo scene, and then it makes the HDR lighting ball (aka ‘light probe’) that would have produced the scene’s lighting. Using this new light probe, you can then seamlessly render a 3D figure against the backplate photo. The sort of thing that should be in Poser 14, I’d suggest.
Beware of InsightFace
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Beware of integrating any AI face-swopping technology from the open-source InsightFace developers. Because they appear to be getting very screwy on the legal side of things, for instance issuing several takedown notices for benign third-party YouTube videos… in which a well-known and respected YouTuber simply shows the technology. InsightFace’s products are thus not something you would want to use in your animations or graphic novels, I’d suggest, in case of legal problems with future licencing and distribution of your work.
Poser 13.1.518 (October 2023)
Poser has had its free monthly update for both the PC and Mac versions. Poser 13.1.518 adds…
* “Import and Export for Render Presets” (via Manage Preset for both Firefly and SuperFly rendering).
* “Disable Drag Docking For All Palettes” (as an optional toggle, via Top Menu | Window | Disable Drag Docking).
The earlier update added a number of PostFX fixes, and also rather usefully “Eliminated color shift at end of FireFly render”.
Renderosity Halloween 2023 contest
Now on, Renderosity’s community 2023 Halloween Contest. Has an open theme, other than “Halloween”. Prizes include Poser 13 and store gift certificates. Deadline: 7th November 2023.
Fixing Google’s .webp mess
Google’s .webP security debacle: how to fix it, or just block .webP as much as possible. Includes links for the fixed libwebp.dll for various software, and the fixed WebP.dll required by the popular IrfanView image viewer.
A glasses-free 3D monitor
Coming in the new year, the glasses-free 3D screen called the Lenovo Thinkvision P27h-30. February 2024 is pencilled in. The monitor’s proprietary eye-tracking cameras nudge the lenticular lenses in the monitor, to seamlessly maintain a 3D view for one user.
I wonder what sort of depth you’ll get with that? Will it be like a ‘3D software viewport, seen in deep real-time 3D’? Or shallow, more like those lenticular 3D panels you see on the side of children’s lunchboxes?
The first model to launch, it seems, will be the 27″ one. At 1920 × 2160px. You’ll sit back at the sticker price ($3,000), and also when you see the actual monitor. Apparently the effect only works for a user with eyes at 24″ to 39″ from the screen. I’m used to having my eyes about 17″ from the monitor.
Release: Cartoon Animator 5.2
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Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator) has a new Motion Pilot feature. Seems to be a motion-damped mouse-cursor, so you can easily draw an editable motion path. But it has adjustable settings, as you can see here…
For full details see the Motion Pilot demo video.
ElevenLabs is out of beta
The leader in AI text-to-speech voice, Poland’s ElevenLabs, is now out of beta. Now supporting 28 languages in ‘Eleven Multilingual v2’. Can be paired with Professional Voice Cloning, which should mean that those with the correct intonations in the input can also get these in the output in another language. They also have a ‘Voice Styles’ library.
The newly added languages are…
Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Indonesian, Filipino, Japanese, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Finnish, Romanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Malay, Slovak, Croatian, Classic Arabic and Tamil.
The Pricing is nice, though no PayPal. Someone making a short 90 minute audiobook per month would need the $22 a month subscription, but the free and starter tiers are very reasonable. Especially so for those making short 12-20 minute animations with Poser and DAZ.
Auto Effects
AI-powered auto sound-effects for a video. Finds… “the right sound-effects (SFX) to match moments in a video”. A task which can take a day or more of finding, for a long video. Plus the trimming, volume balancing, and slotting in to the video.
Of course it’s not going to do much for Tom & Jerry style animation SFX, compared to the real thing. But I guess for regular normal Powerpoint things (“that’s a dog, it barks, get bark-sound”) it could be useful for those making a ‘holiday-photos slideshow’ presentation.
And it may also save time for creatives. For instance this could interface in interesting ways with the giant Freesound library’s new simple taxonomy. (“That’s a dog, it barks, get links to top-12 bark sounds on Freesound”). That would save some time. Not so much a new ‘recommender’ system (they’re always dim-witted), but more a new creative ‘options bundler’ system. Likely to find a place within the emerging and more complex AI-powered script-flow workflow software.
Renderosity Animation Contest 2023
A reminder of the Renderosity Animation Contest. The deadline is a bit close now, but a fast worker could do it: 30th August 2023. And don’t forget that Renderosity’s Poser software does real-time rendering of toons, via the easy-to-use Comic Book Preview feature.
Gift certificate prizes, no Poser 13 licences.
The featured artwork makes the mistake of ‘black on black’, a fundamental mistake which is beloved of 3D people trying to do a comic look (I blame Batman and Catwoman). Try to keep your character as ‘readable’ by the eye as much as possible. If you look at how a master like Brian Haberlin does it in his comics, he’ll often have a faint ‘fog layer’ across the whole background, as well as a ‘holding line’ around the character.
The left pigtail cannot be distinguished from the scenery.
Release: Poser 13.1, inc. Mac version
Poser 13.1 is now available, and includes the new Mac version alongside the Windows version. It’s a free update for Poser 13 licence holders. Lots of rendering quality improvements for SuperFly (Poser’s version of the latest Blender Cycles). See the linked page for the full list.
No mention of changes to the Windows OS spec, so you should be able to run it back to Windows 7 (though without access to store-purchased third-party scripts on Windows , and likely with no helpdesk support).
No changes to PostFX on Windows, to OIDN de-noising, or to Poser’s unique abilities with real-time comic-book line-art, Firefly line-art, and Sketch rendering.
The current released version is 13.1.449.
Howler gets 9x faster
The latest PD Howler 2024.2 is available. It has an interesting new way of rendering 3D, via an innovative CPU/GPU mix. The CPU handles the grunt-work on the render, then the GPU does the final shading. 9x faster rendering than before, apparently! Supports PBR materials, tone-map and gamma. 16x anti-aliasing.
Now also includes a full word-processor! Also .GIF animation loading. And the previous .point iteration had “Dark mode support in Windows 11”.
Hr-213
The sci-fi friendly Hr-213 hair has mysteriously become unavailable on Renderosity, and has been removed from WishLists with no warning. I hope it’s not been removed due to some movie producer saying it’s too close to a sci-fi movie or TV series haircut (UFO, etc).
However, I still see it for sale at Mankahoo.
We’ve also mysteriously lost the excellent ‘dForce Space Jumpsuit’ for G8F, which has likewise vanished from my WishList.