A new video from Lightning Boy Studio, Dynamic Outline Inking with Blender. Definitely not as simple to set up or control as Poser 11’s real-time inking, but the video’s result on the test ‘dinosaur mask’ looks production-ready to me.
Category Archives: Spotted in the News
Double it and double it again…
Using the latest DAZ Studio gives you a substantial iRay speed boost, thanks to the integration of the latest iRay version. 2x faster on CPUs, for instance. Though, as NVIDIA want to sell $500 graphics cards, you’ll only read about that in a quiet blog post from the iRay dev team.
But now I read on the forums about another way to add a further 2x boost to DAZ Studio. So long as you don’t have transparency in the scene, choosing the “Interactive” rather than “Photoreal” version of iRay in DAZ Studio should apparently give you another 2x speed-boost with minimal loss of quality. Some shadows are skipped and transparency is handled differently. But otherwise it’s a good WYSIWYG representation of what your render will look like. The advice is from someone on a fast dual-Xeon PC, but it’s something to consider re: working toward a real-time iRay viewport rather than just a Preview window. It’s easily tested on your system.
P3DO Explorer Pro 2.7 R3 – now supporting Poser light and camera presets
P3DO Explorer Pro has updated to a 17th January 2020 release, and…
“As promised this version contains Poser additions: lights and cameras have been added to the Poser formats supported.”
This again brings P3DO into parity with its competitor PzDB, following the recent addition of DAZ .DUF content indexing. Lights appear to have been done in quite a robust way, and search hits…
“shows the lights list with the light type (infinite, spot, point, diffuse IBL, area light) and image references for IBL.”
And for an unspecified future release in 2020 the maker plans to…
“add the ability to load only one light/spot from a given set into Poser.”
There will be a P3DO 2.8 ’20th anniversary edition’ in April 2020, so the Easter store-wide sales may be the time you’ll want to bag a copy on Renderosity.
Poser 11 Webinar Series: Meeting 1
Poser 11 Webinar Series: Meeting 1 January 2020 is a welcome new webinar from Poser expert Nerd3D. Here’s the handy contents-list from the front of the video recording which is archived on YouTube…
I’ve added three red dots on those items likely to interest those who are not store content-developers.
Perhaps, in future, the show might get an even bigger audience if the producers were to front-end it with such general items, and then follow those with the more content-developer-ish items?
Enlightening the dense
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Posted in Lighting, Natural media emulation, Poser, Spotted in the News
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A promising new 2020 paper, “Generating Digital Painting Lighting Effects via RGB-space Geometry”. Along with the paper are Python scripts that inspect your digital painting, detect where “the density of strokes” are, and then intelligently re-light the painting accordingly.
It’s ‘early days’ for this and similar experimental re-lighting techniques. But one wonders if it could be used on 3D renders, perhaps if they were output along with a quickly-calculated data-file that served as a proxy for “density of strokes”. That would perhaps be the equivalent of Poser’s Sketch rendering, but without the rendering — only the stroke density data would be saved, as a text file. Poser can already save its stroke data for export to Corel Painter.
Renderosity officially mentions Poser 12, dates Poser 11.3
New at Renderosity, a brief post on What’s planned for their Poser 11.3 ahead of Poser 12 (“We’re saving the big things for Poser 12”, they say).
Due at the end of March 2020…
* “improved local library search experience by using “AND” versus “OR” logic.”
Nice, but I’d ideally also want “NOT”, to be able to knock out unwanted items.
* Software helper “wizards and alerts of potential setting problems”.
Sounds useful, especially for new users. Perhaps even for advanced users, if the wizards can double-up as time-savers (e.g. one click to turn off all background sketching sliders, after loading a default Sketch preset), and if the alerts can be told to tone down the nagging (as an alternative to turning them off).
* Easier content installation for store purchases.
Sounds good, but you would need to be able to specify the runtime location, as many users have their main mega-runtime located outside the official runtime folders.
* Small bug-fixes.
So it all looks good, and we’ll also benefit from the small tweaks that appear to have been ongoing, re: the dating of the installers, since 11.2 was released. For instance I have 11.2.x, but I think I’m a few small increments behind on having the very latest build.
Unleash the chibis!
The training provider 3Dbuzz has just closed its doors, but has kindly made all its online courses free to download. Of most interest to readers of this blog will likely be training videos that are not software version-specific, such as…
* A four-hour course on making chibi artwork. Chibis being the cute stubby little characters from Japan. The single .ZIP file has all four parts. Poser 11 ‘Comic Book mode’ users interested in getting a quick-start with such art should also see Hivewire’s excellent-but-expensive Universal Chibi Head.
* Creating Compelling Character Concepts, in seven parts. Shows the step-by-step design and making of a fantasy mage character.
* Developing Modular Rigging Systems with Python, offering “over 50 hours of in-depth lectures”. Python being the much-in-demand scripting and programming language.
* Plus a small variety of introductory courses on hand-drawing, and lots of student-y 3DS Max and Maya and ZBrush stuff that now looks outdated.
And… I noted a three lesson course introducing level design and mods for the classic Unreal Tournament 2004. Still a very fine videogame, even now, and a good learning experience if making your first showcase game level.
Given the weight of all these video files, I’d guess that the server providing them may not be around forever and that they may not be archived to YouTube or Archive.org. If you want a course you should probably download it now.
“Core blimey!”
It’s finally official, AMD is set to ship its long-teased “world’s first 64-core, 128-thread” CPU early next month. It’s a consumer unit, not a server unit. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X will be $4,000 and will ship on 7th February 2020. By all accounts AMD generally now has total supremacy in the marketplace, beating Intel by a mile on both price and speed in both the server and the consumer markets. Their new CPU would be like having a 128-thread render-farm under your desk, crunching on your CPU dependent rendering (i.e. from Vue XStream, Poser’s Firefly, Keyshot etc). I imagine it would also probably be rather handy for capturing and streaming HD video while you run demanding software.
Of course it would need your other PC components to be able to keep up with it, so you’d really want it in a new PC. Thus the most important question is, what’s the likely cost of that? I can’t immediately find anyone set to ship such a thing in February, but I suspect you’re probably looking at $7,000 for such a PC by summer 2020. That’s a hefty dent in your wallet, but it’s not an impossible sum for a small studio looking for a tax write-off. Yet if AMD can get some sort of 64-core into mass production and thus drop the price, it would be nice to imagine that a 64-core could be in a $4,999 content-maker workstation by late 2021.
The obvious step down appears to be the new $800 AMD Ryzen 3950X, at 16 cores and offering a mere 32 render threads. That’s for the CPU alone.
Below that is the $500 AMD Ryzen 3900X at 12 cores and 24 threads, again for the CPU alone. A somewhat future-proofed self-build list in summer 2019 used this CPU and quality components and topped out at $3,400. However I see that the same CPU is now in UK gaming rigs at around £1,300 all-in. I assume the graphics card in one of those would also make light work of iRay renders from DAZ Studio, though at that relatively cheap price it probably wouldn’t be capable of fast real-time ray-tracing.
Below that, in terms of pre-built PCs, the cheapest gaming PC with a AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (8 Cores, 16 render threads) can be had in the UK for around £480 from Fierce, but it may be just as cheap to custom-build up your own 3D-focused PC from a motherboard + CPU bundle. Note that 2700 is the energy-efficient 65w version, and the 2700x is the more power-hungry and slightly faster version. It’s apparently a trade-off there, slightly more power from the 2700x… but noiser fans. The 2700 is said on the Smith Micro forum to be in 2019 about the equivalent of 2 x Xeon X5690 CPUs (24 render threads) in a old refurbished workstation.
Avoid the pre-Ryzen AMD FX-8320 PC, which can be found at about the same price as the 2700’s. Supposedly “8-core” circa 2012, and nice to have at that point in time. But apparently the 8320 was really 8 threads-pretending-to-be-cores sitting in 4-cores, done via some fancy cache workarounds. So far as I can tell that means you won’t get it to show 16 render threads to the likes of Vue in 2020, since it’s wasn’t a real 8-core. However, if you can pick one up for £100 it could be used as a fairly fast render-node for Vue.
How to sell at Renderosity
Renderosity has a new “How to become a vendor at Renderosity Marketplace” guide page with specifications, links to templates, and a vital little visual guide to how to find the right bit in the UI for the first time…
Note that a new vendor is only allowed three products, until they reach a certain amount of sales. Thus, don’t launch with three small or niche “test the market” products, or you may then never be allowed to list your blockbuster products for sale.
MMD to Blender 2.8.x
Take the vocaloid 3D characters from MikuMikuDance to Blender, via what appears to be a free set of MMD Tools. Now updated for Blender 2.8x.
As you might expect it’s a little complex, but there’s a detailed tutorial video on the install and conversion for Blender 2.8. Apparently the dance motions are also converted.
I’m not sure quite why you’d want them in Blender rather than their native MMD software, but the tools are being mentioned here because one could probably learn something about building and texturing toon figures by examining one of these inside Blender. Perhaps it’s also possible to give them a makeover and then convert them back the other way, and thus create new non-standard MMD characters?
Hopefully it’s not all just to remove the clothes and see them dance in the nude as A.I.-driven webcam girlz.
MakeHuman 1.2
The free open-source MakeHuman 1.2 released a new 1.2.0 alpha 4 before Christmas, and the next will be a beta. As usual in the Blender community, a tiny increment in the version-number can mean substantial new features. Three key features in 1.2 appear to be…
* “A completely new Blender integration, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect”. “Import directly from MakeHuman [to Blender] The process is almost instantaneous”.
* “A new randomization functionality, for generating large sets of randomized characters.” … “Real weight estimation.”
* A new Windows installer that supports uninstall, if you just want to take a quick look at it.
They also have a new DeviantArt group, but without active moderation and barring it appears to have been invaded by the usual tedious foot fetishists and other digital sexhibitionists. DeviantArt could really do with an AI that spots pictures of feet and toes, and adds such pictures to its adult filter. Until then, people using Chrome-based Web browsers (e.g. Opera etc) can install the handy DeviantArt Filter add-on.
New Mandelbulb training series
Mandelbulb 3D : The Complete Guide to Forging Infinite 3D Worlds, a series of webinars coming in January and February 2020. The first webinar is free.
The Mandelbulb 3D software is also free, and one of the leading fractal-landscape making software packages. It doesn’t make normal vanilla landscapes, it makes weird sci-fi landscapes and machine-scapes. It’s increasingly often used for compositing, to create pictures such as this new one from Hel1x…
HeadShop 12
The $100 HeadShop 12 plugin is “coming soon” for Poser 11. With its ‘Lovechild’ feature which seamlessly morphs between two photos, under the control of simple sliders, before producing the 3D head.
The blurb on the announcement page says the Poser version will work with “Poser LaBelle”. But I suspect that must be a translation error, and he actually means La Femme — which is Poser 11’s flagship female base figure.
HeadShop 12 is already available for DAZ Studio, at $100, and works with Genesis 2, 3 and 8.
Lineworks 1.0
Lineworks 1.0, a new Blender helper at $20.
“quickly add rigged line strips and grease pencil lines to your characters. The lines will follow the surface of your character [and each has] a rig that gives you control over the lines”.
Something along those lines (ouch) would enhance the Comic Book mode for Poser 12, I’m thinking. One could of course make a character MAT on which you’ve hand-inked along the seams and suchlike, but that wouldn’t enable quick turning on/off of lines, or things like wiggling toon eyebrows.
2000 3.D.
A peep behind the scenes at the 2000 A.D. thrill-factory, showing how 3D was used to help make the Christmas 2019 front cover…
