News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

MangaName 2

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Japan’s MediBang released their updated MangaName 2.0 Android app, back in the summer. Available free on Amazon, it works on the Kindle Fire HD 10″. Also available on Google Play.

It’s a fine simple tool to create a rough comics storyboard, and is unique in being geared to multi-page comics storyboarding rather than screen animation. It appears to be ad-free. It’s a little temperamental on the Kindle HD, but you get used to how it needs things to be done.

Sadly they appear to have removed the multi-page manager feature from their main MediBang Paint desktop Windows software. But this little app still works fine for multi-page planning and re-ordering.

Lumion 10 and NPR

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Lumion 10.0 has released, it’s a $1,500 – $3,000 “real-time architectural visualisation software”, and I wouldn’t normally bother mentioning such things here. But 10.0 adds new arty NPR presets…

“an experimental new Artist Styles feature, which uses AI techniques to stylise renders to look like the work of famous painters.”

Albeit which what appears to be a hefty render time. It’s not ‘NPR in real-time’, even on the sort of render rigs that architects have access to.

Dimension3D scripts – free Poser 11.2 fix available

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, Poser, Spotted in the News 3 Comments

If you run the latest Poser 11.2.x., there are a couple of third-party Poser scripts that won’t work because… “unexpected version of Poser”, or gnomic error-messages to that effect.

All my existing scripts worked fine after the 11.2.x. update, so I didn’t need to investigate a fix. But then last week I purchased Dimension3D’s $9 eXtended Access. I found it was one of the affected script utilities.

But I’m pleased to find that it’s now fixed. Poser wizard SnarlyGribbly has kindly created a small AVFix script. It’s available free at the Dutch PoserLounge site, and works fine. (That page and .zip are now also archived to Archive.org, for safekeeping).

The installation instructions for AVFix are clear and straightforward. To help jog my memory in future, I installed the fix to a folder named “Snarlygribbly – fix Poser 112 errors” rather than simply “Snarlygribbly” as suggested. The fix script still worked fine.

Once installed I… 1) run the AVFix once, then 2) start my new ‘XA – Toolbar’. I find the fix will also enable the launch of the ‘XA – Content Library’ in the same way, though I use PzDB these days. Dimension3D’s Extended Shader Manager does not need the fix. The fix is also said to cure the Reality plugin launch problem, and will presumably do until the new open-source Reality version arrives which supports Poser 11.2.x or higher.

I’ve updated my Python scripts for Poser 11 page, with a link to the fix.

‘Buy our shares, investors… we have talking cats!’

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Oh dear, Adobe wants to do talking cats. Their “Project Sweet Talk” aims to go head-to-head with the existing and very mature CrazyTalk from Reallusion. In a demo this week the only difference appears to be auto-identification of where the mouth and eyebrows are…

“The [Adobe] system works with any unprepared image, identifying and deforming facial features to generate mouth shapes and, to a lesser extent, eye and brow movements matching the audio file.”

But if CrazyTalk doesn’t already precisely auto-select the lips and eyes, then it’s a feature that can’t be too far off. How difficult is it, anyway, to just manually add a half-dozen control points to help guide the software? It’s part of the fun, especially for kiddie-oriented software.

U-Render

Posted on by Posted in 3D Renders, Companion software, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

Interesting news of a “really real-time” renderer for Cinema 4D, thus potentially interfacing with imported scene files from Poser. U-Render works on Cinema 4D R16 and upwards, is OpenGL 4.5-based and is GPU agnostic (Nvidia or AMD). Poser 11 Pro’s PoserFusion plugin supported Cinema 4D to R19. Thus it should be theoretically possible to import a Poser scene to C4D and have it render in real-time.

U-Render is somewhat affordable at $329 (currently with a 33% discount offer). In its latest 2019.11 version it newly supports volumetrics.

The only major drawback seems to be that U-Render is developed for the toxic tangle that is Windows 10. But there’s a 30-day free trial to test it — please comment here if you find you can actually get it running under Windows 8.1.x.

One wonders if this could be plugged more directly into a future Poser 12, too, perhaps as a $199 plugin.

Incidentally, if you’re inclined to ask “what version of OpenGL am I running”, then be very wary of installing the commonly-suggested GL View utility to find out. It will bring your PC to a grinding halt for two hours while it does its intense tests, and it cannot be halted no matter how many times you press Crtl + Alt + Del. The only way to kill it is to remove the power-cable and kill Windows. This makes it highly dangerous for most users. It’s not intended to be malware, but its aggressive system-hogging, and lack of asking user permissions or offer of slower probing, effectively make it so.

The far easier way is the portable freeware GPU Caps Viewer. This is very light on your PC and indeed takes just half a second to give you the answer. I’m on OpenGL 4.2.

Update: installing new GPU display drivers upgraded me to OpenGL 4.5.

DAZ $5 sale now on

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A DAZ Store mega $5 sale is on now. Mountains of stuff is very heavily discounted to $5, mostly for older characters and Genesis. Including the M3 base and his Brom Morphs. I went through 80 pages of $5 items, 80% of them newly discounted.

My haul…

Michael 3 Millennium Beard.
M3 Creatures Combo.
3 Piece Suit for M3.
Daedalus Sky Mercenary for M3 (airship/steampunk outfit).

Steam Voyager airship. (DAZ with G8 poses, but includes .OBJs)
Max Muscles for M4 (character).
Country Courtier for David (can be converted via CrossDresser).

ZBrush 2020 and others

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The students have a little chunk of grant money left to spend, and ’tis is the season of the big releases. The new Adobe Photoshop; a new Adobe After Effects (which, interestingly, ships with a cut-down ‘Lite’ version of Cinema 4D); KeyShot 9 (hairness, conversion of Substance Designer materials, GPU rendering for those with big fast cards and Windows); Lumion 10 (new NPR); and… ZBrush 2020 will release on 12th November 2019.

ZBrush 2020 is mostly 3D printing and sculpting oriented, by the looks of it, in comparison to last year’s big NPR rendering additions. Possibly the most interesting new thing, for Poser/DAZ people, may be ZBrush’s new…

Sculpt & Paint in Morph UV allows you to sculpt and paint on the 2D unwrap of a model, applying all updates to the 3D model.

Catula for Poser

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Catula for the HiveWire House Cat, just yesterday updated with a new Poser version. It had been DAZ before, and now it’s both.

If you already purchased this vampire cat…

1) Go to HiveWire and download the “Catula for the HiveWire House Cat| DAZ Studio Files” again. You will see from the dates inside that these are new files. Re-install. Replace existing files.

2) Load Poser 11.

3) Load Figures | Hivewire 3D Animals | Hivewire Housecat.

4) Load Materials | Hivewire 3D Animals | Hivewire Housecat | B&W Tuxedo texture.

5) Switch to Poses | Hivewire HouseCat | NapalmArsenal | Catula. Inject all morphs, head, body, expressions.

6) Select Body | Morph Dials | and you will see the dials to create Catula to your taste. Also open the mouth to show teeth, and lower the eyelids for a more sinister look.

Save scene file for future quickstart.

Renderosity outlines possible tweaks to Poser

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

Some additional news yesterday, about possible directions for further improvements to the Poser software. The news in a new Renderosity blog post “Poser has a new home: What can we expect?”.

“the next steps for the software may include render engine and Cloth Room improvements, and also performance improvements. They are also planning improvements in other areas, like scripting, vendor tools, fitting tools, etc.”

* Render engines: Yes, I can see that it would make sense to robustly integrate Reality, now that it’s open source. And perhaps give Reality a tab on the Render Settings, rather than hide it away. It probably wouldn’t be viable to then keep on chasing changes in the underlying Lux renderer, but one could presumable stick with a single stable version of that.

* “Cloth Room improvements” / “fitting tools”: I never use those, but I imagine they’re important for content makers.

* “performance improvements” / “scripting”. Always welcome. Adding the equivalent of Photoshop’s recordable ‘Actions’ would be a kind of speed improvement, enabling the recording and automatic re-playing of tedious steps in a workflow.

There’s also reassurance that there will be a 64-bit Mac version. Apple seems to have thrown 32-bit software overboard with its new OS, and the Mac version of Poser was still 32-bit.

The latest DAZ Studio – fast and furry!

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I recently finally got around to installing the latest DAZ Studio version 4.12.0.8x beta.

iRay is definitely significantly faster. I use the Scene Optimizer plugin + the CPU, for iRay renders to screen-size (1200px tall). Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need a Nvidia graphics card to run iRay. The latest DAZ Studio makes this approach significantly easier, integrating iRay RTX 2019.1.3 — which the Nvidia developers have stated on their dev-blog runs fine on non-RTX cards and should also give a 2x speedup of CPU-only rendering of iRay. In my tests, it’s definitely faster.

The very-very latest 4.12.1.16 (15th October) even integrates “iRay RTX 2019.1.4”. No speed-improvements there though, just bug-fixes, according to the iRay 1.4 release notes.

Also interesting, in the most recent releases of DAZ Studio, is the Strand-Based Hair. This seems to be production-ready now, judging by this Store product preview of the just-released Plushies 2.0: Scamp The Fox from Lady Littlefox…

It’ll be interesting to see what sort of render-time hit this fur type makes, if any, and if render-time increases with strand-length / curliness or not. Also how it compares on render-time with a Look At My Hair preset, and with Poser’s Hair Room fur.