The Poser sale is still on. Upgrade even a very old Poser version to the latest Poser Pro, for $49.95. Looks like Smith Micro can also ship you a physical disc in the mail, which could be rather handy if you’re in a remote place with weak or no broadband.
Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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Vital Kinect accessories are officially discontinued by Microsoft, and the technology downplayed. If you rely on Kinect for your body-tracking / motion-capture workflow, now might be the time to hop on eBay and grab a couple of replacements for some vital components.
Poser 11’s 11.1 update is now available, via your Smith Micro Download Manager.
If you run a 64-bit instead of a 32-bit install of Poser 11, then you need to make sure to un-check the 32-bit check-box when the installer runs. Otherwise it may look for both 64-bit and 32-bit installs of Poser, and may then get confused when it can’t find the 32-bit.
If you don’t yet have 11, the Smith Micro site currently has a load of discounts on Poser 11. Including on upgrades from older versions.
After the regular run of Service Release patches for Poser 11, Smith Micro has just announced a free Poser 11.1 update. It’s due later in December.
There are “many improvements” and even a few new features. For free, which is nice. The additional features announced, so far, are:
* 3D Animation Path – “create and manipulate a 3D path on the project scene and have an object travel that path while animating it at the same time”.
* Animation Palette – “group keyframes by categories and/or themes and easily identify the existing keyframes within each group. Additionally, the Animation Palette now shows the number of keyframes that a group contains at any given frame, and also allows for management and assigning of categories to keyframes”.
* Paul v2 and Pauline v2. These are the flagship male and female characters which ship for free with Poser.
I’m not likely to use any of those, but it’s good to see that hard work is being done by the new team on progressing Poser.
Just announced, Amazon Sumerian. It’s Amazon’s crassly-named new tool for building 3D in virtual and augmented reality. Judging by the cringe-inducing 2002-style picture it looks like they’re anticipating organizations will be using VR for the same-old “Death by Powerpoint” presentations, but done in a way where you can’t look away… because you have huge goggles strapped to your head.
Perhaps you’ll at least be able to close your eyes, and thus have a snooze without anyone in the room knowing, though I guess there will also be all sorts of prompts and audio pings that will try to prevent that. Horrible. Why would anyone want to work for an organisation which inflicted such horrors on staff, at a time of near-full employment (at least here in the UK).
But one hopes that employer fears of lawyered-up claimants — claiming motion sickness / eye-strain / headset-allergies / ‘unfriendly to disabled people’ etc — will put the kibosh on this before it starts.
And it that doesn’t do it… nodes. Nodes with adjustable spaghetti wires. Ugh.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – Expanded. A limited edition soundtrack of 3,000. Released on 12th September 2017. Edward Shermur’s classic soundtrack for the classic valvepunk movie, with a whole hour of additional tracks over the 2004 release. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this movie, must be 20 times at least. It could never be made today, the studios would dilute it to death before it even got started.
Amazon UK and USA both report that Brian Haberlin’s graphic novel Anomaly: The Rubicon is shipping. It’s made with Poser + digital overpainting, and those who have enjoyed the earlier Anomaly will need no introduction.
Listed as 244 pages in the UK, and 264 pages in the USA. I hope that’s a mistake and there’s been no censorship of the graphic novel for the UK market.
Wowzer, I didn’t think the new Amazon Fire HD 10″ 1080p tablet + Alexa would get lower than the standard £150 UK retail, but it is! £109 and free delivery. Nice. It’s included in Black Friday on both Amazon UK and USA.
Amazon must have decided they want to take a big loss on the hardware, to get the eventual income from ongoing content sales.
Things to bear in mind:
* It’s not really going to be the sort of ‘digital painting tablet’ that a 10″ iPad + Apple Pen can be. But then… it’s a fifth of the price.
* Amazon has their own equivalent of Google Play. The Fire 10″ can’t access Google Play without some workarounds, and even when it can it runs an older streamlined version of Android and thus may not play nicely with some Google Play apps.
* If you find you really don’t like Amazon’s mis-targetted ads and “your tasteless friends also brought…” on the lock-screen, you can do a unofficial workaround to remove them. Or just pay Amazon £10 later on their website, to have them removed.
* It has a 16:10 screen, eminently suitable for movies and showing your widescreen artwork — because no “black bars” above and below such content. Also good for comics and graphic novels and magazines. Shows 104% of the sRGB range, and has good blacks.
* Alexa hands-free voice assistant. Apparently it works well, and it always listening.
* Mediocre camera.
* Apparently it’s going to be rubbish in sunlight, re: reflections etc. It’s an indoor tablet for lower lighting situations.
* Reviews say it’s ugly. But I checked out a model on display in my local Tesco store and it looks fine to me. It looks even better at £109. 🙂
An interesting new UK startup, YellowDog. Harvest the PC processing power which is idling away at general businesses, and sell it to people who need 3D renders done quick.
The VUE 2016 R4 update patch has just been released. A few of the selected highlights of the 480Mb patch…
* Stereoscopic rendering and VR180 Panoramic rendering.
* Better multi-pass masking, re: semi-transparency (“For instance, cloud passes or tree leaves masks won’t show the sky in the background”).
* You can now embed the alpha channel for each mask pass, when the output format supports it.
* Path Tracer Renderer improvements.
* VUE now supports CPUs with more than 64-cores on Windows. [Meaning that Xeon users with multi-workstation render farms will be happy]
* Added Cinema 4D R19 support.
SketchUp Make, the free desktop version of SketchUp, has reportedly been canned in favour of “SketchUp Free, a free browser-based version” of SketchUp. Users get only “10MB of free storage”, so it looks they’re planning to monetise it via the “add extra storage” angle.
The lack of a free desktop version is going to be rather annoying to:
1) The nearly 40% of rural Americans who still lack access to fast broadband Internet. Many in Canada are also in the Internet boondocks. Australia likewise.
2) Kids whose Internet time is heavily metered and restricted by net-nanny software.
3) Anyone who, for whatever reason, does not have access to the Internet. Prisons, the military, merchant ships etc, all usually with heavily locked-down or no personal Internet access.
4) The rest of the world, re: poor or no viable Internet access in many places in developing nations.
And so on. For the next few days (maybe weeks) you can however still download the free SketchUp Make which is the free desktop version for Windows and Mac. For the benefit of future searchers, sketchupmake-2017-2-2555-90782-en-x64.exe will be the Windows install file you’ll need to search the FTP sites for.
New type of comic book, albeit with a heavy dose of motion-sickness included…
“By layering the 2D art and animating each layer independently, a 3D effect is created. By itself, it’s a cool effect that brings the comic to life, but there’s more to it than that. The comic also responds to tilting your iOS device. You can tilt your iPhone or iPad to get a different perspective on the scene and peek at details that can’t be viewed from certain angles.”
Sounds like something the developers of CrazyTalk Animator might think about enabling output for.
New $100 Wacom pen, the “Pro Pen 3D”. This new pen’s… “third button provides additional control options for 3D programs and applications”.
Posted in Comics, Companion software, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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Clip Studio Paint (formerly much better known as Manga Studio) has just been released for the iPad.
Lumion 8 has just been released. Mostly intended for architects working with CAD models of buildings for construction clients. Which makes it very very costly, but as a result, also very fast and streamlined — if you have the ninja workstation needed to run it. In terms of the tools that readers of this blog are likely to have access to, it only interfaces nicely with SketchUp and (apparently) Cinema 4D. As such it’s probably not for most people who read this blog, but it’s interesting to at least see what the architects have at their disposal these days.
Here are all the new features in Lumion 8. I like the look of the “softening of hard edges” filter, which smooths some of the razor-sharp edges that 3D renders often have…