News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

Release: Poser 11.1

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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.

Poser 11.1 – due in the next few weeks

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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.

“Death by Powerpoint”… in VR

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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 soundtrack

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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.

Shipping – Anomaly: The Rubicon

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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.

Black Friday – Amazon offers big discounts on the new Kindle Fire 10″ HD

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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. 🙂

VUE 2016 R4 update – available now

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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.

Release: SketchUp Free

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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.

A new take on motion-comics

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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.

Release: Lumion 8

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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…

Game of Groans

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Movie trade magazine Deadline reports that…

“the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien is currently shopping around rights to a TV series based on The Lord of the Rings with a hefty sticker price. The Tolkien estate has put a price tag of $200-250 million dollars on the rights and is currently taking meetings with Netflix and Amazon”

Ugh. I do hope it’s not going to be “Games of Thrones-ified” and “global-reach”-ified once they get the rights. But it probably is. Because a $200-250m price, plus the $750m making-of costs, will demand as wide an audience as possible, with only a few scraps thrown to the fan-base for Tolkien’s writing. Jeff Bezos just sold $1.1 billion in Amazon stock, so they have that sort of cash. They’ll have to get that back.

There are more back-stories to be told in The Lord of the Rings, it’s true.

For instance, one could have an alternately charming / creepy Shire Stories series of self-contained episodes: Bilbo’s visit to the Michel Delving mathomhouse; Ted’s “cousin Hal” encounters the “walking trees” “beyond the North Moors” (last of the Ent-wives?); Gandalf’s arrangements with the dwarves for the making and delivery of the Party toys, his design and making of the Party fireworks; the building of The Hedge, the attack of the trees of the Old Forest, the burning of the bonfire glade; and Farmer Maggot’s encounters with Tom Bombadil. Etc. There are also plenty of pre-Bilbo places for more epic back-stories, such as the life-story of Aragorn.

But as Phil Dragash has so ably shown, full-cast / full-symphonic audio-only seems the best way forward. Which, interestingly, puts such back-story ventures well within the reach of fan-work makers, and for a lot less cost than $1bn. All you have to do is find someone who can write like Tolkien, and with the same pre-modern concerns. Which may, admittedly, be rather tricksy.

Update. Amazon got the TV rights to The Lord of the Rings…

“Set in Middle-Earth, the television adaptation [“a multi-season commitment”] will explore new storylines preceding J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The deal includes a potential additional spin-off series.” Telling… “previously unexplored stories based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s original writings”.

Interesting, so it’s a Second Age prequel series. New Line Cinema are lined up. I’ll bet Apple won’t be able to resist making it politically-correct, despite the risk that entails to getting back their $1.2 billion.