News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

Muvizu

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Freebies, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

It’s all happening! A new Poser coming, and now Muvizu wakes up as well. According to their news mailing Muvizu, the very useable and free real-time toon production software from Glasgow, is moving forward again with a new Chief Exec. Also…

“From August we will introduce a market place where we will offer new characters – and content packs as well as expansion packs including multi-layer rendering and key framing.”

superhero_pack_large

Poser 11 to integrate Blender Cycles render engine

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

Interesting. Project Manager for Poser, Charles Taylor, reports that Poser 11 is set to plug in the powerful Cycles rendering engine from Blender…

“Poser 11 will include … Our new render engine … based on the Cycles engine of Blender fame. Don’t worry; the familiar FireFly render engine is still going to be there. We’re just giving you another rendering option.”

“Poser’s integration of Cycles, (currently code named SuperFly) is going to give you a much-requested feature: rendered caustics. SuperFly will use the same material room you already know from FireFly. You won’t need to learn a new material interface.”

And since I seem to remember that Blender Cycles does glow very well indeed, this may (my guess) also bring a proper spillover glow effect to Poser users?

Victoria 7 for Genesis Female 3

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

Available now is the new flagship female DAZ character Victoria 7 for Genesis 3, which only works with the DAZ Studio 4.8 beta.

v7

Some readers may be wondering: “What?! I only have Genesis 2, where do I get Genesis 3?” Good question — none of the Victoria 7 DAZ Store pages have any indication of how you get Genesis 3. The latest version of DAZ Studio states clearly that it only ships with Genesis 2. DAZ’s main Genesis 3 information page has no links to any G3 downloads or product.

So the process of getting G3 seems a real mystery. It took me 40 minutes of searching until I found the following aside, buried in a Forum thread:

“You can select it [the new G3 Female icon] in your Library [inside of DAZ Studio 4.8 beta only] then click the Download & Install button”

This apparently starts your “G3 Female Starter Essentials” download and install, through Download Manager. There’s currently no other way, such as .zip, to get it.

Then once you have G3 up and running, you can then load your new Victoria 7. You can also now get three G3 Female expansions…

Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs

Genesis 3 Female Head Morphs

Genesis 3 Female Expressions

Note that the new G3 Micheal 7 flagship male character won’t be released until mid November.

v7g3

Childhood’s End set to be a TV series

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The Syfy Channel is known for its often-unimpressive low budget SF productions, with painfully cheap and sparse CG. But it’s interesting to hear that they’ll be dramatising Arthur C. Clarke’s intelligent and sweeping debut novel Childhood’s End as a serial.

“Childhood’s End will be adapted by Matthew Graham (creator of BBC’s Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes).”

childhoods-end-cover

Update: I’ve now seen it. A very excellent 5.5 hour adaptation, and definitely a success. It was slow in the middle, partly because it was padded with about 40 minutes worth of “emotional couples talking about their emotions”, presumably added to widen the audience appeal. At least 50 minutes could easily have been cut, giving a big boost to the narrative energy. Hopefully we’ll see a tighter fan-edit at some point. They didn’t mess with the ending either. Overall, a very fine adaptation.

Reality 4.1 will have a 10x speed boost

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Remember when the Reality plugin for DAZ Studio was ummm, well… a little slow? Reality 4.1 will have a 10x speed acceleration, due to acceleration and other tweaks built into the forthcoming LuxRender 1.5 beta. Yup, ten times faster.

“Q: Can I simply install LuxRender 1.5 and reap the benefit of the acceleration?
A: nope, it’s not going to be that easy, we will have to wait for Reality 4.1.”

Paolo is so excited he’s funded a nightly build of LuxRender 1.5!

New Vue! Vue 2015 released

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, Vue Leave a comment

E-on has just released Vue Infinite 2015 and Vue xStream 2015.

Key new things…

* A new non-photorealistic ‘sketch’ renderer, with 40 presets.
* Render performance has also been improved across the board
* Photometric rendering speed now twice as fast.
* Scene previews up to eight times faster.
* New displacement mapping engine that may reduce render times.
* Pipeline integration – exchange data with ZBrush via GoZ.
* The user interface is more customisable.
* Real-world terrains can be imported in DTED, SDTS/DDF, and GeoTIFF data formats, on top of the existing DEM import.
* New content browser for searching, browsing and previewing large numbers of files.
* Further improvements to the clouds and atmospheres.
* Export Vue scenes to LumenRT for real-time renders.