Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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OTOY has announced OctaneRender 3, calling it a massive upgrade.
Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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The leading videogame engine Unreal Engine 4 is now available… “to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free!”…
“You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.”
Autodesk will be hosting the Real2015 event at Fort Mason on 25th-27th February 2015. It’s on the ubercool convergence of the 3D sensing, making and visualisation industries.
“30,000 sq.ft., the ‘world’s fair’ of 3D tech demos”
Oooh, the end of rendering is here! Again. Yours for a mere $50,000 / £32,000 + tax, the new Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) from Nvidia. 8 of Nvidia’s supercharged graphics cards are at your command, along with 256 GB of fast memory and oodles of other drool-inducing components.
I guess it’s not an impossible option for a 25 business ‘incubator unit’ of creative digital businesses. Everyone would chip in $2,000, via a quarterly $250 levy on their office rental for two years, then time-share the unit over a network. It is amazingly fast, after all, so it’s not as though Sally’s ‘formerly nine hour render’ is going to block Bob’s ‘formerly six hour render’ if they can render in minutes instead.
I also wonder how easy it would be to DIY something similar, and at far less cost, with eight cheap Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 cards and a big empty case, if one was familiar with building PCs. Actually, such a chassis/case may not be that hard to find, as I guess the Bitcoin miners have some similar kit like that lying around, since that sort of thing is what they use to ‘mine’ the coins.
The Poser developer team are looking for a Product Manager.
A new version 3 of Comic Life software has been released, and it’s a desktop Windows version. Comic Life aids you in layout out and lettering a comic book page. Sure you can do this with Photoshop, but it’s much more fiddly and will probably take most people about twice as long. You can also do it with Manga Studio, but that’s software for professional comics artists and there’s a bigger cost and a learning curve. So it’s good to see Comic Life back in the game and on Windows desktop again with a fresh version that works on Windows 8.x.
Cartoon Brew Seeks An Associate Editor…
“the animation industry’s most visible news source” seeks “a key member in the website’s development, someone who understands both the practice and business of animation inside-out”.
Giant, flocking and interlocking exploration-habitat vehicles. For Antarctica. Presumably they’d basically drive themselves, like the Google Car. A cool concept, visualised in 3D by Henry McKenzie and Artur Kupriichuk.
iClone 6 Pro is now available via Reallusion (not the DAZ Store, yet). The cheaper Standard version is due in Jan 2015. I see a $109 price for the new Pro 6 version, when I’m logged in to my iClone dashboard.
3D Art Live, online Xmas Party!
Posted in 3D Utilities, DAZ Studio, Lighting, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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The new Reality 4 is now available in both the DAZ Studio Edition and the Poser Edition. Reality is the high-end LuxRender rendering plugin, and comes in 32 or 64 bit format.
The newest Daz Studio Pro 4.7 is out now.
There seem to be some quite interesting and possibly important new features, which include among others…
* UI interface and navigation streamlining
* Interactive Progressive Rendering (IPR)… “see near real-time camera, light and material modifications”. Even moderately accurate WYSIWYG previews of the final render lighting would be a 1000% improvement on the old versions.
* “Back to Base”… an easy way to safely strip out all the modifications you made to a base character/figure.
* Render Settings Pane overhaul… an improved layout for this important panel
* Extended Texture Format Support… “Added support for using .EXR, .HDR, .PSD, and various others directly as textures.”
* Render Engine Update… “3Delight render engine to 11.0.105”. But this just seems to be a bugfix advance. The last important speed change was back in August with 11.0.101, which added… “Ray-traced subsurface scattering now uses much less memory and is 5% to 7% faster”.
Still free (for now), and still including…
Genesis Starter Essentials
Genesis 2 Starter Essentials
FBX Plug-in for DAZ Studio
Texture Atlas for DAZ Studio
GoZ for DAZ Studio (ZBrush connector)
3D Bridge for Photoshop
Subsurface Shader Base
Content Creator Toolkit
Though those installing for the first time will find the above extras are separate downloads.
DeviantArt is getting very tiresome. For weeks now it’s been either unreachable, or loads slightly and then stalls. The problem happens in multiple browsers, and so seems to be a major problem with the servers…
Poser Pro 2014 is now half-price at Smith Micro, until 23rd November 2014. Upgrades are also heavily discounted.
