News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

Mined out

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As Bitcoin miners sell off their nearly-useless graphics-card stuffed mining PCs, where will those machines go? The miners are either going to be left with awesome videogaming rigs (Skyrim at 8000px on a wall-size HD TV, anyone?), or else the Poser/Daz 3D rendering market is about to see a flood of high-end graphics cards on eBay. Those running a GPU renderer, and in the market for a ninja graphics card or two, may want to keep an eye on eBay in the coming months.

Firefox gets native 3D via bundled Unreal Engine 4

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A new Firefox feature is rather cool…

“You’ll soon be able to stream and play highly realistic three-dimensional video games from within the Mozilla Firefox [Web] browser. … Firefox’s gaming capabilities don’t even require a Web browser plugin to function … ability to run the Unreal Engine, even the new Unreal Engine 4”

Firefox joins Google Chrome in this, as Chrome has had the same HTML5 3D gaming ability for a while now.

Given the pace that Firefox is developing it can’t be long until we see it in the latest Firefox downloads. In fact, those with the 64-bit developer Nightly build of Firefox can already play Monster Madness. Or, they can if they play it if can get past the dreadfully unintuitive UI interface which serves to hide the buttons that actually starts the gameplay. I clicked the main play button, but was then presented with nothing that would actually start the game. Though the game’s interface elements loaded fine…

madness

Such teething problems aside, we’ve come a long way from those far-off years when a clunky Java browser applet would load… and load… and then… crash and freeze your entire PC.

PzDB updates

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I’m pleased to see continuing development on the PzDB DAZ/Poser content library management software. (My review of PzDB). Version 1.3 is currently in public beta testing…

“We’ve expanded to PzDB to work with more of your favorite CGI programs, so many in fact, we have introduced a new File Types window to enable you control which files PzDB indexes for you. You can now index more kinds of bitmaps and CGI Content files from Anime Studio, Corel Creative Suite, Google Sketchup, iClone, Maya, Quindam, Softimage, Wings3D, and even movies and audio files.”

Yep, iClone content indexing, as well as DAZ/Poser! Nice. Plus better indexing of those annoying new-fangled DAZ 4.x file types. It has a new and more polished look, too…

PzDBScreenCars

Decimator plugin now for DAZ Studio 4.5 and higher

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Now available is Decimator for DAZ Studio for DAZ Studio “4.5.0.114 or higher”.

I bought this a few years ago as part of the set of Game Developer Kit suite of plugins for DAZ Studio 3, to get DAZ content to iClone. I used it a lot and it’s excellent, and does the job: reducing huge 3d meshes down to a much lower number of polygons. It’s very flexible and easy to use (once you find how to launch it in the menus), and its great to see it being kept updated to work with the latest versions of DAZ Studio.

decimator

DAZ Carrara gets LuxRender

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Are you a DAZ Carrara user, but jealous of the DAZ Studio and Poser plugins for the free advanced LuxRender 3D renderer? Well, now there’s a new Luxrender plugin for Carrara! It’s called Luxus for Carrara and has just been released, at an introductory price of 30% off. There are 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it works on Windows or Mac.

luxus

Freebies and an extra manual for Carrara Luxus can be had over at the Carrara Cafe website.

[Hat-tip: Jose Rendero]

Poser Pro 2014 announced, priced and dated

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Natural media emulation, Poser, Spotted in the News 2 Comments

Smith Micro have just officially announced Poser Pro 2014, and they’ve even priced and dated it: 21st May 2013!

poser_pro_2014_box_shot

Here are the new features, with my comments on each:

* There’s a new Pro-version only “Fitting Room”… “to convert your existing clothing and props to fit any figure”. Useful, although third-party software such as CrossDresser (my review) already does that quite well and also works seamlessly for DAZ Studio too. Plus a related… “Morph Brush now supports Sag, Tighten and Loosen so clothing works better”. Poke-through, begone! Maybe.

* “Pixar Subdivision Surfaces for fast and efficient scene building” This means you can change the density of the surfaces on your model, by making the mesh looser or tighter. Looks like an on-the-fly polygon-reduction system, and one you can apply to any bit of a 3D model. Nice. Not sure how many times I’d use it. If I ever had a scene that heavy then I’d break it into background, foreground, character, and then composite their multiple renders together in Photoshop.

* “Bullet Physics for Soft Body Dynamics, Rigid Body and Hair.” Nice, for the small handful of serious Poser animators.

* A new “Comic Book Preview Mode” for color and B&W cartoon illustration and animation. A bit more on this one: “This feature will enable you to create comic art with fantastic line control and color, or clean black and white outlines with persistent shading even when rotating or animating your point of view.” Plus some new semi-toon characters which will ship with the software.

Sounds cool, especially if we can tweak it and can make share-able presets. The existing sketch mode in Poser can be made to produce rather nice effects. But I’ve yet to see a useful straight comic-book filter from any software, and I’ll be surprised if Poser 2014 manages to finally get it right.

* “Interactive Raytrace Preview.” Grainy real-time preview in a tiny window, but it looks really useful in terms of seeing what your render is actually going to look like, and as such could save a lot of time. Reducing the amount of wasted “fiddle-about-with-it time” can only be good, since that’s a real drawback in using DAZ Studio or Poser compared to iClone.

* “OpenGL Speed Optimization.” Nice. It was a bit sticky and slow, for me, so improvements are welcome. Not sure it’ll be as lovely-looking and responsive as DAZ Studio 3’s implementation of real-time Open GL, but we can hope.

And of course, the ever-present promise of faster rendering…

* “The Firefly render engine has been optimized for faster performance when Raytracing.”

So for me, the new version boils down to: it may render a bit faster, it has a useful real-time preview, and the comic-book filter might be cool. The real-time preview window looks like the must-have “killer feature”.

Anyway, judge for yourself. Here’s the official video for the new features of Poser Pro 2014…

Carrara 9 dated by DAZ

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Hot from the Carrara Cafe! News that DAZ Carrara 8.5 is to be released at the end of summer 2013, with Carrara 9 set to follow perhaps Christmas 2013 or in the first quarter of 2014.

Carrara 8.5 will include…

– Support for up to Windows 8 and Mac OSX 10.8
– DSON support
– Metadata support
– New animation tools (keyframe tool improvements, smoothing, keying every frame, etc.)
– Graph editor improvements
– Improvements to viewport avatars (Lights – spotlight, sun, moon, etc. Cameras – conical, isometric, etc.)
– Improved bullet simulation for soft bodies

Update: ok, they were perhaps a little ambitious on the timeline for the version 9 date, which has now been and gone. 🙂

Free webinar: What’s new in Manga Studio 5?

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Digital comics makers who draw or paint over their DAZ Studio or Poser renders for might be interested in a free webinar from Smith Micro on “What’s New in Manga Studio 5?”. Despite its somewhat misleading name, the specialist graphics software Manga Studio 5 is not just for manga artists. It’s just about the best dedicated comic-book production software available. MS5 also has the industry’s best range of pressure-sensitive digital “black ink” brushes.

The free one hour webinar is on 5th February 2013, at 3pm in the afternoon (US Pacific time). It’ll be presented by Doug Hills, comic book artist and author of the training book Manga Studio For Dummies.

“Doug will explore the new, fully-customizable interface and show you how it can help to improve your workflow. He will also review the stunning new coloring and painting tools, demonstrate how it is even easier to import and use 3D character and background images, create word balloons, and much more. We will conclude the hour with a brief Q&A session where you will be able to ask questions and have them answered.”

The pro “Ex” version of Manga Studio is set for a summer 2013 release.

3D Universe website makeover

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Daz/Poser toon specialists 3D Universe have given their website a makeover. It looks as though it’s configured for an iPad now…

Some bits and bobs appear to have been lost in the move, like the free Mimic files for Noodle the Cat. Plus, their webmaster broke all their inbound product Web links with a new page URL system — and is wasting all that prior traffic by just serving up a “404 not found” notice for the broken links.

DeviantArt’s new Dreamup commissioning service

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Can you make money with your digital art? The well-known fantasy and sci-fi art website DeviantArt thinks you can, via its new (beta) commercial commissioning service, Dreamup.com. It’s nice to see them set a price threshold, of a decent $200 (about £130) for a finished picture — so there should be no eLance-style “race to the bottom” in pricing, no ‘ten illustrations for $10’ done by slave-style workshops in India or China. Dreamup keeps the cash in secure escrow until project stages are hit. Per-stage payments are available. One of the benefits should be that the artist’s payment arrives very promptly after the work is done, rather than the artist having to wait for months for a seemingly semi-mythical payment that’ll be… “in the mail soon now, dude, really…”