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.
Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Lighting, Poser, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
A first look at the upcoming OctaneRenderer render plugin for Poser, showing the workflow…
It’s also coming for DAZ Studio 4.5 too…
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…”
The official Renderosity annual user survey is underway. There’s one version for content vendors, and one for buyers.
Interesting consumer news from Europe…
“Users of digitally downloaded software can sell it on secondhand, providing they deactivate or delete the original copy from their hard drive, the European Court of Justice has ruled.”
“The ECJ said that software owners exhaust their rights to control the sale of their copyrighted products when they first sell them within the EU, regardless of whether the sale concerns a physical product or one downloaded from the internet.”
This presumably includes DAZ Studio or Poser content models. Tired of that cute “Fluffy the Cat” character? Burn it to a DVD, uninstall it, and it seems you can now legally sell the DVD. Only the one time, though. This legal ruling (by the EU equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court) would seemingly also allow a relative to legally ‘gift’ or ‘bequeath’ their entire 3D content and software collection to their relatives, on their death.
Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012 are now available in native German-language versions…
“Ab sofort konnt ihr die erfolgreiche Figurengestaltungssoftware Poser 9 und erstmals auch Poser Pro 2012 in deutscher Sprache bestellen.”
Posted in 3D Utilities, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
Leave a comment
Poser 2012‘s new physics engine add-on is coming soon. PoserPhysics has a summary of the features we can expect, and two video demonstrations. Here’s one of the videos..
Just published, Les Pardew’s new book for DAZ Studio 4 users, Figures, Characters, and Avatars, Second Edition. This is an update of his earlier book for DAZ, and this new edition of the official guide weighs in at 221 pages. The title shows up on Amazon USA as Figures, Characters and Avatars: The Official Guide to Using DAZ Studio to Create Beautiful Art
Here’s the book’s cover and the table-of-contents for the new edition… click on the table-of-contents to see the full-size version…
The editors of 3D Art Direct magazine have started the magazine’s first download podcast. Artists covered in the first MP3 include…
DeeDee Davies (Vue Studio, Poser Pro and Carrara Pro); and Les Garner from Sixus1 Media (Poser models and props)
Templum is a new digital arts magazine, now inviting submissions for the second issue. Quite painter-y, but probably open to those who overpaint their DAZ Studio and Poser renders.
The new 3DS Max 2013 (shipping 12th April 2012) has new features that may make it more interesting than before, for Poser Pro 2014 users using it with the PoserFusion plugin. These include among the features list…
“a new ability to output renderings in a layered PSD [Photoshop] format”
Smith Micro have today announced some details of the Service Release 2 patch for Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012…
“The SR2 update for Poser will enable export of bump and normal maps in Photoshop compatible fashion.”
This will enable you to export a character in the Collada .dae format, and then have it load up in Photoshop CS6 Extended with all materials properly applied and with no additional need for tweaking…
“The model comes in [to Photoshop] perfectly, with all normal map detail preserved, ready to use in your illustration.”
I’m guessing this feature may also extend to other external load-and-illustrate packages, such as Keyshot?
They’re also going to support the coming wave of 3D in Web browsers, which will work without the need for plugins (Google Chrome now natively supports full-blown 3D games, without the need for Flash or other pernickety plugins)…
“[get] animated 3D characters from Poser into WebGL-enabled browsers like Chrome”
Posted in Carrara, Competitions, DAZ Studio, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
Leave a comment
The 2012 CG Student Awards are now open. Entrants worldwide are invited to compete for $100,000 in prizes. You have to be on, or a recent graduate from, an accredited course at a college or university.
Added to the New training books in 2012 page on this blog — a new second edition of the official training book for DAZ Studio, Figures, Characters and Avatars: The Official Guide to Using DAZ Studio to Create Beautiful Art
This new training book is due to be published on 15th April 2012, according to Amazon USA, and will presumably be updated for DAZ Studio 4.
Cloud-based rendering could be coming to DAZ Studio soon, as Otoy has purchased New Zealand’s Refractive Software. The news from GDC 2012 is that Otoy will now reportedly pair its cloud-gaming power with Refractive’s GPU-rendering software. The result will be Refractive’s Octane plugin presented as a cloud-renderer… “for DAZ 3D Studio”. No time-frame on that yet, but possibly 2012?
Although quite how a home user will send the bundle of data (FBX?) required for the cloud render, is another matter, especially on slow broadband uplink speeds.
The standalone desktop version of Octane costs only $99. So there’s hope that the DAZ Studio version would be at the same affordable cost. Poser users can already use Octane. My guess is perhaps $250 a year with the cloud rendering thrown in? That would certainly be cheaper than that the dual top-end Nvidia graphics cards needed to run Octane optimally on its own. Even then, you might need to scale down your 4000px skin textures on your DAZ exports.
One of the interesting aspects of Octane’s blurb is that…
“Octane Render provides [a] ‘What You See Is What You Get’ rendering environment […] The viewport on the screen IS the final render”
Nice, especially for 32-bit systems. But don’t think it’s going to replace software built on game engines, like Lumion and iClone any time soon. Here’s a real-world Octane user review, just published…
“At work, I use a fairly old quad-core workstation with bags of RAM. A 1080p frame with AO, some reasonably complex geometry and soft shadows will take me around 3 and a half minutes to render in Cinema4D’s native renderer. In Octane I can get much higher quality (including, I might add, working AO) in about 1 and a half minutes.”
Not bad, and no doubt useful for shaving down a commercial production company’s billing times. But what I want is genuine WYSIWYG 1080px in the viewport at 60 frames per second, like a videogame.
