Posted in Companion software, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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Blend.Stream, a new showcase and aggregator site for all movies made with Blender. This means more than just the official open movies sponsored by the Blender Foundation, and the site is open to all quality films made with the software. Also keep in mind that they’re not all under Creative Commons, though they are all free to view.
Impressive, a 3D isometric room created purely in CSS, and Ricardo has kindly supplied source-code.
Some official news of the Poser 13 Release.
* Aiming for a March 2023 release.
* Queue Manager will now support the PostFX processing panel, and also GPU rendering. Useful for animators.
* “Both CPU and GPU-based renders will be significantly faster using the updated SuperFly render engine.”
So that latter point means the newer Blender Cycles render-engine, of which Superfly is a re-branded version. Cycles has “a massive performance boost” back in April 2021, and I’d assume that’s the version Poser 13 will be upgrading to.
I would imagine that the very under-powered PostFX processing panel will also get some care and attention. It’s the obvious and logical thing to enhance, in terms of building on Poser’s unique market niche in fast and commercially-useful non-photoreal rendering from 3D (e.g. real-time Comic-book mode and Sketch rendering).
ZBrush 2023 has been released. I think this is the first release after they were purchased by the Cinema4D owners Maxon. The last ZBrush I looked at here was ZBrush 2021. But I know that some in the Poser and DAZ crowd use ZBrush as a round-trip software, so the new 2023 version seems worth a quick look.
The big news is that the Redshift renderer is now integrated into ZBrush. But only for CPU rendering, not the GPUs that Redshift runs best on (GPU rendering is only unlocked if you pay a subscription). This ‘integrated Redshift’ comes with the required materials and PBR controls. It also supports bucket rendering.
Things I’m not sure about:
i) if it’s just for final renders or is also able to power the Viewport in near real-time (if you have good enough hardware for that) like iRay can in DAZ Studio;
ii) and if Redshift will render the many comic/toon non-photoreal presets (BPR/NPR) that ship with ZBrush. I suspect not, since those will be highly tuned for the existing BPR (“Best Preview Render”) in ZBrush.
There are also some updates to the bundled Sculptris Pro. Sculptris gets what’s said to be a new SubDivide slider control, and the ability to restore areas of higher polygons by painting the back onto the mesh.
There are still perpetual one-time payment ZBrush licences, but these are expensive and you no longer get free upgrades from earlier versions. I imagine that many users are going to be thinking that there are not enough benefits to upgrading to 2023. It doesn’t look like an incredibly feature-rich whizz-bang ‘no-brainer’ upgrade to me, especially given the high price.
Many will be sticking with what they have, and thinking of switching. For that there’s:
* Blender 3.2 or higher, if you can stomach the UI and have a suitable graphic card;
* the hugely-improved and relatively user-friendly 3DCoat 2022 (it’ll be very interesting to see what 3DCoat 2023 looks like), a nicely priced one-time purchase and works back to Windows 7;
* and everyone seems to have forgotten about Autodesk’s Mudbox, but it’s still out there and apparently many students still pass through it briefly at university;
* there are a few others in either OpenGL browser form or mobile app, such as the popular Nomad Sculpt with its real-time lighting.
E-on has released their landscape software Vue in the 2023 version. This offers “feature parity between Creator and Professional” and unlimited render-size for Creator. Creator is now “personal non-commercial use only”, but that really shouldn’t affect most hobbyists and students.
Vue still has easy automatic Poser integration / import, on which see the recent test in Digital Art Live magazine #71…
Which means this new unified 2023 version now offers an easy Poser export route to…
3D Studio Max 2016 to 2023
Maya 2015 to 2023
Cinema4D R20 to 2023
Creator 2023 users now have access to these export options, since they are no longer locked away in the more costly version of Vue.
Advance news of a Upcoming Renderosity Marketplace Update. After the forthcoming changes…
* “Vendors should find a more streamlined experience”
* “Buyers will have an easier time managing purchases, as well as looking through their history or Wishlist.”
Sounds good. Also news of the Poser 13 release dating. They state a… “planned Q1 release of Poser 13” in 2023.
The short film Heroes of Bronze has a release date and teaser-trailer with the date.
Read a long interview with maker Martin Klekner in the recent “Warriors” themed issue of Digital Art Live magazine (#71, August 2022).
Posted in 3D Utilities, Automation, Companion software, Spotted in the News
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MiDaS uses trained AI to take a normal 2D image and output a 3D depth-map. In Poser-speak it’s like Poser’s ‘auxiliary Z-depth’ pass or render.
Free and public, no sign-up needed. Just drag-and-drop your image. It can probably also be installed locally, though I haven’t looked at the requirements for that.
Once you have it you can use the usual Photoshop layer inversion/blending-mode tricks to create ‘depth-fog’ in the scene, where there was none before.
3rd Annual Pinup Contest at Renderosity. Win licences for Poser 12 and more. Live now, with a deadline of 28th February 2023.
A rare 50% sale for Nursoda at Renderosity. Also a new standalone figure-character this week, called Chull for Poser and DAZ. As usual, he comes with poses, clothes, expressions, hand poses. Currently discounted to just $9.
Also, free are 15 Expression Presets for Chull on ShareCG.
Renderosity’s Free Christmas Gifts page. Get them while they’re hot! Here are previews of just a few…
Includes a fabulous .OBJ fantasy helmet by Poisen, which works very nicely with the aid of Poser’s Comic Book mode.
The script Hampelmann 1.7 for Poser 12 has been released, free. It allows you to easily control figure-parts, with the mouse and/or keyboard. Here’s the basics of how to install and then use it for the first time in Poser 12.
1. Download the new Hampelmann 1.7 for Poser 12, extract the folder and and install by copy-paste of the folder to…
C:\Program Files\Poser Software\Poser 12\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu
Rename the new sub-folder there to something a bit more descriptive, such as P12-Hampelmann-v17-figure-controller or similar.
2. Download the old Hampelmann 1.6, extract. With this you want everything except the scripts. Copy only the config and img folders and the help files (not the scripts) to your new…
C:\Program Files\Poser Software\Poser 12\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu\P12-Hampelmann-v17-figure-controller
This .ZIP also gets you the help / instruction pages, not included with with the 1.7 .ZIP file. You might want to make a shortcut link to these pages, on your desktop.
3. Run Poser 12, place a test figure such as the standard Andy on the stage (Library: Character | Additional Figures | Mannequins | Andy).
4. Run Hampelmann 1.7 (Top Menu | Scripts | P12-Hampelmann-v17-figure-controller | Scripts | Hampelmann_17).
You should see this…
Click on “Import layout/figure/geometry files”. Then locate the folder you extracted from 1.6, the one with the layouts and config files in it called config_files. There are a confusing range of files in there. I had success with Andy by importing all three at once, and was then instantly taken to the figure posing screen. It worked, so… success.
Now click on a body part on the Hampelmann panel (not on the figure on the stage), and a click-hold of the mouse will gently move that part of the figure. Right button for back/forwards, left button for up-down. You get the idea. Sensitivity of movement can be easily adjusted with a single slider.
That’s the basics. There are detailed and rather daunting instructions in the 1.6 help files, if you need more guidance. And yes, it can work with more than one figure on the stage, and can switch between them.
It looks like can also create your own setup files for any Poser figure, via working with the companion Hampelmann_Setup.pyc script.
Marmoset Toolbag 4.05 is now available in a public beta. Despite being a .05 release for this games-focused desktop software, it’s being touted as a big update which greatly improves texture painting and the available range of materials and lights. There’s also a new stabiliser for your hand-painted brush strokes. Apparently also a “10x” speed boost, on big complex multi-layered object-painting projects.
Interestingly there is also a mention of the NVIDIA “DLSS viewport upscaling”, the first I’ve heard of such a thing in 3D production software. Intended for (retro/older?) videogames, it can up-scale “by 4x”. In Marmoset Toolbag it’s said to enable real-time up-scaling of your viewport. (Adobe also has something called “neural rendering”, which seems to evolve an AI render from a 3D point-cloud, but that’s still at the research-paper stage).
Sadly Marmoset Toolbag is now “Windows 10 only”, but it’s good to see there is still a one-time purchase at $320 for hobbyists. I admit I’m not very familiar with this side of the 3D software world, but I know that Substance Painter (or the free Material Maker) and 3DCoat are some of the ‘adjacent’ software packages for desktop. I’m uncertain how Marmoset and 3DCoat line up these days, feature-wise, and if they can perhaps be classed as broadly having feature-parity. Maybe a reader of this blog could advise on that?
Terragen’s easy sky generator is now available in Early Access, for Windows desktop PCs. Make “photorealistic CG skies” with “a simplified UI and workflow” using sliders. Also 360-degree HDRIs.
In Early Access it’s apparently not yet a standalone software, but will be. Currently it exports the sky into the main Terragen desktop software, and thus is only available to those who have a Terragen licence or subscription. If Terragen Sky will be free or low-cost and/or public, when it reaches its final release, is as yet unknown.
On Renderosity -renapd- is retiring some items, with heavy discounts for those who want them while still available. The most unusual are the RTproductions Napoleonic-era military uniforms for M4, including British and French packs. I also see a Russian Cossack and a Cossack Peasants pack for M3. Very niche, but no doubt they have a certain appeal in Europe.
