News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: The Animation Industry

Boost for DAZ

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DAZ Studio users are set to get a new integrated iRay render-farm service in the Cloud. Infinite-Compute’s “Boost for DAZ” will presumably become available as a free plugin soon. Nothing there yet, I just looked. According to the press-release on the partnership the new service will offer the ability to first configure… “a custom NVIDIA iRay Server within minutes” by budget / time / complexity. Then once that has spun up, users quickly render the project on it and “only pay for what they use.” No need for expensive graphics cards, then, just a fast Internet uplink to get the file and any relevant folders uploaded.

Looks good, and it may be especially welcomed by those who are shut out of the NVIDIA ecosystem, either because of Apple or the simple lack of fast cards to buy at their supposed ‘budget’ prices.

Presumably you can also still run things like Scene Optimizer in DAZ first, and thus make the upload / cloud rendering faster and thus save cash? But that’s just my guess.

Said to be “affordable”, and judging by the current prices on the Infinite Compute site it is and is pay-as-you-go.

Top of the range is a professional studio NVIDIA Quadro RTX4000 aided by 8 CPUs. But you can also render iRay on 12 x CPUs alone if you want. Yes, iRay can run on CPUs alone, as it’s a myth that it needs an NVIDIA card. That’s what I’ve actually got under the desk: 12 CPUs / 24 render threads, and with a little help from Scene Optimizer and a couple of tweaks it can push the Viewport into something approaching real-time. A bit grainy for a few seconds when the camera moves, but perfectly acceptable in giving a ‘what you see is what you get’ view of the scene.

I assume that what you won’t get from Infinite-Compute is some kind of hook into powering your DAZ Viewport, whereby their server also helps render your Viewport in iRay while you set up the scene and test angles, lighting etc. As such I expect Infinite-Compute will mostly be used for big 6k final ‘beauty’ renders and by animators. You’ll still need some kind of hefty local computing power to help with the scene setup.

Monkeying with Moho

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The venerable indie animation software Moho, now back with its original developers, has released a YouTube preview of a new CrazyTalk-like ‘Live Mesh’ feature. Apparently this is…

coming with the free Moho 13.5.2 update for Moho 13.5 owners

Looks like you can relatively easily add face-rigging to a 2D image, for a 2.5D animatable look, something other software can also do. Though here it looks nicely professional, is integrated into the all-in $400 software (i.e. no $1,000+ of extra plugins to buy), and it obviously gives good results.

Sadly it’s probably not an alternative way to rig a Poser face, and thus perhaps have an older Poser figure fake the look of having ‘real stretchy muscles’ under the skin. Other than as a 2D rendered from Poser. That’s because Moho (formerly Anime Studio) had licencing problems with the Smith Micro / Renderosity switchover, and that caused the drop of the Poser import feature with Moho 13. My guess would be that there was a big script doing the work and that was by Smith Micro and had not been labelled as public domain (as DAZ tends to do with key scripts, presumably to prevent such future problems). So far as I know 12.5.x was the last Moho to officially support Poser import, and there have as yet been no experiments to see if the following is possible:

Poser 11 -> Moho 12.5 -> save file -> open in Moho 13.5.

New Enterprise Licensing plans at DAZ

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DAZ Studio has new Enterprise Licensing plans for studios creating major productions with the help of DAZ Studio and “large scale” use of the software’s various plugins and content. So far as I can see this changes nothing in the current and long-standing royalty-free arrangement. It just provides “world-class” support to studios using DAZ assets, in a busy work setting where time-is-money. The first such client enjoying the service is Canada’s…

Wind Sun Sky Entertainment [which] has seen exceptional success this year including their […] hit Amazon Prime Original series Invincible.

Invincible has been such a hit, that in May 2021 Amazon renewed the show for another two seasons. Nice to be able to show it to the pros who disdain DAZ and Poser and say… “yup, that’s made with DAZ that is…”.

A recent job ad for a new series suggest their key tools are DAZ Studio and Adobe After Effects.

Time to move to Texas…

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You now have to smuggle some types of gaming PCs into some U.S. states. The PC makers such as Dell can’t ship there…

“This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled.”

Even a really rather basic one from Dell, that is little more than a standard £800/$1100 desktop…

Presumably any kind of slightly-powerful graphics production workstations must also be effectively banned in those places? Hollywood, which last time I heard was in California, may be rather annoyed at this… though not quite yet. Because a little research shows the legal problems will only start for non-gaming high-end PCs from 9th December 2021. Time to follow Elon, Hollywood… and move to Texas?

One wonders if the politicians who passed these laws have electric cars standing next to their heated swimming-pools, and how much energy those need.

Anyway, it’s often rather pointless trying to regulate such fast-moving technology. It just shifts things sideways. The politicians have probably never even heard of eGPUs.

First thoughts on MetaHuman

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Hmmm… MetaHuman. First thoughts.

It’s obviously destined for semi-pro and small-studio videogames makers who want to shave a few days or weeks off a too-tight production schedule. It appears to output very good starting points for your hundreds of NPCs, that will later be optimised in-game for 60 frames per second. However, flip through the latest PC Gamer magazine for a second. Do you see any “uncanny valley” hyper-real characters, that look like the standard AAA humans MetaHuman is pushing? Very few, these days. In fact, the new U.S. edition has a manga/anime girl on the cover. She runs real-time in the latest hit game.

That said, the head-and-shoulders MetaHuman demo shows obvious superiority to previous “quickie avatar/NPC makers” for games, of the sort that now litter the bankruptcy registers. As such there’s also obvious potential for real-time motion-capture movie-making use, if (and it’s a big if) the mo-cap and AI-aided tweaking in postwork can get the footage past the “uncanny valley”. The average screen entertainment viewer wants Marilyn Monroe, not the 2020s equivalent of a Thunderbirds puppet. But 98% of digital art hobbyists have no interest in making storytelling movies, nor in the full-body motion-capture rigs needed to make that happen.

The MetaHuman tech-demo is set to evolve into a free ongoing cloud service, if the early reports are correct. As such I’d say they have two money making options which will dictate their add-ons…

1) make the exporter modules a paid item, if you’re not sending your figure to the Unreal engine. Exporters to push your 12Gb’s of .FBX figure to Blender, Cinema 4D etc, maybe even to DAZ. But, most likely, never directly to their competitors such as Unity, NVIDIA Omniverse etc. Since their build-a-human service is in the cloud, the exporters cannot be pirated. That sounds steadily lucrative, and for not much ongoing effort.

2) or build a vast sprawling content eco-system on this, complete with ‘anatomically-correct’ figures, skimpy frillies, ankle-bracelets etc. Then promise not to look at the ‘megaboobs’ and other naughty figures that people make and download. But that would damage their brand, and also be a big hassle to admin and do PR for. Why bother, when you have the money coming in via option one? For that reason, I can’t see that DAZ or Renderosity will have a great deal to worry about. The ‘silent majority’ of their users will not want to use cloud services, and will be content with clothes-swopping, kit-bashing and morph-tweaking in privacy. Even if it means staying a step below the current state-of-the-art in hyper-realism. Much the same is true of those who want the wealth of creative science-fiction and fantasy content that DAZ and Poser now provide, royalty-free. Not to mention toon, animals and monsters.

It also seems to me that the average dedicated DAZ user will fairly soon just say… “I got a new PC and a 30-series NVIDIA card, so I run DAZ iRay in realtime now”. True, there’s still a damnable graphics-card drought but that surely can’t last forever. This means the “ooh… it works in real-time” thing is a bit of a red-herring. The only caveat there is the hair. Adding 3D hair has always caused a huge drop in scene pliability, and it’s just possible that MetaHuman has done more than create awesome-looking ‘helmet hair’. Real-time hairs that are true ‘stranded grooms’ and which can be easily re-styled… that would be quite something.

Finally, the ‘elephant in the room’ is AI. We’ve recently seen the Deep Nostalgia service very ably auto-animate a still 2D vintage photo with head-turns and eye-blinks. How much further will that go in the next few years? We may yet see Reallusion popping out a ‘CrazyTalk AI’, so don’t count them out yet either.

Mastering Animation in Poser

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Coming soon and booking now, Mastering Animation for Poser 12 webinars with Charles Taylor. Also relevant for Poser 11, of course, it’s just that 11 users won’t have such swift SuperFly rendering or some of the new Cycles nodes. But that won’t matter much if you’re using Firefly, Sketch, Comic Book, or Preview PNG sequence + Photoshop filters/actions.

Release: NVIDIA Omniverse

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NVIDIA Omniverse has been released in open beta. In its current form it appears to be an extensible virtual production studio, giving teams the ability to… “simultaneously work together on projects with real-time photorealistic rendering” but also to “work concurrently between different software applications” via Omniverse Connectors which bridge into “leading” content creation software. Most interestingly, there is a promised Connector bridge to the free Blender in the near future. Naturally, your studio’s creatives all need to be brewing their wizardry on fast n’ shiny NVIDIA graphics cards and Windows.

The Omniverse platform is only in open beta at present, but already has several working modules within it. Including ‘Omniverse View’ for architects, and ‘Omniverse Create’ for designers and creators. It seems to use the Pixar USD format for universal ‘in-out porting’ of the 3D scenes and moving them around the various applications?

“Early next year” this virtual studio platform will see the release of…

“‘Omniverse Audio2Face’, AI-powered facial animation; and ‘Omniverse Machinima’ for GeForce RTX gamers”.

Machinima being the term for real-time WYSIWYG animation using a game-engine, and from the sound of it ‘Omniverse Machinima’ seems to be tilted toward Unreal Engine users and TV studios — rather than the hobbyist crowd that is currently using iClone.

The ‘Audio2Face’ module is more interesting and will aim to have an AI… “generate expressive facial animation from just an audio source” without any need for expensive and fiddly camera-based mo-cap. That makes a lot of sense. Train an AI to match millions of audio vocalisations with visual expressions, then have it generate expressions purely from audio. In fact I’m a bit surprised such a thing doesn’t already exist in software — beyond the existing ‘vocal audio to mouth phonemes’ lip-sync automation. But perhaps animating a full face and escaping from ‘the uncanny valley’ in real-time may need a Cloud connection and a zillion back-end NVIDIA GPUs to work? My guess is that you would need a second AI to weed out the “ugh, no… uncanny valley” results.

Anyway NVIDIA Omniverse looks good and may even be free(?), albeit after the entry-ticket price of a 30-series NVIDIA graphics card and (ugh) Windows 10. When it’s all polished up and hooked to a Blender bridge, that could make it very interesting for small indie animation studios. But what are the prospects for non-techie hobbyists? Well, DAZ is also an NVIDIA partner, so I guess if DAZ Studio implements a Pixar USD-format bridge then they could also enter the Omniverse?

Handy hand-puppets

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A new Reallusion video “Hand Animation Solution from the Puppet Actor Toolkit pack for Cartoon Animator”. Control animations with your hand. Requires extra kit (rather than working from a HD webcam) and is obviously a bit difficult to control in real-time. Nor can you emulate a traditional “glove-puppet” experience, it seems. But it’s amazing it can be done at all, and as always Reallusion has pre-rigged templates for Cartoon Animator.

Poser 12 release-window announced

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There’s a bit more specific news on Poser 12, and an official announcement of a release-window in the first week of November. So they’ve only slipped by a week, from the expected 31st October, which is pretty good for a big software package and a small team.

“The Windows version of [Poser 12] will be available to Early Access customers in the first week of November. The Mac version of Poser 12 will be released in early December.”

“Early Access” presumably being (this is just my guess) some sort of download sign-up gate for existing users, that may warn with something like… “I am an experienced Poser user and understand that this is a .0 release barely out of beta, and some features may be incomplete or missing, and old scripts may not work, and I promise not to moan and rant in the forums…” etc.

My further guess would be that an ‘all-comers’ public Windows version would be out and ready a week before Black Friday, which in 2020 is 27th November. It looks to me like the sensible in-depth reviewer should hold off until January or even February 2021, and ideally wait on the first patch.

Now there’s a fairly firm release-window, even if a bit staggered, I’d imagine that we should have the complete feature-list announced by next week?

On the public marketing, I do hope they have decent demo pictures/video for the Comic Book Mode this time. Smith Micro used to choose the most awful possible figure choices. Such as the rather naff Barney with his black hair and a grungy plaid shirt, representative of a very rough patch in Smith Micro’s stock character design. Or the earlier and even more horribly grungy Creature from the Black Lagoon figure. Even on the back of the retail box they made it look crap. What were they thinking of?

Show the public the free-with-Poser SAK Robo-kitty figure being tooned in relatively flat lighting, would be my suggestion, or the old Poser Star! figure might be an attractive toon choice, or some of the Nursoda figures. The free-with-Poser Maisie can also toon up surprisingly well and pleasingly, with a bit of work, once you abandon the photoreal in which she looks so ugly. She’s obviously not meant for photoreal.

What about the Python scripting language, which is vital to many scripts? The new post focuses on this and we get a version number: Python 3.7.9 is what will be in Poser 12, which will update from the old PoserPython 2.7 version. We also learn that the important EZSkin is being fixed for Poser 12 by the author, and that…

The dev team is working on a way to easily download, install and protect Python scripts that are purchased from the Renderosity Marketplace. We are also looking for vendor partners to create new scripts for Poser 12.

Interesting. You can already create a .PRC encrypted Python script, or at least you could in the previous version of Python and Poser. That’s not ideal, though, as it makes fixing old un-maintained scripts impossible.

So it sounds to me like Poser 12.1.x may have a built-in secure script ‘encrypter/decrypter’ module. I can see how that could encourage commercial $20 script-makers and thus boost the Renderosity Marketplace. It would also enable easy ‘unlocking’ by the owner of Poser, if the family of a deceased coder wished to give away the scripts for free, or sell them on to another developer.

Also, it’s now known there will be a “free trial up to 21 days”, as before with Poser 11. And… “We do not plan to invalidate Poser 11 licenses that are used to upgrade to Poser 12.” It sounds like you should be able to run both on the same PC, meaning you can try a trial version of 12 alongside an existing install of 11. That said, you should probably back up vital presets before installing 12.

After Effects borrows a vital feature from Cartoon Animator

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Reallusion’s Cartoon Animator 4.3 Pipeline recent enabled sending of scenes via a script to Adobe After Affects (CC 2020, CC 2019, CC 2018, CS5, CS6). Perhaps as a follow-on, the latest After Effects has introduced a new “3D Design Space in After Effects”…

This looks very like the intuitive angled-layers view in Cartoon Animator, which should make the Animator 4.3 -> AE transition easier. Amazingly, it seems that After Effects couldn’t do this before now.

‘Look At My Hair’

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The DAZ Studio fur-and-hair plugin Look At My Hair 1.6 is currently on a 50% off deal at the DAZ Store. Its companion LAMH 2 iRay Catalyzer plugin is also 50% off at around $7. Note that the latter iRay addon only works with a few “LAMH models [creatures] compatible with the Catalyzer”, so it you want LAMH for some other use than DAZ LAMH-enabled creatures then the extra iRay addon may not be needed.

Just be warned that it’s well known that LAMH is extremely crash-prone, and it needs to be learned fully and worked in the correct way if you’re to try to avoid some of the crash points. I can confirm that it’s crash-prone, and that it will usually take down DAZ with it. Check the forums for advice and some possible workarounds for such common problems. One of the worst problems is when it crashes DAZ on trying to load a finished scene that was saved with LAMH hair in it — users might save two versions of such a file just in case, one with the preset applied and one with it removed from the scene.

That said, when LAMH can be made to load/render, a preset is simple to operate in terms of fur colour and density and it renders reasonably quickly in 3Delight. Very quickly in default lighting, less quickly in complex lighting. For instance here I have dear old DAZ Millennium Cat with a black cat texture MAT (Classic Cats pack?), a fairly tough ‘Caressed by Light’ light preset #05, and the LAMH short preset for the MilCat ramped up to 260,000 hairs. Even with the tough lighting and many hairs, this render is done in five or six minutes for me. And that’s with me not using the Xeon workstation, just the normal desktop PC.

3Delight. Raw render, no postwork.

Since version 1.5 LAMH has also offered easy export for Poser and Vue and even .OBJ…

New in 1.5: LAMH will now create optimized FiberHair for rendering in Poser and Vue … applies compression to the fibers to control the size of the exported hairs. … LAMH will include the UV’s and custom textures with the FiberHairs, providing a complete asset” for export. Also… “provides the option to write the FiberHairs to .OBJ format.

… and export is relatively straightforward (provided you can actually load the LAMH preset and pose, without DAZ crashing-to-desktop). Such exports alone may thus be worth the $25, when LAMH is on a 50% discount. Indeed, it may even enable iRay (I’ve yet to test that myself) as Kendall in the forums gives some possibly good advice re: taking LAMH FibreHair exports to iRay…

“Do not generate the FiberHair until right before render. [Because FibreHair doesn’t auto-follow the pose]. The FULL version’s FiberHair export will put the generated hairs DIRECTLY on the model in the DAZ Studio viewport.” I also read a little later that “It is no longer necessary to export out FiberHair specifically for iRay … LAMH takes care of determining the rendering engine and adjusting accordingly.

Nice, if that’s the case. And apparently FiberHair exports can also inherit the colouring of the base diffuse texture (.OBJ export of strands don’t).

And I guess that if one then intends to do a lot of iRay rendering with FiberHair, DAZ 4.12.1.83 is current minimum — as that was updated to include “NVIDIA iRay RTX 2020.0.0 (327300.2022)”. That’s important because the iRay devs reported in the early Spring that their new iRay… “2020.0 final has just been released” and strand fibers do “especially well” with the new iRay 2020 + an RTX graphics card. Even fibres with dense intersections do very well, they said. Thus I presume that DAZ running iRay 2020 should help with the speeds on LAMH strand hair, if you have the required graphics card type. Possibly even if you only do CPU rendering, though that’s another guess. According to the forums this ‘Speed’ setting, in particular, might also help…

The current public beta of DAZ Studio is at 4.12.1.117 for the very latest, which is what I’m now running on. As well as the addition of iRay 2020, in recent 4.12.1.x releases the technical Changelog notes several dForce version updates and .OBJ import/export improvements.

For people looking at fur options I should note that Poser 11 Pro has a Hair Room built in, in which basic fur is relatively easy to make and quick to render. I seem to recall that Hair Room fur colouration can automatically take up from the diffuse material’s pattern, if needed. But I hear that LAMH can also do that, though not for .OBJ exports.

There’s also the new DAZ Studio Strand-Based Hair Editor, which is similar but more stable than LAMH. But the problem there is… it has no cat presets! In the meanwhile, LAMH has excellent cat hair, both the old MilCat and the new Hivewire HouseCat. And actually, thinking about it… I have yet to see a single animal preset produced for the native DAZ strand hair. You’d have thought that, a year after release, we’d have fifty or more animals furred by now. Is the absence because such hair can only be saved if there’s a base mesh to ‘grow on’? And that mesh can’t be redistributed, as it’s part of the commercial model?