News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: The Animation Industry

Boom times

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The 3D animation market in general is thriving, according to a weighty new market report. That’s despite the ongoing crisis among the custom VFX houses which service big movies and high-end TV series. But in terms of the whole picture (“hardware, software and services”)…

“The 3D animation market is estimated to grow from $21.06 billion in 2014 to $40.78 billion in 2019 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.1% from 2014 to 2019.”

Of course, one would ideally like to know how much of the consumer end of the 3d videogaming industry they included in those figures. But the relatively small “$40bn” seem to indicate that games and console purchases have been removed, as their previous 2011 report found that…

“The global animation and gaming market is expected to grow from $122.20 billion in 2010 to $242.93 billion by 2016.”

Octane 2.0 released

Posted on by Posted in Carrara, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Lighting, Poser, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

The external render engine Octane 2.0 has been released for various 3D software, and has added…

* Displacement mapping.
* Faster hair and fur rendering.
* Better sky backgrounds.
* Motion blur.
* Region rendering (for making small test renders)
* Network rendering.

…and more.

Octane 2.0 is available for Poser 9 or 2012 or higher, DAZ Studio 4.5. Last I heard, a Carrara version of Octane 2.0 version is being worked on. All Octane users will need a newer CUDA-capable GeForce NVIDIA graphics card slotted into your PC, which for many will require fitting a more powerful Power Supply Unit than the puny one that shipped with the PC.

Free to students with a valid .edu or .ac.uk email address. Note that students are currently limited to the 1.2 version.

Firefox gets native 3D via bundled Unreal Engine 4

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

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.

MotionArtist for motion comics

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Freebies, The Animation Industry, Tutorials

I’m always been a fan of comics, and the chance to combine comics with animation seems like a dream come true — to someone who was a kid in an age when the coin-operated photocopier was the best advanced comics-production technology we had access to. So it’s exciting that Smith Micro, of Poser fame, have announced that they are to very shortly release MotionArtist, for making interactive digital motion-comics…

“MotionArtist is going to be released very soon with amazing improvements over the public beta version. These span from HTML5 output to animated panels, text and word balloons, 3d Parallax effect, and Anime Studio input. Start counting your pennies and watch for additional news about the official launch coming very soon!”

Reallusion also reportedly have something similar in the works, and it’ll be interesting to see what CrazyTalk Animator 2.0 looks like when it arrives. I’d expect Reallusion may learn a lot from letting MotionArtist launch first.

It’ll also be interesting to see how MotionArtist interfaces with Smith Micro’s comics production software Manga Studio, if at all. It sounds like it might interface more with their animation software Anime Studio and with Poser 2014.

DAZ to Unity – detailed technical overview

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, The Animation Industry, Tutorials Leave a comment

DigiTech has posted a lengthy new whitepaper/tutorial on pipelining customised character assets for the popular free Unity game engine, based on DAZ Studio exports…

“This tutorial presents an asset pipeline, and design and code analysis information, to support the character customization workshop project download [available] for Unity game engine. […] The character customization workshop provides a foundation for a startup individual or small team of developers to begin introducing character management to their games.”

Octane renderer is coming to DAZ Studio, cloud-powered

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry

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.