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Category Archives: Tutorials

Restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software ‘PzDB’

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How to restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software PzDB, on an older Windows OS.

Problem: Likely you have been installing various Microsoft updates and C++ redistributables and so on, on an older version of Windows. These may have overwritten elements which enable drag and drop of files from software which uses an underlying MS Access 2007 database. As a consequence, your PzDB may have lost its ability to drag-and-drop from the search results, to load the chosen file into your Poser viewport.

Solution: Get the Microsoft Office Access Runtime and Data Connectivity 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) at the Microsoft Update Catalog. There get the accessrtsp3-en-us cab.

Once downloaded, right-click on and unzip the .cab as if it was a normal .zip file. Once done, double-click the accessrtsp3-en-us.msp installer. The Access 2007 components will be updated. There will be no ‘success’ message, but you can tell if it worked. No need to reboot now.

Launch PzDB and your drag-and-drop capability should have returned. It worked for me. Also seems to have repaired some lost functionality on the top menu icons.

Be aware that this will overwrite the core mso.dll in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12 with a possibly older version than you have. This may affect Office 2007 programs such as Word and Excel.

The alterative for drag-and-drop is to use the bare-bones but excellent external AIR library in Poser Pro 2014. This does, however, require that Poser 2014 be running first. You also need to update AIR to the latest version, for security.

Grotto’s Vampire demo and AI test

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A quick demo of the Grotto’s Vampire for Michael 3 Poser figure from Renderosity, which I had in this year’s ‘Black Friday sale’. Rendered in the Poser software, with some ‘secret sauce’ for the final rendering.

Install and load:

1. Install both .ZIP files to the Runtime, as usual.

2. Figures | DAZ People | and load Michael 3 to the Poser stage. Select BODY rather than Hip. No special M4 morph packs are required.

3. Figures | Grotto’s Vampire | add wings and tail to M3.

4. Pose | G VAMPIRE MORPH-MATL | and load GROTTO VAMPIRE ALL. This loads the morphs. There are 60 custom morphs with dials.

5. Pose | G VAMPIRE MORPH-MATL | and load GROTTO VAMPIRE. This loads the default textures.

6. Pose | G VAMPIRE POSES has a range of preset poses for the figure. See also: Expressions | G VAMPIRE EXPRESSIONS and Hands | G VAMPIRE HANDS

7. Save the base vampire figure to the Library, choosing “Whole Group” when prompted. Now you won’t have to set up the figure again in future.

Here are a few demo render in Real-time Comic Book. Less successful at taking line-art than Mr. Happy, a figure from the same maker. But still well worth having, packed with morphs, and it can take M3 poses and expressions. Possibly also additional M3 head and body morphs.

OK. Now a little experiment. Render to a basic real-time Comic Book + Smooth Shaded render. Make it a 768px square .PNG from Poser…

I then tried “rendering” it with AI. Specifically with InvokeAI and the epicRealism v5 photoreal model. I dropped the .PNG into a ControlNet (‘Canny’ edge trace) and after a few goes and some tinkering with the text-prompt I had this in about six seconds…

The final prompt was…

Positive: A vampire at night, kneeling on a building in Gotham, stormy night, red eyes, dead shiny meat skin, fangs, wings, high detail, dramatic lighting, film-noir lighting

Negative: Batman, female.

Is it Poser, is it AI? It’s both. Just another way of rendering.

Installing and troubleshooting a RTX 3060 graphics card

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Hurrah! Through the great kindness of a benefactor, who was upgrading to a blisteringly fast 40x series card, I now have a MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12GB graphics-card. I had sort of expected I might be gifted it, but I wasn’t sure until he actually got his new card.

So… for the aid of other perplexed card-wranglers, here is my step-by step guide to how to install a 3060 12Gb card to a HP Z600 workstation PC (with Windows 7 as the OS).

1. First, the happy Z600 owner needs to acquire a 6pin to 8pin PSU cable adapter. A Z600’s PSU has only one cable to power a graphics card, and it’s the wrong sort for a 3060 card. But first unlatch the PC’s case-front, and make absolutely sure the card cable is clipped to the PSU box and is actually available. It should be a small black 6-pin connector marked “P10”. Ok, it it’s there you now purchase a ’10cm PCI Express PCIe 6 Pin to 8 Pin Graphics Card Power Adapter Cable’ for a few dollars, from eBay. This additional cable will adapt the Z600 power supply cable to feed the new card’s 8-pin.

2. You may also need a newer type of monitor cable. My MSI graphics-card has one HDMI out (v2.1, supporting 4k display) socket and several DisplayPorts (v1.4a) sockets. Work out what cable you need and order accordingly, to connect the card to the monitor(s).

3. Ok. Download the Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) freeware for Windows. Unless you first uninstall your existing card’s drivers, the new 3060 will send “no signal” to the monitor and the new NVIDIA drivers will also refuse to install. To get around these joint problems we need to first cleanly uninstall everything from NVIDIA, and shutdown the PC ready to fit the new card. DDU does this easily and automatically. Place DDU in its own folder, and extract. Don’t run it yet.

4. Download the NVIDIA GeForce 472.12-desktop-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe drivers for Windows 7. These are recommended on Windows 7 forums, and are also recommended by rival card company GigaByte for exactly the same card specs. Rival card maker MSI just sends buyers to the NVIDIA website and hopes for the best, which… won’t end well with Windows 7.

5. Ok, unbox and unwrap. Gently remove the thin protective sleeve from the card’s PCI slot connectors, to reveal the row of gold ‘teeth’ at the base of the card. These will soon be connecting the card to the motherboard PCI slot. Make sure there are no flecks or damage on these, but try to keep your fingers off them. Place the extracted card on top of its protective wrapper, ready for lifting in and fitting into the PC.

6. Open the PC case. With a flat-head screwdriver, remove the foam-top box. Four screws hold this to the inside of the Z600’s case box. If it’s not removed then the new big card will prevent the case lid from closing, later on.

7. Right, we’re ready. Load the Display Driver Uninstaller freeware, choose the third option (‘close down the PC on finishing, to fit a new card’). The old drivers are then fully uninstalled and the OS cleaned of traces of NVIDIA. The PC shuts down.

8. Now with the PC shut down you ease out the two restraining clips at the back of the Z600, which allows the pulling back of a metal bar holding in the fitted PCI cards. You can now gently ease out the old graphics card, and carefully unclip the end section. Place it somewhere safe. Now remove a second small metal panel-cover from the back of the PC, as the new card is big and needs not one but two panels empty. One rear panel-slot will allow access to the card’s monitor connectors, while the other will vent heat.

9. Fit the new card. It’s heavy, so get a good grip. Ease it in at one end of the slot, then slowly press in the other end until you hear the socket’s clip ‘snick’ home. Close the two clips at the back of the PC, to restore the small metal retaining bar. Once the card is firmly seated and locked in, connect the power cable via the short adapter cable you purchased.

10. Connect the monitor cable to the card, and restart the PC. Turn on the monitor and press on its plastic ‘internal buttons’ to tell it to use HDMI or Displayport, if you were using something else before. If the cables are working and the monitor is in the same era as the card, then you should see Windows starting up. In super-tastic old-school VGA 800px mode! That’s because we don’t have the new drivers installed yet.

11. Ok, now go to your saved 472.12-desktop-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe installer and run it. The installer will (hopefully) refrain from saying ‘not compatible’. As it might have done, had you had tried to install with the old card and drivers still in place. Instead it will now install the new fresh drivers, and then reboot the PC. You have two choices, drivers or drivers plus NVIDIA extras. If you want some control then include the extras. My particular MSI card also has MSI’s Afterburner software (free, download it from their site) which can make it easier to ‘overclock’ the card and also gives you your juicy card stats in a slick GUI.

12. Your new 3060 card should now be driver powered, running properly and driving your monitor. With the full 12Gb of memory detected on the card, too. Make sure all physical connections are secure, and close up the case. In the Windows Control Panel, switch your audio back to ‘via Speakers’ to get it working again. NVIDIA’s own sound driver, installed along with the graphics driver, will have hijacked the audio and that’s why your headphones will suddenly be silent.

That’s it.

I don’t recommended installing later NVIDIA drivers than 472.12 (Sept 2020), for Windows 7. I tried a later installer, but then the software windows and menus became noticeably sluggish and the NVIDIA Control Panel crashed on launch. I used DDU to uninstall, and re-installed 472.12. Everything was nice and smooth again. With these drivers you won’t get the TensorRX speed-up that NVIDIA added to the drivers for generative AI users. But with the magic new LCM Lora that hardly matters any more.

By the way, I don’t know who informed me that Poser 11 didn’t support 30x series NVIDIA cards, but they were wrong. A big 3600px SuperFly render happens in seconds on the new card, using Poser 11. Possibly what they meant was that P11 doesn’t support the advanced OptiX capabilities of a 30-series card.

Update: Some comments from gamers suggested it sounds really noisy. But for even heavy AI generation (a batch of eight) using InvokeAI 3 the card stays whisper quiet. I have no problems with fan-noise, but the fans are on (you can feel the air flow). I can only assume the gamers were running a heavy game at 120fps at 4k, and stressing the card.

G8F to Stable Diffusion Openpose

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Free and easy, G8F to Openpose, for Stable Diffusion UIs with ControlNet. Available now.

1. Get the free Daz Studio G8_OpenPoseRig V1.0. The end result is intended for Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet / Posenet module, which accepts images of poses in the Openpose format.

(InvokeAI is probably currently the most user-friendly and ControlNet-capable UI for Stable Diffusion on a desktop, and is about to go to 3.4. You’ll want to wait for that version (next few days) since it will include a new LCM module which will super-charge generation speeds to near real-time).

2. Once unzipped and manually merge-installed to the DAZ top-level content folder, open DAZ Studio and find G8_OpenPoseRig in the Library. It’s not under People | G8 Female. Instead it’s under Figures | Rogue Pilot | Open Pose Rig.

3. Load the G8F via !FullScene and switch the DAZ Studio viewport’s real-time rendering to Smooth Shaded. Apply a pose. Add another figure, if you want a two-person picture from SD. Tweak the bone positions in Posing / Shaping, if required. You can also load a proper G8F alongside, to see the pose on a more human figure.

Ideally you’ll then render this special Openpose skeleton at the standard SD image-generation size of either 512px, 768px (for SD 1.5) or 1024px (for SDXL), output to a .PNG file. It doesn’t matter if figures are highlight-selected or if viewport widgets are visible. The viewport clutter won’t be in the render.

(Yes, they look like .BVH stick-figures, but are not. So far as I can tell the only way to convert .BVH to Openpose is by dropping the .BVH onto this special G8F and then rendering a frame).

4. That’s it. Drag and drop the .PNG render into your ControlNet’s input window. Your subsequent Stable Diffusion image generation will then, assuming you have a suitable workflow and a pose-aligned prompt, ‘more or less’ conform to the figure poses in your Openpose guide-image. It’s not going to be exact, the Openpose being more of a guideline for SD.

Expressions are instead controlled with a prompt, and perhaps guided by the addition of a LORA. SD is weak at generating several things, and subtle controllable expressions is one of them.

Note the comment on the G8_OpenPoseRig page asking for this freebie to be updated for ControlNet 1.1, which he says can handle finger-bones and thus hands. This freebie doesn’t support these 1.1 style hands, and it hasn’t yet been updated for them. Thus… for 1.1+ hands support you would instead need Poser 12 or 13 with Ken’s paid OpenPose for Poser 12 plugin script.

Note that Ken’s scripts are encrypted and thus require Windows 10 or higher. Note also that Poser 12 can currently be had for $49.

Free scripts and workflows to convert older poses to G8F:

Many old poses in .PZ2 Poser format can just be drag-dropped to a G8, and may be ‘good enough’. But if you need more precise conversion, try…

V3/A3 Pose Transfer to G8F (Victoria 3, Aiko 3). Also try these scripts.

V4/A4 Pose Transfer to G8F (Victoria 4, Aiko 4).

G1F Pose Transfer to G8F (Genesis 1)

G2F Pose Transfer to G8F (Genesis 2).

G3F to G8F Pose Adjust Scripts.

You might also look at the DAZ Pose Converter (Standalone), also free. Half the many commenters just can’t get it to work, the other half think it’s ‘the best thing since sliced bread’. Apparently it can do batch conversion, if you can get it to work. I couldn’t.

Putting a 3060 card in a Z600

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I have a faint chance of getting hold of a Nvidia RTX 3060 12Gb graphics card. To aid others, here are the results of my few hours of advance research re: putting a 3060 in a reliable old HP Z600 which has fast Xeon CPUs (a workstation that was once ‘the PC of choice’ for Poser users)…

Is it even possible?: Yes (video 1, video 2).

Windows 7 NVIDIA drivers: Yes, from August 2022. These support all the 30 series cards, but not the 40 or the coming 50 series. A HP Z600 workstation runs best with its dedicated Windows 7 drivers. Though many gamers just slap Windows 10 on a SSD and hope for the best. (Update: 472.12-desktop-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe are what’s needed for Windows 7, and they also support 12Gb cards).

Windows drivers tweaked for AI: No, not the newer and allegedly ‘AI tweaked’ drivers, at least not if you’re using a Z600 with the expected Windows 7 OS and the original set of workstation drivers.

DAZ Studio: The highest you’ll go with Windows 7 drivers is DAZ Studio 4.21.0.5 (November 2022), due to DAZ’s huge hike in NVIDIA driver requirements.

Poser: You’ll have to say goodbye to photoreal GPU rendering in Poser 11, as only Poser 12 and 13 support 30 series cards. I was misinformed. The 30-series is supported by P11. Perhaps it’s the OptiX rendering that’s not supported?

Card length/width: Yes, length should be just about fine though you want to get one of the shorter versions to be sure. Most of them are also fat things, so make sure you have the width as well, and no other sound cards etc in the way.

Slots on the motherboard: Yes, your card should be PCIe x16 and the Z600 has the required PCIe x16 slot. Make sure you push the new card into the slot your current graphics card is sitting in, and firmly seat it. Remember which slot was being used for a card, when you pull the old one out.

PCIE: Should be fine. Your 3060 card uses PCIE 4.0… but PCIE 4.0 is fully backwards compatible with the PCIE 2.0 (aka Gen2) used by your PCIe x16 slot. Actually I guess the difference may help your motherboard cope with the fast card?

Adequate Z600 power supply: Yes. A standard Z600 PSU pumps out 650W, and they’re reliable and modular (very easily replaceable).

Z600 power-supply cable already in use? A Z600 PSU has only one cable for a card. Unlatch the case front and make absolutely sure it’s clipped to the PSU and available. It should be a black 6-pin marked “P10”.

Z600 power-supply cable has suitable pins: No, it only has six. But there’s an easy fix — a simple ’10cm PCI Express PCIe 6 Pin to 8 Pin Graphics Card Power Adapter Cable’ for a few dollars. These are widely available on Amazon or eBay. The PSU should give the card 216W of power via the PCI-e cable/adapter, plus 75W drawn from the motherboard card-slot. This will be more than enough to fully power the card…

Fitting the adapter also usefully gives you another 10cm to reach the card socket, if required. I’ve read of no problems with melting, but it’s best to check the cable after a few hours of heavy use, and again a few days later.

From the above linked video, showing a fitted RTX 3060 card in a Z600.

Will it connect my monitors? You’ll have to look at your monitor cable(s) and connector types. I have both a normal monitor and a draw-on-the-screen XP-Pen monitor to connect. The card will likely only have one HDMI (v2.1, supporting 4k) and several DisplayPorts (v1.4a).

Card noise: I read that a 3060 can be noisy when two fans are spinning at full tilt in heavy max-settings gameplay. I’m not sure how much strain a real-time iRay viewport or AI work would put on such a card, but I guess the fans will spin up. There is an unofficial way to reduce voltage and thus make the fans quieter, while also saving power. There is also now an official way (Nvidia’s “0dB Technology”) to have the fans turn off when the PSU is at a low wattage + the card is below a safe temperature. Thus they won’t be whirring all night, if the PC is mostly idling along with a few torrents.

Air flow: Never jam the back of the Z600 up against a wall, and especially if you’re adding a big new card. It needs a free outward flow of air at the back. The case is superbly designed for good air flow and heat dispersal, but before fitting the card you might also de-dust the outer vents.

Electric bill: Yes, potentially quite a lot higher. A Z600 that shipped with an old standard NVIDIA Quadro 2000 would have a card drawing about 62w max. You’ll likely be more than doubling that with a 3060. Maybe 140w, and going up to 170w if you’re a heavy game player or overnight batch renderer. Your PCI-e cable/adapter cable from the PSU (650w, pushing 216w to the card cable) should handle a 170w power draw with no problem, but there will be a higher electric bill over time. Especially if the card is running overnight on renders, batch AI etc. Effectively, it could be like your home having an extra 100w light-bulb burning, all the time. But you may be able to reduce energy-use elsewhere in the home, to compensate.

Your free V3 to V4 pose converter

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V3 to V4 pose converter, via DAZ Studio. For free, mostly… probably.

Does it work? I tried it. Here’s the step-by-step tutorial.

1. Get the free “V3/A3/GV3 Pose Transfer to G8F” script (choose the second updated .ZIP file) for DAZ. Then the free “G8F to V4/A4 Pose Transfer” script. You need to be signed in to the DAZ Forums and Renderosity to get these.

2. Unzip and combine the two script-sets into a sensibly named folder. Such as “V3 to V4 pose converter”, so you can find it under Scripts in the DAZ Library in future. Install the folder as you usually would. Load DAZ Studio. Check in Scripts inside the DAZ Library, to see the folder installed correctly.

3. In DAZ, find and load a V3 base figure to the scene. Go: Poser Library runtime (you linked it, right?) | Figures | DAZ People | V3.

4. Find and load a suitable V3 pose.

5. While you’re there, also load a standard V4.2 to the scene. I could not get the second DAZ script working with a plain V4. It must be V4.2.

6. Now go back up to the main DAZ runtime in the Library. Load a G8F in the same scene.

7. Drop all figures to the Floor, just in case (Select figure, Crtl + D) and space them out in the scene. Now save the scene for a ‘quickstart’ in future.

Start the V3 to G8 script. Once the script has started it will prompt to you select the hips of each figure. Once this is done, press OK.

8. The script is really quick. Once done, Ctrl + D to ‘drop to the floor’ again, just in case. Yes, G8F took the V3 pose…

This was where I found out that old V4 doesn’t work, and that V4.2 is required.

9. Now do the same with the G8 to V4 script. The result here with a V4.2 is fairly good, except for the “thumbs up” and the “elbow/thigh contact” which will need adjusting later.

10. Then go back into the Library Scripts and locate your Poser Format Exporter (aka PoserFormatExporter), which is still working in DAZ 4.21.x. This vital add-on script for working with Poser is currently paid at $7, but was free in the past for many years. You may already have it installed, or have got it in the distant past and can thus re-download it from your “Purchases” library at the DAZ Store.

Select V4.2 in the DAZ scene and use PoserFormatExporter to save out the V4 pose as a .PZ2 file for Poser. I had success with the following settings…

11. Load Poser, load a v4.2 figure, then drag-drop your newly made .PZ2 pose onto the figure. She will take the pose. Make some final small adjustments and save the pose into Poser natively.

Done. Nope, there’s no batch. It’s ‘one at a time’, as you need the old V3 pose on a V4.

Not tested with ‘M3 to G8F to M4’, but I guess that may be possible. The scripts are open text files, so they could be adjusted as needed in response to any error messages.

The result is far more accurate than a straight “drop a V3 pose on a V4.2” attempt. As you can see in the results seen below, where we have intersected feet/knees, fist hitting the head, no toe/foot bending, and one hand with scary ‘flying fingers’ which would take a lot of correcting. I suspect the fist is also bunched too tightly…

An alternative ‘drag and drop’ of the pose, direct to a V4.2 in Poser. Doesn’t work properly.

Denoising in Photoshop CS6 32-bit in 2023

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DAZ’s free Photoshop Bridge only fully works when using 32-bit with a 32-bit Photoshop. Ideally Photoshop CS6. As I’ve explained before here on MyClone, here and here.

But imagine you’ve got it working and are auto-sending renders to a comic-book page that’s set up in Photoshop. Each render drops into a comic-book panel. But, since there’s a lot to render on each page, the renders are quick and grainy and have ‘fireflies’. This grain will not matter so much, if you’re then filtering them using a non-naff artistic Photoshop filter (Mediachance, Sketchmaster 2018, some G’MIC filters).

But what if you’d just like to denoise a photoreal render? Sure you can filter with an NVIDIA-only denoiser, back in DAZ Studio. But that feature has never worked for me, and I guess my NVIDIA graphics card is just not worthy. Or you could lift the shadows and create a flatter and more comic-book look with the Exposure Value and Shutter Speed sliders in DAZ. Less shadows, less noticeable grain and fireflies.

True, there’s a free mcjDenoise plugin for DAZ which actually uses Intel’s OIDN. But it can only be applied to the stack of recent renders. Thus it can’t work to process the render that’s to be automatically sent to Photoshop via the Bridge.

Ideally there would be a Photoshop plugin that uses the open-source Intel OIDN denoiser. Which has a superb AI model especially trained to clear 3D renders. This plugin would speedily fix all the grain and fireflies, in one click. But, rather surprisingly (given the potential market and the very open licence) no-one has made such a thing. There are only two Windows GUI standalones.

What about other AI-powered denoiser plugins for Photoshop? The Topaz AI Denoise plugins were available for CS6, but… only for 64-bit and they were trained for megapixel night photographers, not 3D renders. There were three or four pre-AI denoiser plugins for 32-bit, but they were expensive and (even if still available) are not ideal now.

Thus the fallback in 2023 would be the free and actively developed G’Mic plugin suite. Its 32-bit .8BF is happy to run as a Photoshop CS6 32-bit plugin. Currently in G’Mic, the 2022 filter Testing | Afre | Denoise appears to be the quickest/best on 3D renders. In fact it’s near-instant, which is very nice. But obviously it’s not as good as OIDN. The results are softer than OIDN, and not all noise is cleared. But it’s better than nothing, and if your comic-book page is destined for digital-only… then it may be good enough.

And don’t forget that .PSD is a portable format, so you can do all the render-catching and layout in CS6, and then load the CC 2018 or higher for postwork and filters.

But the ideal for CS6 would be that someone plugs OIDN into G’Mic in the near future.

Tutorial: Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy

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Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy:

Requires:

Blank Boi base figure.
BlankDolly.
Elf Basics.
Blank Boi Nose freebie prop.
Blank Boi in Space freebie clothing set.

1. Load the Blank Boi base figure in Poser. To be found installed in Poser (totally counter-intiuitively) under Figures ..\3DZToonz\BlankBoi\BlankBoi.cr2

2. Load Elf Basics hood and clothing to head and body. Found under Figures ..\Elf Basics. Conform if needed.

3. Load Pose ..\BlankDolly\ Normal Shader | Dolly body gets you the eyes seen here.

4. Props | Blank Boi Features | Nose. Load to head.

5. Adjust DollyEars morphs on ears (from BlankDolly) for pointiness. Set ears slightly off-centre for added quirkiness. A little postwork clean-up will be needed re: the conjunction of the ears and the hood, when seen at at certain angles.

6. Hide (make ‘not visible’) the end of the elf boots. This makes him less obviously a generic fantasy figure. Set the “Feet swap” morph to “2” for the new ‘toon feet’ seen added below.

7. Props ..\Blank Boi In Space | BB Space Pack for an oxygen backpack. If the .OBJ is lost on loading, it’s to be found in ..\Runtime\Geometries\treasurechest\bboiclothes

8. Apply Aiko 3 poses. V3 also, but those poses will tend to reposition the figure somewhere else on the stage.

9. Change the material diffuse colours to a more space-y colour scheme.

10. Render in flat colour and lineart, and combine these two renders in Photoshop…

Not ideal. The ears are sometimes seen inside the hood. The neck-joint needs more of a spacesuit-like air-seal. The feet are ok, but not great. There are probably better figures with which to make a whimsical space-adventure storybook, but the Boi is fairly cute and it could be done. The lack of a mouth is a great advantage, since you wouldn’t have to be constantly tugging at that to get it to look right, or manually drawing it in.

Stop Shreddit videos

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Here’s a uBlock Origin filter that blocks all autoplaying image-loops on Reddit forums. I go to Reddit for information and occasional images, not video memes…

Also…

Paste these into your filters list, and save. Reload the page.

You’re welcome.

How to use Ocenaudio as a simple ‘video to audio’ extractor

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How to use Ocenaudio as a simple ‘video to audio’ extractor. No need for online services or questionable free software from Whereizitagin.

1. Open Ocenaudio (the excellent freeware replacement for Audacity). Drag drop the .MP4 video file on the sidebar.

2. It will be opened as if an audio file.

3. Save it as .MP3. There will be a progress-bar, showing time remaining for conversion. It’s that simple.

DSpeech on test against Balabolka

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It seems rather odd to consider old-school text-to-speech software and SAPI5 voices, at a time when Poland’s ElevenLabs is doing such great things with AI-generated voices. But I’m always one to cherish old Windows freeware, and at present all the new AI voices are online and require a monthly/yearly subscription. So I was pleased to find an alternative freeware to Balbolka for desktop PC text-to-speech using SAPI5 voices. Many such voices are also now abandonware on Archive.org, the key companies having since been sold on several times.

Made in Italy, the DSpeech TTS freeware used to be fairly basic, but it’s improved enormously since about 2016. Though this is not a fact reflected in its rather basic 1990s-style download page, which you’ll have to overlook. This freeware is now in version 1.74 (spring 2022), It’s genuine one-man freeware, made in Italy, and is feature-comparable with Balbolka though a bit rougher in UI and Help translation to English.

The DSpeech download link uses only a .GIF button, so if you have a .GIF blocker in your Web browser, then you instead right-click the page and ‘View Source’. You should then see a live working link to the download in the HTML…

The English manual is included in the software. There’s no Windows installer, just unzip where you want and run it.

SCRIPTING: Beyond the usual control tags, DSpeech supports basic scripting including voice-recognition and script loops. Which is unusual. Apparently it can even read out VLCplayer movie sub-titles in real-time, in a chosen SAPI5 TTS voice and speed.

TAGS: The tagging menus make switching voices easy. There’s better right-click support than in the latest Balabolka for adding tags, though that’s not saying much. When you highlight a word in DSpeech, and add a tag, the word is not wrapped with a closing and opening tag, it’s deleted. Urgh! Having right-click is great, but… the rest of the tag insertion system is not good.

LOQUENDO: DSpeech is supposed to support Loquendo ‘voice expressions’ (laugh, sigh etc) via the Italian Loquendo 6 Italian ‘Paola’ and ‘Luca’ TTS voices, combining words with special expressive tags such as \_Laugh and suchlike. Later the tag syntax was changed to \item=Laugh in Loquendo version 7 voices. But while these v6 voices work fine in any DSpeech, and v7 voices work fine in DSpeech v.1.72.29 (December 2018, not the latest 1.74.x), their expressive cues no longer vocalise in DSpeech. You just hear silence.

Spanish Loquendo 7 voices (not 6) can however ‘express’ when used in Loquendo’s own Java-based TTS Director, which came with the Loquendo SDK. See YouTube for examples and useful links.

Regrettably neither the Loquendo 6 or 7 voices can even be played in the other TTS freeware Balabolka, though they do show up on its voice menu. It thus seems that properly-working Loquendo voices are limited to…

* Loquendo 6 (any voice) on DSpeech 1.74.x or earlier. Loquendo 7 not supported on the latest DSpeech.

* Loquendo 7 (Spanish) on DSpeech 1.72.29 (or earlier?), or Loquendo 7 (Spanish) on Loquendo TTS Director with SDK and Spanish pack.

The Spanish version 7 voices do however have ‘expressives’ that work fine with Loquendo TTS Director 7, which was Windows freeware which shipped with the developer/API/SDK kit. This success at least showed me that the problem was not with my PC or a 32-bit / 64-bit Windows clash, at least for version 7 voices.

Yet it’s strange. Obviously DSpeech could, at one time, play the ‘expressives’ in the Loquendo 6 voices. But, no longer, it seems. Switching back to an older DSpeech 1.72.29 didn’t cure the problem, but it did usefully fix the playing of the Loquendo 7 voices. I suspect that Loquendo 6 voices now have a 32-bit / 64-bit problem on 64-bit Windows, despite the player and voices both being 32-bit.

Loquendo TTS Director voices have a complete list of expressives in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Loquendo\LTTS7\data\voices\Soledad\SoledadGildedParalinguistics.sde file (change name for each voice). Open it in Notepad++ to see the list in plain-text. For instance, Soledad has the following, and obviously you can also mix and match and tone-shift…


\item=Ah
\item=Ah_01
\item=Ah_02
\item=Ay
\item=Ay_01
\item=Breath
\item=Breath_01
\item=Buh
\item=Buh_01
\item=Buuu
\item=Buuu_01
\item=Cataplum
\item=Cataplum_01
\item=Click
\item=Click_01
\item=Click_02
\item=Cough
\item=Cough_01
\item=Cough_02
\item=Cry
\item=Cry_01
\item=Cry_02
\item=Cry_03
\item=Ehm
\item=Ehm_01
\item=Epa
\item=Epa_01
\item=Hey
\item=Hey_01
\item=Hiccup
\item=Hiccup_01
\item=Hiccup_02
\item=Laugh
\item=Laugh_01
\item=Laugh_02
\item=Mhmm
\item=Mhmm_01
\item=Mhmm_02
\item=Mhmm_03
\item=Oh
\item=Oh_01
\item=Ohoh
\item=Ohoh_01
\item=Ops
\item=Ops_01
\item=Prrr
\item=Prrr_01
\item=Shhh
\item=Shhh_01
\item=Sigh
\item=Sigh_01
\item=Sigh_02
\item=Singing
\item=Singing_01
\item=Smack
\item=Smack_01
\item=Smack_02
\item=Sniff
\item=Sniff_01
\item=Sniff_02
\item=Sniff_03
\item=Snore
\item=Snore_01
\item=Swallow
\item=Swallow_01
\item=Throat
\item=Throat_01
\item=Throat_02
\item=Throat_03
\item=Uff
\item=Uff_01
\item=Ups
\item=Ups_01
\item=Whistle
\item=Whistle_01
\item=Whistle_02
\item=Whistle_03
\item=Whistle_04
\item=Whistle_05
\item=Yawn
\item=Yawn_01
\item=Yawn_02
\item=Yeee
\item=Yeee_01
\item=Yuhu
\item=Yuhu_01
\item=Yuhu_02
\item=Zas
\item=Zas_01

Easier to just paste these all in and cut out what you don’t want. Rather than wrestling with menu-based insertion.

VOICEWARE: DSpeech has support for reading with a VoiceWare TTS, but not for a vital aspect of the voice. The first version of the TTS VoiceWare voices (e.g. VW Bridget, British) had different inflections on words if you added ! ?! or !? (again, see YouTube for demo and useful links). But this feature of the voice is not supported in DSpeech. It is supported in Balabolka. So this is another deal-breaker for DSpeech.

CONCLUSIONS: Despite what at first glance seems to be DSpeech’s more intuitive right-click tag adding, Balabolka is on several counts the superior tool for longer-form editing. It properly wraps highlighted words in starting/closing tags, which is vital if you’re TTS-coding something longer than a paragraph. It also supports VoiceWare’s ! ?! and !?, useful for one of the best British voices.

I thus suggest using the latest Balabolka for freeware TTS scripting and recording, and the old Loquendo TTS Director + its Spanish voices for creation of vocal FX, pitch and speed-shifted to match the voice being used in Balabolka. Then embed these vocal FX as audio clips in Balabolka. This is not as ideal as having Balabolka support Loquendo (it refuses to even read their voices), but it’s a viable workaround.

The ideal would be to have a standard SAPI5 voice that was ‘expressives only’, for use in Balabolka. A sort of audio FX bank, that could be reliably called with a simple tag (such as \_sneeze etc). But so far as I can see, that doesn’t exist, other than by chopping bits from my Dictionary of British Pronunciation for TTS.

Finally, note that TTS Director only ‘sees’ its own Loquendo voices, and is therefore no good as a general SAPI5 TTS script editor. TTS can be done in Adode Captivate (used for super-Powerpoint ‘e-learning’ creation) and in CrazyTalk / Cartoon Animator, but the editing is not at all comparable to Balaboka.

Find the G8.1 FASC face controller interface in DAZ Studio 4.21.x

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How to find and load the G8.1 FASC face controller interface in DAZ Studio 4.21.x.

1. You first install Genesis 8 Starter Essentials pack, if you have not already done so. It should be in your Library at the DAZ store. Possibly you have not installed this since before Genesis 8.1 was introduced, so you need to do it again — it now also includes the 8.1 stuff.

These are chunky downloads, and will take a while for those on slow connections. Extract the .ZIP and install as usual. Those with an install manager may do things differently, but this is the old-school way.

2. Load Genesis 8.1 from the DAZ Library (you do this from Genesis 8 Female or Male folder, not the 8.1 folder, for some reason).

3. In the Genesis 8 | Developer Kit folder…

4. … you will find the FACS (face controls interface) loader icon, the one with the powder-blue background…

5. Load this to a default Genesis 8.1 figure. You don’t need to first select the Head. In the hierarchy list you will now see that a FACS interface has been added.

6. Switch the DAZ Studio UI over to the Posing / Shaping tab, and the controls will become visible.

In practice, though, they appear to be far more trouble that they’ve worth. The huge main problem being that it’s very difficult to easily select each face controller ‘chip’, by simply clicking on it. 90% of the time, no matter what selection movement-type you have activated up-top…

… the attempt to select a face control chip by clicking on it fails to do or activate anything. Sometimes it selects and lets you work with it, but most of the time it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter where you click — the arrow, the plus sign, or exactly on the wireframe wire — most times nothing happens.

The alternative option of using the control sliders, which are alongside and do the same thing for each control chip, works fine. Though there you have the hassle of scrolling up and down the big list, and trying to work out what each control name refers to on the face.

A standalone Intel OIDN de-noiser with GUI… Merry Christmas!

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Tutorials 1 Comment

I dug up a free Windows GUI version of Intel’s CPU Denoiser, aka the open-source OIDN. This is standalone AI-powered desktop software made by a guy in Japan, and which no-one but some Lightwave guys seem to have ever heard about.

You feed it your partially-completed .PNG render, which has noisy ‘fireflies’ you want to clear. It works back to Windows 7, on SSE4.1 CPUs or better, and with most 64-bit OS’s.

So… no need to worry if Santa didn’t bring you an expensive $800 NVIDIA graphics card, or worry about wrangling with many dependencies on other bits of software such as ImageMagick.

It just works, and beautifully. Merry Christmas!

USE:

1. Download and unzip OIDN-gui from GitHub.

2. Run OIDN.exe and the simple graphical user-interface will appear.

Here you load the same target .PNG render into all three slots, “Beauty”, “Albedo” and “Normal”. Then “Run Denoiser”.

DAZ iRay can do the regular render (here called “Beauty”). But if you did also have additional auxiliary/buffer/canvas renders, then your “Normal” would help preserve subtle bump-mapping, while the “Albedo” would do the same for fine textures. And apparently these two work in tandem, so both would be needed.

But you may have already stripped most bumps with the DAZ Scene Optimiser, and have no complex fine-patterned clothes in the scene. If so, then you’re smiling.

There is however another way to add detail back into a denoised render. In Photoshop you drop the output over the original, as a new layer. Then you ‘paint the detail back in’, by running a soft-edged small Eraser brush over the bits where you need most details (eyes, eyelashes etc). This reveals the detail beneath… and hopefully doesn’t reveal any pesky fireflies.

In tests an old 32-thread Intel workstation took about 2 seconds on a single 1920px render, and gave great results even without having the proper “Albedo” and “Normal” auxiliary/buffer/canvas renders available. The denoised image is saved with the same file extension and type, in the same folder, but the filename will have ‘-denoised’ added.

It seems you can batch process a series of animation frames with this (untested by me). But here you should know that OIDN is not “temporally stable”. Which in plain English means that when the animation is run ‘you may see some slight waver or detail-popping’ across strongly denoised areas.

That’s it. There is a later version by the same maker, re-written for QT. But that has no regular Windows .EXE file, so far as I can see.

There’s another Windows GUI option here, but it’s drag-and-drop with no batch. The above software does batch.

Note: Not needed in Poser 12 and also the latest E-on Vue, as in both cases Intel’s OIDN is built-in. The above advice is mostly for DAZ and Poser 11 users.