Category Archives: Uncategorized

A plugin for Blender, that auto ‘renders’ the 3D scene with generative AI, and it appears to be a third-party plugin and not official. Looking a bit rough at present (the Christmas tree is flubbed, in the image below, and the box is not round), and currently in a rough beta and with a waiting list. But it’s a glimpse of what’s going to be possible in terms of auto-rendering without typing out descriptive prompts. Especially if another AI ‘pre-processes’ to work out what the shapes are (‘girl, round box, plant, tree with baubles’), before the generative AI image work takes place.

EmotiVoice AI: a Multi-Voice and Prompt-Controlled TTS Engine. Open source and free, for text-to-speech audio generation…

The most prominent feature is emotional synthesis, allowing you to create speech with a wide range of emotions, including happy, excited, sad, angry and others.

An easy-to-use web interface is provided. There is also a scripting interface for batch generation of results.

Thus, if you can get past the fiddly command-line install and Python dependencies (there’s at present no simple standalone Windows installer), then this may well be of interest to 3D and 2D animators, as well as creators of TTS voice-overs for YouTube videos etc.

Found in a 1992 NASA book on Space Resources, an amusing staff cartoon which makes the point about how the 19th century would have visualised mining on the lunar surface. And thus that the 20th century can’t easily visualise how the late 21st and 22nd century Moon colonies will go about such things.

Since it’s public domain, it might inspire those looking for a starting-point for a ‘steampunk miner’ concept, for realisation in 3D as Poser/DAZ character content?

Here we can also see the difference between the really terrible scans that some of these old books and suchlike get, at the online archives, and a good scan of the same page. We need to start treating our vintage space art with more archival respect.

I’ve added a second freebie to my Stuff for free page, here on this blog. It’s a cute retro three-wheeler car, an .OBJ conversion of a public domain CC0 Blender model. The original was nice, but had no material zones. I’ve added these, and now you can easily drag-and-drop new materials. Commercial use of your renders is fine by me.

Comic Book FX. The Comic Book Sound Effect Database. 1,482, so far.

The sculpting tool ZBrush has a new lite version ZBrushCore, stripped down to the core to make it easier for beginners. Currently set to launch October 14th, and on a special pre-order offer of $119.

DAZ’s Carrara 8.5 Pro is currently nearly half-price on the store…

The Octane renderer for DAZ Carrara is due sometime this Springtime. Back in early February 2014 Octane was announced as “a few weeks” away. Octane is a GPU (graphics card) based renderer, and here’s a Jan 2014 preview. It’s not iClone — in terms of true “what you see is what you get” real-time rendering — but for a viewport updater it’s still pretty impressive, and is apparently even doing automated replacement of the textures with Carrara shaders…

H.P. Lovecraft was afraid of caves and octopus, so what could be more Lovecraftian than the new free Cave Octopus for DAZ Studio (warning: DS 4.6 .duf file).