News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

New Stonemason scene released

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Any new scene pack from Stonemason is guaranteed success. The latest such is the just-released “stand-alone 360 degree environment” called Return To The Enchanted Forest, which is now on the DAZ Store for DAZ Studio and Poser. It looks like a darker and moodier version of his existing Enchanted Forest pack. Perfect for dark fairy-tales…

Survey of 3D assets for Space Art: planets and planet surfaces

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My Survey of 3D assets for Space Art for users of Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2014 / and DAZ Studio.

Part One: planets and planet surfaces.

1. Planetary bodies:

Landing Zone’s Mophing Terrains will quite easily get you a unique rugged planetoid or moon, although it’s showing its age and the textures look a little soupy today…

One could, with a few tweaks and a new sky, double for Mars or Tatooine or similar…

Planet X for Poser. Spheres specially UV mapped for the various planet textures available for free…

“Textures are no problem for this model. UV mapped to accommodate the wealth of 2:1 textures available from the likes of NASA, content providers, and enthusiasts across the web, a simple search will begin to yield a galaxy of planets”

You can find a really nice 2:1 texture set for alien planets via MyClone…

Planet Suite for Poser (doesn’t work in DAZ)…

“is a collection of medium and high polygon 3D planets and celestial bodies. There is an Earth-like layered planet with separate surface, clouds and atmosphere, a sun, a moon, a generic planet with no atmosphere, a ringed planet, an asteroid, an asteroid field and a star field.The planets are surfaced entirely with Poser’s shader nodes so they can be rendered at virtually any size, without fear of pixellation.”

Over on the DAZ Store, there’s the ‘Strange Worlds: Planet Pack’…

Lucky DAZ Carrara users have the Home Planet pack…

2. Photoshop plugins:

Photoshop users can make their own 2D backdrops for Poser and DAZ by using the Gitterator starfield and nebulae plugin, and the LunarCell planet making plugin. SolarCell can also make flare effects, as can Star Spikes. And if you need quick efficient water, they also have Flood.

3. Space Panorama Systems:

The DAZ Store has The Heart of Space, and Heart of Space 2: Nebulas, both addon packs for the Millennium Environment pack. Although the ME pack backdrops have started to look increasingly low-res as the years have gone by, and possibly these Space packs have suffered the same fate? Please comment if you know different.

4. Special Effects:

Space Explosions for Poser is a set of animated explosions.

5. Atmospheres:

Horizons with the Atmospheres Pack…

“Bring your Poser spacecraft into close orbit around strange new worlds, with the Horizons morphing scenery pack. Horizons is a terrain set complete with morphing water, clouds and land layers, as well as two separate cloud and land figures to allow you to create different effects by merging using extra layers. With morphs to curve it into a planetary horizon and seven different terrain morphs, you can achieve a wide range of scenes with as much or as little horizon curve as you need.”

There’s also a special SF version of Atmospheres/Weird Weather…

Spaceport scenes and the like would benefit from Fog Tool Deluxe III for DAZ and Poser, which is available on the DAZ Store…

There’s a quick tutorial for Fog Tool Deluxe here. And a Poser Pro free materials upgrade for Fog Tool.

There’s also a useful short volumetric “light cone” tutorial for Poser, at 3D Artist, perhaps useful for Sparth-like spaceport scenes…

Spaceport scenes could also benefit from the use of various greebles packs, intended for use in the middle and far distance, of which Stonemason’s is perhaps the best known…

Steampunk 3D Content Assets Survey, part three

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Number three in this series is… my close frottage of some of the more striking steampunk clothing, available for DAZ Studio / Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2014…

Victoria 4:

The core DAZ/Poser female outfit is Lady LittleFox’s SteamPunk for V4, of which there are now also many retexture variants available. This being one of the subtlest and less gaudy…

You can also buy the same Accessories for V4 seperately and at less cost.

The other major V4 steampunk outfit is (or was) Acherontia Finery and its Apteromata Flight addon…

Sadly, though, both these appear to have been withdrawn from sale recently (they were available until a few months ago).

Less fantastical Victorian-era daywear can also be had for V4, in various forms, although not a great deal.

Rather unusual, and worth noting, is this V4 Mechanica No.5 mechanical doll… Was at RuntimeDNA, now appears to be lost.

Micheal 4:

Sadly I really couldn’t find anything I’d really want to use on Micheal 4. Perhaps Poser/DAZ users are meant to be satisfied with a Vicky-only lesbian adventure…

The best I’ve found is EF-Steampunk for M4, although it’s a little too “Wild West” for my purist English tastes.

There’s also this awesome Steam Powered Armor for Michael 4… Was at RuntimeDNA, now appears to be lost.

And the Space Defenders: Commander for M4 suit could double up, with some retexturing, as an Imperial airship commander’s uniform…

Micheal 3:

Possibly Micheal 4’s neo-Victorian wardrobe is so lacking because the market was saturated for M3 — there’s a fine variety of older M3 Victorian clothes to be found by searching the DAZ Store for “19th Century”…

David:

The Edwardian Casual Suit for David 3 had this rather nice working-class addon, “J. Buckley”…

Dr. Pitterbill:

SteamPunk for Pitterbill…

Pitterbill also has a couple of “Han Solo -style” steampunk outfits from Jonnte, although these seem more Wild West than English Victorian.

More exciting is this SteamPunk Scientist hat…

Plain OBJ or Poser-only personal props:

Hat Set Steampunk gives the standard base for a helmet and goggles, on which one can build.

There are also various types of more elaborate goggles available, to which you can fit your own oculars (some come with such attachments) such as these…

Steampunk Armor for Poser also looks rather cool for a Time Traveller -style inventor character…

Steampunk Tobacco Pipes…

The DAZ Store has a nice Steampunk Explorer mask for entering the sewers and the like….

And Jonnte has a SteamPunk Protective Mask, although it needs to be severely dirtied up…

That’s it. I might have a look at weapons for the next installment.

Steampunk 3D Content Assets Survey, part two

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Here’s my survey of some of the various quality steampunk transportation, available for DAZ Studio / Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2014 …

Personal street transport:

The classic early Victorian mode of personal transportation, the Penny Farthing by Traveler…

Something that could look home-brew steam powered (add a steam boiler and a retexture), is Oskarsson’s Steampunk Transport1…

And at the top of the range in road transport is the Steampunk Coach…

There’s also a nice SteamPunk Mechanica II Monocycle.

Those in need of an early car should look at the Steampunk Carriage.

Airships:

A pretty good work-horse of the air is 1971s’s Vacuum Zeppelin for Poser…

Also look at this excellent free airship from Adm on Archive 3D. Like most Archive 3D models, the textures are missing and you will have to retexture by hand…

If you want a leviathan-class airship, Meshbox’s Clockwork Steampunk Zeppelin 1888 should fit the bill. It also has its own Docking Towers…

The Steampunk Cathederal for Poser also has an airship docking tower. This one looks best in Poser, and even then may need some texturing.

Hot-air balloons:

There are many conventional balloon models. But this delightful steampunk hot-air balloon is something special, with a flag texture and brass bathysphere-type basket…

promo1

Going underground, not into the air? Try this Meshbox Clockwork Steampunk Digger…

Going underwater? Try this free one-person submarine, Senya’s Submarine for Poser…

Or try 1971s’s Steam Fish for Poser…

Also look at the excellent and authentic free Turtle, although you will need to convert it from Sketchup…

For something more Nemo-esque there’s also a very nice Meshbox Submarine, although it’s only available as a freebie if you buy the whole of the Meshbox Clockwork Vol.1 series…

The best of the free 3D Warehouse steampunk models are all collected in this comprehensive collection.

Another installment of the Steampunk Survey, soon!

Steampunk 3D content assets survey, part one

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Here are a few of what I think are the best scene assets for Victorian steampunk renders and animations in Poser 9 / Poser 2012 / DAZ Studio:

Old England room…

Steampunk Timelab (makes sure you get the Poser, and not the Vue, version), and a cool boiler which would suit the lab nicely…

The DAZ Store’s The Enigma could also fit in a Lab nicely…

The following three Meshbox scenes, and the trolley bus, are part of the larger Steampunk City Volume 1:

Meshbox Fantasy Crystal Palace…

Meshbox Charles Babbage’s Thinking Mansion…

Meshbox Baker Street Construction Set…

For a more interesting roofline, combine Baker Street with the NeverHome pack, available on the DAZ Content Store. Suitable street accessories for Baker Street, from smaller developers, would be the SteamPunk WheelChair, and a free MIDI-powered Victorian street organ…

Also suitable for the street is the Steampunk Clockwork Trolley-Bus (yes, there were steam-powered trams, in the early days) which is almost a complete environment in itself…

The DAZ Store’s Rybolt Mechanical would nicely complement the Bot Shop…

And the DAZ Store has set of Steampunk Tools and Machinery for the lab (I found the textures on these are best in Poser)…

Good for simple posing of characters against are: DM’s Clock for Poser and DM’s Inertia for Poser and the DAZ Store’s Steampunk Empire…

That’s it for now. Clothing, goggles, headwear, and rifles/guns will be covered in a future post on this blog. I’ve also noticed that there’s a number of elements now that could called “valvepunk” or “Teslapunk” — I’ll also survey those in a future post.

DAZ free software offer extended to 31st March 2012

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It seems that DAZ has officially extended the free software offer to 31st March 2012…

“Due to an absolutely astonishing response from 3D ART enthusiasts everywhere, DAZ is extending this offer through March 31, 2012!”

And it looks like 3D Photoshop Bridge is now back in the mix, now included in the DAZ Studio Pro download rather than an optional extra as before…

“3D Photoshop Bridge: Retail $199.00 (Included with DAZ Studio 4 Pro) Retail $199.00”

How to render with Poser using the GPU, via Octane

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Durn it… I missed an extra external Poser render (see yesterday’s blog post on these).

Poser works with Refractive Software’s Octane (Nvidia graphics cards only). What makes Octane interesting is that it uses the GPU for render acceleration. The common advice on Poser forums to the… “I wanna new graphics card, which is best for Poser?” query, seems to be that Poser relies mostly on the main processor. But Octane would seem to change that, passing over the heavy-lifting of rendering to the much faster graphics card.

Octane is still in beta, and is reportedly not wholly stable. But then the same could be said of the similarly crash-prone LuxRender. Octane costs E99 Euros (about $130). There’s a Deviant Art group of Poser2Octane users who can give advice, and there are tutorials from the group on how to use it with Poser Pro 2014.

It appears Poser users need to export an OBJ of the target Poser scene — either directly from Poser, or (for more complex scenes?) via loading the Poser scene in DAZ Studio, then saving out as an OBJ, in order to get an OBJ that Octane won’t reject. Sounds a little clunky.

One alternative route that occurred to me might be to get a Collada export from Poser Pro 2014, then use Meshlab to get the OBJ and textures. Another pipeline might be: Collada – Autodesk’s free FBX convertor – OBJ. In fact, I read on the Octane forums that .dae import is supported, so it may now be a straight Poser – Collada – Octane pipeline.

My guess would be that it would probably also be a good idea to use Photoshop’s batch processing to downsample any really huge 4000px or larger materials/texures, down to 2048px, before you load the scene in Octane. Game cards, especially ones that are no longer cutting-edge (like mine), are geared for handling smaller textures.

The Poser2Octane tutorial doesn’t cover re-lighting the scene in Octane, but there’s a very clearly-presented video tutorial on that here…

I do like what I see, I must say. But it doesn’t look as seamless as Vue.

A survey of external renderers for Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2012

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I’ve been looking into external renderers for Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2014, other than the “PoserFusion” plugins that ship with 2012 (and which let you use 3DS Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and LightWave). Vue 10 seems the best option. But I think I still need to research more, to find out if one of those PoserFusion plugins for Maya or 3DS Max or Lightwave can offer something more seamless and “three-clicks” than Vue. But from my research it seems Vue is the currently preferred choice of many Poser users. Anyway, here’s the survey…

1. Cinema 4D: Interposer ($75) is an alternative to the PoserFusion C4D module that ships with 2012. Fine, if you own Cinema 4D ($1,000+). Personally C4D is not a 3D software I’ve ever touched. I have old versions of 3DS Max and Maya in their educational versions, so one of those — probably 3DS Max — would be my choice over C4D.

Verdict: No.

2. Blender: a Poser importer titled Poser Tools 2 for Blender is actively underway at 2012 — but it seems far from finished. While Blender is free, it has a nightmare of an interface, and I really doubt I’d want to use it unless Poser Tools comes with a “really simple five-click Wizard” or similar.

Verdict: Very unlikely.

3. Pose2Lux ($ free) gives access to the free LuxRender. The disadvantages are…

  * still in beta at version 0.8.7.

  * download pages and even the quick-start page are presented in “techie developer”-speak that’s likely to have that average hobbyist creative running screaming to the hills.

  * getting it to actually work looks to be an incredibly fiddly process.

  * LuxRender doesn’t exactly seem stable. The same stability problems appears to affect the Reality 1 LuxRender plugin for DAZ, which negate a Poser-DAZ-Reality-LuxRender pipeline.

Verdict: Unstable. No, but look again at Reality 2 when it arrives.

4. Vue: Vue 10 Frontier ($99) is commercial hobbyist software dedicated to working with DAZ and Poser imports. It’s a cut down version of the more expensive and more complicated Vue software versions. Vue is definitely more affordable than the big beasts such as 3DS Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Lightwave. Worth trying. Some drawbacks, though…

  * forums say Poser 9 / 2012 character import currently only works with the 64-bit version? And then possibly only with the more expensive Vue 10 Complete or Infinite versions?

Update on the above point: this official page for Vue 10 Studio states…

“Poser SDK from August 2011: This SDK adds support of Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2014. This SDK used on Mac will only work in 64 bit. It will work in both 32 and 64 bit on Windows.”

But it seems this is incorrect. Several different forums users are adamant that a Poser Pro 2014 .pz3 file will only import under the 64-bit version of Vue 10. I’ve tried some 32-bit experiments myself, and it seems the forums users are correct. A 32-bit Vue 10 install will not import a Poser Pro 2014 .pz3 file. Vue’s spec sheets on their Web site are misleading. I also learned from the forum that E-on, the makers of Vue, are notorious for giving out such misleading information on their products.

  * import of .pz3 files can be a bit of a nightmare, in terms of getting Vue to accept them.

  * model import other than from Poser or DAZ requires the $129 3DImport plugin.

  * bump map import can be glitchy, and many other materials may need fiddly tweaking to reduce a likely performance-hit from a scene with characters using massive 4000px textures, and from any texture mess-up that may happen on import to Vue.

  * static characters / props only. No animation gets imported.

  * Vue really bogs down when importing more than a simple character.

  * the ability to render higher than 1920px needs an extra $70 plugin called RenderUp.

  * Vue’s rendering is really s…l…o….w……

Despite its many apparent drawbacks Vue looks initially like the best value and simplest option, and comes with a skin shader plugin called SkinVue that’s designed to do a mostly-automatic conversion of the skin materials on the Poser character imports. However, SkinVue requires the purchase of extra per-character modules.

But at a total purchase of $300 for Vue 10 Frontier + RenderUp + 3DImport this version of Vue is not as cheap as it first looks. You might was as well buy Vue 10 Studio. Even then, I’d have to be prepared to shell out for Windows 8 in 64-bit, and for SkinVue character modules.

Verdict:Perhaps. But very expensive. And slow. And heavy on system resources.

5. The other alternative to consider might be DAZ Carrara, which supports Poser .pz3 files. But I’ve not been able to find out much about the quality of the renderer when compared like-for-like with Vue. I see lots of reports of crashes, although from some years ago. Most people seem to currently use Vue instead, and I guess there’s a reason for that. Possibly it’s render quality? But I guess the new “coming soon” Carrara 9 might change that, if it can offer a simple “three clicks” import and render of complete Poser scenes with the original placement of lights.

Verdict: Wait, see if Carrara 9 works well with whole Poser scenes, and gives great render quality

6. Octane. I found out about Octane after this post was released. I made a separate post on it. It seems to have the same problems as LuxRender.

Verdict: Interesting. But doubtful.

Overall, Vue 10 seems the way to go. But only if you’re running on 64-bit Windows with lots of RAM and generally have a big wallet. So until then, for me, it’s back to looking at the PoserFusion plugins, and the possibility of using them with 3DS Max.