At Renderosity, Nursoda has a new character…
Poser 12 Early Access – new version released
A new iteration has been released for Poser 12 Early Access.
The last public update was 12.0.421 (public on 2nd March 2021). It’s now at 12.0.469 (public on 7th April 2021), so there are six behind-the-scenes updates included in the new release.
Notable items in the Changelog:
* “OpenGL Comic Book Preview: Last Draw checkbox option added to improve quality of geometric edge lines”. Hurrah, this is the first non-photoreal tweak for Poser 12, and hopefully the first of many. I wonder if this change is related to my discovery of ‘how to fill in the chips’ in Poser 11 lineart?
* “Material Room: added ‘Replace All’ button in Texture Manager. Gives the ability to replace all occurrences of a texture map with a newly selected texture map in a single action. The ‘Replace All’ button opens a drop down list to replace all occurrences of a texture map in a material, object, or the entire scene.”
* “Material Room: Implemented drag/drop of an image map, to replace an existing image map node”.
* A number of improvements and fixes to the Japanese and German translated versions, which at a guess possibly also led to the “FBX Export texture map improvements” which fix “missing text characters”. Possibly Japanese and the German ‘dotted-letter’-type characters were not being passed into the FBX, at a guess?
* Some OPTIX rendering tweaks and fixes.
* “Added PoserPython actor locking functions”. At a guess, this may be related to the new commercial script LockMaster for Poser 12.
* Python API now “has the ability to delete morphTarget”, and “remove a morph from an actor”. Sounds useful, to be able to clear some or all morphs with a click.
And some ‘store-purchased content install’ additions and tweaks, which I don’t intend to use. I’ll still be downloading and installing manually. Some of it will be unavoidable though… “Added ability to present dynamic promotional images as background to splash screen on launch”.
Free the squid…
OnlyFreeTurboSquid. A handy UserScript for your Web browser, that…
“makes it so you only see free things on TurboSquid.”
Squid’s in…
Here’s a demo of AntFarm’s Squid Mech in Poser’s Comic Book lineart. Looks very nice in Comic Book Mode. Regrettably the textures are very heavily dark and grungy, though, and there are no alternative MATs. But one can use the gamma-lift script in Poser, and then put a ring of bright lights on it.
Gilbert the Goldfish, also fished out of the DAZ Store bargain-bin for a few $s, was less of an immediate success. Trans-mapped fins mean he doesn’t toon well. But they are at least the right shape in geometry, so the trans-mapping can be replaced with toon-edged textures and then coloured toony hair material images applied. Then in the Material Room : Simple set a Transparency edge on them of 82%. Save as “Gilbert2021” in his folder, which is ‘FishFriends’ rather than Gilbert. Evidently a whole series of toon fish ‘FishFriends’ was once planned.
Still not ideal, but he was only about $2.50. Could be useful to comic-strip artists as an artists’ reference model, hand-drawing over the base render.
The discounted ‘The Back: Lite’ was also only partially successful. Skimpily documented, it needs one of the backdrop sets for me to be able to discover how it works, re: the required correctly-proportioned picture sizes and node connections for the backdrop. The ground morphs work fine and show in Comic Book mode. There’s obviously more to it than just loading a 2D picture into the back, re: getting the picture to fit properly.
Update: It shows up on Props and Poses as “OOT The Back”. Textures are under ..\Runtime\textures\outoftouch. It you get the Space Gate pack, you’ll see what the sizes are. Transparency is always “on” when a Floor loads, and needs to be manually tweaked back again. But otherwise it all works in Poser 11.
Poser: the Chain Break tool
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the “Chain Break” tool, aka the “Chain Tool” in Poser. Ever wondered what it does? Here’s how it works.
1. Inside a Poser figure is a simple ‘chain’ skeleton that allows it to move. This is very useful — for instance, when you pull on a hand, the arm will follow along with it and the figure will start to bend over to one side from the hip. Sometimes you need to temporarily break the chain skeleton inside the figure. This is what the ‘Chain Break’ tool does. To get to it, ensure you can see your Editing Tools panel of icons.
2. First, place a figure on the Poser stage. Ensure the figure is selected. With the Editing Tools panel and its buttons visible, click the ‘Chain Break’ icon (or press the ‘l’ key).
3. Now simply click on the body part you want. After your click, the body part will now have a little icon on it. Its skeleton chain has been broken off from body parts further down the chain. (You will also see one on the hips, but that one cannot be removed).
4. Now, if the figure’s hand is selected and moved, the lower arm will no longer follow along with it. Select the Translate/Pull tool (press the ‘t’ key) and try it. The selected body part is no longer part of the skeleton chain. You will see however that the wrist, hand and fingers can still be moved, even while the lower arm stays put. The rest of the figure’s torso is also unaffected when the hand moves.
5. Once you have made your adjustments to the hand, click the ‘Chain Break’ icon again (or press the ‘L’ key). Then click on the icon on the locked body part. This will re-link the skeleton and the figure will be back to normal.
6. The re-posed hand will stay as you posed it, and will not suddenly be jerked about once the skeleton chain re-connects. For instance if you now move the arm and tilt the figure’s torso, the hand will not change. This does not mean it is locked, just that it is at the end of the arm chain and thus it has no further IK ‘chain’ pulling on it. However, if you have parented a prop to it (e.g. a battle-axe) then you will have effectively extended the chain. Pulling on the axe will move the hand.
The tool works on more than arms and hands, and can work on nearly all chained body parts (except the hips).
Mastering Animation in Poser
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.
Poser 12 Early Access updates again – now has new PDF Manual
Poser 12 Early Access has updated again. Now at 12.0.421 (2nd March 2021). The main thing is the Manual.
* “Major updates to Poser Manual to cover Cycles updates and other new features”. Related to this is “Several Help menu commands are correctly linked” in the software.
Beyond that, more tweaks to SuperFly, which is Poser’s implementation of Blender’s main Cycles renderer…
* “SuperFly using Infinite lights [now] consistently renders specularity on sequenced images”. Which appears to be a useful fix for animators.
* “Fixed HDRI background images corruption, no longer previews or renders red or black.” Also, SuperFly render size was being constrained in size by a 4095 pixel limit on background images. This limit has been removed.
And some Python scripting things fixed, presumably ahead of a big update for the bundled scripts and more (said to be due in mid-March), such as…
* “Bundled Python command-line tools and apps now have the correct library load path attributes.”
A few demos
A few Poser tech-demo renders for some of the items picked up back on Black Friday or thereabouts.
Vintage Robot.
EV6 Europa for V4, A4. Afflicted with grungy ‘swamp-soup’ textures, but you can see here the potential for a texture makeover.
1971s Indoor area. Nice as always, from 1971s.
Mechanical Sandworm. Looks awesome when Comic Book inked in Smooth Shaded Display mode. Its basic textures are not great, but would provides a surface to colorize later. The “eyes” (not really visible here) can be hidden.
Cybertenko Spy Hood. Grungy textures again but a nice addition to the steampunkery collection. The whacky ‘earpipes’ can be made invisible, for a more straightfoward helmet.
1971 Techno Interior. Toons nicely, but like most corridors it’s difficult to control the lighting unless you want either ‘dark shadows and glows’ or ‘a uniform spread’.
A Moebius style helmet from the Helmet-Z3 set by Poisen. The curve at the base of the sides looks more low-poly than I would like, without fixing. But otherwise, a fine design. Real-time lineart run through a quick Sketch render in Poser…
Lots more, but these were some of the ones I picked.
DAZ/Poser content survey, February 2021
What’s new for DAZ Studio and Poser, in February 2021? Here’s my monthly pick.
Science-fiction:
Need to recreate Marvel Comic’s Deathlok? The DIY Cyborg Outfit for Genesis 8 Males will help get you started in the right direction.
Free RoboFish which might also make for interesting headwear.
Angel Heart Outfit for Genesis 8 Females. Possibly similar to a Chinese superhero, though, so check that before any commercial use. If it’s an original, then it would also suit a Moebius-style comic.
Frankenstein’s Lab, modelled on the 1931 Universal movie, which I think is now in the public domain.
Also a Cosmic Ray Diffuser from the same movie.
WarTech beast pack as Poser/DAZ standalones, presumably for WarTech fan-art only. Still, it looks like a content developer might learn a lot about “looks like it was painted” figure textures from these.
Moon Bug and extra Textures for DAZ Studio.
Soviet Snow Tank, which might perhaps be adapted to a sci-fi hover-tank.
Steampunk and dieselpunk:
CyberSteampunk Accessories – The Mask for Genesis 8 Female. Various mask models.
Victorian Bath Chair for Poser, by railway specialist Dryjack.
Futuristic Vintage Car in FBX. Meant for games, so may be low-poly. On the other hand that may be good, as you could then have a road of them in different colours, animated.
Technomage Prison Cell. Five parts, which can be detached. Also for DAZ Studio, on another page.
dForce Unusual Hat for G8F. Definitely unusual. Though before commercial use I’d want to check it isn’t inspired by The Handmaiden’s Tale TV series, the new Dune movie etc.
dForce Business Woman Dress for G8F. With a few added accessories, it looks just as suited to an early-1920s dieselpunk environment. Perhaps an airship passenger or attendant.
YesterYears II for La Femme, with a nice looking 1926-1946 style.
Usefully generic Steampunk Wings, made for La Femme but presumably they can be fitted to any figure. They don’t convince you that they work, which is kind of important with steampunk stuff, but they do look like they would toon well in Poser’s Comic Book mode.
Steampunk or fantasy scissors for DAZ Studio.
Fantasy:
A free Scroll Throne.
A Hobbit house, though I’m not sure I’d want to use this commercially as it feels a touch too close to the movie versions. For authenticity the Ikea-style cushion-covers and the chintzy Celtic knotwork would need to be removed. There appears to be no front-door. Still, very nicely done otherwise.
Ye Olde Library Props Add-on would add suitable clutter for a Bilbo/Frodo ‘scholar hobbit’ hole.
There are also a variety of demon-people currently going through the DAZ Store, which I assume are closely akin to some new TV series that has passed me by?
Storybook:
Party Props. That’s all this month, for this category.
Toon:
A TB Toon Picnic Camper for Poser.
Grizelda for the HiveWire House Cat. I seem to recall that Grumpy Cat has a copyright troll, so beware of commercial use.
DAZ Aniblocks for Moshi the toon kitten.
Little PuddyTat Poses for the HiveWire Kitten.
Animals:
Woolly Mammoth for Poser. Also for DAZ Studio, on another listing. Just be sure to reduce the textures in size, otherwise you’ll be loading huge PNGs as 8k texures and crashing Poser.
A free Nautilus belauensis shell for Mandelbulb3D. Takes a while to render though.
There’s also a big new range of British bulldogs on the DAZ Store, and various dog accessories.
Landscapes and gardens:
Meditation Gardens from Stonemason. A classic Japanese garden.
This new Stonemason garden should fit well with ShaaraMuse3D’s Wild Mossy Bamboo Forest which now supports DAZ Studio as well as Poser. It appears there is no extra charge for past purchasers of the Poser version, to get the updated DAZ expansion.
A free Tropical Beach for DAZ Studio.
Vehicles:
Need to pack up your business and haul it from California to Texas? You’ll be needing the AJ Trailer and Tanker for Futuristic Truck.
Historical:
1920s Ziegfeld Follies Head-dress & Collar Set for G8F.
Hermes the Greek god outfit, in dForce for G8M.
Ukulele Collection for Genesis 8 and poses, for all your George Formby strumming needs.
The DAZ store also has more Egyptian pharaoh war/battle items this month.
Figures:
The Kiara for Genesis 1 is a useful way to quickly get away from the stock G1 ‘puffy potato’ look.
Not keen on old Genesis? There’s a new free CE Expressions for Genesis 8 Female set.
HF Underwater Action Poses for Genesis 8 Female. Unusual, and potentially very useful for someone with an Aquaman-like or all-action mermaids graphic novel to make.
LF Soft Expressions for La Femme. Relatively subtle expressions and eye-looks, and a reset.
Software, scripts and add-ons:
NebulaFX – Modular Effects for Genesis 8. Probably should have been called “Blob-attack on Planet X18!”, but this this is your go-to FX panel for weird deadly encrustations of various types.
LockMaster for Poser 12, useful for figure setup and animation and making feet stay put. Note this is Poser 12 only.
MARSA Anaglyph3D. ‘Red-blue glasses’ 3D scene maker for DAZ Studio, said to be easy to use.
FormatSwap for Blender. Seems to be a sort of equivalent of Scene Optimizer for Blender. I guess they have their ‘crazy texture-sizes bloat’ problem too.
Tutorials:
Reflections and Light for DAZ Studio. Mirrors, etc.
Render Engine and Scene Optimizations for older PCs running DAZ Studio.
Portrait Character Lighting Tutorial, for a more painterly look from DAZ Studio.
That’s all for now. I couldn’t get fully through the DAZ Store’s new ‘continuous scrolling’ as it slows the Web browser to an impossible crawl after the first fifteen pages or so, and thus I may have missed a few. I got back as far as the new ‘halftone dots guy’ before giving up. Update: Thanks to Kevin M. I’ve solved my problem with the infinite scrolling on the DAZ Store, which after a while causes the thumbnail loading to freeze. This had caused me to have to skip some DAZ Store items that were too far back in time. Setting “Items Per Page” to 60 brings back the paginated browsing.
Mammoth textures
Many buyers of the new Wooly Mammoth (available at Renderosity) will find Poser totally crashes when making either SuperFly or Firefly renders. The main culprit is the size of the many skin materials — 8192px and 20Mb for one Skin_Normal.jpg for instance. And the same size again for just the Mouth Normal map, too. There are 15 other skin materials of comparable size to load. Groan.
My solution was manually resizing the 15 materials found in the “dull” folder, which is where the various skins materials live. Saving Skin_Normal.jpg at 2048px and 65% JPG compression resulted in a mere 465kb normal map (down from 20Mb), for instance. The others were similarly resized. With these lightweight skin materials loaded to the Mammoth the SuperFly rendering was then fine, and the fur looks much as it does in the Store preview — very nice indeed and with no loss I could detect. What can be seen of the skin still has nice detailing. A FireFly render still crashed Poser, though.
So… it doesn’t toon well (which is to be expected), Firefly may be iffy for you, but SuperFly is OK and most people will want to manually reduce the texture sizes down from 8k.
Release: VUE R6 provides a Poser to 3DSMax / Maya / C4D / Lightwave route.
The subscription VUE R6 is out, and it’s a big update. I hadn’t realised that the new subscription Vue now includes major compatibility with…
* 3D Studio Max 2016 to 2021
* Maya 2015 to 2020
* Cinema4D R20 to R23
* Lightwave 11.6 to 2020
Or, if it didn’t before, then it does now with the new R6. Therefore, since Vue still has excellent Poser scene import… this could be a way to get your Poser scene over to those big beasts, if either: i) you can no longer get the PoserFusion plugins; or ii) your PoserFusion variety can’t support the very latest edition of Cinema 4D, Maya etc and your boss needs you to.
Poser to the forthcoming Omniverse modules too, via Vue…
* “We’ve also included a direct export preset for Nvidia’s Omniverse.”
Other changes:
* Export via Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (.usda, .usdz, .usdc).
* Control clouds based on their altitude in the scene.
* Support for “non-photorealistic rendering” in the Path Tracer, and supports for the Substance GPU engine in the viewport. It’ll be interesting to see demos of those.
* Python 3 since R5. Therefore those relying on Python 2 scripts either need to get them updated or stick to R4.
* Terragen .TER import is back, from R5. Had been broken.
* I see that “SkinVue fixed and added to VUE” since R2, which is important for Poser scene imports with figures.
* Vue’s developer are obviously spending a lot of time aligning the software with NVIDIA’s doomed Omniverse project.
All in all, I still don’t see a big need for a hobbyist to move from the old Vue 2016.
Blender 2.92 – key new stuff
Blender 2.92 is around the corner. What’s new and key?
* Geometry nodes, scatter and instancing.
“Nodes can be used to change an object’s geometry in a more complex way than regular modifiers.” There’s a new node-based system for this, which “lays the groundwork” for the future but for now it has “object scattering and instancing” already enabled. Could be useful for DAZ and Poser… scatter in Blender, save and use in Poser or DAZ.
* Primitives in a click.
“Create primitives with two clicks.” Nice. It’s now probably a bit easier to set up a Synthwave picture by loading simple primitives to an Eevee scene, and then (see below) to get mattes for later compositing.
* Eevee Cryptomatte
Create mattes from the scene, for compositing. This was already in Cycles, is now also in Eevee. A “new compositor node was also added to adjust the exposure of images”.
* Grease pencil
Edit grease pencil strokes using Bezier curves. Also a rather vital Grease Pencil menu, that was accidentally totally bjorked by 2.91, is back again. Nice for the NPR crowd, but grease pencil is obviously one of Blender’s many ‘moving targets’ with features and menus popping into and out of existence.
* Cycles
Faster rendering on complex scenes. “Multithreaded export of geometry, to improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many mesh, hair and volume objects.” Also faster hybrid rendering. “GPU devices can now take over rendering of tiles that are currently being rendered by CPU threads, to improve hybrid rendering performance”. This looks like the main thing.
Cycles getting power-ups is important, because these may well feed into Poser 12 at some point. In Poser, Cycles is ‘SuperFly’.
* Fluids
Viscosity, so you can now do things like ice-cream cone twirls. Or er… doggie doings. Yum.
Sew cool…
Want to make your fave 3D characters into cute sewn-fabric plushies? Thomas Kole’s Seams to Sewing Pattern promises to as least get you a viable sewing pattern from a 3D model. Theoretically, it appears that the DAZ and Poser to-Blender scripts should give your figure access to the script in Blender. Relatively simple toon figures will probably work best.
World explodes
Old 3D World magazine PDF scans have been taken down from Archive.org. They can still show up in search results there and at Google Search, from circa the 2008-2012 era, when it was taking notice of Poser in a real way (some tutorials from Brian Haberlin, some letters-page advice, freebies and an occasional review). But they are gone once you click through. So far as I can tell from search, the only way to get issues from that era now is to buy them in print from eBay when they come up. A pity, as it was quite fun to browse them occasionally and chuckle at what the oldware looked like. Or what a (now puny) PC £2,300 would buy you, back in the day. And sometimes they could yield up a useful nugget of obscure information.
I’d like to think that 3D World are preparing a $25 DVD with all their 2000-2015 back-issues as good digital scans on it, but such things do not tend to happen from big publishers. Being beholden to advertisers they view their complete set of back-issues as a liability that would distract attention from the current issue and its ads, rather than as an asset.
Though a couple of issues from even earlier in time are still online there, to give you a taste of what we once enjoyed each month circa 2006. Also most of the free cover-CDs as ISOs. I produced a survey of the 3D models on the latter, a few years ago. You may want to grab them now, just in case they go too.
Tasty Tafi
Tafi has taken on the task of making game-ready DAZ conversions for the Unity Game Engine, and to a level that will satisfy real game-makers. Around 300 of them are on the Unity Store now. The prices are right, especially as it seems they can be put into commercial games royalty-free. Though I’m not 100% certain of that. The licence info is rather basic on the page. Perhaps there’s a big legal agreement in the download?
