News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Poser 11: ramped

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If you were somehow thinking of doing ramped toons with Poser 11’s Cycles-based SuperFly rendering, rather than in the fast real-time Comic Book mode, there’s now a new free .MT5 Poser Cycles Color-Ramp to help with that.

But, as Poser’s own Charles Taylor advised in the recent Poser 12 Early Access webinar, basically… don’t try to use SuperFly for toon. I agree, learn to use the Comic Book mode properly instead. Real-time, fast, great results if handled correctly.

Still, I guess the ramp might be useful in other complex node setups that you need to port from Blender to Poser.

24 Days Of Christmas Freebies at Renderosity

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24 Days Of Christmas at Renderosity, a fun Advent Calendar that is now slowly filling with freebies. I’m not sure the bloody Guillotine Props Set is really suitable for Christmas, though it’s from RPublishing and thus it perhaps wryly symbolises the Poser 12 developer workload and its shipping-date deadlines.

Amazingly, I had somehow managed to miss getting Powerage’s Pacificator for Poser, over the years, but it’s an Advent Calendar freebie and I have it now…

There’s also a free Textures Pack for Pacificator if you want to make it look jazzier than my quick real-time Comic Book render shown here.

Also note the new free preset to Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings for DAZ Studio 4. Very useful if something you loaded as an experiment (such as HD morphs) has messed with your settings, or you’ve been fiddling with the settings and things have not gone as planned.

For some reason, under any version of DAZ Studio and across different PCs, I have never ever been able to get anything at all to show up in the “Presets” render panel…

I can only assume it’s an un-fixable perma-bug. This freebie is exactly the same in this respect. Nothing shows up there after install.

The clunky workaround is then to drag-drop the “Restore Default iRay Engine Render Settings” .DUF file to the DAZ Studio Viewport. This will reset the iRay settings to their defaults, and also sets a 1600px render setting.

Apocalypse Girl – now complete and available for the Kindle

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Did you get a shiny new 10″ Kindle on Black Friday? Need a comic to put on it? There’s a new graphic-novel, from well-known store vendor Sixus1 (Les Garner), and it’s now a complete story. I’ve just spotted that his final Apocalypse Girl #6 issue landed on the Amazon Kindle store at the very end of September, thus completing his graphic novel of Apocalypse Girl…

“Dogs of War”, the conclusion of the first Apocalypse Girl” graphic novel

Congratulations to Les for getting it completed and published!

DAZ Store freestuff – updated

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The DAZ 3D Store’s Freestuff page has updated. In terms of stuff without dependencies, the old $38 Runtime DNA Ultimate Lights And Backgrounds bundle may be of interest to Poser users using FireFly. There are also some sky sets with matching lights, which require the RDNA Terradome uber-environment as a base dependency in Poser.

While you’re there, don’t miss the free toon Lil Gnome which is new.

Goodbye to the Mac

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Based on what I hear about NVIDIA drivers and OpenGL, and also the ‘death’ of DAZ Studio and Vue on the ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS, it seems to me that the Mac can no longer be considered a serious and stable platform for 3D graphics production work. As such I will no longer be wasting time on this blog in also trying to note or consider the tedious “Mac issues” in my posts. I’ll simply assume that all readers are running Windows.

OctaneRender 2021

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OctaneRender 2021 has moved up to a closed beta, with the forthcoming OctaneRender 2020.2 as its release-candidate engine. Octane is interesting because DAZ Studio already has it, currently via a Free tier in the subscription rates, and because Poser 12 is to get a current-version Octane plugin in 2021.

OctaneRender 2021 is said to add…

* Improved volumetrics.

* Improved performance for scenes too large for the GPU’s memory.

* Updates to the AI Light algorithm, said to accelerate final renders by “2x or more”.

* Octane can now also work as a host for other renders such as “Arnold, RenderMan, Radeon ProRender, and Blender Cycles”.

* There’s hazy talk of something called “Brigade” which will offer real-time Eevee-like rendering via Octane, but ray-traced rather than OpenGL. But if you have the horse-power to do that then why not just use real-time iRay instead, and for free?

* There’s also an even hazier mention that OctaneRender 2021 could introduce Octane’s own “AnimeRender” rendering engine.

AnimeRender? It’s said to have been in development since 2018 but is not yet released. But let’s assume that AnimeRender does what it sounds like, an NPR toon render that is i) not fiddly to set up or use; ii) can be used with just a few clicks without having to manually re-texture figures with toon materials; iii) has a quality and style that would be commercially-viable in terms of appealing to regular comics readers.

If then available via Octane in DAZ at the Free tier (doubtful, but possible) then AnimeRender might open up easy comics rendering from DAZ Studio, and with more or less the same ease as Poser 11’s existing real-time Comic Book mode. I’m making a lots of guesses and assumptions there, though. AnimeRender might turn out to be be just another naff attempt at a few cheesy NPR filters and some ugly hatching. Poser’s easy real-time Comic Book mode remains the gold-standard for now.

HiveWire sale now on

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HiveWire have just launched their big sale and it’s a store-wide sale at 40% on everything. Included are the many SongBird Remix and Nature packs, and the new and desirable Poser 11.x script utility “Scatter”. Comics makers and animators may want the Universal Anime Head and Universal Chibi Head. And there are of course a wealth of beautifully crafted horses, cats and other animals, including a few rare animation items such as ‘running dog’ animation packs.

Until the end of 3rd January 2021. Sadly you can’t just splurge all your “store points” at once, but you can draw them down a bit by a series of purchases.

Hide all “out of stock” items on Amazon

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Searching for a new graphics card on Amazon? 98% of what you want will be “out of stock”, so there’s a handy new UserScript that shows “Amazon in-stock only”. I’ve looked at the code and it’s clean.

For those using their national Amazon rather than the main .com it needs some slight tweaks to work. It’s easy to run it on my Amazon UK, but there you change the detection-phrase from the capitalised “Out of Stock” to “out of stock”.

Black Friday: NeoWin Poser (extra 20% off) / Blambot / HiveWire / Eye Candy

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And… it’s a wrap. Black Friday has fried, Cyber Monday has sighed, and only a few week-long sales continue. I hope this blog’s readers managed to bag themselves a few excellent discounts. Here are a few final items…

* There’s a new coupon that’s worth a try with the $80 Poser 11 Pro at NeoWin Deals. They have a… “Use code CMSAVE20 for an additional 20% off site-wide.” Posted Nov 30, 2020 15:00 EST. Poser 11 Pro for just $64? Try it and see.

* The HiveWire 3D store sale has not yet started, but should do so later today.

* Blambot Comic Fonts have finally loaded their discount… 30% off with coupon code CYBERWEEK until 7th December 2020.

* The venerable but still-useful Alien Skin Eye Candy plugin for Photoshop is modestly discounted to $74 from $89.

* The Comic Life software seems to have had no discounts at all this year. They usually do. Oh well. Nothing either from PhotoLine, Expressi, Redfield, Wonderdraft, or Jitbit Macro Recorder. Flaming Pear (Flood 2) offered their discount a week early then closed it before Black Friday, as notified here.

Octane and AMD – correction

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I’ve updated and corrected my recent post “Christmas is on the (graphics) cards” post, re: Octane and AMD graphics cards. I had thought this was fixed up now, but no. Apparently it’s still only on the Mac that Octane-AMD is possible, not Windows…

“Octane X on Mac Pro Features. Completely rewritten mesh geometry engine optimized for AMD GPUs”

I’ve also added note about the NVIDIA driver problems. I’m about done with covering this tedious “Mac stuff” I think. Windows only from now on, on this blog.

Poser/DAZ new content survey: November 2020

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It’s time for the monthly survey of the most eye-catching, possibly useful and interesting new goodies, as released for Poser and DAZ Studio in the last month.

As usual, freebies are not covered here if “non-commercial use”, unless obvious fan-art.

Science-fiction:

Lifepod Hangar.

Colony Subway, which could perhaps double as a Hyperloop interior.

Space Agencies Pack 2 for FA FireBlade vehicle for Poser.

A new Ali “Hr-” hair, Hr-239 which looks quite suitable for science-fiction.

EArkham’s ZWorld Beast from Below. Could also be a shoreline scavenger on an alien planet, which would mean that you could hide the hands in shallow water.

The Beast from Below is probably lurking near the new Underground Bunker, from a name new to me, Dekogon Studios.

Steampunk:

Steam Helicopter.

Need a helmet for your helicopter pilot? Steam Punk Hats for Genesis 8.

Steam Drone for Poser.

The Strange Man Characters and Hair Set for Genesis 8 Male. Requires Strange Man.

Frankenstein Laboratory for DAZ Studio.

Cybertenko’s Instant Zombies 6: Human Experiments. Including steampunk elements.

Free Modular Facial Hair for G8M.

A free Camera and tripod.

Michael 3 1800’s, an M3 outfit.

England’s Glory Vintage Matchbox for Blender.

Storybook:

Thanksgiving Feast.

And for pudding, a yummy 41 Food Shaders for the kids.

The free Young Child Pose 4 – 13 and 4-1) from bbarbs. Requires Just Kids 4.

The free Weatherman’s Home for DAZ Studio, a storybook fantasy home.

Historical:

WashTub For DAZ Studio, and poses. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ materials.

There are matching Saloon Gal Bloomers for Poser at PoserWorld. For V2(!), but could be converted with the free CrossDresser.

Western Guns, a big collection.

Jamestown Smithy for Poser and Jamestown Stable for Poser which could also work as a Dark Ages farm.

Also a matching Jamestown Walls and Gate.

A free Ancient Rainforest Rope Bridge.

Arabian Dreams, now updated for iRay.

Need to bring your Ancient Egypt scenes to life? Now-Crowd Billboards – Ancient Egyptians. Don’t forget to add the kitties.

Animals:

Need to make your Ancient Egypt scenes pop even more? Bring on the Egyptian Elephant Warrior for African Elephant. Requires African Elephant Updated which needs the African Elephant.

Hippogryph Add-on for the HiveWire Horse.

A fine free Morphing Fishing Rod For DAZ Studio.

3D Insect Fauna: Bee Swarm.

Animations and Poses for the HiveWire Mule Deer and Caribou.

Landscape:

Hawthorn Trees for DAZ Studio and iRay.

Forest Path Vignette. Simple, but nicely done.

ShaaraMuse3D’s Photo Props: Crystal Clusters.

Poser 12 and Python 3:

Poser 12 Early Access (upgrade) is now on the Renderosity Store. If you need the full Poser 12, save yourself $50 by first getting the Poser 11 NeoWin deal, and then use the licence to get the upgrade to 12. Be aware that 12 is not yet properly released, and you may want to stick with 11 for a few months.

A free Swimsuit for La Femme, who ships free with Poser 12. And a free Shape of Fifi: Youthful character for La Femme.

The free P12 Script Starter, a customisable panel for loading Poser 12 scripts.

Node Tidier 3.

A Poser 12 fix for the depth-of-field script.

Parent Lister. Shows a quick list of what your figure is parented to.

Useful for comics makers and over-painters are the updated Color Me White (strip all materials) and Color Me Random for Poser 12.

Utilities:

Spring Dynamics for DAZ Studio from 3D Universe. Can save and load presets.

Genesis 3 & 8 Face Controls. A non-rendering face-control plate. Overkill if you just want basic eye-control, but perhaps you can turn some of them off.

Instancify. Turns repeating props into instances, to save memory when rendering. There’s also the little “convert instances to props” script Instances to Objects that goes the other way, turning DAZ’s instances into proper props (vital when exporting to Reality, Poser, Vue, Blender etc).

Pixeluna’s SkinDesignS for Genesis 3 and 8 Females. Easily applied tattoos.

MK Facial Asymmetry Morphs for Genesis 8 Male.

A set of free pose-transfer utilities:

* G3M: M4/Hiro4/Freak4 to G3M; and the reverse G3M Pose Transfer to M4/H4/F4

* G3F: V4/A4 to G3F, and the reverse G3F to V4/A4.

* G8M: M4/Hiro4/Freak4 to G8M, and the reverse with G8M to M4/H4/F4.

* G8F: V4/A4 to G8F, and G8F To Victoria 3 / Aiko 3.

Tutorials:

Are you new, and baffled by all the different figures, their names and abbreviations? Generations: 3D Figure Evolutions is a webinar that surveys the key figures.

“How To Use the DAZ Studio Geometry Editor”. DAZ has an easy built-in Geometry Editor for cutting up and into meshes? Yup. Who knew?

Supercharge Your DAZ Studio Content with GIMP, the free graphics editor.

That’s it, more picks next month!

Black Friday: Teknology3d Poser/DAZ store / World Creator / itch.io / Blambot / Comic Life

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* The DAZ/Poser store Teknology3d has 60% off the entire store. They mostly specialise in supporting quality toon figures such as Mavka, some of the Nursoda figures, Sam and Sadie etc.

* 30% off all versions of Stefan Kraus’s real-time World Creator 2 landscape software. There’s 12 months of “Free updates to major new editions” which should theoretically also get you the imminent version 3. Which will have a radically new UI, so if you do plunk down your $150, wait a few weeks until you can learn it on 3.0.

* Black Friday 2020 at itch.io, on now. No discount on the real-time landscape software FlowScape, which lives there. While you’re in there, you may want to add the “name your price” Call of the Sentinel graphic novel to your basket and pass it on to young readers with shiny new 10″ tablets.

* Blambot Comic Fonts usually have a Cyber Monday only sale. No word on that for 2020 though.

* Nothing yet at Comic Life but they also usually discount on Cyber Monday only. I may not be able to post here on Monday, so here’s the link now.

Still no movement at Flaming Pear (Flood 2), Redfield (maker of the best non-pencil Photoshop sketch plugin, Sketch Master), Expressi (inky Chinese brush painting software), Wonderdraft (a leading fantasy map maker software), or JitBit Macro Recorder (automate any software).

The HiveWire store is closing

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Sad news, the HiveWire store is to close…

“We will have a final, FINAL storewide sale beginning the first of December and will run til the first week in January 2021”.

So, you may want to hold back some PayPal from your Black Friday/Cyber Monday purchases for that, with the date to mark being Tuesday 1st December. Especially if items such as the new Poser Scatter Tool (likely to make the move to Poser 12) and Ken G’s superb creature packs have substantial discounts then.

They’ll be moving the store into the Renderosity Store, which makes a lot of sense in terms of going where the traffic and buyers are…

“Renderosity is excited to receive content that has been published at HiveWire” and there “our impact as a HiveWire brand will continue”.

I’d suggest they’ll also be able to cross-sell better there, and create bundles that only involve purchase from one store. For instance, the new HiveWire Tiger is currently also on Renderosity, but if you also wanted its paid LAMH fur preset then you could only buy that from HiveWire.

However, their content sellers are not obliged to make the move to Renderosity and some may perhaps go elsewhere. After the move HiveWire will get access into Poser 12’s new in-software Store purchase/download tabs, though, which may encourage many to go to Renderosity.

It’s said that the HiveWire Community Forums will not be combining with the Renderosity forums and will be staying online at community.hivewire3d.com. If you’re going over there to take a look, note that the per-software forums there are not immediately obvious to the visitor, and are found under “Using 3D Software”.