The third-party P3DO Organizer Poser library (May 2020) now has a November 2020 fix for use with Poser 12 Early Access.
DAZ Studio on the latest Mac OS
I’ve just had a quick look into the DAZ Studio problem on Macs. I’d glanced at it when I looked at what the new Filament renderer is, and had then spotted that DAZ Studio 4.14.0.8.. was Windows 64-bit only — as I told my readers here.
But being a dedicated Windows users I don’t take much notice of Mac stuff, so I left it at that. It now seems that the new Mac OS update simply broke DAZ Studio on the Mac altogether. There’s no simple ‘rollback DAZ to 4.12.1.117, and all you lose is Filament’. Richard Haseltine on the forums states, of older DAZ Studio versions that…
“I would very much doubt that older versions [of DAZ Studio] would work any better”
Wow. So I guess Mac users will now have to run DAZ Studio under Windows, since I get the impression that having the latest OS is effectively required by Apple. Most modern Mac users can run a Windows install on a Mac with a free utility called Boot Camp. Doing that is said to be fine re: the DAZ viewport and rendering. Which is not the case with the Mac user’s other “virtualisation” option in which both the viewport and rendering are far from ideal.
Apparently a fix for the show-stopping problem on Macs is “not due until mid-2021”, again according to DAZ forum guy Richard Haseltine.
I’m told that DAZ Hexagon, the modelling sister of DAZ Studio, has not been able to run on the Mac OS for many years now.
Release: Diffeomorphic DAZ-to-Blender 1.5.1
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Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Spotted in the News
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There was an important release that I overlooked, back in the summer. The free DAZ-Blender bridge plugin by Diffeomorphic, Thomas Larsson,was released as v1.5. This is in active development and at November 2020 is now at version 1.5.1. Apparently it does a good job, and is quicker and in some ways better than the free official DAZ 2.0 script. Since it doesn’t need to convert via an .FBX or Collada conversion and instead reads the DAZ files directly. Said to support polyline hair, but not strand hair. Worth a look, if you’re getting into Blender and its real-time Eevee engine.
Interestingly, I recently noticed that Eevee is actually OpenGL + PBR materials. I hadn’t known that before. It explains why my OpenGL upgrade fixed Blender. It just shows how far OpenGL can be pushed.
Update December 2020: diffeomorphic.blogspot.com totally dead. Fixed links by sending to WayBack and I’ve directly linked the repository.
Black Friday: the lull before the storm
And… it looks like it’s going a bit quiet from now until Friday. The early offers are out if they’re out, and it seems the rest are waiting until Friday to start.
* 3DCoat, aka 3D-Coat, has a huge splash banner for “a $100 discount”, but their store knows nothing about any discounts. Indeed, in the UK it adds a hefty 20% VAT. Then you realise that this actually just a tease announcement, and that we won’t know the version that the “$100 discount” is to be applied to until Friday. But given the size of the discount it has to be the same as last year — for the expensive Professional and Floating Licences only. That’s a pity, as bringing the Amateur version down to $50 for a few days would bring in thousands of new users, and also switch people away from pirated versions.
* Topaz also has an pre-announcement that it will have a Black Friday sale, on Friday. Topaz Clean and GigaPixel AI are likely the most desirable Topaz items for many, if the discounts are 30%+ significant. GigaPixel now has a new “Artwork” up-scaling module.
* No movement on other makers and software I’m monitoring, such as AKVIS (their new improved Charcoal is of interest), Expressi, Redfield, Flaming Pear (Flood 2), PhotoLine, Clip Studio, Blambot comics fonts, Comic Life, and JitBit Macro Recorder.
Black Friday: Reallusion, Particle Illusion, Affinity series, uRender.
More Black Friday offers of interest are coming in. All of these are non-rental, I’m not covering rental/subscription software.
* The Reallusion Store (iClone, Cartoon Animator etc) has “Buy 2 or more items to receive a 50% off the List Price”. Also check your member email for a link to a better price on the vital 3DXchange 7 Pro ($99 vs. $129 via the Store), this being useful even for non-iClone users who want to take .SKP to .OBJ (despite what Reallusion misleadingly says about “no export” in Pro)…
Real-time in iClone is nice and the support and training is excellent, but the iClone ecosystem is an expensive one to get locked into. So be sure you have a plump wallet before getting into iClone. Consider also that a fast 30-series RTX graphics card, enabling a DAZ Studio real-time viewport, could end up being a viable “what you see is what you get” alternative for the equivalent total price.
* “50% on all Boris FX Bundles and 25% on individual products”. Not really for hobbyists but the $295 Continuum 2021 may interest, this being the new name for the paid pro plugin version of Particle Illusion — which emits all manner of pretty FX particles in After Effects and Premiere. Consider the rival HitFilm as the alternative, which bundles video-editing with the FX and is also discounted.
* Serif’s Affinity trio now has 30% off, including the budget DTP software Affinity Publisher. This is the price-comparable rival to the perfectly fine Microsoft Publisher (which, note, you have already have, as Publisher 2013 or 2016 bundled with an old non-subscription edition of Microsoft Office).
* There’s a reduction on the price of uRender, the increasingly capable real-time OpenGL-based plugin for Cinema 4D. It’s sort of like Eevee for C4D, and is now at $99 off the price.
Black Friday: Instant Terra software and the Kindle Fire 10″
* Instant Terra goes to a 50% discount for Black Friday. It’s now standalone perpetual desktop software, as it was recently switched away from subscription. It offers fast procedural terrain generation and real-time preview, with a new World Browser module to “download elevation data for any region of the world and generate a corresponding terrain” with isolines. I’ve been unable to find out how easily the output integrates with Vue, though the output looks fairly standard. I doubt it gives access to high-res terrains here in the UK, though at guess it may in the USA.
Might be worth $75 just to have a really easy hassle-free way to grab any terrain mesh from the real-world, though overlaying satellite imagery is not due until 2.2. The very latest version offers “a simple way to automatically refine the [downloaded] terrains and transform low-resolution terrains to high-resolution terrains”, via the addition of a new “up-scaling node”. I’m not sure how well this removes ‘stepping’ aka ‘zipper’ lines.
* Amazon’s flagship Kindle Fire 10″ tablets are now a healthy 40% off at Amazon UK. One of the most affordable ways to read digital comics, and I find it will also run Nomad Sculpt.
* Also, keep in mind that there should be a few good ‘Amazon Warehouse deals’ soon, perhaps around 9th-10th December, as hardware returned by perfectionist techies is graded and re-packed for re-sale. Some of these deals can be excellent, when something like a scratched casing or a tiny defect on a big monitor screen triggers a hefty discount.
Black Friday: 1971s sale and X-Pen
* At Renderosity, 1971s’s Store on Renderosity is now on a big sale, 60-70% discounts. The prices are unlikely to get much better than this, even on a store-wide Black Friday sale. 48 hours only. Nightshift3D’s Steampunk props and NoMuse’s Steam Props are also on sale. I picked up a nice mix of 1971s, Nightshift3D and NoMuse which, with a little Store Credit applied to defray the cost, cost me only $14. Nice.
* A substantial sale is on now at the XP-Pen Official Store. Formerly Ugee, maker of affordable “draw on the screen” pen-monitors with (when last looked at) very sturdy tilt-adjustable stands. You can see the stand-type here and it’s what to look for if buying for a desk-based studio (i.e. where you don’t need to travel out to show work to clients in-person)…
I’ve been pleased with mine, purchased back when Amazon was shipping a 1440px Ugee 1910b at a bargain price, and I’m hoping in the New Year or early Spring that I might get a larger and more colour-faithful review-model, perhaps the current XP-Pen Artist 22E seen above.
* Meanwhile, over in France… ” The French government on Friday declared it was cancelling Black Friday”. Durh…
Black Friday: PzDB and Udemy courses
Yet more discounts, as we head toward Black Friday (next Friday)…
* 50% off PzDB, the Poser external library. The offer has been around for a while now, since the summer in fact, but as I recall it’s only going to last until Cyber Monday. PzDB is not Python-based, so won’t break with Poser 12. It is still the best external Library for big runtimes, in my view. Especially so if you have two monitors and want your Library over on monitor #2, which you haven’t been able to have with Poser since Adobe Flash / AIR became insecure and was abandoned. If you only use Poser, note that you only really need the PzDB 1.2 at its discounted price of $20.95, rather that the more expensive 1.3. Try the free trial first, if you need to re-assure yourself it will work for you.
* Udemy has a big Black Friday sale on, with heavy discounting. They front-load their site with expensive programmer and IT techie courses, but if you dig you can find some creative ones. Some of which seem to be one hour only, which hardly qualifies them as a “course”, so watch out for that as they’re no cheaper than longer ones. Noted by me, usually at £9.99, were…
How to use MotionArtist (the only dedicated motion-comics software)
Complete Clothes Drawing Course – Folds, Wrinkles And Outfits. With a focus on realistic wrinkles. Something you don’t get taught on any comics course, but kind of important if your cast isn’t entirely hard-metal robots.
Cel Shading for Animation in Photoshop and Cartoon Animator 3.2. Looks like a bit of a quickie course, but it may interest some.
Concept Environment Art Using Krita. Looks excellent. He appears to be talking about painting a set of matching 2D environment assets or elements, not painting a full scene or backplates.
3D Coat Sculpture Modelling, Retopo, UVs and Paint. A big, popular introductory course. Better than “Introduction to 3D Coat” which suffers from a very rushed presenter and a giant spider for the vital 3D mesh painting section.
Learn iClone 7 | Character Creator | Unreal Engine Pipeline. Probably a bit out of date by now, and also overtaken by Reallusion’s own excellent free video training.
Poser Pro Game Dev Fundamentals. Poser to the Unity game-engine, an Infinite Skills training course. Not discounted, but interesting that it’s still available. Its subject-matter may be made moot by Poser 12, if there’s to be an easy Unity exporter. If you were wondering, there are no other Infinite Skills Poser courses on there.
3DCoat 2021
Good news, I’ve just heard that a “new 3DCoat will ship within Q4 this year as 3DCoat 2021 … including the new user interface”. Most people think of 3D-Coat (now “3DCoat”) as model texturing software. But its relatively easy 3D sculpting also makes it one of the few viable alternatives to ZBrush. The drawback there is that it suffers from a poor sculpting UI. Not “thrown together by mad imps” like ZBrush or Blender, but rather too off-puttingly stolid and a bit too fiddly and cluttered for the new user.
So a new UI sounds enticing. However, a little research discovers it’s actually going to be a tweaked and slightly tidied-up UI according to the official preview video. Not a “new” UI in terms of being a radical replacement. What a pity.
However knowing about this relative lack-of-makeover means that if 4.9.x Amateur comes up in the Black Friday sales at 50% off (i.e. $50) it should probably be grabbed, because it’ll be no use hanging around in the hope of a shiny new wholesale UI makeover. The current Amateur licence limits you to 2048px textures and 7 layers, which will be fine for most users. Non-commercial use too, but apparently that means ‘earning more than $10k a year from it’. Again, fine for most people.
Also, so far as I can tell from the 2021 announcement, prices will go up and not down for the new 2021 version. The new version will stay as a perpetual licence. It may even be possible to get a free upgrade via a Black Friday offer on 4.9.x Amateur, but it may not…
It can also do PBR materials, which also makes it interesting re: the new SuperFly in Poser 12, and how easy it is to plug a PBR material in there.
Yet more Black Friday items
More new discounts, spotted this afternoon.
* XfrogPlants, various packs and bundles are now at 50% off. Yes they sell 3D plants, not frogs.
* HitFilm Pro is 40% off, £185 for perpetual software. What is it? It’s a supercharged video editor with advanced FX and more, and has often been called “the poor man’s Adobe After Effects”.
* The galaxy-spanning science-fiction space game Elite Dangerous is now completely free at Epic in its latest version, ahead of a big paid update in early 2021 that will add a more social/diplomatic side to the game.
A couple more pre-Black Friday items
A few more additions for the Black Friday sales list.
* The non-subscription Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021, and Premiere Elements 2021, are 40% off. Seemingly only via Amazon, as the Adobe Store knows nothing.
* Poser 11 Pro is still $80 at Neowin Deals and has rolled over for another 7 days. I assume Renderosity is still honouring the sold licence, as the Poser 11.3.x installer is still available.
Release: MakeHuman 1.2 final
The open source figure-creation software MakeHuman 1.2.0 final has been released. It’s now Windows 64-bit only, and it appears that it still integrates closely with Blender, and indeed now has… “completely new Blender integration, MPFB, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect.” Lots of other improvements and changes, and a move to the new Python version.
Another pre-Black Friday roundup
So we’re still a week away from Black Friday, but many stores are going a week early. Several offers have even been and gone, including a modest discount on the latest GigaPixel AI and some nice offers on key Flaming Pear plugins such as Flood 2.
What’s tasty in non-subscription software?
* 30% off Rebelle 3.2 is a good one, as I’ve never seen it at a discount before. The software is near-perfect, not least in its simplicity, if you’re an illustrator in a traditional style who want to remove white from lineart and then add very realistic watercolour layers underneath. Watercolor painting is the main strength, as well as the best-of-breed UI. It can kind of do speed-painting, but is not really the best choice for that. It also lacks the extensibility of software like Krita.
* “Top Corel Products” are now discounted, with Painter Essentials 7 at a quite reasonable £30, with is pretty good though keep in mind that Krita 4.x is free. Corel also has PaintShop Pro 2021, less desirable at £50, especially when compared to the recent Humble Bundle offer.
* The Reallusion 20th Anniversary sale until 22nd November, including the fine Cartoon Animator 2D software.
* There are big discounts in Unity plugins at the Unity Asset Store including 50% off the three major rival toon plugins RealToon, Flat Kit, and Toony Colors Pro 2. Also the “visual novels” engine Naninovel.
* “Up to 50% off the entire store” on the 3D model packs at KitBash3D, albeit coming down from a high starting price.
* DxO ViewPoint is discounted. Automatically fixes the weird angles on your ‘big architecture’ photography, so you have straight verticals.
A few more details on Poser 12
Here are just a few main details from the many given in Sunday’s key Poser 12 webinar. It went very well, and the upgraded “500 capacity” room was required as people continued to pour in.
Poser 12 SuperFly, based on Blender’s Cycles render engine:
“Adaptive Sampling” means that SuperFly is now stated to be “almost twice as fast on a CPU render”, provided you’re willing to do slight and fairly-easy tweaking of bucket sizes and other render settings (as was shown in the webinar. Doubtless there will soon be shared “ideal” render presets for CPU-only and cards on the forums, if there are not already). CPU users of adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will paradoxically see better results from quite small bucket sizes.
As is well-known from the forums, for GPU’s and for a further 2x speed boost in SuperFly you’ll need an NVIDIA 20 series RTX graphics card, or a NVIDIA Quadro card that supports RTX. Poser 12 should work with the new 30 series RTX, but they’re so rare that Renderosity has not yet been able to get hold of one to officially test.
The new SuperFly now supports Ambient Occlusion, and it was said that it can also render to a set of render-pass layers much like the Firefly renderer can.
The new Cycles also makes it “really, really easy” to set up a PBR material for Poser 12’s new SuperFly. Just export three layers from Substance Designer (or, presumably, 3D-Coat), and plug them in to the simple node setup (as shown in the webinar) inside Poser. Also, these PBR materials “will just look right” in Poser renders without much tweaking needed. Other Blender’s Cycles node setups can be easily ported over, once you know that Blender’s direction of node flow is a “mirror-reverse” of that used in Poser. However, it was highly recommended not to try to toon in SuperFly, and to instead use Poser’s excellent and real-time Comic Book mode.
The new SuperFly also has a Hair node, deceptively simple-looking but actually very complex in its own right, which can produce complex and “amazing” results. More neat new shader nodes for Cycles/SuperFly will be exposed in Poser 12 in due course.
Intel OIDN Denoising of quick renders is software based, and is not graphics card dependent.
Scripts:
As is very well-known from the forums, the move to Python 3 has broken many old PoserPython scripts, but these are getting fixed. DAZ’s DSON importer for DAZ Genesis 1 and 2 is broken, but such old Genesis figures can still be imported as .CR2 (or, I would add, poly-reduced static posed .OBJ for more wieldiness and which can also do Genesis 3 and 8).
Runtimes:
Also well-known from the forums, there’s a new integrated method of installing purchases via the Library, but you can still do it the old way via .ZIP files. And downloadable .ZIP files for content will still be available on the Renderosity Store.
Yes, you can still have all sorts of weird and wonderful locations for your Runtime. If your Poser Runtime is safely stored in a cave on the Moon, and you access it via infra-red radar pulses, just so long as it has a mapped drive-letter on your network… then Poser is sure to see it.
Windows/Mac:
Yes, it’s common knowledge now that you can run Poser 12 and Poser 11 side-by-side. Yes, it can install and run fine on Windows 7 and 8, even though the official store specs are for “Windows 10”. Yes, the Mac version is coming.
Update: Yes, forum reports say Poser 11 and 12 have been tested on the new ‘Big Sur’ Mac OS and both run fine.
Others:
There were also a lot of special “reveals” and hints about what’s set to be added to Poser 12 in due course, but it’s not fair to list those here. Of those I’ll only note that Bloom is to be added to the Post Effects tab, thus enabling Glow. Glow can already be done natively in Poser Firefly with an atmosphere and a point light, even with an emulated emissive spillover, but has severe limitations. There are also SuperFly glow materials. But I’m guessing this Cycles node may be more controllable and have less need to interact with other stuff?
Renderosity’s trailer-page for the webinar had mentioned “new Geometric Edge Lines for Comic mode” and “new lighting: area lights and caustics”, but those were not shown this time around.
Poser can still “speak Vue” and thus presumably send a scene to Vue. The currently subscription Vue still supports Poser scene imports.
Nearly all of the new stuff other than the new SuperFly update appears to be “as well as” rather than “a replacement for”. Check out the free Trial version of Poser 12 Early Access to re-assure yourself that your favourite bit is still in there.
So, steady progress and it’s looking very positive for the probable December release on Windows and Mac, and even now looks especially nice on photoreal render speeds. Congratulations to the team for more or less sticking to the schedule, even during the lockdowns and changes re: Macs and Python.
Release: KeyShot 10.0
KeyShot 10.0 has been released. What’s new and important for people in the DAZ/Poser world?
* KeyShot “now respects alpha channels when importing FBX”. That’s interesting. So, does that mean trans-mapped eyelashes/hair from DAZ/Poser figures finally work properly in KeyShot without a whole lot of fiddling and prodding? Worth testing, I’d say.
* “A new Light Manager and Light Gizmos to control individual lights.” Colour, power, size, beam-angle and spread, etc. Which makes it more like Poser and DAZ, but you can still slap on the usual type of light if you’re feeling lazy.
* “Visually identical results in the real-time view and in final-quality output.” I thought they basically had that already, bar a bit of grain and gloss/texture and a few fireflies? I’ve never noticed very much difference.
* “Can now hide all of the objects in a scene, except the one you want to work with.” Again, making it more like DAZ or Poser or iClone, and opening up possibly interesting compositing possibilities re: Photoshop layers and automated filtering.
* “A revamped UI for the Move tool.” Chunkier (or at least size-adjustable) is probably better, in these days of huge monitors.
All the above are in the Standard version, still $995. No changes to the new bristles/fur, or to the NPR rendering capabilities. No native render-speed improvements, as far as I can tell. By which I mean, optimisations that are independent of what graphics card you’re using.