The Poser sale is still on. Upgrade even a very old Poser version to the latest Poser Pro, for $49.95. Looks like Smith Micro can also ship you a physical disc in the mail, which could be rather handy if you’re in a remote place with weak or no broadband.
Here’s another way to quickly change the entire colour and/or line style of Poser’s Comic Book Preview or Toon Outlines lineart. It’s not the same as hand colouring with a soft brush, to partly match the colour flats layer beneath – but it’s a quick way to get the ink line colour away from black. It uses Photoshop’s Layer blending mode.
1. Open Poser’s render of your ink lines, in this case a simple toon outlines render.
2. Run a Photoshop Action on the layer that knocks out the white, leaving only the black lines.
3. Add a new white layer under the lines, so you can keep on seeing your lineart properly.
4. Top menu | Layer | Layer Style | Blending Options | tick Colour Overlay | click on Colour Overlay to open its controls.
5. Adjust the colour and settings of Colour Overlay, to taste. In this example I’ve had the ink lines become red…
You can also simultaneously apply the next Layer blending mode, Gradient Overlay…
The stacked blending mode can be saved as a preset to the Styles palette, from where it can be easily applied to other lineart.
A new free 90-minute webinar on using Poser for comics production, “How to Create Graphic Novels and Anime Art Using Poser Pro”, from Digital Art Live and Smith Micro. It’s on YouTube in 720p. This is the second of two versions of the same webinar, presented by Tasos Anastasiades. The first run-through had some glitches, but this second one is excellent.
There’s also an in-depth interview with Tasos, to be found in the latest (Dec 2017) free monthly magazine from Digital Art Live.
Poser’s Sketch Designer module probably doesn’t get as much love as it should do. It’s been around and unchanged forever, which means that most Poser users last took a serious look at it a long time ago, when running on underpowered PCs and a crash-prone Poser version. Sketching took forever, could easily crash your PC, and the render size was insufficient to do much with. Most people seem to have forgotten the Sketch Designer is even there. If they do try it, they try the official presets and find that most still take forever and still crash your PC.
But there’s a whole lot that can be done with it, and with super-quick rendering times, once you break free of the presets and work out what the sliders do. Learning how to turn off background sketching is the biggest time-saver. This done via: Background tab | Opacity 0% and just-in-case bring all the other sliders down to 0% too.
Ignore almost all of the official presets.
Turn off background and brew your own presets.
There’s also the fact that Sketch Designer results can now be quickly improved with some fairly recent additions to Photoshop’s features. For instance, here’s how to quickly fix the output from the plain vanilla “Sketch” preset, using Photoshop CS6 and higher. Here I’m using a flat IBL light, and I’m in Comic Book Preview mode in Colour with lines turned on. Basically, the scene is about as flat as it can get, though admittedly we’re still getting some indication of shading from the character’s materials.
Then we run Sketch Designer’s standard “Sketch” preset on it, after turning off the preset background and turning the sketch lines’ Opacity down to maybe 40%. If you were trying to sketch a creature with a dark material, such as a dinosaur, either re-texture or set opacity much much lower.
This is the result in a 2400 by 1800px render size in .PNG format…
You could also experiment here with turning Depth Cueing on, to see if you get fainter pencil lines further away from the camera.
Then load the PNG render in Photoshop, apply Smart Blur followed by Surface Blur, then finish with a little bit of Noise. Sketch Designer’s strange swirly-whorly Sketch patterns now look like graphite pencil shading and some artistic smudgery, but we’ve kept the linework un-blurred…
The addition of Noise is a quick and clunky emulation of paper texture, but you could omit that and blend onto a real paper texture. In that case, you might not want to lower the Sketch preset’s opacity quite as much as I have in this example.
You might also add the original Poser Sketch layer back on top as a 50% blending Photoshop layer, then go over it with a big soft Eraser to remove the knots in the whorls and just leave what looks like ‘a trace of pencil strokings, here and there’.
The only problem with Sketch renders is that when you save the render to .PNG it is not masked. But there are multiple other ways to get the mask from Poser.
Following my recent Poser lineart colour tutorial, many thanks to Mike Mitchell for pointing out his “Noir Style Tutorial, Pt. 8 – Step 3: Edit Materials” blog post. Mike’s post usefully points out that Geometric Edge line colour can be easily edited, in Poser’s Materials Room.
This works, but on its own it is not all that useful for my suggested Photoshop-oriented workflow of “colour flats + shading + linework” as layers. Because it can’t be applied in the Comic Book Preview mode’s B&W setting, only in its Colour or None setting. Here it is with Colour on…
And with B&W on…
As you can see, the bright green line just isn’t being picked up when B&W is turned on. Nor does it help to switch Poser’s overall Display to one of the Cartoon Display modes, or to render in Firefly with Toon Lines on. Nor does it help to use a shade of grey for the green line.
Mike’s tip would be most handy if you’re tweaking textures directly on the character, in the hope of quickly pumping out a set of single finished/usable comics renders from Poser. I haven’t yet got as far as doing the whole ‘total character materials makeover for comics’ thing — which obviously has huge potential — and currently I’m still slowly exploring the best options for getting multipass renders stacked up in Photoshop. That’s mostly because I want to find a relatively quick-and-automatable way to create consistent comic frames that look like they’re hand-drawn (aka ‘the mythical Northwest Passage to the fabled Land of the “Make Art” Buttons’). “Consistent” is the key word here, so as to avoid two hours per page of colour adjusting and tweaking shadows to get them to look alike in each comic panel and from page-to-page.
However, prompted by Mike’s note I’ve found that there’s an exception and a workaround. Simply switch Poser’s overall Display to “Cartoon w/lines” (three tones) and we get a grey-filled duplicate of the previous B&W mode. No extra ink lines are being added when compared to the B&W Comic Book Preview mode, but we do retain the green outline, albeit initially with a hair-thin black line either side of the green ink line. (I can’t see any way to colour-ramp the line with a gradient, as it has no ‘node connector hole’ in the Material Room. So it appears to me that the Geometric Edge line can only ever be a solid colour).
However, fiddle with the Comic Book Preview dials a bit and the unwanted hair-thin black lines vanish. This makes for a solid colour edge-line which is useful, for instance when used as a Colour blend layer in Photoshop. When we export this as a masked .PNG, then everything else in the render will be grey or black. Therefore it should be possible to either Colour blend or to select-extract just the coloured line. If you just want a solid colour fill on your linework, and don’t want to fiddle with fiddly adjustments layer or blending modes in Photoshop, then is seems this is a quick way to do that. Here’s Darkseal’s Nyla in a nice dark pink line…
There’s no need to make multiple renders for multiple line colours, because Photoshop can ‘Replace Colour’ with ease, or change colour of a layer using Layer Blending modes and Colour Overlay.
How to change Poser’s Comic Book ink lines from hard black to… any colour you like. You can’t yet do it natively in Poser 11, although perhaps the forthcoming Poser 12 will add a feature to make that happen.
I’m assuming here that you make several quick real-time render passes from Poser. These being, for this tutorial:
i) The Comic Book ink lines from a flat IBL light-lit scene.
ii) The colour flats, with the same light, made by just turning off the same Comic Book mode’s ink lines.
iii) A 3D grey/shadows layer. In this instance, from a simple switch to the old default Poser light preset + set Display as Cartoon w/Lines. (If you’ve swung the camera before starting, make sure there’s a fairly even illumination by having your main light ‘dead-centre’, as you can see happening on my light preset icon). This layer is just used later to subtly add detail to the colour flats. Any good lots-of-shadows layer, suitable to become a greyscale, should work. It doesn’t need to be pretty, so don’t waste time tweaking it.
iv) Then you make an alternative linework render. This is made very simply by switching scene iii) from Colour to B&W in the Comic Book controls, and tweak the B&W dial slightly to get a layer with different lines and more of a 2D manga-like subtle shading to it. The horrible posterision of the shading edges doesn’t matter, as that’s easily fixed in Photoshop. (Though if you want better shadows in Poser, try taking Preview-light “Shadows” up from 512 to 2048). (If you save ‘2048 shadow’ lights, label them ‘do not use with Firefly’ – as lights with that setting will reliably crash Poser when making a Firefly render with them).
Once the two ink line layers are loaded into Photoshop with “Paste in Place”, you can knock out white, blend the two line layers and clean any stray lines and ink in missing lines. Here I’ve knocked out the white from both layers (there’s an automated Photoshop action for that), then used the eraser to clean the mouth ink lines and a couple of unwanted weird lines that were lurking below the helmet edge. I could have done much more to tidy up the linework, but this is just a demo. I then softened the posterised edges on the subtle shadowing ink-lines layer, by applying Surface Blur to the whole layer at 7 | 42.
Under the ink lines is the 3D grey/shadows layer, but converted to greyscale (with a simple Desaturate), and then set to Screen blend at 30%. That makes it blend into the Colour Flats layer below it, softening down the colour layer while also adding a bit of subtle shaping to the colours, but not so much as to provoke an “Ugh, that’s so 3D!” reaction. No watercolour shaders required.
The problem then is that when you turn the two ink line layers back on, over the colour, then the inking looks way too heavy and crudely black. To beautify we need to make the black ink lines change colour. Here’s how…
Firstly, in the Layers Pallette, turn off all but the topmost of your ink lines layers. Then click on that layer’s tweeny-weeny little checkerboard icon…
Then select a big soft brush at 100% opacity in Normal blend mode, pick a colour and simply paint over your chosen layer’s black line work. Only the ink lines should be colorised, because we turned on the little checkerboard icon.
Repeat for the next ink line layer.
Here’s the result, with the ink lines coloured up a bit so as to better match the colour flats layers below, and all layers turned on.
In the comic book colouring trade, this is known as a “colour hold” on the line.
The ink line edges are a bit jaggy here because I’m only doing a demo here so have been working with 800px 72dpi renders. Ideally you’d be working with 5000px and above. Even at that size they render quickly, because all the renders come from the real-time Preview render setting.
The flattened final frame can also be art-ified by being run through a Photoshop filter. Note how what was a clunkily-inked nose and mouth now look very nice indeed.
Here’s another and less garish version, with the same filter just run on the base layers and then with the colour layer blended. Still not ideal, as again we’ve lost some of the ‘sci-fi look’ on what was a white jumpsuit, and our carefully coloured ink lines are now shades of dark grey and white. But at least they’re not a jarringly hard black, and you get the general idea.
If you have an additional Poser Sketch Designer sketch-lines render layer, you could blend that back onto filtered versions, for a charcoal line look. That charcoal linework could also be coloured using the technique above. You can also colourise in Photoshop using the Replace Colour option (though not from a hard black) and can use the Sponge to desaturate small areas when a filter causes them to “pop” too much.
Updated my recent “Survey: 3D to 2D tooned, the software options in 2018” post with a DAZ Studio section re: the potential and difficulties of the Manga Style Shaders and Visual Style Shaders packs. If anyone knows of simple (scripted?) ways to make these two easier to apply and control, then I’ll happily mention that.
Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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Vital Kinect accessories are officially discontinued by Microsoft, and the technology downplayed. If you rely on Kinect for your body-tracking / motion-capture workflow, now might be the time to hop on eBay and grab a couple of replacements for some vital components.
Dark Ops Ready to Render Bundle, currently free on DAZ. Includes V4.2 Base, M4 Base + Michael Skin Maps (High Res) and M4 Creature Creator MorphsCreature Morphs.
Most people will have V4 and M4, but if you’re new to Poser or DAZ this Christmas then it should be a welcome freebie for core figures.
Just released today and available now, LightWave 2018. Free 30-day demo. New basic cel-shading engine, built-in. I’m guessing that Poser integration will be coming, at some point, via a new version of the PoserFusion plugin for Lightwave.
Here’s the gist of an amusing recent academic paper which claimed to be a ‘critique’ of Poser and DAZ Studio. I’ll spare these clueless academics the exposure by name. In plain English, they were claiming that Poser and DAZ can’t do more than standard body shapes…
“each piece of [such] software shares similar gaps in the ability to create avatars outside of normative anatomical frameworks. Acknowledging the limitations of [these] current software models, our research aims to create software that expands the affordances and usability of human avatar software for creative purposes.”
Have these idiots ever even heard of morphs, have they ever seen the Renderotica store? They obviously have no clue about what Poser and DAZ can do with a figure. The actual ‘critique’ is fleeting so my guess is that they looked at the software for all of seven microseconds, before condemning it out of hand as insufficient — and claiming they need to make their own software. Right… good luck with that one. Apparently their paper was presented at DiGRA. I’m surprised they weren’t laughed out of the hall. They’re located at Goldsmiths, of course. The place really does seem to deserve its dismal reputation for producing unemployable jargon-spouting posers.
Renderosity currently has all its Clearance items on sale at $3.50.
There’s 64 pages to skim through down there in the murk, but my picks of the quality are:
Flying Cadet Lola Pepper for V4. The textures are a little iffy these days (the painted-on buttons, for instance), but the modeling is fine. I can’t believe that no-one ever made a texture makeover set for this, but there’s nothing out there. Also in Clearance, the matching Celestial Defender, Steam PropsSteamPunk – BFG, SteamPunk Wand (as .OBJ) and Marauder Arm for V4.
Swidhelm’s Tyrannosaur and his Iuvenis baby dragon.
UnDead Carl for M4 and Morphs++.
Medieval Watermill by Dante78 (as an .OBJ file).
Also noticed some scripts: Dimension3D’s runtime packager and Poser Python tools for the very useful Eye Cube and others. The first is Windows, and I know that the latter still works in Poser 11 — I reviewed it here. One of its scripts can be important for serious work with Poser 11’s Comic Book real-time renders.
Posted in Carrara, Comics, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, SketchUp, Vue
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Here’s a concise list of the current toon options for 3D-to-2D comics at 2018, sorted by price.
* Free. Blender has a Freestyle toon module. Powerful but inevitably unfinished even after a decade, and Blender has a very steep learning curve. Apparently Freestyle is easier to obtain good results from if you already know how to model and texture in Blender. May be improved and changed in future.
* Free. Formerly from Google, Sketchup has a small range of impressive sketch render presets suitable for things like buildings and gadgets, and a simple sketch style-mixer so you can make your own. Widely known among visualizers in architecture and product design, quick to render and fairly easy to use. But it doesn’t play nicely with Poser, DAZ etc and is not very friendly to OBJs either.
* Free + modest $s for plugins and content/shader packs. Public videogame engines such as Unity and Unreal. Very steep learning curve, but well supported. Possibly the best choice if you also seriously want to get into making games and have $100 for the relevant plugins. Be aware that output from game-engines may not be print-res.
* $40. The free DAZ Studio has some native but rather fiddly cartoon capabilities, and the paid shader packs Manga Style Shaders and Visual Style Shaders packs ($40, together). But in my experience these are so fiendishly difficult to apply and control and combine, that I just can’t recommend them to anyone who has the easy real-time comics capabilities of Poser 11 (see below). Visual Style Shaders does however offer very nice bases for rendering colour flats of your character’s skin and hair, and these are relatively easy to apply. They would thus provide good bases for drawing ink lines on by hand, perhaps guided by a basic toon outline render. And Manga Style Shaders should still be considered and tested if you’re intent on serious comics production in the traditional ‘zip-toned b&w manga’ style. Note also that DAZ has a well-hidden shader-free ‘Cartoon Render’ setting, but it’s not impressive. There are also lineart rendering plugins such as pwToon and Lineart9000, but these are also said on the DAZ forums to be rather difficult and fiddly to set up and control.
* $80 up (when discounted). Smith Micro’s Poser 11 has an excellent Comic Book Mode (aka Comic Book Preview). This is very easily applied to a vast range of content, and is rendered out in WYSIWYG real-time using the Preview OpenGL renderer. Interesting additional line types are obtainable via pushing Sketch Designer output into just the Comic Book Mode ink lines. Poser also has the P.A.S.S. watercolour shaders [update: now available again, for free]; some good toon cel shader materials (if you dig around a bit, to find them); and the older toon lines mode and some helper scripts can help you to obtain even more toon lines. Professional studios should also note that the Pro version of Poser 11 has a mature PoserFusion plugin to easily send your Poser scene and textures over to Cinema 4D (up to R19). C4D has advanced ‘sketch and toon’ capabilities built in, but you’ll still need to spend a week developing your own custom presets and even then scenes take quite a while to render in C4D.
* $150. DAZ Carrara and either the older and limited $40 Toon!Pro plugin or the newer (2013) free YAToon 2.0. This seems to be the best option for DAZ Studio users, as Carrara handles most DAZ files nicely and can open (nearly) all Poser content and some of the early DAZ Genesis content. Note that 64-bit and multipass render-passes are ‘Pro version only’ in Carrara ($285).
* $200 upwards. Reallusion’s iClone 7 has a very limited Toon Effect filter, which was broken/wonky in iClone 6, but has now been fixed in iClone 7. Fixed as in “it was broken, and now works again”. Works in real-time, but then so does Poser’s Comic Book mode and Poser is by far the better and more fully-featured option. Cheaper too, if you can grab Poser on a discount.
* $400 upwards. The latest Vue 2016 has a fairly sophisticated toon-lines and paint module built in. I’ve spent a few hours with it and although it’s not ideal, it’s a welcome effort at this price point and could certainly be useful for those who overpaint their Vue renders, such as matte painters and concept illustrators. Vue can also elegantly import Poser scenes, with auto material conversion including skin.
* $Lots. There are strong toon capabilities in the “big guns” in 3D, such as Cinema 4D (‘sketch and toon’ is included in the Studio and Visualize versions only) and 3DS Max (toon as various plugins, last time I looked). The latest Lightwave 2018 has a basic cel shading functionality, which is new. I don’t know much about Maya, but I assume it has toon and cel-shading and plugins. 3DS Max always had good CAD lineart output, for the engineering crowd. Third-party plugin renderers can also often do a basic CAD-style lineart render.
Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, The Animation Industry
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There’s an interesting real-time PBR viewport for Cinema 4D, PixelBerg which is now in a stable 1.9 beta. It seems to be genuine full-scene real-time, and doesn’t need a powerful graphics-card to run. Which might make it an alternative real-time option to consider before you plunge into an iClone purchase and the Reallusion content/upgrade ecosystem.
Here’s a side-by-side render demo of Pixelberg running in real-time as the main viewport, using a HDR for lighting, alongside the turbo-charged 24-seconds final render. It seems to be genuinely What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)…
Pixelberg may be especially interesting to Poser Pro 11 users, as Poser interfaces smoothly with Cinema 4D via Smith Micro’s PoserFusion plugin. Only the Pro version has the PoserFusion plugins which seamlessly and quickly take your Poser scene to Vue, Cinema 4D etc.
Nice price for PixelBerg, too. $1!
“PixelBerg is available to buy and download now at Pay What You Want Price. (minimum $1)”.
Cinema 4D itself is sadly a lot more expensive, with the cheapest version being $995. But depending on your ‘destination configuration’ for iClone, that may be price-comparable with iClone Pro + extras (provided that you can do things like roll your own figure-animations, or can bring them in from Poser). If you’re in education, note that Cinema 4D has an 18-month student and teacher license which comes in two flavours: free (full featured, but no plugins will run) or £140 (can run plugins in it). Running PixelBerg would require the £140 Educational version.
Update: I hear that Cinema 4D also supports the Indigo renderer, part of which provides a GPU-powered large supposedly real-time preview window. But it costs a hefty 200 Euros, and according for their forums the “real-time” interactive preview window is still limited and buggy at December 2017. The new Cinema 4D R19 also reportedly has a new fast native viewport built-in.
Here’s how to quickly load Michael 4 (M4) with his morphs in Poser, avoiding a half-hour of “where the heck is it!” searching:
1. First, install M4. Then ‘initialise’ M4 so that he can accept his vital set of Morphs++ morphs. Do this by running DzCreateExPFiles-M4.BAT and DzCreateExPFiles-M4Gens.BAT files which are both found on your hard-drive in your DAZ content directory, likely to be in: ..\Studio\content\Runtime\Libraries\!DAZ Just double-click on each of these Windows .BAT files.
The .BAT files only need to be run the first time you ever install and use M4. After that you don’t need to touch the .BAT again, until you get a new PC or re-install Windows. (I have no idea what Apple Mac users do, as .BAT is a Windows format. I assume Mac users have an AppleScript or something like that?)
Poser’s Library can show more than one runtime. Make sure you have the one containing the M4 selected. Also be sure you don’t for some strange reason have two ..\Runtime\Libraries\!DAZ\Micheal 4 folders.
2. In Poser’s Library, then find your installed base M4 character at – Library | Figures | DAZ People | Micheal 4. Load him to the stage/scene.
3. The M4 Morphs++ are found at – Library | Poses | DAZ’s Michael 4 | Morph Injections | and then look for the INJ Morphs++ M4 icon.
Select M4’s full Body on the stage, then double-click INJ Morphs++ M4 to inject the morphs. Alternatively you can go to ..\Runtime\Libraries\!DAZ and run the .BAT there as DzCreateExPFiles-M4 file.”
Give it a couple of minutes to work. There’s no confirmation that the new dials loaded. But they are there. You may need to select a body part to see them.
You may also want to run the DzCreateExPFiles-M4Gens.bat file which looks like it erm… ‘handles’ the naughty bits, separately.
4. Now randomly select almost any M4 body part and look down at the Parameters dials panel. Under Morphs | Shapes you should now have lots of new Morphs ++ dials for total control of M4. The injection of the Morphs++ worked.
Morphs++ is required by a good number of cool character presets, which in your runtime are usually labelled INJ BODY or INJ HEAD or similar. A youth (middle teens) body morph, for instance, is free at Renderosity as Connor for M4 (in Library: Pose | REC Connor M4).
And of course the Morphs++ dials can still be useful for manual tweaking. Here are the full-body ones…
5. Now save the Poser scene file with your fully morphed-up M4, so that you can quick-start making an M4-based character in future. You probably want to get away from the bland default M4 face as fast as possible, and there are many character heads available.
You may also want the M4 Magnet Fits which injects morphs in clothing, for fine fitting of too-puffy shoulders and suchlike.
The loading process is much the same for V4.