A quickie Poser 11 SuperFly render of an older figure, AM’s early Sabertooth tiger, to make sure it and its fur still works in the new Poser version. Single light and a “Quick Preview” render preset. A ten minute render to 2800px (CPU only) in a .PNG. Then reduced in size to make the fireflies/speckles vanish, and slightly re-lit with Photoshop (light bouncing up off snow, added shadow beneath). Background from Wikipedia.
Well, it’s that time of the month again. Here’s my survey of what I found to be the most unusual / freshest / adaptable new content for DAZ Studio and Poser.
Before I start the post, I should note that it’s now official that the Runtime DNA store is being sold outright to DAZ. My guess is that the growing Hivewire3D store will get some of the more Poser-centric RDNA vendors and Poser script/utility makers — and perhaps even get the official Poser forums. I also guess that a few smaller vendors may not want all the hassle of moving elsewhere and their content could just vanish altogether. So… if you have anything on your Runtime DNA Wish List you’ve always wanted, especially if it’s from a small vendor, now might be the time to grab it.
Sci-fi:
New content-creator Sharktooth shows sci-fi promise with his Nanoflight Jetpack for Genesis 2 and 3 (Manga-Anime Battlesuit and helmet not included)…
The AntFarm has a delightfully designed little Helper bot, in a 1960s Italian retro style…
Sleek Chic for Genesis 3 Female is possibly useful generic sci-fi clothing, for background extras in a large scene.
VYK_Meerka for Victoria 4…
Edit Male Hair for Genesis 3 Males, which has a futuristic/sci-fi vibe…
Elegant for Genesis 3 Female has a nice steampunk / Sky Captain feel…
Rebel Star for Genesis 2 Female will be useful for those making fan-art for the new Star Wars movie…
This month coflek-gnorg has Futuristic Promenade, which can double as a future museum or alien aquarium…
In sci-fi scenes Stonemason has Our Lost Future. A naff name, but a very fine sci-fi-horror tunnel entrance…
How to reach that remote and abandoned tunnel entrance? There’s a highly detailed Expedition Truck for Poser. This looks absolutely outstanding in its attention to detail, range of texture makeovers, and inclusion of a complete interior.
For commercial use you’d want to remove some of the trademarked decals via a little Photoshop cloning. Use of the famous Red Cross / UN symbol should also be very carefully considered, even in non-commercial renders. Diluting the power of the Red Cross brand could cost real lives…
The AntFarm has Explosive Props, always handy for the “Destroy ALL Monsters!” type of sci-fi. You can probably scavenge some similar items for free, given an hour’s searching, but here they all are in high quality and they come with DAZ iRay materials…
Cybertenko’s STRATCOM War Room may be useful for some, with a bit of re-texturing of the screens. It reminds me of early Sean Connery-era James Bond movies (Dr No to You Only Live Twice are the ones worth seeing)…
Need close-ups pictures of meteorites or small asteroids, for your sci-fi? Weathered Rocks come with hi-res 4096px textures for Poser and DAZ…
And there’s also some unusual new Zero-G Pinup Poses for zero gravity portraits.
Generic scenes:
ironman13 has an amazingly detailed i13 Coffee Shop for DAZ Studio iRay complete with G3 poses.
TruForm has an Italian-style Small Library for DAZ and Poser.
Stonemason also goes with the Italian vibe with The Streets of Tuscany…
Tuscany looks just the place for Vue users to park their snazzy new 3d replica of the vintage 1928 Mercedes-Benz SSK…
Slightly less alluring than Tuscany are the terraced side streets of the northern Midlands and Northern England. Northern Terrace Street faithfully recreates those. Just add half a ton of litter, and choke the roadsides with parked cars…
Jackson’s Field doesn’t look much at first glance, but is fairly unique. It’s a typical scraggy bit of English farmyard, plus a ditch which might suit insect and pond-dipping storybook pictures. If your runtime has small children in dungarees and cute farm animals, who all need some exercise, then this might be the place for them. Jackson’s Field also comes in a DAZ Carrara version.
Dante78’s new Medieval Plantation models may be able to turn your Jackson’s Field into a more medieval scene.
Characters, body shapes, and hair:
There’s now a free Genesis 3 Poser Updater, allowing G3F and G3M to be imported into Poser 11 (previous Genesis incarnations and related props can of course be brought into Poser 11 very easily, via the existing free DSON importer plugin). This new free G3 converter works inside DAZ Studio, converting and outputting a Poser 11 -compatible figure…
There are two fine new characters for Poser 11’s new flagship Pauline character (she comes with Poser 11’s free 5Gb content bundle)… Elly for Pauline and Altea for Pauline…
Also some conforming clothing for Pauline, MMOS-Sweety Set…
Kimi Style for Genesis 3 is a flexible everyday clothing set, which could be livened up with some chunky hiking boots and ankle-warmers.
Doris V4 is a characterful older woman for Victoria 4…
Growing Up for Genesis 3 Bundle is now available, for both boys and girls…
The best-selling Rayn and Skyler G2F/G3F characters now each have a set of distinctive new face/head presets, via the new Rayn’s Friends pack and the Skyler’s Friends packs…
Fantasy and macabre:
1971s has a fine new Fantasy rock house…
Poisen mixes twee and macabre with his new set of heart-shaped CharmZ…
Muud for Genesis 3 Male is unusual and suitably priced. He might benefit from an add-on that pools the mud around the ankles and feet, and has drips and splodges on the floor, like he’s just raised himself up out of a cave-pool and is still wet and dripping. Maybe also a preset to have him become a Lava Man.
RawArt’s Woody for Genesis 3 Male is superbly macabre. Possibly he needs a set of marionette strings, though, as a freebie. And a matching ramshackle/rustic performance stage with spooky light presets…
Nature V4 Hair seems like it’s a nature/faerie hair base that will inspire a few texture makeovers. It might even be amenable to a sci-fi makeover, or could become wood-shavings + nails hair for RawArt’s Woody…
Semi-toon and comics/storybook:
This month saw the release of the way-too-expensive The Guy 7 and The Girl 7 for DAZ Studio’s Genesis 3.
Anime and manga comics makers may like the new Lynn for NearMe. This requires the specialist anime production base-character for Poser, NearMe 1.1…
There’s a new Leotard for Star!…
Sewing Notions is unusual, and seems to have the items a children’s book illustrator might need for a mice-meet-faeries storybook tale set around a sewing table at night…
dhouck has the latest in his Moon Modern Jetsons-style sci-fi retro furniture and rooms. The growing series is not especially well presented by his main store previews, but the range of clean n’ curvy shapes might work very well with the Comic Book Mode in Poser 11.
Animals:
Not much this month. Australian and New Zealand animals seem to be popular, at present. Alessandro has a new Tasmanian Devil with Look At My Hair plugin presets.
Songbird Remix has New Zealand Kiwi birds and a Kiwi Burrow for them. (They burrow? Yes, apparently so…)
Others:
Stonemason has a $800 Stonemason Indie Game Developer License for his content. Good luck in poly-reducing them to run in action games. But for rendered cut-scenes and splash screens, and for other games genres such as point n’ click adventures and gamebooks, they could look awesome. Stonemason has a small gallery accompanying the license that seems to suggest that sort of use.
Lastly, Hologram Image Maker for Daz Studio is very intriguing. It makes a series of video files that apparently then go into Adobe After Effects or similar, and can then be made into a hologram that can be projected by a smartphone into a little prism-like container. It’s not exactly ‘Princess Leia holograms’, but it’s an interesting novelty until the Microsoft Hololens arrives in the shops.
That’s it, more next month.
A useful old book, free online, Old Sword-Play. Lots of big pictures from primary sources, for those who want to recreate historical-authentic sword-fighting poses for Poser and DAZ Studio.
Are you using Poser and DAZ Studio to make comic strips or faux-vintage artwork? Then you may enjoy these new freebie halftone brushes for Photoshop CS6 and up. Hi-res, and cleared for commercial use.
Historical 3D graphics consultant Paul S. Docherty has recreated the famous bust of Nefertiti (Ancient Egypt, c. 1340 BC) in hi-res 3D, using only a variety of public photos (“photogrammetry”). His detailed account of the process is here. The Swiss microengineering specialist C. Yamahata has duplicated Docherty’s process and kindly offers a free .obj for download.
There’s a new book out for Poser clothing content-creators, How to Make Clothing for Poser: A Step By Step Guide
A sample page…
NVIDIA, whose most expensive videogaming graphics cards can now power Poser 11 and DAZ Studio 4.8x and higher, is doing rather well at selling its cards…
“In the three months to January 31, revenues from the graphics chip giant’s PC cards rose 25.4 per cent on the year-ago period to US $810m. … its gaming wing more or less doubled in revenue [and] it absolutely dominates the company’s [accounting] books”
Another example of Poser 11’s comic-book mode. Runtime DNA’s ‘Ninja Sprite’ toons up especially nicely, although the top of the hair needs a little Photoshop…
Poser 11 Pro currently has a $120 discount at Smith Micro. And Reality 4.2 for Poser is currently 50% off at Renderosity.
Here’s my quick selection of the ‘top ten’ tips I spotted during the recent two-hour official Poser for comics webinar. Thanks to Charles Taylor for the first tip, and Brian Haberlin for the rest. There are more tips than these ten, though, so watch the whole webinar. It’s free online.
1. Apply canned stock animations to your character, then scrub along Poser’s animation timeline to find exactly the right pose — the pose and angle that fits the story-moment happening in your comic panel.
2. When using an Infinite light with Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview mode, dial up the Preview Shadow Map Size to 4096 to get quality shadows.
3. Improve texture quality in Preview, by going to Render Settings | Preview | Texture Display, and dial it up to 4096 for quality textures.
4. Different parts of a character or prop can be given a thinner or thicker ink line, when using the Comic Book Preview mode. Simply switch to the Material Room, and then dial the Geometric Edge setting up or down.
5. Simple hand-inking of a face texture can get you nearer to a production-quality comic-book character, when starting with a V4 or M4 character which was intended for photoreal rendering. Hair can also be painted as ink lines.
You can also re-colour individual lines of polygons directly on the mesh, to serve as quasi ‘ink lines’ in the render.
6. For very large landscapes, having the far distance as a wallpapered dome won’t get you the toon ink lines you need. For that you need real geometry. So don’t forget about the low-poly royalty-free game landscapes now being sold fairly cheaply in .obj for Unity.
7. A lone ToonID layer rendered in Firefly (a Poser 11 Pro-only feature) can be used later, in Photoshop, to quickly ‘paintbucket’ flat colour into large areas of the comic panel.
8. Don’t accept the default camera lens for a scene, spin the Focal dial on the camera and see what dramatic effects it can give you.
9. Once you have all the thumbnail planning of your panels and pages firmly nailed down, it’s possible for Brian to produce up to six pages a day when everything is going smoothly. Thumbnailing is vital to prevent wasting hours in fiddling with all the possibilities that 3D offers.
10. It can take a day to fully ‘design’ a production-level Poser character from a stock M4 or V4, runtime-bashing clothing items together to form a unique look, finding or making textures that suit the Comic Book Preview mode, etc. But once the final character is “drawn” in 3D and looking right, the rest of the work is mostly posing and rendering.
Now online for free at YouTube, the recent 2-hour official Poser webinar on using Poser for making comics. There’s a very poor microphone being used by the initial tutor, but you can’t sniff at free + two hours long. You might want to start at 27:30 mins then loop back to the starting section later on, to avoid getting bogged down right away in the first 25 minutes of fiddly animation timeline wrangling.
I’d almost forgotten that Vue XStream 2015 added a new NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering, or ‘toon and paint’ to the rest of us) module, when it shipped last spring. I took a quick look at what people have been saying about it, and doing with it over the last nine months.
Unfortunately there seems to have been very little interest in this feature. Judging by the half-dozen 2015 NPR renders shown online, there was even less use of the feature. Just a few tests.
Here are the better ‘not-too-Photoshoppy’ demo pictures made with Vue 2015’s NPR: Vue’s own planes’ promotional picture; some trees by CG-Garlic; and (with some Photoshop) Dave de Kerf’s “Trench Run”.
This again confirms my general theory that the mass of 3D users only really want “photoreal, photoREAL, PHOTOREAL!”. Though we may may occasionally go “oooh!” at an NPR picture for five seconds, before going back to using the magnifying glass to get each of Genesis 2 Female’s individual SSS skin pores looking just right.
But I also have a theory that the professional artists — those who can massage these sorts of NPR effects up to the level where most paying clients can’t really tell if they’re 3D or 2D — they just don’t want to say anything about it or show it off in public. Because they’re making money off it. Mostly that’s just my educated guess, but I have heard various people say things along those lines. Did you know, for instance, that the artist Dave Gibbons extensively uses Poser and he made one of the all-time-great graphic novels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen? Yup, Poser. And I bet most readers can’t get a third of the way through a copy of ImagineFX, without muttering: “they must have used Poser or DAZ for the basis of that one…”.
Anyway, here’s everything I could find on Vue 2015’s NPR. There’s not much. Nothing official from Vue on YouTube, which is kind of amazing. But Vladimir Chopine of Russia has a good solid 35-minute tour of the NPR module for free on YouTube, part of his longer paid-for GeeksAtPlay video introduction to using Vue 2015. The NPR module looks very powerful and flexible, able to combine and merge multiple lines and effects. If this was a Photoshop plugin for sketching and painting over imported 3D models in Photoshop, there would be a mini-industry built around it by now…
GeeksAtPlay’s video tutorial continues in Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, to get the full 35 minutes.
And 3D World magazine #196 (July 2015) offered a free downloadable preset (48Mb) for the NPR module, as part of its review of 2015. No-one else seems to have whipped up some cool presets for NPR in Vue 2015 and given them away free, so far as I can find. The same issue of 3D World also had a short Vue 2015 review, which said of the NPR…
“Vue contains a new, extraordinary NPR (non-photorealistic render) engine, which is simply awesome. There are several NPR engines in different applications, but e-on did something truly revolutionary and created a free and customisable tool for artistic abstraction. Here you can determine the full artistic style of the rendered image. This is a valuable addition because you have the opportunity to combine, for example, the brush weights with the colours of the pictures and other manipulators. […] For backgrounds in animation and feature films this could bring a strong uniqueness. Unfortunately, NPR engine only currently supports Vue xStream module.”
For artists to read that about a major 3D software in a major magazine review, and then give a collective shrug of the shoulders to it… it seems a bit sad.
I spotted another content designer who has a Renderosity sale, 1971s. Nice 25% discounts, on the following and more, with 65% discounts for Prime ($29.99 USD) members. His sale ends today (28th Jan, USA time). Update: sale extended to 2nd February.
