At SIGGRAPH 2021, a demo of an automated AI to ink vector lines over a loose lineart sketch…
PDF examples.
Release: MeshLab update
A new version of the free MeshLab was released, just before Halloween.
Mostly used for poly-reduction of 3D meshes, for many. “Quadric Edge Decimation” is what you want there.
Bear in mind that the two new versions in 2021 have bjorked every Meshlab tutorial ever written on smoothing, as all the relevant filters are either removed or differently-named or put somewhere else. The solution is to go get Meshlab 2016 which is still available and is what the old tutorials were written for.
Cleaning Firefly’s speckles with vectorisation
I did an experiment with speckle-removal in a Poser Firefly “toon lines only” render. One of the problems of that special kind of render is, the closer you go in with the camera, the more speckles. Until a character can look like they have the measles. Removing bump maps helps a bit, but not always.
Anyway: I rendered and took the render into a leading vectorizer, Vextractor 7.x. I had found that this has a useful and very easy ‘remove isolated spots’ filter, of the sort needed after scanning hand-drawn line-art. If a spot has x number of empty/white pixels around it, it’s removed.
This works on the above very subtle example. But the problem is that the lineart produced is then inferior to what you would get from the other non-vectorising method, which involves the free Paint.NET and two free plugins.
But it occurs to me now that, back in the day, Poser’s Firefly lineart speckles were not considered a problem — because it was thought that people would vectorise the lineart and thus be able to easily clean off the specks. If you’re doing animation, this may well still be viable. In a 30 FPS cartoon seen across a living-room, that vector line ugly-fication is going to be far less noticable. But it’s not much good for comics.
So the best method for comics is Paint.NET and it’s wholly free and should run on Windows back to XP. But… it’s Paint.NET and not Photoshop. So I took another look for such a ‘remove stray pixels’ filter in Photoshop, something that would be very useful for automation of the whole process. But nothing in that line has appeared since my last such search. There are zillions of photographer plugins for correcting grain and ‘hot pixels’ on the camera sensor, but nothing for this ‘scan artwork and clean’ task. The native ‘Median’ and ‘Dust and Scratches’ are useless because they nibble into or erode the fine lineart from Poser. What’s needed is a computational solution that says “that dot can be deleted, because it has only white all around it and its diameter is 2 pixels or less”. The free G’MIC might have the capability to build that, but I don’t see anything there at present.
DAP dipped
Better late than never, the worthy Dynamic Auto-Painter (DAP) is currently 20% off. So basically, your local sales tax is likely being covered. It’s very rare that the main DAP ever has a discount, though the older Photoshop plugin version (which works a bit differently) is always on a perpetual discount.
Update: Ah, I think I see why they’ve done a discount at last. They are touting several positive reviews.
Note also their new budget-priced software, both rather interesting and unique, Style Animator and CQuill Writer for writing stories and novels. Both are currently at the 1.0 stage, but look very promising.
DAZ freebies page updates
The DAZ Store Freebies page has updated. Michael 6 / The Girl 6 / Gia 6 Starter Bundles, all for Genesis 2, including some hairs; a 1970s-style sci-fi ‘Wicked Date Night Genesis’ dress; and a retro early-1960s outfit ‘Ordinarily One for Genesis 2’.
If you go to the Store and sort by price you’ll also currently find the freebies ‘Gingerbread Set’; ‘Ivy Plants’ and a ‘Holiday Lucky Bag’. Which is a bag, not a surprise freebie.
Renderosity’s Advent Calendar freebies
Renderosity now has an official Christmas Advent Calendar. Each day, with download links active for ‘one day only’, leading vendors give away Poser / DAZ content as an open download. A new cumulative post each day, and the list is currently on the third day.
Blender 3.0 lands
Blender 3.0 stable is out, and there’s also a 3.1 alpha. Mostly 3.0 seems to be about speed/performance, UI changes, and the new Asset Browser. The multipage changelog for 3.0 is big and techie enough to stun a charging rhino, but here are some highlights I spotted…
* Faster rendering on Cycles, “rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.” If… you have a hefty RTX graphics card. (That sounds like very good news for Poser 12, if it can be plugged in any time soon. Poser uses Cycles, but there it’s re-branded as SuperFly).
* Auto tile-tweaking. This is about the tile-size that gets rendered when rendering. e.g. 128 pixels. “Previously tweaking tile size was important for maximizing CPU and GPU performance. Now this is mostly automated.”
* Faster hair curves (not ribbons), but again only if… you have a fast NVIDIA OptiX card.
* A less laggy viewport, and again… I suspect that having a fast shiny new graphics card will help there.
* For the overall UI “the default theme got a refresh” and various changes.
* It’s now faster to work with the UI, which is good because Blender needs a lot of clicky-clicky work. The speed is due to things like faster text rendering, as panels spring into existence.
* Not much this time around for Eevee, but… “Performance when editing a huge mesh is improved.”
* New GreasePencil abilities with some new line modifiers (dashes, wiggles etc), and thus expanded lineart possibilities.
* A major rework of the UI layout for Freestyle. I hear elsewhere that it’s a bit quicker now to load a previous set of lines.
* .USD files can now be imported into Blender. This is the Pixar Universal Scene Description format.
* AMD GPUs are now supported.
* OpenCL rendering is removed. So is Branched Path Tracing. And the Rigify Legacy Mode is gone.
* A new Asset Browser for: Objects; Materials; Poses and Expressions; Worlds. I assume it’s drag-and-drop.
Blender 2.93 portable could run on Windows 7 with a small workaround. I assume there will also be enough demand to fix 3.0 for Windows 7. But until then, 3.0 is officially Windows 8 or higher. It will also refuse to install unless you have a sufficiently powerful graphics card.
Release: Poser 12 Early Access 12.0.752
‘Tis the merry season of releases. Blender 3.0 tomorrow, Rebelle 5.0 on the 15th, and probably more to come as the various dev teams steam toward their Christmas deadlines.
Poser 12 Early Access also has a new version online today. 12.0.752 (24th November) is ready for download.
The last version noted here was 12.0.703 in October, so there have been four internal updates since then, and now this public release. There’s a full changelog on the download page, but here’s my digestion of the highlights. There were three broad areas of focus this time around: general Library and UI usability; the PDF manual and Python documentation; and some tweaks to get ready for unimesh.
* The Poser 12 manual now documents new features in 12.x, and a handy 108Mb PDF version is newly available here. Here’s how to get the PDF downloading for you…
* “Pydoc browsing for Python developers” (see the PDF manual). It appears that Poser 12 users can go to the Python console within the software, from there get a browser-list of modules and then click on the poser module in the list. I could be wrong but it seems that this then lists all the other Python modules currently available under poser and that a Python 3 script can run in Poser 12. Also other Python items.
* Fixes for the drag dock option in the UI.
* Various Content Library palette fixes, including “Content Library search/locate feature now jumps to selected item so the user no longer needs to scroll for it”.
* Various Hierarchy Editor usability fixes.
PzDB no longer sold
I see that the third-party Poser Library software PzDB is currently in the ‘no longer sold’ category. The Payloadz payment system refuses. The software’s ‘ping’ server is still working though, the ‘ping’ being required on loading the software. My installed 1.3 version is thus still working. So there’s hope that the problem may just be with the payment processor.
The problem may be…
1) the Payloadz payment system is kaput for PzDB and other items too, for some reason;
2) that the hefty monthly PayLoadz account payment of $29 (!) has somehow ceased, and the maker of PzDb hasn’t yet noticed;
3) the maker has turned off purchases because his MS Access reseller licence (PzDB is build on MS Access) doesn’t support the latest Windows 11. However, that is unlikely, since I read that…
“MS Access database can be sold as a standalone [custom] application with a runtime edition of Access which is licence free, if you have Developers edition of the Access/Office”.
Which was what was happening with the back-end of PzDB. However it’s said that Microsoft does not love Access and that it becomes more and more difficult to run Access on newer versions of Windows. One user of the 60-day trial (still available) reports crashes with PzDB on Windows 10, but he also has the full MS Access installed, so there might be conflicts.
Anyway, just my guesses. Let’s hope it’s just a payment system problem and that sales processing can can be easily switched to Gumroad instead.
On the other hand, if it is to become abandonware then I’d suggest that perhaps what’s needed first is a small crowdfunder to raise enough to unlock the ‘ping’ and make it free + charity-ware. Even as freeware for Windows 7 and 8, it might help raise some money for charity — perhaps especially if it ran a discreet banner ad and a link inside the UI.
What are the alternatives?
1) There’s the affordable P3DO Explorer, but I find that’s impossibly slow on searches (eight minutes for a simple search for the Pitterbill keyword), and results are then mediocre. I can’t see any way, in the confusing and labyrinthine interface, to speed it up.
2) There’s the native Poser 11 Library interface, which is far better than it was. It’s now reasonably fast, but far from ideal in terms of the UI or triggering of indexing. The Search over in DAZ is not much better or faster on a large runtime. But PzDB just finds so much more stuff. For instance try a search for Aiko 3 in Poses. PzDB just finds more, presumably because of the character-based cross-referencing and clustering it does on initial indexing of the runtime. It can also show you just what you just installed.
3) Everything is free and useful for quick searches, when set to Large Thumbnails / View By Path / Search for Picture. It’s lightning fast because it builds an index first, and as such it’s probably the best sort-of substitute for PzDB for casual Poser users, in combination with RSR to PNG and the native Poser Library. It can sort by Date Created in the latest 1.4 but this needs to be manually turned on. Yet Everything is still not ideal, because you then still need to open the likely folder in Windows Explorer, and find the non-picture Poser file that can be dragged and dropped to Poser. You thus need to know what you’re looking at and the difference between your .MT5s and your .PZ2s etc. Ideally the makers of Everything would add a half-dozen features geared for Poser and DAZ content discovery.
4) If you have it, then Semidue’s Shaderworks Library Manager 2.6 still works in Poser 11, including drag-and-drop from the search results. It’s abandonware from circa 2016 and Semidue has long departed the scene. But it actually does rather a good job, and searches quickly and elegantly on a large runtime. A few seconds longer than PzDB perhaps, but quite bearable. Good results too, even though it’s searching folders only (for filenames use Everything, see above). It may need the free AVfix on some iterations of Poser 11.x. Library Manager itself doesn’t like to be run at startup of Poser 11, so you need to manually start it each session. It’s all Python so can dock with the Poser 11 UI (also Python) and replace the Library. There’s no Tkinter, so it should theoretically run on a Mac. The PDF manual is here, but the software is otherwise unavailable unless you can dig it out of an old backup drive or DVD-r.
DAZ-ling romance
“Writing Romance and Relationships for Visual Narratives”, a two-part webinar with Drew Spence on getting ‘the feel’ right for convincing DAZ-rendered relationship stories in comics, storybooks, slideshows, animation storyboards etc. Booking now.
Fantasy Attic’s 2021 Advent Calendar
Fantasy Attic’s 2021 Christmas Advent Calendar page is now online, for a month of Poser and DAZ freebies. Day 1 should be opening today.
Giving Tuesday
I hope readers picked up some nice software and 3D content bargains over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, perhaps with the aid of my numerous posts here. If you have any PayPal left-over after bagging the best savings, please do consider becoming my Patron on Patreon. Even a few dollars each month will be very welcome, and will really encourage and help me out in the present hard times. Many thanks.
Lighthouse now collected in one volume
Brian Haberlin’s Lighthouse is now out in collected trade paperback and Kindle ebook. It’s a fine science-fiction graphic novel when you put all the issues together. The adaptation of Jules Verne’s The Lighthouse At The End of the World (1905) is fairly loose, and transfers the setting into the far-future and remote space. But the story grips right to the end. These are the issue covers…
A couple of the initial reviews of the first issue, by fly-by comics critics who have not returned to review the full run, were a bit sniffy and grudging. But I found Lighthouse great fun when read together as one completed graphic novel. It’s a little talky near the beginning, and you have to suspend disbelief. But it’s a good story, well told.
The art is made with the aid of Poser, which I suspect may have put a dampener on some reviews of #1.
In contrast, the one amateur reviewer who made it as far as issue #4 noted, in a long and positive review…
The interiors here are mindbogglingly gorgeous. I love seeing how detailed and extraordinary computer artwork can be nowadays. The linework is exquisite, and the varying weights and techniques being used to create this level & quality of detailed work are astonishingly brilliant. The use of backgrounds [and their creation of a] sense of scale and overall sense of size and scope is phenomenal.
That said, be warned that you might be put off by the trade paperback’s half-hearted front-cover. It seems as though the publisher for some reason wanted potential buyers to think it’s set at sea and underwater. On the website the additional background graphic also implies it’s a historical adaptation of Verne. It isn’t either.
There’s currently one short review of the October 2021 trade paperback, from poet Bernie Gourley, and he was pleased with the quality of the story…
I found the story compelling. The source premise of being far from help and at a severe disadvantage is thrilling.
I looked long and hard for proper reviews that stepped beyond a glance at #1. There are none from publications, though the couple of amateur reviewers (see above) are positive. It’s a bit sad that a comic of this scope and quality (not to mention technical innovation) can be all-but ignored by the comics establishment. But that is what seems to have happened here.