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Category Archives: Automation

G’Mic as a Topaz Clean replacement

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I’ve found a way to just about emulate the Topaz Clean 3 Photoshop plugin, using the free G’MIC filter set in its new Photoshop .8BF form. Since G’Mic also runs on Paint.NET and PhotoLine, it will also work there. I can’t vouch for Krita, as Krita bundles its own variant of G’Mic.

Why is this needed? Because Topaz Clean 3 is no longer sold. Clean was unique and useful for 3D comics people, old manga scanners, and those who wanted to perk up character screenshots from The Sims etc. My specific use case is filtering a ‘colour flats’ base render from Poser, which could be very nicely de-grunged with Clean 3.1 in Photoshop.

This is as close as I can get in 2021 to Clean 3. It uses G’MIC’s standard Artistic | Comic Book filter with the sliders tweaked as you see below. There is also a comparison with the original and the old Clean 3 result. The original render had already been taken some way by using a flat IBL light in Poser, but still had unwanted grunging and speckling.

Pretty close, but there are drawbacks:

1. It takes a long time to run, 60 to 80 seconds on a workstation. Compared to a much more nippy 15 to 20 seconds for Topaz Clean 3.1.

2. You cannot take the Comic Book lines off altogether. Their lowest setting is locked at 0.5. This matters little, however, as you’re going to drop a real-time lineart render on top.

3. There are still some artefacts, that seem like posterization of the colours, here and there. Topaz Clean smoothly cleans them away, but G’MIC doesn’t.

But there you go… if you need free and no longer have Topaz Clean 3 for some reason or can’t (cough) find a copy, then this should help with the degrunging job for 3D comics when using layers (colour flats / details / lineart / shadows, all on their own filter-able and editable layers).

And it can do so in a more satisfactory way than the obvious and cringe-y ‘Posterized in Photoshop’ look, or by applying some swirly-blurry mess-filter that destroys edge details. The aim here being to somewhat emulate the crisp ‘paint-bucket’ flats that a professional comic-book colourist might start the colouring process with.

Bypassing the scroll-bars problem in Poser and DAZ: with Pointix Scroll++ 2.02

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Call me ‘delicate’, but I’m not so keen on painful swollen fingers and hurty-squinty eyes. Thus I went in search of a way to bypass the thin dark scrollbars in Poser 11 and DAZ Studio. Of course you can always ignore them and click into a panel/window to get ‘focus’ on it, then scroll and scroll again using a central mouse wheel and big twisty finger-movements. That’s not ideal, and such clunkiness is compounded by mouse-wheels that tend to become gunked up and anything but free-wheeling.

But imagine you could just hover your mouse over a Library window pane in either DAZ or Poser, auto-focusing the mouse into that window. Then with a single ‘right-click and hold’ (anywhere) start elegantly scrolling the window’s contents down or up. With the scrolling all then under the control of very subtle mouse movements. No need to shift focus to a different Library pane, by first clicking inside it. No need to then scrollwheel and scrollwheel again and again to get down a long list.

There’s a surprising lack of Windows helper software to do this. Some of the functionality is built into modern mice, but while they sort-of work well on browsers they can’t do what I describe above. Nor can they distinguish between different Library panels in DAZ and Poser. Is there software that can? Well, Google Code has kept the old abandonware MoScroll_0_7 beta around, but I found it very basic and so far as I can tell no longer does anything at all after install.

The best option that can is the equally old Windows abandonware called Pointix Scroll++ 2.02. Basically its unique function can be summed up as “right-click anywhere to smoothly scroll, under the control of subtle mouse-movements”, and it can handle focusing into subtly-different Library panels with ease. This software has now turned up at at WinFiles Mouse and Keyboard Utilities. There is also a slightly different copy of 2.02 on Archive.org in an old cover-disc bundle of freebies and shareware titled ‘(Czech) PC World 1999-06 CD-ROM.’ Yes, it’s that old. But… like many old bits of Windows shareware it still works fine!

After getting it (ideally from WinFiles, which is what worked for me) you then visit Carlton Bale’s page “How to Scroll if Your Mouse has No Scroll Wheel”. There he has the Netplaque and zeroes you need to enable this old abandonware. He also offers some useful settings screenshots. Tested and working for me on the WinFiles download of v.2.02. He also hosts an archive of the slightly more advanced 2.05 version, but so far as I can tell neither his Netplaque or regfix work on that.

So… 2.02 is still working fine, is stable and doing a lovely job (though I can’t vouch for it on Windows 10). Version 2.02 may thus be enough for you, especially if you need scrolling on a scroller-free device. It works very nicely with auto-focusing on and scrolling the Poser and DAZ UIs, and does the same with the PzDB 1.3 external content library manager. Very useful when scrolling past 463 similar MAT files. It’s also said to be especially unique and handy for handling scrolling and zooming on large 3D CAD files, which may also interest some readers. A commenter on the Carlton Bale page linked above said…

in CAD its function is to zoom in and out wherever you place the cursor. This is currently done with the wheel in jumps, as you can zoom only to the extent the finger can turn the wheel. And the wheel gets ruined very often. It’s a delight to just press the button and get to the required zoom at fantastic speed.

Which kind of suggests it may also be of use for things like Google Earth, though I’ve not tested it with that. I know it also works nicely with Trello, as it can also scroll sideways. A normal mouse will only scroll up and down on a Trello column. The original market was business people with big spreadsheets to navigate, hence it had to go sideways as well as up/down.

Back in Poser 11 it does not affect or work on the Poser dials, which is good, though it will scroll down a big list of morphs like any other long UI panel. It will not scroll up and down a long list of render presets in Poser, regrettably.

You can still make a static right-click and get the usual Windows context-menu.

Now my main problem was that it uses the right-click button, a problem possibly unique to me. Because using Scroll++ meant my trusty old StrokesPlus mouse-gestures software was bjorked, and StrokesPlus is vital for things like Back / Forward in a Web browser and in Explorer. Eek! Could StrokesPlus perhaps emulate the unique Scroll++, I wondered? Well, while it can assign things like a clunky PageUp key as acSendKeys(“{PGUP}”), its ‘local’ scrolling commands all now fail to work (not because of Scroll++, I might add). So no, StrokesPlus is not going to do what Scroll++ can do.

The most obvious solution, for me, was to…

    - run StokesPlus set to a right-click.
    - run Scroll++ set to a middle-click.

… and thus they don’t conflict and fight over the right-click. It’s easy to swop them over, if that proves more convenient for long periods of either 3D or Web work.

But this meant that my trusty five-year old and somewhat gunked Microsoft mouse was no longer up to the job of the middle-click. Even a cleaning and a generous squirt of WD40 would not fix it. Thus a new mouse was needed… with a highly sensitive middle-click (unlike the old one). Thankfully I had picked one up in a sale a while back, and it had been stashed in a drawer ‘waiting for the day’. It’s HP’s perfect wired clone of my previous and also perfect wired Microsoft mouse. I presume they’ve licensed this very affordable re-brand of Microsoft’s usually very expensive mouse. Get them while they’re hot.

So there, for those who need it, is the obvious additional solution to running StokesPlus (old LuaScript version) and Scroll++ 2.02 in tandem. A new mouse. The middle-click button is now a pressing-only button, although can also finesse the scroll with a slight nudge, and is thus less likely to become gunked up too quickly.

On the Kirb

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics

A quick experiment to see if Mike M’s “Jack Kirby in 3D” dream is actually possible. The style can certainly be approximated, and quickly.

Yes, I know, shadows and other embellishments would need to be added. The colours would also need to be muted back to more of a “faded 1960s comic-book” look (I’m not a fan of garish re-colours of 1960s comics, printed as reprints on slick white paper). A firmer holding-line would need to enclose the character, and some clean up is needed on the over-complicated head.

“Get a Sammy on the job…”

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, Spotted in the News

It’s always good to hear about a new semi-automated AI assistant feature for the free Unity engine, to remove some of the drudge-work. The ArtEngine apparently automates seamlessly tiling of materials, and also…

“up-resing, de-blur, un-warping, color matching”

Drawbacks: appears to need an NVIDIA graphics card, and costs a ridiculous $1,140. Still, it’s likely to be a herald of things to come in Semi-automated Assistant AIs.

We probably need a short name for those in creative production, actually. How about SAMAI or SAMAAI, to be pronounced in conversation using the friendly non-scary name “Sammy”. A Fully Automated Routine AI would be a FARAI, pronounced “Fairy”. Or just said as “Sam-eye” and “Far-eye”.

Out of the shadows

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Spotted in the News

Portrait Shadow Manipulation is an interesting new technology, hot from the Google labs.

It automatically lifts hard shadows in a head-and-shoulders portrait, these being the shadows of the sort commonly seen in pictures and videos casually made by amateurs in sunny places. Here’s the research video and a useful screenshot from it.

It also removes ‘sweat-shine’ highlights.

As you can see, if plugged into a graphics package, this technology might produce better base-portraits from which to then build comic-like art and line-art. Since what you want for your comics ‘colour flats’ layer, under the lineart, is a fairly ‘flat’ lit face or body. To which you add the shadow-render as a separate and adjustable third layer. Otherwise you’re never going to control the shadows so they display in a believable and uniform way, across the 120 panels of a 28-page comic.

What would be even more interesting would be to go the other way with the new technique, and to ‘auto-cast’ shadows onto fairly flat-lit faces, just by knowing where the eyes / mouth / shoulders are.

Freebie: Automatic OBJ Exporter

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser

What’s that you say? You want semi-automatic speedy export of any Genesis figure from DAZ Studio, to use with Poser’s real-time Comic Book mode? What? And you also want it posed and clothed?

And you’d like to add fast and stable poly-reduction to about 200,000 polys, to make the figure wieldy inside Poser in real-time? And you want all but the unwanted specular textures loading back onto the OBJ, when you load it in Poser?

Oh, and you’d also like the poly-reduction to be done by an efficient stable super-fast third-party decimator that doesn’t crash or stall (i.e. MeshLab), or take forever to produce a crumpled mess (i.e. DAZ Decimator), or which needs three hours of wrangling and head-scratching to even start to make work (i.e. Blender)?

You’d also like this done in less than four minutes?

So… you want a miracle, right? Well, it’s here. All this is available in the new free Automatic OBJ Exporter suite of scripts, which provides a step-by-step and highly-automated way of getting posed/clothed Genesis figures to Poser for tooning. Works in Windows only, and to be so fast it requires the $52 Atangeo Balancer — which a script will launch from an icon inside the DAZ Studio Library.

G8M, with lineart and toon in Poser 11. Yes, with extreme poses / tight clothes you may have to fix some poke-through via Photoshop’s heal/clone brushes. And yes, you’ll also likely want to blend in a shadows render too, which hasn’t been done for this demo.

There’s a clear read-me, but here are a few extra tips on use:

1) On importing to Poser, there will be a message that the Specular materials cannot be found. They’re not needed for toon and are not available because they were deleted earlier by a script. Just carry on loading and the rest of the textures will load on fine.

2) Once you’re happy with your reduced OBJ in Poser, obviously you then re-name its export sub-folder to something meaningful like Export_0001_Kid_Bounty_Hunter_01 and also delete the larger original OBJ in that folder (it’s the one that now has a -bak file-name). The next time you run Automatic OBJ Exporter, you rename the final created export sub-folder as Export_0001_Kid_Bounty_Hunter_02. And so on. Otherwise Automatic OBJ Exporter will over-write your older exports.

Fixing line-breaks in Poser lineart - the solution

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Poser, Tutorials 2 Comments

Right, so after more research I find that there are in fact two ways to have Photoshop play “spot the differences” across an image stack, and to extract those differences. This solution relates to my previous post on Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview lineart, and the desire to fix small breaks and missing ‘chips’ of inked line.

I had discovered that a click of the current Display Mode’s ball-icon subtly randomises the coverage and break-patterns of the line-art available from Comic Book Preview in Poser 11. I was thus looking for a Photoshop plugin to combine multiple PREVIEW renders made in this way, but I now find… the feature is already native in Photoshop and can be done via two different methods!

First you’d assemble your slightly variant lineart renders, made as described here. 1.png through 6.png should do it, though you could go to twelve renders if you wanted to be really thorough.

METHOD ONE:

Top Menu | File | Scripts | “Load files to Stack” (Stack is 64-bit only, do not tick “Automatically Align”). Shift-select all layers in the Layers Palette. Top menu: Edit | Auto-blend Layers | Stack Images. That’s it. Photoshop will then whizz through the stack as fast as a whizzly weasel, spot the differences, and produce a single unified image containing all those small differences.

The result is not as adjustable later, since Photoshop does it a weird way and you don’t get discreet cutouts on new layers, each containing ‘just the bit that was different’.

I never knew this feature existed. Never heard it mentioned in umpteen years, or had cause to use it. It’s generally though of as a focus-stacker for macro photographers.

METHOD TWO:

1. Top Menu | File | Scripts | “Load files to Stack” (Stack is 64-bit only, do not tick “Automatically Align”).

2. Select top layer in the Layers Palette. Set its layer blending mode to Difference. Invert. ‘Select Colour Range’ - white. White highlights the bit(s) different from the layer beneath it.

3. ‘Copy merged’ and ‘paste in place’ your selection to a new layer at the top of the stack, invert it to return it to black. Ensure the new layer’s blending mode is set to Normal.

4. Delete the source layer and have the Action move down to the next layer in the initial stack. Repeat.

Eventually you have a base layer and all the differences are isolated, extracted and stacked on top. This stack of differences is more adjustable than the results for method one, for instance allowing you to delete a layer with a manky eye if needed. However, it’s probably not as computationally precise compared to Method One, because the process can only ever compare with the layer beneath it. Fragments may also have slight unwanted fringing around them.

In terms of speed, once you have Method Two as an Action they’re both about the same speed.

Either method is still not going to automatically fix tiny hairlines running across eyeballs, or noses that have double lines or broken ridges when seen at certain angles.

Fixing line breaks and ‘chips’ in Poser Comic Book lineart

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Poser, Tutorials

This post is about how to partly fix line-breaks and missing ‘chips’ in Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview lineart renders. Solutions are not being sought here for the purposes of ‘closing gaps’ to enable easy flood-fill colouring in paint software. Since, if you’re doing it right, Poser already gives a ‘colour flats’ render. I’m thus assuming that your basic output layers are colour flats, lineart, and shadows/highlights, each as a separate render from the same scene and ready for a Photoshop Action to composite and tweak. Thus your lineart is on its own layer, making it vastly easier to filter and correct later on.

Here the solutions are being sought simply to have nicer lineart with fewer or no breaks.

Update: the solution. It’s No.1 + a couple of little-known Photoshop features.

Here we see a deliberately extreme example showing the breaks and gaps that can happen in a raw lineart pass from Poser. We’re in Poser’s Smooth Shaded Display mode here, and on B&W in Comic Book Preview, and thus some of the Neal Adams-style inking is coming from shadows cast by one of the two lights. Poser is running in real-time with OpenGL, and it’s all WYSIWYG. Brom’s hair (‘Mature Mark’) is of course completely un-optimised for tooning as yet.

As you can see his nose and eyes may still need some manual clean-up, even when using some of the tricks given below. Manual clean-up of such source linart is not ideal. If cleanup takes just under an hour per page, and you have a 28 page comic, that’s perhaps four days of extra work. Per month, perhaps! Across a six-issue series intended to become a graphic novel that’s… way too much fiddly and non-creative work.

Here are a few of the options I explored…

1. PARTLY WORKS. In Poser, before you render to PREVIEW you click the Document Display Style ‘ball’ again. Then do it again. You’ll notice that each time you click, Poser slightly randomises the lines-joins on the inking, and may also make other lines look better. Nice.

Sadly, it’s not viable to then do six clicks, save a PREVIEW render from each, and then combine them all to ‘fill the gaps’ in Photoshop. I’ve tried it and the accumulated result is just dark and grungy blurgh. We would need a Photoshop plugin able to computationally ‘spot the differences’ between a near identical set of lineart. (Update: the solution is that Photoshop has this natively).

So, ‘click the ball again’ is simple and a neat trick, but there’s also not much this trick can do about the nose when the faces is seen at certain angles (see example above).

However, it does has two advantages:

i) it quickly enables you to at least find a state that offers a balance between ‘good eyes’ and ‘reasonable lack of line-breaks’. Such a balance may be good enough, when mixed into a final complex blend of colour flats, lineart, and shadows. You have to remember that your ‘artist eyes’ see things in the art that the general reading public never even notices, and especially so if the intended audience is under age 12.

ii) it also offers the possibility of making just two near-identical lineart renders, one where the eyes are at their best, and another for the rest of the linework. Then you’d make a loose Lasso selection around the eyes and have a Photoshop action feather, switch layers, ‘paste in place’ and merge, and then drop back down the layer stack to delete the source layer.

Bad eyes

Good eyes

iii) there are also more complex ways of using Photoshop in which you effectively just ‘paint in red’ on nice lines you want to keep. But here we’re trying to avoid the whole ‘spend an hour carefully fixing the lineart across six panels per page’ thing.

2. SOMETIMES SUCCESSFUL. Make a suitable fast custom-preset for Poser’s SKETCH renderer, one that gives you lineart with a fat charcoal line when run on b&w lineart. A preset that smurshes away most of the gaps and broken chips. Here’s my “2000AD” custom SKETCH preset at work…

We’d still need to dab some white on the nose and draw in some Dan Dare eyebrows, but it’s nearly there. Like I said above, the hair is completely un-optimised for tooning and we’ve smurshed it to black here. Although the black does then lend itself to raking with a wide white ‘rake’ brush.

Alternatively idea 2 could be emulated by running the lineart through a Photoshop filter, G’Mic filter etc, of a type that also smurshes out most of the breaks and gaps. Partly the success of this will be dependent on your comic’s style.

A sub-option for idea 2 it to simply scale down the inking, via the dial on the Comic Book Preview control panel. With thinner lines you have more leeway when bloating them, either by SKETCH rendering into PREVIEW lineart or via a third-party filter.

3. FAILS. You might think there would be some computational solution by now. CorelDraw does have a tool called “Join Curves” for lineart. Apparently Illustrator can also do that. For those who need free software, Inkscape also has a free inkscape-chain-paths plugin which does much the same thing. However, judging by the Inkscape experience it doesn’t work as hoped, in terms of nicely closing small gaps in vectorised lineart.

4. FAILS. Clip Studio has a feature found at Correction Line > Correct line height. This fattens all lines on lineart from which you’ve ‘knocked out’ white. (That latter option has the deeply un-memorable name of Edit -> Convert brightness to opacity, where it should have a dinky little icon showing a white Mickey Mouse glove throwing a knockout punch). Sadly Correction Line just fattens everything. I’m very much a newbie at Clip Studio, but it appears to me that there’s no way to have Clip Studio do a more refined fattening of the lines. For those who need free software, line fattening is also easily done in Paint.NET via the free Overliner plugin.

5. SUCCESS. I’ve yet to get to this point in my experiments, but from what Sixus1 has said I suspect that one takes a Texture Atlas from a figure + clothes, up-scales it to 8k and starts hand-inking ‘along the edges/seams’. The intention being to give the figure a total ‘hand drawn toon’ makeover, which you can then load back onto the figure at 4096. Possibly body and head are each done separately. That’s my guess, based on what I’ve picked up. You can see this partly happening in this Brian Haberlin screenshot from a while ago now. This is one of his hand-inked faceplates seen in Smith Micro webinar, presumably partly designed to work with and mask Poser’s small lineart breaks and chips.

Like I said, I’ve yet to get to experimenting with this ‘intensive makeover’ approach, but from what I’ve heard on webinars and podcasts that seems to be the gist of the approach. And judging by Brian’s marvellous Poser-made comics, the approach can succeed very well. It looks quite labour intensive at the start, and before you start you’d have to be absolutely sure your ‘runtime bashing’ was finished and you’d devised exactly the character you want for your story. Because changing things later could be difficult.

One other trick learned from Brian Haberlin’s webinars is that it’s possible to emulate inking in Poser by zooming right in and selecting a line of polygons, and giving these a black colour. For those who find they have a persistent ‘break’ on a character’s lineart, even from different angles, this may be worth considering.

You have to do this ‘Haberlin approach’ by hand because there’s as yet no market in figures designed like this, or in off-the-shelf makeovers designed to do this for existing figures. Although if you go look at the Gage fan-art Poser figure on the Forender store, then you’ll get an idea of how attractive this approach might be be made for buyers, and how it would play very nicely with Poser’s Comic Book Preview.

X. A future possibility. Software such as Krita, Clip Studio etc can already successfully flood-fill gapped lineart with colour. Presumably it does this by detecting and forming an invisible shape in order to “hold” the paint. This shape could theoretically be repurposed by future plugin makers to run a dark line along the ‘invisible shape’ outline, which would then be imposed to fill gaps in the original lineart. If the result would be pretty or not is anyone’s guess. I suspect it would be a blobby mess, which itself would then need manual cleanup.

Release: EBSynth moves to beta

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, Freebies, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry

EBSynth has moved into beta. 10x faster, and batch auto re-naming of files when you drag-and-drop. Still free.

It’s style transfer for video frames. You first extract a still keyframe from a video, and give it a nice manual artistic paintover. Then you use the resulting painting as a style-source in EBSynth for processing all the other frames. Once done, the whole video clip should have taken on the same painterly style.

Obviously you have to work ‘per sequence’ of the video. For instance, you can’t just take a frame out of an exploding tropical volcano scene, overpaint it, and then also expect the same painted frame to work on the next scene… which may show James Bond in a speedboat racing over the sea.

Thus the way EBSynth works is a bit different than just running an entire video through an automated paint-emulation filter. One of the advantages may be, judging from the test footage, that the resulting ‘art emulated’ video is less flickery, depending on how wild your paintover was.

With a bit of careful work it seems it can also be used to remove or add wrinkles, and thus change age. It’s still at the “interesting tech-demos” and “light-show hippies getting freaky with footage of Terence McKenna” stage, but it’s one of several free and relatively easy style-transfer options worth keeping an eye on. Though it looks like we’re still a long way from “grab a Jack Kirby comics frame, apply the style to my basic lineart”.

There’s an official tutorial here (starts at 4:54, once the introductory guff is out the way).

Releases: AKVIS Decorator 8.0 and Charcoal 5.0

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, Natural media emulation, Spotted in the News

There’s some interesting movement from AKVIS, makers of rather over-priced but robust single-purpose graphics plugins.

1) Their AKVIS Decorator 8.0 is now finally ready for prime-time, having introduced a 3x speed boost with version 7.0 just before Christmas 2019, and their version 8.0 in early 2020 polished that up even further. It works as a Photoshop plugin and replaces clothing and wallpaper while retaining shadows, folds etc…

I’ve given the Photoshop plugin version a good test in PhotoLine, and it now works fine and fast, having previously been very slow. It can now take only seven seconds to replace a dress at 2400px, compared to many minutes before. Just remember to tweak your material scaling up to 150% or above, for a huge speed boost. The higher the scaling, the faster it runs.

2) Their AKVIS Charcoal 5.0, which I’ve not been impressed with in the past, now runs on a completely “new photo-to-drawing conversion algorithm” as of the new 5.0 (29th July 2020) version. A change which kind of confirms my feeling that previous versions were lacking something. Again, I’ve tested the latest version, since they have ten-day demos. As you’d expect from the name, it tries to convert your cute cat / boyfriend / selfie photo etc into a mixed charcoal/chalk drawing. It’s fast and on my test Poser comic-book render I found a few of the thirty or so presets that I could just about imagine making a stylised horror comic with. Most were too scribbly and the scribbles had no respect for the eyes, though, and did little better than the free G’MIC. AKVIS needs a “detect and partly protect the eyes” module in the algorithm, I’d suggest. Still, I was able to brew a pleasing custom preset fairly quickly…

…and I like the software far more than before. This picture is still sharp at the edges, because Charcoal was running on a masked PNG render. Provided you want heavily ‘smudged and gauzy’, with a little work it could give you a style that could work for a Halloween ghost tale. There may also be some potential for hatching into shadows, but I didn’t immediately see it other than in some promisingly-labelled sliders. Otherwise, for charcoal also look at the free G’MIC plugins before you spend $50 to buy this. The only drawback there is that, last time I heard, the G’MIC suite is for Krita, GIMP, Paint.NET… but not for Photoshop. G’MIC for Photoshop will likely happen, but it could be a while yet.

The cost is the main drawback with AKVIS, with each plugin costing around $50. $49 for Charcoal, and $54 for Decorator. And even at that price, neither are commercial-use and amazingly they’re feature-restricted unless you go for the even more expensive Business version. For example, the $49 standard version of Charcoal won’t let you select an earlier frame unless you have the $89 Business version.

It’ll be interesting to see if AKVIS Watercolor gets the overhaul treatment next, as the February 2020 changelog suggests it’s about where Decorator and Charcoal’s changelogs were a while back.

Adobe Research previews Structure

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, Poser, Spotted in the News

Adobe Research has given online demos of a possible new Adobe application called Structure. It’s working now in a basic way and is generative iterative software that works directly on a 3D model. Take a 3D model of a sofa, and randomise it — plumper cushions, more cushions, make it wider, less cushions, curvier arm rests. There is no need to edit the mesh directly. The user selects which of the new random variants they like, then runs the process again. Thus they can more or less work toward generating their “ideal sofa”. Sounds fun, like some of the old generative Kai-type tools but for 3D, though currently it’s still an R&D project from the labs.

They’re also experimenting with rendering from 3D straight to vector graphics, for Adobe Illustrator to then apply a line-stroke to it. But why not just do the lineart in the 3D application, in real-time, like Poser 11 does? I guess the answer is that Illustrator gives you more line-type choices. This would be most interesting to me if I never had to see/learn the Illustrator UI, and instead Illustrator’s line-stroking services were just called in to the 3D software. To be exposed there as a little user-friendly panel — Illustrator as just another possible render-engine.

Line stroke types would be an interesting thing to add to Poser 12, actually — allow the user to make basic changes to the type of line being used by Comic Book Preview mode to “ink” the 3D figure. One can sort of do that already, by using the sketch render on lineart in Poser, and it can get so fast that it is almost real-time. But it would be nice to have a choice of line-types for inking, from within a neat drop-down placed on the Comic Book Preview mini-panel. Perhaps: plain black ink; dotted line; coloured ink (red, blue, rainbow); fat and curvy; basic rough pencil; and basic rough charcoal.

How to extract skin and eyes for colour blending

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, Natural media emulation, Poser, Tutorials

Ideally Poser 12 would have the ability to render only those parts of the skin and eye materials that are visible to the camera, and nothing else in the scene. And to do so in a real-time Preview render.

However I don’t think this is possible, due to the limitations of the current Preview and Firefly engines. I can’t find any script “to render just materials X and Y, as visible to the camera”.

Why would one need to do this?

In post-work a render may be filtered through a Photoshop plugin to get an artistic effect (see below), and the colours will thus shift or wash out. The general colour and contrast shift may be pleasing, but the skin and eyes may then look “off”. Skin can look yellow and jaundiced, and eye-whites less than white. By laying in a render-pass layer containing only skin and eyes, the correct colours can be restored — the layer is blended using a Colour or Saturation blend-mode.

There are several possible workaround solutions to get something like such a useful ‘skin and eyes only’ render.

1. Create a Python script to temporarily hide hair and clothes and props from the Poser figure, auto-remove any Comic Book inking lines, auto-render to Preview, then have the screen restore all visibility. It can be done, and I now have such a script working. The results are not ideal when you’re pasting over a picture which has hair and collars, and where the eyes have become better than what you’re pasting in. But a few dabs with an eraser can just about blend in the new layer. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best in-Poser option and is quick and mostly automatic.

All we want from this is the colour, blended as a layer in Colour blending-mode

2. Extract skin with the free paint.NET graphics software and its rather nice Color to Alpha v2.2 plugin. Imperfect, and may need a wide Gaussian Blur to fill holes and soften raggedy edges. Might be good if you don’t need precision or eyes. Update: it’s capable of far neater work. More useful if your graphics software can ’round trip’ to Paint.NET and back, such as you can do in PhotoLine.

Set the skin tone, and the skin is extracted while the rest is sent to transparency. Adjustable via sliders. This example was run on a Poser Sketch render, and its’s not the extraction that’s caused the artistic effect.

3. Render each and every figure / hair / hat / prop in the Poser scene separately and then assemble them in the graphics software as aligned masking layers. Again, I now have a Python script to do this in Poser. But in practice it’s not viable, since hats, helmets and hair etc don’t mask. Meaning that you see the back of them, when there’s no head in them. If you only have scenes full of bald and hat-less monsters and robots, you’re fine. Otherwise, not so much. That said, it’s quite possible that some makers of comics and storybooks will want to manually draw on the hair afterwards, along with brows and mouth-lines.

4. In the Materials room set a bright green colour (it’s found under ‘Math’, perversely) as the Firefly auxiliary render ‘option one’, repeat for all the fiddly bits of skin and eyes you want masked. Render in Firefly with the ‘option one’ Auxiliary switch thrown, save to .PSD. Select colour, extract, use as a mask. Fiddly, slow, and clunky as hell. Best avoided.