About this blog
Hi! This is a blog about creatively using and testing popular 3D tools such as Poser and DAZ Studio. The blog is mostly intended as for regular news about these and other popular 3D graphics and animation software packages…
* DAZ 3D Studio (both the old 3.1.2.24 Advanced and the newer DAZ Studio 4.x).
* Poser, mostly Poser Pro 11.
* Poser-friendly software, such as Vue 2016, Cinema 4D, MotionArtist and others.
I also regularly survey…
* the best of the affordable royalty-free content made for Poser/DAZ, and to a lesser extent for Vue.
* developments in 3D for comics production.
I also occasionally cover…
* 3D artists, digital comics makers, animators, and innovative content-creators.
You may also find occasional coverage of…
* wider artistic and industry developments in animation and 2D/3D and graphics in general, especially if relevant to NPR rendering.
* the other production tools needed for making digital comics and graphic novels.
You may also enjoy my long-standing blog about other real-time animation software such as iClone, at the MyClone blog, though this is now defunct in terms of regular posting.
My software progress:
I’ve been using Poser since the early days of Poser 3.0. Some years back I started using DAZ Studio 3 far more, in combination with the real-time iClone. With the release of Poser Pro 2012, I became more of a Poser fan than before. Although I still mainly tended to use the free DAZ Studio 4.7 and iClone.
I went off iClone when they did away with the familiar old interface, and yet without a powerful graphics-card I struggled with DAZ Studio’s new and sluggish iRay rendering. Which meant I was ready for the new vastly improved Poser 11. I did an in-depth review of Poser 11 and quickly became a big fan of Poser again. I soon had a more powerful PC to run it, and a full copy of Vue to connect it to. I also especially liked Poser 11’s unique new real-time Comic Book Preview mode, and could see how this could connect in interesting ways with the Sketch Designer.
By late 2017 I was also increasingly liking the new DAZ Studio 4.10 for casual work, because its iRay rendering had finally become usable for me — thanks to the wonderful new Scene Optimizer plug-in. It still wasn’t ideal, especially re: lack of good lighting controls in DAZ, but it was fast enough to use.
By late 2018 I was intensively experimenting with Poser 11 for comics production, documenting and niggling down into the work-flows in terms of… i) how to automate the process as much as possible, and ii) how to arrive at convincing ‘artistic 2D from 3D’ comics and sketch looks. Looks that would not cause snorts of derisive laughter among regular graphic-novel readers or buyers of children’s picture-books. I’ve so far had good success with that, and have arrived at about six different styles that I think would pass the ‘sniff test’ among comics buyers and even storybook editors. I’m now slowly finding time to work on refining and automating these as much as possible, and am also developing a set of speedy Sketch Designer presets.
In 2019 I got a multi-core workstation, albeit one a decade old, which runs Poser and Vue much faster. It can even do real-time iRay in DAZ Studio, on relatively simple scenes. I also began to take an interest in making Python scripts, as a way of reliably automating some of the production processes in Poser. I can’t and never will write Python from scratch but, as with Javascript, I can now hack and splice and tweak it — until it does what I want it to.
In 2020 I picked up Clip Studio and MotionArtist very cheap, for possible future comics use, but they’ll take some learning. I also got Cartoon Animator 3 Pipeline on a nice $70 deal, which I already knew from previous versions. I moved over from the lumbering old Photoshop CS6 to the nippy $65 Photoline for 98% of everyday graphics editing, with AlphaPlugins Launchbox (runs old 32-bit plugins) and Paint.NET (to run G’MIC and a nice Liquify) providing extra round-trip plugin support to Photoline.
that´s really helpful, thank you. I need to show the the bodies muscle maps though, is it possible to do so in iclone or maybe complete the motion i need in iclone and somehow import it into daz studio
You could probably get someone to convert and rig a Poser M4 for iClone, with the body textures you need. Ask on the iClone forums.
Hi, that sounds interesting. I would prefer not to have an SEO article on the blog, as that could reduce search-ranking in Google.
However, a square sidebar ad-graphic, with text link below it, would be $50 a month by PayPal.
I’m also the editor of Digital Art Live magazine, which welcomes advertising and which reaches your target audience.
Yours,
David.
Hi David. I understand this a very farfetched request, and not entirely on topic with this blog, but I’m hoping you could be of some help. I’m looking for the 9GB file of Flash assets that was released many years ago as part of the “Free Jack” program. (Odd Job Jack) This includes the 13 episodes of season three I believe, along with all characters, backgrounds, and props to be used in flash (now adobe animate). I’ve been searching high and low for this thing all over the internet, but the original torrent is long gone and all the old links that pertain to it are dead. Even on the Odd Job Jack website, I’m getting no where because the site is outdated.
I understand you downloaded the file at some point? There are a few download links for it on your older blog, but they all redirect to a “offline” sharesend page. Is there any way you could help me out with getting these assets? I’d really appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Remy
I’m fairly sure I deleted the original torrent for space on my backup drive, but I still have the extracted ‘converted to Cartoon Animator’ props .zip’s somewhere. Perhaps I should try to get them up to Archive.org or somewhere permanent, if people still want them, though it would take an hour to find them and dig them out. They were under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, so Archive.org is likely to accept them.
I’m fairly sure, also, that the backgrounds/backplates I extracted were sent to Flickr under Creative Commons, though, and are still available - if that’s all you want. I went through it thoroughly and got everything worth having re: Cartoon Animator. Yes… here they are, 344 of them… https://www.flickr.com/photos/futurilla/albums/72157640059507136 74 views in gawd knows how many years - which shows you the low level of demand for this stuff.
It took about five hours, but they’re now all on Archive.org.
Thank you so much!!! I apologize for being several months late with my gratitude, but I had given up the search and nearly forgot I asked for this. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to find and upload everything. I’m sure that was a labor, but just know there’s at least one person who will be putting this pack to good use. The art looks great.
Thanks again,
Remy
I am looking for help in “cartooning” noram figure to create outlines that look like totally blank figures with a thin pen drawn outline (B&W). I have done all the instructions and I get to OK results, but with great lack of anatomical details (clavicular lines, sterno-cleido mastoid, rib cage, Iliac wings). Could you help me in the right direction? Thanks !
I’m not sure what you mean by a “noram” figure. Is that manga production-speak for “North American”?
In Poser you have two main options to get lineart that looks like pure inks on a white figure. Comic Book Mode in b&w with a flat light, and Firefly rendered with toon lines only. There’s a render preset that will help with setting up the latter, at: https://www.sharecg.com/v/93014/ Such a Firefly render will give you every line available from the model, which is something that the Comic Book mode will not necessarily give you. Once you have both renders, you can then blend them in Photoshop, erasing unwanted lines. The Firefly lines can also be filtered by various third-party filters, to make them look more hand-drawn. For instance, past posts on this blog have demonstrated the free G’MIC filter set and its remarkable abilities in this direction.
So the answer is, it’s probably not possible in a single render pass. You will need two, and to blend and filter them in Photoshop etc, and then save the finished recipe as a repeatable Action. You can also then use Photoshop to “knock out the white”, leaving only the inking while also revealing a colours-only (“colour flats”) render beneath. This base colour render can also be filtered for a more artistic look.
It will also help to have the right starting 3D model, as some are fairly featureless, while others have lots of creases and wrinkles that “catch the inks” in Poser. Unless you want to do a lot of post-work on your comic, it can be best to write the comic script to the 3D assets that are already available, and which you know will work well. Rather than write a wild sci-fi/fantasy script, and then spend a month hunting for and testing figures and props to fit it.