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Category Archives: Spotted in the News

Release: EBSynth moves to beta

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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).

Release: ZBrush 2021

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ZBrush 2021 is shipping. In general it…

* “sculpts more fluidly” and “speed has increased across all sectors”.

Among the new feature list…

* “the ability to open native-format files created by ZBrushCoreMini”. Mini being their cut-down non-commercial version, that’s been made relatively easy-to-use.

* The iMage 3D format. This is a single .GIF or .PNG for website posting “where it will appear as a regular 2D image”. But once this image is “opened in ZBrush [it is] the complete model with all its SubTools and ready to edit.” Nice idea, and presumably done via steganography. This should open up the possibility of easily posting smaller 3D models on blogs, social media etc without the need for third-party file-hosting. Presumably this could also be done in such a way that it also works as a 360 on Facebook?

* Collada (.DAE) import/export. Not sure if this was in already, but the ‘new features’ list makes it look like a new thing.

* Lots of focus on cloth draping and ‘pinned’ cloth sculpting (think: making hats and headwear), along with a set of new Cloth brushes. Also a new way to make chain-mail, hairy canvas, rough denim surfaces by ‘pinning’ a bit of geometry to each polygon.

A new CC comic

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There’s a new comic under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, from the Czech Academy of Sciences. “When the Earth Quakes” is a 26-page comic designed to teach about earthquakes and seismic waves. It was crowd-funded among interested scientists who just wanted something to help with outreach and education. It’s in English, and the makers are interested in hearing from people who could translate/re-letter it into other languages.

FlowScape is back in the flow

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The development of the $10 FlowScape landscape-creation software is back on track, now that Australia is recovering from lockdown and the kids are back in the schools again. There’s a preview video of the next version of this real-time tool. Lots of new stuff for makers of isometric dungeons (think all those Diablo-like dungeon-crawler videogames) which though fun is presumably mostly for RPG makers. But also, later in the video, we see ‘flocking’ fish shoals underwater, fast auto-growing grass and ground-cover plants that automatically follow the terrain without any ‘painting’ being needed, while auto-culling happens on terrain slopes and hollows. Plus there’ll be a configurable “stick it where you want it” user interface.

Releases: AKVIS Decorator 8.0 and Charcoal 5.0

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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 $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.

Release: latest U-Render is now in the C4D viewport

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The real-time engine U-Render can now run in the Cinema 4D viewport. Just released, U-Render 2020.07.6 is a “really real-time” WYSIWYG render engine for Cinema 4D and runs on OpenGL. It costs around $350.

With 2020.07.6… “it is no longer necessary to install the Windows-only standalone renderer” as everything is integrated into Cinema 4D as “a viewport renderer, making it possible to see a live render directly within Cinema 4D”.

This change apparently also makes U-Render accessible to Mac users, at least for now — Apple is widely said to be set to ditch OpenGL entirely from Macs. However, Windows users should also note a problem — U-Render only appears to work on the toxic tangle that is Windows 10. Which means I can’t test it, even though there’s a demo available. But I wonder if the viewport integration has now solved this Windows problem for Windows 8.1 users?

All this is theoretically interesting to me as there’s still a way to get Poser 11 scenes to Cinema 4D, via the free PoserFusion plugin. That still works fine, for those who have the required bits to hand. The other question is, will the latest U-Render run in the older version of Cinema 4D required by PoserFusion (which was R19, when last heard about).

The other question is… how much extra the U-Render’s OpenGL real-time would actually add to an imported Poser scene… who knows? By that time the materials would have been through two conversion processes: Poser to C4D (automatic) and then C4D to U-Render (automatic). It might then be more trouble and cost than it’s worth to fiddle about for hours fixing skin and eyes and the like.

Still, if we could get a direct Poser 12 to U-Render plugin, ideally at a sub $100 price, that could be an interesting thing to have in terms of making Poser 12 work more like iClone. I haven’t heard anything about that happening, it’s just my complete guess. The less expensive route to WYSIWYG full-viewport real-time might be to plug some sort of stable ‘Eevee port’ from Blender into Poser 12. It would presumably be no use to ‘send Poser scene to Blender, for real-time display in Eevee’, since Blender is such a fast-moving target and the UI is still very daunting even now.

But judging by the recent call for Poser 12 beta-testers, it’s Unity that’ll be the real-time destination, not Blender. Unity is also free. It remains to be seen if Poser 12 users will be sent into a full “OMG, I have to learn to drive yet another nuclear submarine!” Unity UI, or into a “we’ve cunningly hidden all the complex bits” Poser-friendly Unity viewport.

BEER flows

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BEER is now moving ahead again, having moved past the half-way point on its crowdfunding journey. BEER aims to make a relatively easy-to-use Blender plugin for stylised rendering output. That means render types that emulate hand-drawn and hand-painted art, ultimately. They’re now into week 8 of a 10 week development cycle, after a long period of fund-raising. The drooling masses want photo-real babes and few people are interested in arty rendering, so it appears to have been a long-haul for the BEER team. But to reach the half-way mark is a good sign. They hope that the other ten weeks of work can be input when BEER is fully funded at $20k. Instead of nodes, in BEER there are building blocks that make sense to artists…

BEER runs with NPR features as the building block of a material. Diffuse [basic material] is a feature, hatching is a feature, rim light is a feature. We stack these NPR features to make a final material.

Adobe Research previews Structure

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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.

DazToBlender8 is the new DAZ Blender plugin

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Ah, so the $15 Japanese DAZtoBlender8 plugin is the new official DAZ Blender plugin.

It’s been taken off sale at Gumroad, and the maker states there that… “DazToBlender is now available for free in DAZ 3D.” He also reports that there’s been a slight change due to the swop-over and name-change, and… “Props from Renderotica cannot be [used with] the version published on the DAZ 3D site.” The trade-off is that in DAZ’s hands the plugin appears to have been quickly extended to supporting transfer of Genesis 3 as well as 8.

The last non-DAZ developer version was 2020-07-01 | Version 1.9.3.4, then newly supporting Blender 2.83.

Another interesting item to note is that, now this is with DAZ… “This project is open source.” That’s from the DAZ Store page.

Comics from Unity – via Poser 12?

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Renderosity is calling for beta testers for Poser 12 and they specify Unity knowledge as one of the skills they’re seeking. Which makes it sound like there will be a Unity bridge in Poser 12. That would make a lot of sense. Unity is one of the two big free game-engines (the other is Unreal), and it’s reasonably well-supported by third-party add-ons. The free Unity Personal Edition allows commercial use, as long as you don’t make more than $100,000 per year in your business from using it.

The ideal would be, at a guess, an integrated three-click “Poser 12 to Unity” workflow that’s as easy as getting a Poser scene into Vue. But which also sends Poser’s current camera and framing to Unity. The other useful thing to get, either in Poser or from Unity itself, would be some form of Matcap. ‘Matcap’ is a process that inspects the existing texture, then automatically tries to replace it with a best-guess toon material. So a red shiny dress becomes a red toon shader with ramping and highlights.

In which case, what is available in Unity-land for tooning? Below is my initial survey of this. Please don’t go buying these yet. Not least because some of them are rather expensive (“‘Cos yur gonna make big bucks on your game, guys…” Yeah, right…). But mainly because a three-click fiddle-free ‘Poser 12 to Unity’ process is just my hope at present, based on very slim evidence.

Shaders in Unity:

Sugiyama Toon Shader, aka SugiyamaToonShader. An early success in 2016, but said not to work with newer Unity versions?

TypeA AnimeShader. Said to work especially well on hair.

VaxKun’s Anime/CelShading Shader. Includes emissive glow and toon-reflective glass. I suspect the demo pictures are being a bit more honest than the other packs, re: what you’re likely to get.

However, you don’t need to go to Unity to get the above looks. With a bit of setup, re-texturing and the right IBL lighting, they can be had now in Poser 11.

There are two competing suites or kits for Unity…

Toony Colors Pro 2 shaders set, with basic lineart.

Flat Kit: Cel / Toon Shading. Also with basic lineart plus a depth-fogging effect. This might be your best starting-point, though Toony Colors Pro seems to have been out longer.

Flexible Cel Shader. Possibly an additional useful set to have, in combination with one of the above two kits.

Nice Water Shader, adjustable and with a toony edge-ripple preset.

And lastly, RealToon shaders set. Seems to be older but is apparently quite flexible, and you might brew up a more unique look?

Lineart:

Jiffycrew Post Process Line. Seems to be outstanding, and thus has left little place for others in the market? The monopoly position has made it rather expensive.

The slightly more stylised NPR Contour Drawing and Sketch may also be worth a look.

Contour-hugging hatching on 3D models:

ToonSketch Core. A bit too grungy, and may work best on models with big flat surfaces?

NPR Cartoon Effect. Unappealing demo images, but scroll through to the simple hatch-shading demo.

Jiffycrew Hatching. Not very convincing, but with a bit of wrestling I guess it might produce dash-shading that looks cleaner and a bit more Moebius-like?

Obviously hatching still has some way to go in Unity. There are also some rather ikky attempts at manga halftone shaders.

Painterly:

Painterly.

Kuwahara Filter.

Flockaroo’s full-screen camera effects Aquarelle, Colored Pencils and Sketchy effects filters. It looks like you could cook up a reasonable ‘storybook look’ with these. These are full-camera effects and, by the time Poser 12 is released, Unity should support… “Camera Stacking, enabling users to layer the output of multiple cameras in rendered output.”

Watercolor Painting effect. The first picture seems a bit questionable, re: what you’re likely to get. As all the other demo pictures look very different.

Hand-painted skyboxes, inc. clouds:

Hand-painted toon sky-boxes include: Toon Sky, Toon Night Sky, PDG Cartoon Sky, Cartoon Skybox – Red moon. There’s also a starry night-sky in the Toon Skyboxes pack.

Toon Clouds is a dynamic cloudscape generator. Though they’re not as nice as the hand-painted ones seen above.

Amplify Impostors seems likely to be useful here, for quickly duplicating content to fill backgrounds that have large views with skies. There’s also a free SVGimporter which brings in a vector shape as a tessellated mesh.

You can also find packs of other “quickstart” Unity files on Gumroad, although they appear to be just skeleton set-ups and to lack art assets.

Vivify/re-colour:

Amplify Color seems the best option, enabling in-engine colour grading and saturation. Free.

Exporting big, hi-res, and nicely anti-aliased screenshots:

MadGoat SSAA & Resolution Scale. Because the aim here is not to make games or animations, but to get output for comics frames. A short endorsement of this by an architect is encouraging, re: getting clean hi-res output that’s then usable in graphics editors.

Visual novel engine:

And if you did want to make a game, Naninovel is quite capable. It’s for making a Japanese style ‘visual novel’, where the game elements are nearly all in the story choices. (Though note that the similar Ren’Py Visual Novel Engine standalone is free, and has a much larger user-base).

Having said that many Unity addons are expensive, the starter kit for ‘comics with Unity’ seems more reasonable. I’d start with the TypeA AnimeShader ($10), the Flat Kit ($40), Amplify Color (Free), and MadGoat SSAA & Resolution Scale ($16) for export. Total: $66. Though even then you’re probably not going to get a dramatically different look than you could get inside Poser and with a couple of filters applied to the renders. You’re not going to get realistic sketch pen-hatching or a sophisticated shadow-puppets/silhouette effect with light-leaks. What you might get that’s unavailable from Poser, if you want it, is a sort of pixellated Minecraft or low-poly look.

There you have it. These seem to be options for getting big comic-book frames from Unity in late Summer 2020, and mostly with a look that regular comics readers won’t cringe at.

Renderosity is hiring

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Following their DAZ announcement, Renderosity are “Now Hiring Community Moderators” more generally for the forums and other community aspects of the site. It seems a good time for this to be happening, since the forums have become a much nicer place to be than they were seven or eight months ago, and there are also many indications that Poser 12 is coming fairly soon.

My hunch is that 90% of the former problems in the forums were actually caused by one person, who was using a variety of aliases and sock-puppet accounts to aggravate and annoy. I assume the troll has now been detected and ejected. Just my guess, but things seem much better there now. Sign up, and help to make it even better!