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Hornet3d
Wise
Only fair I should show this render with the merchant resource as it came out of the box so without my tweaks.
CGI Subtle Skin Merchant Resource by ColorGaleria from the box, Dawn 2 default with a Hivewire3D pose Dawn II bikini (shaders from RPublishing - Ghostship) and hair HR-243 from Ali (shaders from RPublishing - Ghostship).
CGI Subtle Skin Merchant Resource by ColorGaleria from the box, Dawn 2 default with a Hivewire3D pose Dawn II bikini (shaders from RPublishing - Ghostship) and hair HR-243 from Ali (shaders from RPublishing - Ghostship).
I like how the face looks like here , lovely .
unreal
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Ahhhh, a new figure. It always takes me a bit of hacking to become comfortable enough with a figure such that I can easily get it to do what I want. I'm nowhere near that with Dawn 2 (or original Dawn, really).
Poser 13 is also somewhat new. And the laptop it's running on (MBP M3 Max, 128GB 16cpu cores, 40gpu cores). And CyclesX running Metal (which profoundly changes things on a mac). Essentially, everything is new!
Dead simple image. Dawn 2 (my character morph and body part scales). "10 minute Leotard", via blender and poser. A single HDRI as background and light (via Ken's script). Everyone recognizes Paradise hair (superfly shaders). Then I added Ghostship's spandex shader to the leotard. 2 figures, one prop, a single 4k HDRI.
First things I need to know:
Anyway...
Conclusions.
Poser 13 is also somewhat new. And the laptop it's running on (MBP M3 Max, 128GB 16cpu cores, 40gpu cores). And CyclesX running Metal (which profoundly changes things on a mac). Essentially, everything is new!
Dead simple image. Dawn 2 (my character morph and body part scales). "10 minute Leotard", via blender and poser. A single HDRI as background and light (via Ken's script). Everyone recognizes Paradise hair (superfly shaders). Then I added Ghostship's spandex shader to the leotard. 2 figures, one prop, a single 4k HDRI.
First things I need to know:
- does my Blender add-on still work? (I use it to take morphed OBJs back and forth between Poser and Blender). It does. So I can create morphs using a combination of the two (morph brush is good for some stuff, Blender sculpting for others). I used it to make this youthful character. (I'll probably go more anime-stylized, once I have things sorted)
- How easy is it to make a simple conforming clothing item? The leotard I always use to test each figure since it covers the two complex joints: shoulders and hips. This took about 10 minutes to make. I went back and forth 4 times. I roughed the shape in blender, took it to poser to use the fit morph brush. Back to Blender to clean the edges, symmetrize it, then quad-remeshed it. Back to Poser to fine tune the fit. Back to blender to add the solid edges. Back to Poser and 1 click rig. Copied my character morph. Fit and it was perfect. Considering the shape (and scalers used), the leotard moves very well, in large part due to the superior mesh and rig of Dawn 2. I've never had this test work so well; so fast and effortless. I'm impressed with Dawn 2.
- Next HDRIs... Could I stop using the EZDome (which never worked for me with superfly shadowcatching)? I used Ken's script. And found a bug in Poser on mac. One node is missing a value (only on mac), which prevents the rotation from working (no "radians"). The script is super useful. I also set things up by hand. The script saves about 5 minutes with each setup. And a minute with each subsequent tweak. I think it pays for itself in only a few uses (depending on how you value your time. I value mine quite high
) script is nice I'm still having trouble getting sharp images in my renders. Could just be my setup. Render settings are arcane art. I had Poser 12 nailed. 13, not so much. Yet. GPU is about 5x-10x faster than CPU. Both look the same on a mac.
Also, a weird bug re: shadow catcher. For it to work, I absolutely must start with the factory scene. If I add ground later, and set it for shadow catching, it never does (in superfly) but always does in firefly. This makes me wonder if the ground is different. I haven't pulled the files apart to see.
- How about expressions? The facial rig. 1st, still need morphs when using the face rig. Second, hard to use the rig via poser's native GUI. Again, Ken script to the rescue. And I found a second mac poser bug. The PIL module is missing on mac poser. So I couldn't use the script (yet). But, again, i can see where it would save HEAPS of time.
Anyway...
Conclusions.
- Dawn bends very well. Maybe second best figure (compared to out of the box figures, and figures with heaps of added corrections). And Dawn 2 does it with so much less drama.
- Developing for: amazing. Due to her rigging and mesh, skin tight conforming works really well and is very easy to make. I'm going to re-rig some V4 stuff and see how it goes.
- Morphing: again, due to mesh and rig, really easy.
- Posing: Dawn and V4 poses work quite well, with only tweaks necessary. For people with an embarrassment of V4 content (guilty), this is super useful I find that a V4 pose (one click), with a Dawn hand pose (also one click) is 95% of the way there. The time saving is huuuge!
unreal
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Continuing my Dawn 2 exploration:
Re: cyclesX on an Apple silicon Mac. Yes, it was my setup. Turns out I can jack the Pixel Samples *and* the bucket Size (massively) and it renders sharp and quick. 24 minutes for something that used to take hours (on an 18 core iMac Pro). Dunno about Windows, but the improvement for Mac is *huge*.
I'm practicing making some expressions in Blender. Still tuning this one. It's a matter of making it look good on the base Dawn 2 mesh *and* this character morph. (Still looks odd because there is no eye morphing... yet. And the creases at the lip ends are not quite there, I think)
But I'm liking the edge flow for sculpting
And OOT hair... more, please!
Poser, Blender, the Mac, Dawn 2... all new.
Re: cyclesX on an Apple silicon Mac. Yes, it was my setup. Turns out I can jack the Pixel Samples *and* the bucket Size (massively) and it renders sharp and quick. 24 minutes for something that used to take hours (on an 18 core iMac Pro). Dunno about Windows, but the improvement for Mac is *huge*.
I'm practicing making some expressions in Blender. Still tuning this one. It's a matter of making it look good on the base Dawn 2 mesh *and* this character morph. (Still looks odd because there is no eye morphing... yet. And the creases at the lip ends are not quite there, I think)
But I'm liking the edge flow for sculpting
And OOT hair... more, please!
Poser, Blender, the Mac, Dawn 2... all new.
unreal
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Very nice bending
This is a v4 Pose with only a few degrees of thigh bend added after. no more than would be needed to precisely position the figure anyway. Dawn hands, one click. v4 static hair with only a little Y and Z shift. No touch up morphs on Dawn 2 at all.
The leotard actually followed the pose very well.
As you would expect, the lowest area would have some touch ups as the movement of the leotard leg opening edges would not be accounted for in Dawn 2 as a donor rig. Normally, a donor to skintight clothing makes it move as if glued to the skin. In reality, the cloth, especially at the edges would slide over the skin below. Same issue underwear would have.
But, considering how extreme the legs are bent and rotated, there was very little to do with the leotard edge except some morph brush shifting of the edges, then a little smoothing. Nothing that couldn't be done in a few minutes.
I'm really happy with how the leotard edges are constructed, to make the morph brush almost fun to use on the edges. That only took a million previous attempts to figure out. And it's so ridiculously simply it's embarrassing.
unreal
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More Dawn 2 Bendiness (that's an actual word I made up
Another extreme pose from the V4 gymnastic collection. I left Dawn 2 have limits, which keeps an applied pose from doing weird things. In this case, again, it was very minor corrections to the legs (to make the pose work within Dawn 2's well thought out limits, which keeps the rig to nice bends.).
What was true in V4 days was that to get more extreme poses, you had to bend her beyond limits, as her mesh wasn't quite as optimized. I've found just the opposite with Dawn 2. Keeping the limits on enhances the ability to get into even extreme but realistic poses.
For instance, this one. She's not even bent to her limits.
I was particularly taken by her how her butt is working with this hip position. No nasty distortion at all. A realistic glute movement. And that transfered completely to the shorts. Friggin' awesome!
10 minute top and shorts. Blender (rough), Quadremesher, Blender (sculpt and finish), Poser one-click rig (from plain Dawn 2 as donor). Copy the character morph.
Both highlight joints that are generally a PITA for form fitting clothing: hip-thigh and arm-torso.
Again, I'm happily surprised at how well they're bending. The shorts are only really touched up at the leg openings. Most of the touchup was liberally smoothing, then shifting the smoothed edges to account for cloth sliding that would happen. For the tops, even less. Not more than a few minutes with Poser's morph brush, in total.
One thing I've found that helps is to transfer Dawn's edge loops for the Actors. I can transfer those into Blender, turn them to edges for mat zones, which can be used to guide the quad-remeshing. The resulting clothing mesh has the shape of the body and the flow follows the joints, the mesh, itself, only changes density depending on curvature. The mesh itself doesn't look at all like the body. But, by having the actor edge-loops approximately perpendicular to the body's actor edge-loops, a transfer in the auto rigging produces good bendiness (see? That word is useful. As in "Gumby had great bendiness. Dammit.")
Single HDRI setup with ken's script. shadow catching. Nothing else in scene besides Dawn 2, hair, and clothing.
I can see that I need to work on some muscle/tone morphs. Project for this weekend
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Well, my first time sculpting anything like muscles in Blender. Not quite there... muscle structure not entirely right. But it's my first time
The nice Dawn edge-flow sure helps. A *lot*
I've never really used Blender's sculpting tools extensively. But wow, the sculpting plays nicely with shape keys. It's literally like layers for shapes when sculpting. It's super fun sculpting a combined shape by tweaking each layer so the "morphs" will play nicely together. I did not know this. But I love it.
Really easy to get it back into Poser as a FBM. One click. I love that, too. Ever closer to the long promised "make art" button in Poser. (not generative AI. That's a "make something that's a mashup of copies of art" button. Sure, a cool button for some. But not cool enough for *me*.)
Anyway... a work in progress.
On another topic, I can't find much chatter about Dawn 2. She's such a cool figure. Am I just not hanging in the right places? I haven't enjoyed working with a figure like this in *forever*. ("forever" as a vector stretching backwards in time to infinity. Or, at least as far back as my birth. I don't really have any memory before then. And my knowledge of history is a little vague. But I digress.) There has to be other Dawn 2 fans, right?
The nice Dawn edge-flow sure helps. A *lot*
I've never really used Blender's sculpting tools extensively. But wow, the sculpting plays nicely with shape keys. It's literally like layers for shapes when sculpting. It's super fun sculpting a combined shape by tweaking each layer so the "morphs" will play nicely together. I did not know this. But I love it.
Really easy to get it back into Poser as a FBM. One click. I love that, too. Ever closer to the long promised "make art" button in Poser. (not generative AI. That's a "make something that's a mashup of copies of art" button. Sure, a cool button for some. But not cool enough for *me*.)
Anyway... a work in progress.
On another topic, I can't find much chatter about Dawn 2. She's such a cool figure. Am I just not hanging in the right places? I haven't enjoyed working with a figure like this in *forever*. ("forever" as a vector stretching backwards in time to infinity. Or, at least as far back as my birth. I don't really have any memory before then. And my knowledge of history is a little vague. But I digress.) There has to be other Dawn 2 fans, right?
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Really nice start. I might have to have another go at Blender as I'm having issues with ZBrush but I'm working from DAZ Studio. The new DAZ Studio (just updated yesterday) now can not find the ZBrush installation when I click the bridge button. It's always something! LOL
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Thank you. That's software. Always something. But then, if it wasn't, programmers would be unemployed. Imagine how more difficult it would be to get a seat in a cafe. I'm loathe to give up *my* seat
The quad-remesher I use in blender was written by Maxime who wrote zremesher. It's an absolute necessity in turning sculptures into perfect quad meshes.
Zbrush is the only way to do subdivided mesh morphs in Poser (apart from Poser's morph brush, which is not as easy to use as sculpting (but really good for it's original intent). Since I don't have zbrush, Dawn 2's "obviously agonized over awesome edge flow" is a god-send. To the Dawn team: the (I'm sure) endless tweaking, etc... well worth it. The rig is just plain superior.
Blender does take some getting used to. But it's really come a long way. There are some weird missing things. Like easily locking vertexes. But the scripting is first rate and often you can just find an add-on that does what you want. If not, you can write one.
I wrote a little add-on that takes a morphed Poser mesh exported as OBJ and uses that to reshape an imported original OBJ mesh copy. It can either make a new mesh in that shape or use it as a shape key for an existing mesh. You can continue sculpting. Blender maintains vert order on OBJ import and export (assuming you don't change the vert count in the mesh). The resulting exported OBJ can be used as FBM in Poser. Possibly DS as well. This is what makes using Blender for sculpting much more useful, as you can sculpt in both (not quite a bridge, but more a "manual virtual bridge" from this use case. A smarter programmer than me could turn it into a proper bridge.
Next script I write will be to mass-import a figure's morphs as a stack of shape keys for the mesh in blender. Possibly.
The quad-remesher I use in blender was written by Maxime who wrote zremesher. It's an absolute necessity in turning sculptures into perfect quad meshes.
Zbrush is the only way to do subdivided mesh morphs in Poser (apart from Poser's morph brush, which is not as easy to use as sculpting (but really good for it's original intent). Since I don't have zbrush, Dawn 2's "obviously agonized over awesome edge flow" is a god-send. To the Dawn team: the (I'm sure) endless tweaking, etc... well worth it. The rig is just plain superior.
Blender does take some getting used to. But it's really come a long way. There are some weird missing things. Like easily locking vertexes. But the scripting is first rate and often you can just find an add-on that does what you want. If not, you can write one.
I wrote a little add-on that takes a morphed Poser mesh exported as OBJ and uses that to reshape an imported original OBJ mesh copy. It can either make a new mesh in that shape or use it as a shape key for an existing mesh. You can continue sculpting. Blender maintains vert order on OBJ import and export (assuming you don't change the vert count in the mesh). The resulting exported OBJ can be used as FBM in Poser. Possibly DS as well. This is what makes using Blender for sculpting much more useful, as you can sculpt in both (not quite a bridge, but more a "manual virtual bridge" from this use case
. A smarter programmer than me could turn it into a proper bridge.Next script I write will be to mass-import a figure's morphs as a stack of shape keys for the mesh in blender. Possibly.
