JAY VERSLUIS

How to transition from a static pose to aniBlocks in DAZ Studio

March 29, 2015 by Jay Versluis

The way aniMate works is that we can either animate characters with a traditional keyframe approach, using the standard timeline, or we can use aniBlocks. There’s no easy way to mix and match both approaches. But sometimes it’s necessary to transition from a static pose to an aniBlock to get a smooth transition. The best way to …

Getting started with the ZModeler in ZBrush

March 28, 2015 by Jay Versluis

The ZModeler is is a new feature in ZBrush 4R7. With this new gadget we can perform polygonal vertex modelling, something that was not possible before the introduction of this brush. The term “brush” is a tad of an understatement if you ask me: this “minor addition” gives ZBrush abilities that are worth about $1600, which is what …

How to turn a 3D object into conforming clothing in DAZ Studio

January 22, 2017March 27, 2015 by Jay Versluis

If a 3D object is meant to follow the morphs and movements of a DAZ character, it needs to become an item of conforming clothing. This allows a garment to be fitted to a DAZ figure, following its movements and full body morphs (at least to a certain extend). The procedure is called rigging, and …

Did I mention my new book?

April 2, 2021March 26, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a book. It’s about how to run web applications in the comfort of your own home. Yesterday it went live on Amazon! I have an author page and everything! Turns out that writing was the easy part: formatting it so that it looks good on Kindle devices was a …

How to export a garment from Marvelous Designer

March 26, 2015 by Jay Versluis

You can export your garment from Marvelous Designer either in OBJ or FBX format. Note that at the time if writing, FBX is highly experimental and appears not to work very well. OBJ on the other hand is doing a fine job. Head over to File – Export and choose OBJ. There’s also an option …

How to import DAZ characters into Marvelous Designer

May 8, 2015March 25, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 09.24.00 Marvelous Designer comes with 7 default avatars, but it’s very easy to use your own 3D figure and create custom clothing for it.

Simply export your desired character as OBJ, including full body morphs, then import it into Marvellous Designer.

Here’s how to do with with the Genesis 2 Male character from the free essentials pack.

Exporting from DAZ Studio

Load your character into an empty scene and select it in the scene tab. It’s typically located on the right hand side in DAZ Studio.

Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 09.31.21

Head over to File – Export and pick a location for your files: DAZ Studio will create a .OBJ and a .MTL file. It will also bring up an export dialogue in which you can specify the scale and size for your export. Those need to match the import dialogue of your other app.

How to create editable blurry text in Photoshop

March 22, 2015 by Jay Versluis

There is an easy way to create blurry or out-of-focus text in Photoshop using Layer Effects. The text remains therefore perfectly editable. Here’s how to do it: First we’ll create a standard text layer. Pick a font and write something nice, and choose the foreground and background colours as you wish. You should end up …

Navigating 2D and 3D Space in Marvelous Designer

April 30, 2017March 21, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Sometimes it’s the simple things they don’t to tell you about in the brochure: Zooming Magic Trackpad: move two fingers up or down, much like you would scroll a web page up or down. Intuos Tablet: hold the lower button down (right-click), then drag the pen. Mouse: rotate the wheel. Moving/Panning Hold the ALT/OPT key down, then: Magic Trackpad: drag …

ARM: Rise of the low-cost CPU

March 5, 2015February 27, 2015 by Jay Versluis

The other day I was looking at Samsung Chromebook laptops. It’s the latest fad in giving laptops something to do in the post-PC era. They’ve largely replaced netbooks for “surfing with something that’s not a tablet”. I’m a fan of open source operating systems, and Parallels Desktop offers to install Chrome OS as VM too. …

How to install Carrara 8.5 in Mac OS X Yosemite

September 17, 2016February 4, 2015 by Jay Versluis

I’m configuring a new Mac Mini 2012 specifically for all my 3D ventures this year. As such I’m installing all my favourite (and annoying) 3D apps fresh from scratch. Being a futuristic kind of guy I’m using “the best operating system ever” (yeah, right!) OS X Yosemite.

Over the last 7 years I’ve installed Carrara more times than I can count and in every version of OS X and Windows that I can remember, and it’s never given me any trouble – neither when installed manually or via the DAZ Install Manager.

Until today, when I’ve received the following message in OS X Yosemite: “The application cannot get the administrator access right”. Thank you, Yosemite!

What does that even mean? I thought my user account HAS admin privileges.

Turns out they’re just not administrative enough. The solution to this awkward puzzle is to login as root for the initial launch of Carrara. Which leads us to the next adventure:

How do we enable the root user in OS X?

Hey there, Television! How’s it going?

October 31, 2016January 30, 2015 by Jay Versluis

What’s wrong with this picture: Some organisation decides to broadcast a movie or TV show, at a time that they deem “the best” to maximise their profits. The organisation has commissioned the programme at great expense, and they decide to chop it up into little pieces and place a plethora of annoying adverts in it to make …

Steel-cut Oats

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015 by Jay Versluis

I’ve always liked oats for breakfast, and I was intrigued to find something in the US that I hadn’t come across before in my life: steel-cut oats. They’re marketed here along the lines of “the real Scottish oatmeal”, yet it’s not a term used by the Scottish as far as I know. So I …

Keyboard Navigation in Photoshop

January 24, 2015 by Jay Versluis

There are a number of super handy keyboard shortcuts for navigating the Photoshop interface. I keep forgetting them so I wrote them down here as a reference. I’m using Photoshop CC 2014 on a Mac which means that magic trackpad gestures work well for the following: zooming (pinch gesture) panning (two finger drag) rotating the …

What I’d like to see in a potential Apple iPad Pro

January 28, 2015January 22, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Rumours that Apple are working on a larger version of the iPad go back at least a couple of years. In fact I had secretly dreamt up something I felt they should call the iPad Air around 2013, before Apple had actually come out with the “real” iPad Air.

See, my idea was to make an Apple version of what Microsoft did successfully with the Surface Pro:

take a MacBook Air
take off the keyboard
and add a touch screen
give us a real Wacom stylus
keep the size of 12-13 inches
and voila!

That’s precisely what a Surface Pro is – and I love using mine. But there’s room for improvement, and although I’ve not used the latest Surface Pro 3, or a Wacom Intuos Companion, I’d still like to see something along those lines running Apple software.

Specifically for graphic intense tasks, a stylus is a must – Wacom or otherwise. Ultimately I want a portable Apple-powered Intuos Companion, for drawing as well as “real” handwriting. And with rumours of what the media now dub The iPad Pro, we may see such a gadget at some point in 2015.

But here’s the problem: Microsoft have one version of Windows on the Surface Pro. Therefore desktop apps run great out of the box. And Apple don’t have that. iOS and OS X are worlds apart, even if you can use similar code and turn it into two applications. Xcode supports that.

The iPad Pro as I envision it would seriously benefit from running OS X and make use of the full array of desktop applications such as Photoshop, SketchBook Pro and many others. By which I mean existing apps that we know which are ready to go. Not specced-down versions that don’t deliver.

If however Apple were to bring out an iPad Pro type device and instead have it run iOS, then all we’d really have is a large iPad. There would be no benefits to it whatsoever, other than yet another screen size. Granted, over the next few years apps will emerge that will find uses for it, but that’s in the future and not usable from the get go. And sure, we’ll be able to enjoy Procreate on a very large display, but squishy rubber-tip styluses are not the same as using an Intuos pen on a real tablet.

So if the iPad Pro is to come out, what will Apple put on it? Here are four options I’ve dreamt up.

How to define a Pattern (Material) in Manga Studio 5

January 28, 2015January 18, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Manga Studio has a great feature called Materials. These are akin to Photoshop’s Patterns, but I find they are implemented so much better in Manga Studio. In the olden days, traditional Manga tone artists would cut out small pieces of a pattern out of a larger piece of paper, then stick it to the coat …

How to define a Pattern in Photoshop

January 17, 2015 by Jay Versluis

You can define a pattern from any image in Photoshop and use it as Pattern Overlay later. Simply head over to Edit – Define Pattern and give your new pattern a catchy title. That’s it! There are a few things to be aware of though: most patterns are used as tiles and will therefore repeat. Once …

12 Procreate Brushes: Stitches and Sequins

January 3, 2020January 9, 2015 by Jay Versluis

Over the last few days I’ve been exploring how to create custom brushes for the excellent Procreate on my iPad. To make 3D clothing textures look more realistic we needed some stitch brushes. Plenty are available for Photoshop, but scouring the internet I couldn’t find any for Procreate. Here’s my first attempt at some custom …

Italian Bucca Dress Textures – now available at DAZ 3D

April 21, 2020December 31, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Before the year is out I have some great news: a texture set Julia and I made last year for DAZ 3D has finally been released after 18 months: the Italian Bucca Dress Textures. I can officially call myself a DAZ PA now – a great honour among 3D artists. This is a great incentive to make …

There’s Something Fishy about Christmas

December 29, 2014 by Jay Versluis

This year I’ve learnt two new things about Christmas I didn’t know before. Actually it’s ONE thing I’ve learnt this year, the other I got wind of last year from my barber at Super Cuts before I started “doing my own hair” thanks to a $25 Wahl Clipper Set. The Christmas Gherkin Allegedly there’s …

Broadcast Memories: Das Eurosignal

August 2, 2017December 14, 2014 by Jay Versluis

My first radio in the late around 1980 was a Palladium Mono Tape recorder with 4 band radio. It had a big dial on the right, a display with a moving stick, and four buttons to select FM, AM, Shortwave and Longwave bands. Even with its many limitations I loved this thing! The FM band …

Discovering the NOAA Weather Radio Service

August 3, 2017December 11, 2014 by Jay Versluis

We have something here in the US that most Europeans don’t know about: a nationwide weather radio service called NOAA Weather Radio. The service is broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it has been around since 1953. Transmitting from over 1000 towers across the US, they have 7 frequencies just above the …

Navigating 3D Space in DAZ Studio

March 11, 2020November 28, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Nothing is more frustrating that not knowing how to accomplish basic tasks. Navigating 3D space in different apps using different devices in the same day is one such thing. Before I forget, here’s how to navigate your scene in DAZ Studio 4.7. Dolly You can dolly the camera in several ways: by dragging the cube icon in …

How to group objects in DAZ Studio

November 28, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Groups are helpful to keep the many items in your scene organised and grouped together. They’re like a “folder”, even though you’re not really moving items to another place. They just appear together with a heading and a disclosure triangle. For example, rather than having a character and five independent clothing items, it’ll be much …

How to edit 3rd Party Vertex Objects in Carrara

November 27, 2014 by Jay Versluis

You want to make a quick change to a 3rd party vertex object in Carrara, head over to the Modelling Room, but all your favourite tools are greyed out. What’s going on? Carrara has a feature called Protect Topology, and there’s a good chance it’s switched on for items you bought from a marketplace. It’s …

Creating a waving flag in Carrara using Soft Body Modifiers

January 12, 2019November 18, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Carrara lets you turn any object in your scene into a Soft Body object with the help of a Soft Body Modifier. To create a waving flag we need to use a combination of two modifiers: one that makes the object a “soft body”, and one that attaches it to something else, such as a …

How to render DAZ Studio scenes without DAZ Studio

June 11, 2015November 17, 2014 by Jay Versluis

DAZ Studio has one drastic drawback: while you’re rendering a scene you can’t use the app until it’s finished rendering. In fact, DAZ Studio makes use of every available CPU cycle, turning even the fastest computer into something you can’t even check your emails with while you wait for that render to finish.

That’s great for efficiency – but it also sucks because you need a second computer to keep working with, or alternatively use a second computer for rendering while you work with your main machine. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do something akin to Poser’s background rendering, something that lets you setup the next scene in DAZ Studio while it’s rendering at the same time?

I have good news: you can – thanks to something called RIB files. I didn’t know this until recently, and it works a treat. Let me explain how to use this feature.

How to add effects to a single layer in Photoshop

November 15, 2014November 14, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Photoshop has a feature called Clipping Layers. It’s extremely useful, but doesn’t quite describe what it does. Besides it’s extremely unintuitive if you’ve never used it before. Among other things it can be used to add an effect to a single layer rather than the entire image, as you would if an adjustment layer is …

The old Empty Smart Content Tab ploy – and how to fix it

November 9, 2014 by Jay Versluis

One morning I woke up and my entire Smart Content tab in DAZ Studio was empty. Nothing had happened since the day before when it was working perfectly fine. It just stopped working overnight.

What I had done shortly before going to bed was to install the latest service release of Poser Game Dev (SR5). If this was the cause of the problem or not will forever remain a mystery. In this article I’ll explain how I fixed this issue on my Mac.

Screen Shot 2014-11-09 at 15.06.54

Directory Structure of a Poser Runtime

November 8, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Poser is a tad – shall we say – pernickety about where it allows you to save files if you’d like them to appear in the Library. You can save files anywhere on your system of course, using the options in the File Menu, but Poser can also save files into the Library with the …

How to rotate around selected objects in Poser

November 8, 2014 by Jay Versluis

Other 3D apps rotate around the currently selected object by default. Poser does not. By default Poser chooses to rotate around the center of the universe. That’s great for characters but relatively maddening for larger scenes. The secret lies in the Display menu, in an option called Orbit Selected Mode. Select it and Poser will rotate around your …

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