It is about to get a FREE infinitely configurable humanoid character model that is completely set up for animation, including excellent lip-syncing.

Initially, the character will be part of a series of animation training videos from CGCookie. While the tutorial series does carry a small fee, ultimately, the “toolkit” itself will be made available to the Blender community at no charge. (The characters you can create are not “real life”, they are cartoon style. They can be any humanoid size, shape, gender, ethic group, etc., so you can use this one tool to create an entire cast of characters for a film, a video short, a commercial, etc.)

I’m not sure of the dates for either the release of the tutorial series or the release of the “toolkit” as a free-standing, no-charge item.

CGCookie is taking pre-release orders for the tutorials (which include the toolkit character) for just $38. I have purchased CGCookie tutorials before, and can vouch for their quality. It is, IMO, worth the money. In addition, the CGCookie site has loads of on-line tutorials for free. So, check out both CGCookie and the series here.

The series was also discussed at length this morning by its teacher (and professional animator) Beorn Leonard at the annual Blender conference in Amsterdam. (Boern has a Scandinavian name, but speaks with a British accent.) You can watch a Youtube recast of his talk here.

Last year Daz introduced the Genesis character. This is a humanoid, posable, animatable character that is infintely configurable – young, old, male, female, fat, slim, alien, wolfman, etc.

Getting a preoconfigured Genesis character from Daz to Poser was a problem.

Well, Daz just announced the DSON importer (available for FREE) that claims to solve that problem. (I haven’t tried it yet.)

Daz is free. The importer is free. Poser does cost, but not a lot.

Check out DSON here.

The Debut version is on sale for $29.99 right now, and is a good buy.

Unfortunately, some of the best new features are only available in the Pro version, which is also on sale, but for a much higher price – $149.99. Check here to compare the two.

You can try the Pro version free for 30 days, but PLEASE be aware that you a) have to give them a credit card, and b) unless you say otherwise, after 30 days that card will be charged full price – $199.99 – not the sale price (assuming I’m reading the web sites correctly).

It looks like you can upgrade to Pro from Debut for only $99.99, so, again if I’m reading this correctly, you can by Debut 9 for $30, and upgrade to Pro for $100, for a total of $130 (all numbers rounded, of course). Again, this assumes I’m reading the site properly. You should double check for yourself!

The two best additions to the new Pro version, IMHO, are Smartbones and an improved animation interface, with full curve controls. Check out the extensive videos for all of the new stuff here.

For those who don’t know, Luxrender is a program that takes images from 3D graphics programs, and renders them in “unbiased” style, which means they come out with real-world, photo-like quality. Numerous programs can output to Luxrender. Blender and SketchUp are two free ones. Daz3D can also output to Luxrender, but, while Daz is free, in order to use Luxrender you need Reality, which does cost money. IMHO, it is well worth it. Coming soon: a version of Reality for Poser, another 3D program which currently outputs to Luxrender via Pose2Lux, a free program created by the wonderful SnarlyGribbly! The Poser Reality will also cost a few dollars as well, but will have much more functionality than Pose2Lux.

At any rate, it is faster (which is welcome, since unbiased rendering engines by nature take a long time to generate high quality images), and has improved GPU rendering (which mean it can use your graphics card to speed things up even more).

Note to fellow Mac users: to use the GPU rendering features, you have to be running Mountain Lion.

You can find info regarding Blender, Poser, Reality, Pose2Lux and Daz on this blog. SketchUp is a Google program, and you can learn about it in any search engine (even Google).

You can get the new 1.0 Luxrender here.

All three are wonderful examples of the classic toon Warner Brothers/Disney style, with a modern 3D edge (think Nemo).

This is clearly pro level work, and is a great tribute to the capabilities of the FREE 3D creation/animation Blender software. Mr. Campbell has not listed a personal or professional web site on YouTube at this time, we I can’t tell you anything about him, except to say:

WATCH THESE CARTOON SHORTS!

Even if you’re not into CGI, 3D creation software, etc., they are truly worth watching just for their stories.

You can catch them on his YouTube cannel here.

For example, one of the aspects of the program many disliked was the fact it always used multiple, separate windows – i.e. one for the tool bar, one for the layers table, and yet another for the image you were working on. The new GIMP let’s you put all of this in one integrated window, a la Photoshop.

Power users, who use multiple montors, and LIKE to have separate windows for each function, can still do that. In fact, they can now dock multiple function dialogs into a single window! So, you have the best of both worlds.

Other great improvements: You can now create layer groups. The text tool is now “On-Canvas”, so what you see is what you get as you work with text. Scaling now supports math, so you can add, subtract, multiply and divide size data right in the size entry widget, and GIMP does the math for you!

If you use the Mac, you can get the new GIMP here.

For Windows, go here.

If you use Linux, you may well already have the new GIMP, or will get it soon as an automatic update. If you don’t have it on your machine, just ask your flavor of Linux to get it for you.

To learn all about GIMP go here.

If you want to learn GIMP’s latest version in depth, you might try

The Artist’s Guide to GIMP, Second Edition

• By: Michael J. Hammel
• Publisher: No Starch Press
• Pub. Date: June 18, 2012
• Print ISBN-13: 978-1-59327-414-6
• Pages in Print Edition: 320
• It’s not cheap ($31.95 for ebook, $39.95 for print) but it’s extremely good. Also, if you belong to Peachpit’s Creative Edge subscription service, it’s available to read on-line for no additional charge.Creative Edge is $19.95 a month, and has scads of books and videos on-line that can teach you just about anything regarding computers, graphics, etc. You can learn more here.

You not only get the lectures by David Malan (an extraordinary teacher), you get an entire learning environment, all the notes, source code, and even video “walkthroughs” for each assignment presented by highly skilled teaching assistants.

What do I mean by a learning environment?

Well, the class literature tells you how to download and set up VirtualBox (a FREE program that let’s you run other operating systems on your Mac or Windows computer). It then let’s you download from Harvard, for FREE, a complete virtual Fedora Linux operating system especially configured for this course, so that you are working in EXACTLY the same computing environment as the students taking this course at Harvard. Same software. Same toolset.

Do yourself a favor. Watch Malan’s first two weeks of one hour lectures (two per week, four in all). If you’re not hooked, no problem. But if you have ever wondred what this stuff is all about, you probably will be on board. Just follow the clear instructions in the second problem set, and you’re on your way!

After going through a bunch of tutorials on posing and animating in blender (just search with your favorite search engine, or on youtube.com), I leaned about a wonderful source of assets for blender:

blendswap.com

This is a community of blender users who provide, for free, some great models. As part of my attempts to learn more about posing, I decided to reproduce poses created by professional comic artists. I got some characters from blendswap by a very talented artist called vmcomix.

Here’s my take on the four panel Doonesbury stirp from Saturday, May 5, 2012 in The Washington Post:

In this image, I modeled a table and chair that we have in our breakfast nook, took pictures of the wood grain, and applied them to the models (this is called texturing). I then brought the models into DazStudio, applied the textures there, reproduced the chair to make a set of six, and staged them in a set called Nook: Now and Then I bought from Daz. The final image used a render plug-in for Daz Studio called Reality which ports the data to an unbiased render engine called Luxrender.

Here are the tools I used, and their cost:

Model table in Hexagon:                  free from Daz3d.com

Model chair in Blender:                    free from Blender.org

Create textures in GIMP:                 free from GIMP.org

Buy NOOK: now and then:              $1.99 for Daz3D Platinum Members ($9.99 for non-members)

Bottle, snifter and candleholder:  free from various sources

Stage in Daz Studio 4:                        free from Daz3d.com

Render through Reality Plugin:     $59.95 from preta3d.com

Render with Luxrender:                   free from luxrender.net

SEE WHAT IT CAN DO HERE!

(This has HEAVY traffic. Pause it as soon as you can and wait for the whole thing to load [i.e. the grey bar under the video fills all the way to the right], then watch from the beginning.)