Digital Art Live

10/11/2023

This Sunday, November 12th, marks the beginning of an exciting opportunity for ZBrush artists and gamers alike. Our ZBrush Sculpting Course for Gaming Miniatures is starting, and we invite you to join us. This course is designed to guide you through the intricate process of sculpting and 3D printing your own fantasy miniatures.

Dive Into Your First Session This Sunday

Kick off your journey with us this Sunday the 12th of November. You'll learn how to sculpt and prepare the 3D model for printing, turning your creative concepts into tangible, detailed tabletop figures. John Haverkamp will lead you through the techniques and process, a long term ZBrush and real-world sculptor.

https://digitalartlive.com/miniatures

Is This Course Right for You?

If you're a digital artist keen to explore 3D printing, a gaming enthusiast wanting to create custom miniatures, or someone interested in entering the tabletop gaming market, this six week series is tailored for you.

Achieve Your Creative Goals

Our course is structured to help you skillfully transition from digital sculpting to producing 3D printable miniatures. We focus on practical, applicable techniques that ensure your creations are ready for printing and display.

What Makes Our Course Unique?

We offer a comprehensive approach, combining essential sculpting techniques with a practical understanding of 3D printing underpinned with John Haverkamp's experience. You'll learn how to optimize your designs for both aesthetics and printability, ensuring your miniatures are both beautiful and durable.

Special Offer: Free Access to the First Two Webinars

As a special invitation, we're offering Free Tickets, allowing access to the first two webinar sessions. It's a great way to experience our teaching approach and the course content with no initial commitment.

https://digitalartlive.com/miniatures

13/10/2022

Issue 72 of Digital Art Live Magazine

Few people are in the mood for a gloomy Halloween issue at present, so this is a fun “Costume” themed issue. Here we offer readers a focus on stylish futuristic clothing, rather than fantasy or historical.

From this issue onward your unique magazine expands, adding ten new features! For instance there is now a substantial and timely set of “News‟ pages, which we hope will save busy people much time. We also uniquely cover news for comics makers and the NPR crowd. We even digest the tidal-wave of art-generating AI news, into just one handy page with Web links.

Get this issue via Gumroad:-

https://gumroad.com/l/ozclq

Inside this issue…
MARK FLORQUIN

We interview a leading practitioner of 3D scanning for clothing and theatre costumes, who now has his own studio.

3D SCANS | DAZ STUDIO

“I was able to build a life-size man-doll out of 17 3D printed pieces. I also designed and built a hanging scanner. Now the mannikin is done I can scan clothing items and fit them to a digital avatar immediately after cleanup. It all just works!”

ELIA NECK

We’re pleased to have a new interview with superstar 3D artist and product designer Elia Neck of Brazil.

DAZ STUDIO | LIGHTING

“[If I were able to talk with the great Elon Musk about] how to have a robot be sexy, I would say it is not in the clothes nor the shape of the body. I would talk about creating an android with a penetrating gaze, and one speaking in an affectionate voice.”

“KEN1171”

Ken is a veteran of both the early 3D and Poser scenes, and designed many clothes for classic 3D toon manga figures.

POSER | PYTHON | TOON “One of the things I have learned from this market is that versatility is one of the most sought-after qualities people want from a product. The more they can use it with other contents they already own, the bigger the value customers see.

19/07/2022

New and looking very useful for Zbrush users, the 'Easy Toolbox ZBrush Plugin'. This speeds up your workflow by... "gathering together, in a single interface, many of the most useful functions of ZBrush that you use all the time.". Currently just $6.99 on ArtStation.
https://www.artstation.com/a/17974844

Resources - Power Toolbox ZBrush Plugin, USD $6.99. Easy Toolbox ZBrush Plugin is a plugin to speed up your workflow, both if you are new to ZBrush or an expert user. It gathers together, in a single interface, many...

19/07/2022

Contest: DAZ Carrara Challenge #63: "There be Dragons!" runs July-August 2022, and has four contest prizes of $195 of DAZ Store vouchers.
Deadline: 20th August 2022.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/578331/carrara-challenge-63-there-be-dragons-wip

Your challenge is to do a render/animation of a Dragon inspired scene.

05/07/2022

Freebie: Interested in how Unreal Engine 5 works? Just released is an official Animation Field Guide, a free 120-page e-book on real-time animation production, with case studies. Sign-up required.

05/07/2022

Release: PD Howler 2023 has been released. A new system for rendering sky images with volumetric clouds; new fractal exploration features; perspective guides; updates to filters and colour-picker and UI; a history-browser for Undo. And more. Needs Windows 10 or higher.

05/07/2022

Contest: Reallusion (makers of the excellent Cartoon Animator) have announced their annual 2D animation competition, "Animation At Work". Note the comics category ("turn original static drawings, illustrative art, or comic images into an animated piece") and $15,000 in prizes! Deadline: 8th August 2022.

15/03/2022

Contest: DAZ has a new contest to use the new feature of their latest DAZ Studio version, specifically the new iRay's special features. Create a sci-fi themed render with the latest Volumetric Effects. Deadline: 31st March 2022. https://blog.daz3d.com/enter-to-win-the-sci-fi-volumetric-render-contest/

Submit your best Daz Studio sci-fi-themed render featuring volumetric effects for a chance to win incredible prizes.

08/03/2022

Competition: CineSpace Film Competition 2022. Make a short film using NASA's 'public domain' imagery. Open to all, from around the world. Free to enter. Deadline: 15th July 2022. https://www.cinespace.org/guidelines-rules

08/03/2022

Book: British science-fiction artists of a certain age will recall the Gerry Anderson TV series "UFO", from the same stable as "Space 1999" and others. There's now an official UFO Comic Anthology (volume one, of two) that will form a complete collection of the quality comic-strips which appeared in the weeklies Countdown and TV Action. Volume One features 288 pages of strips and is available now. https://shop.gerryanderson.com/products/ufo-comic-anthology-volume-1

08/03/2022

Release: BiteTheBytes has released the 'initial stable' version of World Creator 3, the GPU real-time terrain maker for Windows 7 and up. Developer Steffan was interviewed in issue #55 of Digital Art Live. The dependency on the Unity engine is removed with this version. Perpetual licences are still available for artists, at $349. https://www.world-creator.com/features.html

01/03/2022

Release: The free NPR (i.e. 'tooning') Blender plugin Malt has finally reached its feature-complete 1.0 preview release. Available now. Lots of new shader coding, and a new rendering pipeline made of plug-able nodes. Testing and feedback is welcomed. https://github.com/bnpr/Malt/discussions/231 and tutorial video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiGYx_DADOQ

01/03/2022

Release: Plasticity, a new early-stage 3D modeller software being built for speed. Beta testers are welcome. https://github.com/nkallen/plasticity

01/03/2022

Release: Open Brush 1.0 is a free open-source advance on Google's old abandoned Tilt Brush. It lets your strokes be both coloured paint strokes and 3D geometry at the same time, and has stroke-smoothing. Open Brush 1.1 will soon add a layer system, and let you cut and delete bits of your strokes. Runs on Windows 7 and up, and seems to support most popular VR headsets.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634870/Open_Brush/

22/02/2022

Wondering how the 'Dream by Wombo' art-AI actually works? We've tracked down the article in which the developer tells all. https://ml.berkeley.edu/blog/posts/clip-art/

22/02/2022

The free Blender software will make a big move into new and upgraded 3D sculpting / painting tools, to be introduced over coming updates. The details are here... https://code.blender.org/2022/02/sculpt-development-update/

22/02/2022

Contest: CC Open Culture Remix Art Contest 2022. Entrants are invited to... "re-use Public Domain or Creative Commons BY-licensed images ... to create, submit, and share original artworks". The 2022 theme is "Love Culture? Share Culture!", and note that all submissions must be... "supported by a brief description telling the story behind the artwork". Free entry. Deadline: 30th April 2022. https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/14/cc-open-culture-remix-art-contest-2022-ccsharesculture/

Calling all artists! Participate in , our new Open Culture Remix Art Contest! The theme this year is “Love Culture? Share Culture!” In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Creative Commons licenses, we are excited to announce the launch of our brand new Open Culture Remix Art C...

19/02/2022

Release: The latest DAZ Studio is now available. Studio 4.20 is out of beta and updates to the latest version of iRay 2021.1.0. Meaning we get the volumetric depth-effects (i.e. lights shining through fogs, hazes, mists etc) that the iRay devs have been working on. The iRay devs also noted in their tech blog (not mentioned by DAZ)... "dramatically decreased host/CPU texture memory usage" - which many doing CPU-only rendering will welcome.

16/02/2022

Freebie: There's a free auto-generator for a random shelf of 3D books. Works in Blender, and is now newly in version 2.0. https://ko-fi.com/s/9879a091a9

16/02/2022

Freebie: The Particle Illusion 2022 particle-emitter software has been released for free. New are: fluid dynamics; save clusters of particles to the Library as a user preset (rather than just one); an updated library of particles; and Mac support. There's also a paid edition, which works as a plugin for high-end professional video editing and compositing software. https://borisfx.com/release-notes/particle-illusion-standalone-2022-v15.0.2-release-notes/

14/02/2022

Opportunity/training: Young digital artists from across Africa are invited to apply for 50 places, on a prestigious 'digital boot camp' in 2022. Deadline: 28th February 2022. https://tshimologong.joburg/2022/01/28/dla-2022-open-call-info-and-faq/

14/02/2022

Contest: Medibang, the free Japanese competitor to Clip Studio, has a fun-looking contest. 'Illustration Contest of Humanized Chemical Elements' asks you to pick a pure chemical element (helium, argon, oxygen etc) from the Periodic Table, and craft a suitable character for it. Deadline: 24th March 2022. https://medibang.com/contest/chemical_element/

01/02/2022

Release: Woof! Project Dogwaffle's digital painting software Artist 2022 is now shipping, aka Howler 2022. This 'Artist' version of Howler is cheaper than the main one - it removes the animation and video, but is otherwise the same for painting. Has a nice price, at present. Note also that it now needs Windows 10 or higher. http://www.pdhowler.com/Cart.htm

01/02/2022

Freebie: There's a new free generic fantasy-style 3D tree auto-generator for Blender. It needs the latest Blender 3.1 beta, though vanilla 3.0 support will be available "soon". https://rc12.gumroad.com/l/fantasytree

01/02/2022

Plugin: The $15 Blender motion-capture plugin BlendArMocap is now in beta, and has a demo video. Works from a we**am. As with most budget mo-cap software, it's best to 'buy it when you see it' - as they tend to vanish after a couple of years. https://cgtinker.gumroad.com/l/rotom

26/01/2022

Contest: The Nikon Small World Competition is open to anyone with an interest in "photography through the microscope", and is free to enter. This may interest readers inspired by our new 'Fractals' magazine issue, and who also have access to a camera-microscope. What real-world sci-fi fractals can you find, down there in the microverse? $6,000 in prizes. Deadline: 30th April 2022. https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/

25/01/2022

Online graphics tool: 'Dream by WOMBO'. A generative AI-trained picture-making tool. Type in a short phrase (e.g. 'flying fish over the ocean') and it will automatically make a relevant picture. There are a variety of styles to try (e.g. Etching, Dali, Mystical, etc). https://app.wombo.art/

25/01/2022

Freebie: A library of over 800 procedural materials for Blender, free under Creative Commons. Compatible with the Blender 3.0 asset library, with only a few minor quirks to iron out. They can all be downloaded at once, in a .ZIP file. https://adamantitemachine.com/b3dmatpack/

19/01/2022

Freebie: The innovative free Clavicula software was featured in the latest Digital Art Live magazine, via an interview. The software has now updated to 0.9.8.x, adding: bone creation and editing; cloth simulation; swirl deform; and paint. https://clavicula.link/ and tutorials are here https://www.youtube.com/c/Neobarok/videos