News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

HiveWire Forums to close

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Sad news, “HiveWire 3D Forums Will Be Closing”. The Poser-friendly forums had continued for several years after the closure of the HiveWire Store, with a strong focus on supporting the high-quality HiveWire content and various incarnations of the Dawn/Dusk/Luna figures. The forums are set to close on 31st July 2026, according to the post.

I have now locally saved the following forums complete, in the form of per-post encapsulated .MHTML files (pages plus images plus page-design intact). Follow-on sub-pages for threads are included.

– Poser
— Poser Scripts
— Poser Shaders

– DAZ Studio
— DAZ Scripts
— DAZ Shaders

– Photoshop

Plus just four selected items from the freebies section of the forums, as .MHTML pages along with their download .ZIPs. I won’t be doing a full archive of all the freebies, so feel free there to do it yourself.

My saves total 2Gb, which compresses down to a 280Mb .7z ZIP file. I’ll upload the ZIP to Archive.org in due course. You will then be able to add this rescue archive to my earlier rescue archives of the RuntimeDNA and Smith Micro Poser forums, and ShareCG, and keyword search across them with desktop freeware such as AnyTxt Searcher or paid software such as dtSearch.

Active Poser forums remain at Renderosity and there’s also a slow sub-forum for Poser at the official DAZ Studio site.

New for DAZ and Poser, May 2026

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Time for my regular pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items released in the last last month. I also add some software picks at the foot of the post.

Science fiction:

Trash Bot from TheAntFarm.

FAC-CH18-07 for DAZ Studio, a flying aircraft carrier. Aircraft not included, but you’ll probably want to add more futuristic-looking planes.

SE Cyborg Maintenance Bay for DAZ.

LI Space Cadet Hair for Genesis 9.

Gothic and horror:

Creature HD Morphs Collection for Genesis 9. Looks a bit more useful for horror than sci-fi.

Steampunk:

Steampunk Alley by Stonemason.

Fantasy:

RawArt’s Grundlebukk Troll for Genesis 9. Not HD, which is good.

Koara Koala for Genesis 9. Perhaps more ‘horror’ than ‘fantasy’. But you may be able to make the face less alarming.

Faeryl’s Horns for Genesis, M4 and V4. Free.

A fantasy Battlefield for DAZ, free.

Free Centaur 8 GF8 ‘skins’. Including giraffe and leopard.

Storybook:

Boutique Front Wonderland for DAZ.

dForce MB Peasant Dress for G9F including the shoes.

Toon:

Free TDSOA Toons poses.

Figures and parts:

James 9, a free figure preset for Genesis 9. Clothes not included.

Z Pose Library Old Age Mega Set for Genesis 9 and 8 Female. Despite the name, the previews also shows males taking the poses.

Swim Goggles for Genesis 9 and for G8 Male.

Shaders:

Wrinkle It! for DAZ Studio. A wrinkle cloth shader.

Landscapes and environments:

LOWREZ People At The Beach, for populating modern beach scenes.

Animals:

Sloth by AM. A real creature.

Songbird ReMix: Orioles of the Old World.

Historical:

Ancient Greek Wall Segments, only suitable for background use.

AJ Ancient Roman Pool for Poser. A touch basic, but now we have AI makeovers.

Wooden Church Ruins 1. A Viking stave church, collapsed.

400 BCE, though more useful for a Wild West scene ‘down Mexico way’.

Caribbean Street Bundle, also useful for the southern seafront cities of the USA.

dForce Long Sleeved Business Suit, 1940s style.

Building On Fire for DAZ Studio. Would suit historical events such as the London Blitz during the Second World War.

Scripts and helpers:

Auto Rigger Pipeline for DAZ.

The new SDK beta for DAZ Studio 6 beta, for plugin makers.

DAZ 2 RizomUV and back… “send any mesh from your DAZ scene directly into RizomUV for UV editing, then seamlessly reimport the updated UVs without losing your materials, morphs, pose, or Sub-D settings.”

Ghost Dynamics 2 for figure interactions that involve touching.

A free Nursoda figures and clothing filter for Everything v1.5 beta. Quickly view all Nursoda items in your Poser runtime, using Everything, with drag-drop to Poser.

Tutorials:

The freeware Everything 1.5 beta setup tutorial, for use with Poser and DAZ.

dForce Weight Maps in DAZ Studio: Better Cloth Control.

Resources:

Need inspiration for your movie / comic scene etc? Frame By Frame offers scene by scene breakdowns of well-known movies. For more inspirational screencaps see the websites at caps-a-holic and FilmGrab.

There’s a new Blender ‘open movie’, Singularity. Screengrabs are freely re-usable, but the source assets are only available to Blender Cloud members.

Five free commercial-use Tolkien fonts and a fine free Photoshop script to jitter the baseline for your lettering, so it looks more handwritten. Tested and works well.

Software:

DAZ Studio 6 beta (free) and Poser 14.0.372. (paid).

Poser 12 is still $29 at Clip Studio’s Graphixly store.

Everything 1.5 beta adds drag-and-drop to Poser/DAZ, tagging and more. Makes setting up a Poser scene so much more pleasant. Free, and effectively a replacement for the much-missed PzDB.

The venerable 3D software Modo is no more, but now offers a Modo End of Life Perpetual License to its paid users… “for a limited time, a Modo EOL perpetual license exclusively for perpetual licence holders who had an active Modo maintenance agreement as of November 7, 2024, the date of our wind-down announcement.” Not to be confused with the 2D animation software Moho, which is still alive.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools.

At last, the ‘holy grail’ for Flux2 Klein in Edit mode! ComfyUI-PixelDriftFix: a Comfy node that fixes pixel drift for image editing AIs. What goes in now matches what comes out, in terms of an exact 1:1 overlay when brought back into Photoshop, so long as you don’t add tiled upscaling to the mix. Tested and working nicely with Klein 4B GGUF (commercial use). 4B GGUF workflow is here.

Flux Klein 4B/9B Multiple Angles workflow for ComfyUI. Works wonderfully once you fix an OS-specific bug in the file-paths of one of the generation modules, which breaks the workflow in Windows. My fixed version of the ComfyUI workflow is here.

Untested by me as yet, ComfyUI-Image-Conveyor a… “ComfyUI image queue that lets you drag in unlimited images, organize them visually, and process them sequentially across queued runs”.

Also untested by me, but some reader may be interested in a working Flux2 Klein pipeline for real-time webcam stream processing.

ShrinkComfy, new software to shrink your ComfyUI .PNG output images while keeping your workflows inside them. For this also look at the mature Windows desktop freeware imBatch which does the same resizing, but can also blur or add a watermark if required.

In generative audio, the wonderful Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX for prompt-to-SFX generation. Tested and working. Commercial use. The larger 9B also works nicely for electronica / Eno-style ambient music production (up to six minutes), and is super-fast enough to be fun.

The model Ideogram 4.0 has been released and is causing a lot of fuss for its exact typography and ability to place elements exactly in a picture composition. Sadly it requires large twin models running at once, as well as a huge Clip, plus a VAE. It can only sensibly be run by those with an expensive 24Gb VRAM graphics card.

That’s it for May 2026. More picks next month!

Release: DAZ Studio 6 beta

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DAZ Studio 6 is out in beta, going from 4.x to 6.x seemingly without a version 5. Still free. The new version is a surprise to all, and touts…

– smoother scene loading, with big textures continuing to load in the background even as you start to work with the scene.

– support for newer NVIDIA 50 series graphics-cards.

– newer version of iRay, 2025.0.3 (NVIDIA drivers update required).

– updated Texture Shaded mode, if you use that rather than iRay for your Viewport.

– ability to hide or show Library content, custom re-labeling, and apparently other content-finding improvements.

– adjust hair strands while still in your full scene, seems to be strand-based hair only.

– the Help system is now run by an AI chatbot. No other AI is in the software. No AI renderer or ComfyUI bridge.

Frankly, such a huge version-leap seems barely justified by the changes. If you work with huge scenes and textures, on a 50-series card, and fiddle with hair a lot, then it may be worth it. Many others will stick with 4.x.

Noted in the changelog…

– “Tweaked the minimum OpenGL version message”, though the newer version was not specified anywhere. Presumably an OpenGL bump is why Texture Shaded mode is now better looking in the Viewport?

– Some changes to formatting of scripts for version 6, and expansion of what they can do.

– A new SDK, so many older third-party plugins won’t work until updated by their makers, if they’re still around e.g. there’s said to be no Animate 2 plugin for version 6.

– “Fixed a regression in the script that backs the ‘Create Poser Companion Files…’ action!” “Backs” rather than “breaks”. That could just be a typo, or it could mean this script broke from version 4.23.1.42 onwards?

Gone with version 6, among other losses…

– 3Delight rendering
– the Collada Exporter (no great loss)
– Mimic and Mimic Live!
– the Photoshop 3D Bridge

Release: Poser 14 updates

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A new update for the latest Poser 14, now at 14.0.372. The web page states…

– a modern real‑time viewport … next‑generation OpenGL previewing.
– cinematic lighting tools.
– smarter cloth simulation, one‑click cloth materials.
– workflow refinements.

The release-notes add, among bugfix and other items…

Lights/Shadows:
– Hierarchy Editor now has light bulb icon to turn on and off lights.
– Gobo spotlight implemented for Cycles using Cycles native image node as input.
– Shadow Blur Radius correctly works in Cycles.
– Eliminated pixelated shadows.

Physics/Cloth:
– Added Cloth Type presets Silk, Rubber, Cotton, Wool/Fleece, Denim, and Leather.
– Added Rigidity Constraints to fine-tune clothification.
– Added painted-on Rigidity Constraints for Poser Cloth simulation objects.
– Added smoothing for soft-body/cloth dynamics during simulations.

Forum chat suggests the real-time Viewport is noticeably improved by the OpenGL upgrade.

An update on Stable Audio 3

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An update on Stable Audio 3. After my success with the Small versions, I tried the Medium in its bf16 version (small 4.6Gb size, slightly less precise output, can do both music and foley sound-effects). Medium can give up to six minutes of music or field-recording style sound-effects, and has better coherence than the two Small models.

Working well and fast, for me. So fast that it’s fun to use. The practical uses for the DAZ and Poser crowd are obvious — soundtracks and SFX for animations and games, soundscapes for still pictures or slide-shows. It was trained on the vast Freesound SFX library, so can do almost any sounds, and they’re commercial-use.

The official advice is that SA3 Medium ‘requires Flash Attention 2’. I have that installed, but Comfy can’t be coaxed to use it. However, despite not being able to load Flash Attention 2, the Medium model still runs fine for me in ComfyUI. Using LCM and Simple, whereas the Small models need PingPong as the sampler.

Restyling an existing track was tried in Medium. A folk-music .midi file was first converted to .MP3 (Windows Media Player -> Audacity -> .MP3) and loaded. SA3 veers off into ‘doing its own thing’ very easily, and having things in the prompt like “… and retain the exact sequencing and pace” seems to help a lot when restyling using different instruments (e.g. MIDI piano to choral).

To locally analyse audio for music description and thus create useful SA3 prompts, I was told you need Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct model. Note however that Jan.ai has only just introduced audio upload, in version 0.8.0 (22nd May 2026). So, users running their GGUF models in the excellent desktop freeware Jan will first need to upgrade to 0.8.0. After that, delete any already-imported Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct and reinstall in Jan along with its MMPROJ to enable the model’s audio comprehension.

I find the Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct model’s useless for my purposes though, as it turns out. Its very short generic responses are useless for converting into Stable Audio prompts (even when told to assume the personality of a professional musicologist), and when asked for anything longer the model’s context runs out. Increasing the context size and restarting the model makes no difference. It’s a fairly small older model, and I suspect it just can’t handle writing 150 words on something the length of three-minute song, even when compressed to a .MP3 smaller than 10Mb. So it’s useless, for both reasons. Deleted.

So Stable Audio3 is a keeper, partly because it produces excellent ambient and electronica. I’m keeping Stable Audio 1 around though, as it seems to handle sound-effect mixes better. e.g. a good field recording of a man walking through crispy autumn leaves, in a balanced mix with the sound of birds chirping.

Finally, note here’s now a local LoRA trainer for Stable Audio 3.

Workflow for Stable Audio 3 ‘Small Music’

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Following on from yesterday’s Stable Audio 3 install / workflow post. I can confirm that the Small Music version of SA3 works and works wonderfully. Super-quick, quality and commercial use. Nice. Fun, too, as it’s so amazingly fast.

I’ve here swopped out the previous standard VAE Decode Audio node for a VAE Decode Audio (Tiled) node, which is apparently better according to Reddit wisdom. Though that node does take longer to process if you go beyond the 47 second default output. Small Music can output up to 120 seconds, but if you go that long then the VAE Decode Audio (Tiled) node will noticeably pause.

There are no vocals, instrumentals only.

Note also that there are now Base versions for the Small models, and that LoRAs can also be trained on them.

How to ‘outpaint’ and ‘inpaint’ audio with SA3 in ComfyUI? That’s still to discover.

Finally, there’s an official prompting guide with a music focus. It obviously helps if you’re conversant with audio terminology, or can find an AI that can describe an audio clip in musicologist terms.

How to install Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX safetensors, and run it in ComfyUI

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How to install Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX safetensors, and run it in ComfyUI.

Why the Small SFX version of the new Stable Audio 3.0? Because it’s amazingly quick, commercial-use, and also because the larger 3.0 main or base version requires Flash Attention 2. As the official readme states…

“Stable Audio 3 Medium requires Flash Attention 2.”

Good luck with that, then. The rest of us will use the Small models. What follows should theoretically also work for the Small Music model, but I’m mainly interested in the audio ‘foley’ sound-effects generator model.

Here’s the install guide for ComfyUI:

1. Upgrade your ComfyUI portable to the latest 0.22 version or higher (required, not optional) which had zero-day support for SA3 a few days ago. Then also run PIP to install the new requirements.txt as well.

2. From the official ComfyUI HuggingFace, download the stable_audio_3_small_sfx.safetensors (2.3Gb) and put it your local ComfyUI’s ..\models\checkpoints folder and also the t5gemma_b_b_ul2.safetensors (1.2Gb) and put that in ..\models\text_encoders No config file is needed.

3. The official readme for SA3 Small SFX says it needs:

Steps = 8.
CFG = 1.0.
Sampler = Pingpong

Hmm… what, Pingpong?? Never heard of it. Turns it’s a custom node and sampler by Blepping, all in one. It’s here as pingpongsampler_node.py. Drop this file in the root of your ComfyUI Custom Nodes folder, and re-start Comfy. It has no requirements.txt.

Once ComfyUI is loaded with PingPong, the new sampler won’t show up on the list of samplers in your regular nodes. Instead you just double-click on a workflow and type pingpong, and then load it via its own node.

4. Now assemble the following ComfyUI workflow thus. This works for me and gives reasonable results with blistering speed. I say “reasonable” because I still think that Stable Audio 1.0 gives a better quality of output and also seems to handle the instruction to ‘mix’ sounds better, but then… 1.0 also takes about 50 times as long to generate an audio clip. If you have a super-ninja graphics card, that may not matter much. But for the GPU-poor it may matter.

You may want to also hook an audio output to Denoised output and compare the two.

Possibly there are going to be better ways to do it. Possibly I’m doing it wrong. But for now, in the first day or so after release, this works for me.

Release: Stable Audio 3, with ComfyUI checkpoints and encoder

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Stable Audio 3 has been released. Free, offline and local. Feed it a text prompt and it generates field-recordings, movie-style sound-effects, mixed-effect soundscapes… and now also music. It’s of obvious use for those creating animations, visual novels, motion comics, YouTube illustrated audiobooks, Ken Burns style documentaries etc.

Very fast, small, and with outputs free for commercial use. Full 44.1 kHz stereo quality. Even the very small models for version 3 (2.2Gb + 1.1Gb text encoder) can produce up to two minutes and can apparently generate this in a few seconds even on a CPU.

Very importantly for creatives, the new version offers iterative editing of outputs. You can regenerate just the bits you don’t like (audio ‘inpainting’) and keep the rest. And the speed should make that a relatively easy matter. You can also auto-extend your audio in the same style (audio ‘outpainting’).

Trained on legally clean sources, so the anti-AI mob can’t wail about ‘stealing’.

The official release is gated behind a Huggingface sign-in, presumably to guard against vexatious lawsuits re: misuse by miscreants. But the ComfyUI models and encoder are here and freely available: ../Comfy-Org/stable-audio-3. I’m still downloading, but I guess it might then need an update of ComfyUI, re: getting the text encoder recognised? Update: needs to be the latest ComfyUI 0.22 or higher.

What’s currently missing is i) an example prompt structure to generate a complex but coherent sequential soundscape (can JSON be used, with timings?); ii) a working example of how the iterative editing is done; and iii) an optimized ComfyUI ‘studio’ workflow (e.g. for optimised stereo separation and movement, and for running the Small SFX with the Small Music model alongside each other for a basic multitrack in the workflow).

For the previous Stable Audio, note that one could multitrack simply via the prompt. e.g. “A balanced mix between a good field recording of a man walking through dry leaves in winter, and a recording of small birds calling plaintively in the surrounding Canadian boreal forest.” The word mixdown would also work. I assume this will work on the new version 3, once I get it installed and working.

I’m less interested in the music than in the SFX and soundscapes, but if the music interests you then note the new Stable Audio Prompt Guide for Music at their site.

Everything v1.5 beta – filter for your Nursoda figures and clothing

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For the new free Everything v1.5 beta, which lets you drag-and-drop to the Poser stage. A custom filter for instantly finding all the Nursoda figures and key clothing, in your runtime.

Add it via Top menu | Search | Organise Filters.

\character\ AND Kelm OR Kon OR Bong OR Holke OR Fehn OR Noor OR Frankie OR Ronk OR Snigel OR Blumi OR Brulba OR Telka OR Zlata OR TocToc OR Koit OR Loik OR Kalinka OR Bong OR Bonga OR Malini OR Eepo OR Eepovik OR Kena OR Merpal OR BizPig OR Spector OR Vila OR Zwen OR Hartmut OR Pitterbill OR Torba OR Halpert OR Yweeb OR Torf OR Slon OR Mandragora OR Puntik OR Kaalkopje OR Anceata OR Semil OR Flisch OR Fehn OR Nunatak OR Kali OR Kelm OR Teo OR Malik OR Hein OR Utla OR Aina OR Wilgen OR Onats OR Muggie OR Chull NOT TechnoOrg NOT Zeekenah NOT Peepot NOT Plateosurus NOT Coffeepot NOT Deepone NOT *.XMP NOT Dinokonda NOT Flowertreepot NOT Konrad NOT SnorkelMask NOT Plateosaurus

No keyword needed. Once the search results are in, re-sort by: Date Created | Descending.

The filter is needed because the maker’s name ‘Nursoda’ is in neither the filename or the file path.

Assumes you have Everything’s Top Menu | Search | ‘Match Path’ ticked, and have also enabled Boolean search (Top menu | Tools | Options | Search | ‘Allow Literal Operators’).

Release: Everything 1.5 alpha adds drag-and-drop to Poser/DAZ, tagging and more.

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Well well… the latest Everything 1.5 alpha 5 (April 2026) can now drag-drop, direct from its search results, to the Poser stage. Tested in Poser 11 and 13. I thus assume any Poser version should handle this. Works for the latest DAZ Studio too.

Update: now in beta.

You just need to sort results correctly, so that the .CR2 to drag-drop is sitting next to its thumbnail in the search results…

Or other Poser file-types or the DAZ equivalent to a .CR2. You do of course also need to know your Poser/DAZ file types. No use dropping a Poser .FC2 face file expression file on a static prop, for instance. That fire-hydrant prop won’t ever smile. You also have to get used to dragging the neighbouring file of the same name, and not the alluring thumbnail. It takes a bit of getting used to at first.

A test with Poser’s Pitterbill figure shows that one can quickly load the figure, add expression, clothes and pose. And do it far quicker than when wrestling with the Poser Library. One can also see more options re: clothes and hair.

Indexing is blazingly fast. Despite the name ‘Everything’, you can just index a folder and all its subfolders, if you know here to look…

Set it up and then ‘Rescan now’ to do the first indexing of your chosen folder(s). I suggest ‘never update’, and then you can do manual re-indexing when you need to. There’s no need to have it re-indexing every day.

Then sorting your search-results by Date Created | Ascending should get you the main figure or prop at the top, then clothes, then extras such as expressions etc. Assuming you installed in that order, and that nothing has messed with your file datestamps. The sets of files should be clustered together in the results.

You can also reverse the search results order, for a quick scrolling view of what you’ve recently installed for Poser + DAZ.

You can try to set the default search-display results method (e.g. Date Created | Ascending) here…

And also here…

But your choice still isn’t respected. Search persistently defaults to ‘Date Modified’, which is very annoying because a Poser/DAZ user then has to switch it to ‘Date Created’. Restarting the software makes no difference. A bug?

Your Bookmarks can however have an embedded/fixed sorting method.

All this all assumes nothing has been tinkering with your ‘Date Created’ on your runtime files. These dates should carry over, even when porting the runtime to a new PC or external HDD.

Top Menu | Search | ‘Match Path’ needs to be ticked…

This lets the search pick up keywords in the file path, as well as from the file name.

The best way seems to have this activated and then to search across everything, but have a negative search-filter always active… e.g….

NOT *.jpg NOT *.xmp NOT *.obj NOT *.dso NOT *.rsr NOT *.dsv NOT *.pmd NOT *.db NOT *.tif NOT *.dsd

… and so on. As you can see, the wildcard * can now be used. Just keep on adding unwanted file types as you find them, until all you see is what you need to see.

You can add this negative filter at Top menu | Search | Organise Filters. Then…

To get NOT working you need to do a one-time activation of Boolean search. This is not on by default. Go to Top menu | Tools | Options and enable the cryptic ‘Allow Literal Operators’…

Despite there being no mention of NOT there, it is in use once enabled. With Boolean search operators activated you can use a search like M4 hair NOT chair and just get hair in the results. No chairs.

Some makers for Poser, e.g. great makers like Nursoda and 1971s, don’t use their maker-name in the either filename or file-path. Thus it’s difficult to see their range of installed content at one go. But now Everything 1.5 allows tagging.

It uses Windows own file-tagging system. You can thus tag in Windows without any extra software. Find a set of 1971s items by using Everything, shift-select all the .PNG thumbnails you want to tag, right-click them, then Properties | Details | Tags. Add a tag and… now they all have that tag in their Properties.

Everything can now read/find the new tag in the file properties itself. In Everything switch the search results to View Details, add there a new Column and choose ‘Tags’, OK. Now switch back to thumbnail view.

You can now search for tags:1971s and get only files you just tagged. It seems you can’t mix search methods with tag search, though e.g. 1971s tags:1971s Make sure the tag is unique, but you can also easily remember it.

Note that it can take a full closedown and reload of the software, in order for Everything to ‘forget’ about any tags you’ve just removed or changed.

An alternative to tagging would be to look at e.g. Nursoda’s online store at Renderosity, make a note of all the names of his characters, then use these to craft a positive filter for Everything. Then you’d search for nothing, with the filter enabled, and ‘Match path’ enabled, and the search results should just show you all your Nursoda characters. It would be more difficult for 1971s, and his names are more generic, and he has made more content. But it could be done.

So, there we have it. Everything 1.4 is still the version that’s being offered to the masses. But those in the know can get the latest Everything 1.5 alpha which adds drag-and-drop to both Poser and DAZ. Also tagging. Even faster search than before. It’s still completely free. With just a little customisation, and some user knowledge of Poser/DAZ file types, it’s now a reasonable replacement for the Libraries and also for the old and defunct PzDB.

Review: WinCatalog 2026 – an AI replacement for PzDB?

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I’ve long wanted a replacement for PzDB, which was an excellent go-to runtime cataloguer and library replacement for Poser and (to an extent) also for DAZ Studio content. It’s now defunct. I’ve now discovered WinCatalog 2026, which initially looked promising. It’s just this month added AI search. I had a look at it.

On loading it presents a very similar user-interface to PzDB, which was a nice start. It looks much like Microsoft Access, which PzDB was built on.

Fairly straightforward and easy to use, though there is a very full online 2026 manual if you need it (and a PDF manual for the 2024 version).

It took a couple of hours to make the initial local index of my DAZ ‘content’ folder, which has the main runtime below it, and then longer to add my larger Poser runtime. The new index is stored on the main SSD and its embeds its own thumbnails. This results in an 8Gb combo database when indexing my Poser and DAZ runtimes. You can’t search two separate databases at once, only one, so you need to have both DAZ and Poser indexed in one. Searches are slow on such a large database, but the speed is bearable.

It doesn’t compare with the speed of the free Everything software, though, which is lightning quick and comparable to the incredibly quick Poser 2014 Adobe AIR library.

Sadly there is no equivalent in WinCatalog of the free Anything software’s vital Search ‘Match Path’ function. Here’s Everything doing ‘match path’ for chull *png …

And here’s WinCatalog doing the same search (no ‘match path’)…

No contest.

Why is Everything better? Because Everything can find .PNG thumbnails even if they are not named with the search term. e.g. Chull expression .PNGs are shown, even though they are not named chull and are only in a folder which has chull in its path. The apparent lack of this vital path-searching feature limits WinCatalog. I’ve looked all over its manual for such a thing, and I can’t find it.

One can at least have WinCatalog sort results by ‘date created’ which means your installed items and their extras are clustered together in the results. Which is useful, but again Everything can do that. I’m assuming here that nothing has monkeyed about with the time-stamps on your runtime files, perhaps during a long-ago move to a new PC.

Like the Everything software, drag-and-drop into DAZ and Poser is not supported. In the old PzDB the thumbnail and the file were one and the same, and you just saw the thumbnails. And then you could drag-and-drop your selection onto the Poser/DAZ stage and it would load or load/conform. That’s not the case here. It’s a big drawback, but not insurmountable. You just have to right-click and view the .PNG file in Explorer, and then 99.9% of the time the target file will be sitting next to it with the same name and datestamp.

You do get Boolean search with exclude in WinCatalog. For example, pitterbill *.png -glove will exclude the Pitterbill character’s gloves, a feature which doesn’t work in the same simple way in Everything (perhaps you can dive into its Regex to do that, though).

Thumbnail quality is fine. Some long-time Poser users will first need to run the freeware RSR-to-PNG-converter on their runtimes. Load | then point at your ../runtime (not your ../content); select ‘recursive’ | let it run (there’s no indication it’s running) for about 30 minutes on a first pass of a huge runtime. Doing this ensures there are .PNG thumbnails for older Poser content, if not already present. WinCatalog can’t make its own thumbnails if there are none already present.

Font size can be changed. Search-result thumbnail size can be changed up or down. There’s no dark mode.

To make the database lighter in weight, the best option seems to be to stop the indexing shortly after starting, delete all the textures and shader preset subfolders (and any other unwanted folders) from the database index, and then continue indexing. Databases can also be compressed after building, and there are scheduled timestamped backups.

Individual files and folders can have user comments added, or can be rather clunkily tagged. Export of search results to .HTML pages is possible. None of that can be done in Anything.

WinCatalog’s clunky tagging process is being sidestepped in the very latest WinCatalog 2026.1.0.415 version, which has just introduced offline AI (if you want it). An interesting development, and I’ve not yet tested it. Once WinCatalog has built its local database, the in-database thumbnails can also all be auto-described by any local AI model with Vision enabled. You supply the AI, and can plug in its local URL. Qwen3.5 4B with its Vision MMPROJ file loaded would likely be a good quick choice, but I could not get WinCatalog to connect to it when running Qwen on Llama.cpp in Jan.ai. Generating the auto-descriptions might take a while though, for huge runtimes with zillions of thumbnails. The AI descriptions are then added to the database, and can be searched across using natural language. That is of course of no help with getting the DAZ / Renderosity store preview or store URL into the database. For that you would need to manually comment individual databased items. Not fun.

Interestingly WinCatalog can generate thumbnails for 3D files, but by default this is limited to the lightweight .STL and .3MF formats. My guess is it would likely be impossibly slow if you added .OBJ files for a vast Poser/DAZ/Vue runtime. But you may find it useful for a smaller collection with lighter meshes.

The WinCatalog 2026 price is comparable with the old defunct PzDB, currently at £32 with a 20% discount. It is said to work on Windows XP SP3(!) and higher, all the way to Windows 11. The Professional licence only gives you technical support if needed, and .CSV export, otherwise the software is the same. Ideally you want Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4.8 installed, but it’s not an absolute requirement.

Overall, WinCatalog is an interesting discovery… with a fresh AI cherry on top. The Everything software is however free, and if set up right it’s of far more use most people’s quick Poser/DAZ search, because it has that vital ‘Match Path’ function (and also complex Regex queries, if you can coax Grok to craft them for you). The decision to spend £26 on WinCatalog 2026 will depend on how much you want its:

– 3D model indexing with thumbnails;
– Boolean search and (rather clunky) sub-folder filtering;
– basic manual tagging and commenting (e.g. tag with keyword, add the store URL);
– multiple tabbed searches;
– export of results to .HTML page catalogs;
– the new AI addition (may require the slow LM Studio, ugh);
– scheduled and timestamped backups;
– software that will run on older Windows PCs.

Neither software has direct drag-and-drop of search results to Poser/DAZ. Ideally we still need something with that feature, and that knows about the Poser / DAZ categories of people, hair, props, materials etc. Everything is still being developed, and is currently in 1.5 alpha 5 with lots of new features, so there’s still hope there that there might be some way to have it better adapted for Poser/DAZ runtimes. 1.5 alpha also has a dark mode and lots of security updates. Update: Everything 1.5 alpha (April 2026) adds drag-and-drop to Poser and DAZ, tagging, Boolean, and more.

New for Poser and DAZ, April 2026

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser Leave a comment

Welcome to another pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items released last month. Also some software picks at the foot of the post. As usual I don’t feature items that are not ‘commercial use for renders’, and I shy away from the great-looking but heavyweight/expensive ‘HD’ items for DAZ.

Science fiction:

An unusual cyber-Medusa Cyber Hair Kit and Script for Genesis 9.

Porter robot, for Poser and DAZ.

Black UFO for Bryce. Free.

A convincing near-future Mars Beetle transport and matching Mars Base. Which could also be a Moon Base. Both free. For interiors see the Hostile Surface series from Coflek-Gnorg, for Poser.

Free, a Totem Serge model which, when glowing and grouped in an avenue, could suit sci-fi scenes such as Moon Base landing strips.

Princess Series Star Explorer Outfit, a good-looking near-future dark spacesuit for G9F.

AB Simple Artificial Skins and Shaders for Genesis 9, suitable for alien humanoids.

Gothic and horror:

LOWREZ Zombies for DAZ Studio. Three groups, for massing in the scene.

Steampunk:

1971s’s Airship with interior for Poser. Also available for DAZ.

1971s’s Sky Boat, now available for DAZ Studio.

120 Metal and Alloy Materials for E-on Vue.

Fantasy:

Palantiliths 2026, a remake of the old ones.

Nobleman’s Cradle for DAZ.

Storybook:

dForce PreT Aster dress.

Hr-282 for Poser and V4.

COS Mae for Genesis 9, a juvenile-delinquent / bully girl character.

Toon:

RA Maisie Scifi for Poser (requires Masie figure). Also a clothing tutorial.

Masie Sci-fi probably flies the cute new ScoTT-00 flying machine.

Buddy Burro for Poser.

Semi Faceless for Genesis 9. Potentially useful for comics, where you want to draw in the eyes / mouth yourself.

Figures and parts:

Width Adjusters for Genesis 9 Female. New characters, with a simple width slider.

Long leg morphs for Genesis 9 Female.

Hair Helper for Genesis 9. Free.

dForce FV Messy Rogue Hair for Genesis 9. Nice multi-purpose male hair.

Conforming Flak Vest for M4. The default M4 is seen in the preview, but know that an M4 doesn’t have to look so boring.

A general-purpose free Conforming Hoodie for LaFemme 2 for Poser.

Shaders:

Energy Effects VFX shaders for DAZ.

Silvia Shaders for DAZ, including a ‘thick fur’ and ‘lava’.

120 Metal and Alloy Materials for E-on Vue.

Landscapes and environments:

Mountain Stone House: Pool by the quality texturer ShaaraMuse3D.

Urban Weeds for DAZ.

Animals:

Short Faced Bear by AM for DAZ.

Theron The Wolf, a great semi-stylised wolf for DAZ and you need the base DAZ Dog 8. Currently on its introductory discount at a very reasonable $12.

Need a yappy mini-dog? Meet Abbey Rose for DAZ and Poser. In China, also know as “lunch”.

Free Cat Zeus Poses, including a chase pose for chasing the annoying Abbey Rose.

Nature’s Wonders Butterfly Garden 2. Butterflies and also their natural habitat plants.

Songbird ReMix Magpies and Orioles of the New World (plus a free nest) and Blackbirds & Grackles. For Poser and DAZ.

Songbird ReMix Cowbirds. For Poser and DAZ. Free!

Nature’s Wonders: Flies. For Poser and DAZ. Also a free Nature’s Wonders Fly Swatter.

Historical:

Porto Bella, a Venetian style town by Stonemason. See also the new KuJ Courtyard.

dForce Traditional Peruvian Woman’s Outfit for Genesis 9.

A Chinese Rickshaw for Bryce. Free.

FG Outbuilding interior from rural America in the 1920s/30s/40s.

WW2 C8A truck poses for Genesis 9. 22 World War Two poses for a truck team. Free.

Launch Tower for Bachem Natter Rocket Plane.

Vintage Guitar and Amp 2 for DAZ.

1970s Asymmetric Blowout Hair for Genesis 8 and Genesis 9.

Scripts and helpers:

Bluegene’s Talk Designer Viseme files for V4-M4. Free. The files enable V4/M4 to talk with TTS and lip-sync.

Automatically rename multiple cameras in DAZ.

Animation Doctor – Motion Control, speed up or slow selected keyframes in DAZ. Also, insert / delete frames anywhere on the timeline.

Tutorials:

How to include lots of fully posed, clothed figures in a Poser or DAZ scene.

Bad design practices to avoid at all costs, when creating 3D scenes in Poser or DAZ Studio.

My failed experiment, using OBS Studio + DAZ/Poser viewport capture via Spout to get a Poser viewport live in ComfyUI.

Software:

Poser 14 was reviewed in the latest Imagine FX magazine. A positive review, but let down a bit by hasty screenshots and by having no mention of Poser’s unique Comic Book Preview mode (the issue was comic-book creation themed).

The venerable 3D software LightWave 2026 is now in beta, with the full release set for the end of May 2026.

Another 3D sculpting freeware, which runs offline and for the desktop PC, Tamga. Aims to be simple and intuitive to use, unlike ZBrush.

Japan’s Clip Studio Paint Version 5.0 has been released. This over-complicated and fiddly comic-book production software now has: built-in 3D hand models; the ability to draw your own guide-lines on the basic 3D figure mannikins; and at last you can now group 3D items in a scene and move them as one.

DaVinci Resolve 21 (beta), with new AI features.

The freeware NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter lets you install and run Microsoft’s Azure ‘neural’ TTS voices locally, running them offline as if they were standard SAPI5 TTS voices. What’s new is that the latest version now supports Windows 7. There’s also a new video showing the secret control-codes you can use with these offline Microsoft Azure TTS voices in Balabolka.

Talking of audio and TTS, who knew that the go-to editing freeware Audacity can run Python scripts?

Dimensions 2 Folders. Windows freeware to auto-sort images into sub-folders, based on their dimensions.

A simple .JSX Photoshop script for zooming in to a set zoom level. No advanced AI could provide me with a working script for this, not even Grok. It means no more wrestling with that infernally slippy Navigator window/slider, if you have images of a set size and consistently need to get them loaded up at a specific zoom level. e.g. eBay postcards at 1600px, where the right-hand side of the card gets hidden under panels at the default zoom-level. Tested and working.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools.

ComfyUI-Image-Conveyor. A drag-and-drop UI to visually ‘queue up’ many images, for the workflow to then process one at a time.

For those with powerful graphics-cards, a free custom node that integrates the OpenCut video-editor freeware into ComfyUI.

A standalone local LavaSR-Fast-Enhancer with GUI, for quickly and automatically cleaning up noisy audio recordings.

Also, note that the free 400 credits a month at the ComfyUI Cloud doesn’t start on the 1st of the month, as you might expect. More like on the 8th of each month. So, don’t panic if it doesn’t roll over on the 1st. Update: Offer no longer functions, mid May 2026. “Subscription required” to run workflows, now, despite having free credits.

Censorship:

Those of us in the UK are now completely blocked from the popular Imgur image-hosting service, widely used on Reddit. It’s also now effectively impossible for us to access the full version of CivitAI (Google sign-in/sign-up doesn’t work if using a VPN). Both blocks are the result of our dismal government. I hear that the Russians have also completely blocked their citizen’s access to DeviantArt, along with many other websites.

Adobe-AVX2-Patch. Adobe software installers now throw a tantrum and refuse to install if your old PC’s CPU doesn’t fully use AVX2 extensions. Sometimes it will refuse even if it’s an old PC that does support AVX2. Yet their software, such as Photoshop, runs fine without AVX2. Bypass this nannying nonsense with a handy patch.

That’s it for April 2026. More picks next month!

Poser 14 reviewed in the latest Imagine FX

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Poser, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

Poser 14 is reviewed in the latest edition of the venerable Imagine FX magazine (June 2026). A good one-page review, though with low-effort real-time viewport screenshots from the reviewer.

“Poser 14 is for creators who want simplicity and a massive library. […] Affordable base software cost […] The interface may be a little dated, but it’s clear and not overly complicated to use. […] offers a streamlined, budget-friendly alternative to professional suites, making it an excellent choice for those who need to pose and render pre-built assets quickly for their digital storytelling.”

Sadly, considering it’s their ‘comic-book creation’ special-issue, there’s no mention of Poser’s unique real-time comic-book rendering.

Preview: iClone AI Studio

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

iClone is now promoting its AI Studio generative-video rendering feature as ‘coming-soon’, a feature with was trailed last month in a 2026 roadmap post. Looks interesting, if they really have cracked character/scene consistency and temporal stability. But it’s Cloud-based video generation, and presumably credits-based, so you’re likely to need a big pot of cash to enjoy it.