News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Release: DAZ Studio 2025 alpha

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The DAZ Studio 2025 is now available in an “alpha” version. Includes among others things…

* Faster asset loading (approx. 3x), with noticeable improvements when working with Genesis 9 content.

* Completely rebuilt viewport architecture that utilizes modern graphics libraries – OpenGL 4.1 minimum on Windows, Metal 1.2 minimum on macOS.

– Completely rebuilt DrawStyles that offer better out-of-the-box visuals.

– Support for NVIDIA 50XX series graphics cards and new driver requirements for them.

– New scripting engine that expands the capabilities of the scripts you can write in DAZ Studio.

Another ‘AI as Photoshop filter’ experiment

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Here’s a Poser render of Nursoda’s Putnik figure, made using the Comic Book preview render + lighting for a ‘flat colours’ effect + a Gamma lift in Poser (see the native scripts that ship with Poser). All this was to try to bypass the ‘grunge textures’. This was my starting image for an experiment to try have AI work as if were a Photoshop filter.

The resulting 2800px render is then shrunk to 768px as here. This becomes the basis for Img2Img at a low 0.2 rate, with (as you can see below) a creative SD 1.5 model and minimal prompting. The Canny Controlnet is however high at 1.0 and set to ‘Control’.

Very subtle, but useful. The variation of results, in a batch of four generated images, is also minimal. But there’s still enough stylisation added to head and ears to improve the look. The improvement in inking is minimal, but the buttons are more obvious since they’re being prompted for.

The strong Controlnet used means that the registration of the two images (source and AI generation) in Photoshop is perfect. This means you don’t have to fuss about colours in the AI image. In Photoshop, you just desaturate, drop the original on top and set its layer blending mode to ‘Color’. That brings back the original Poser colours.

The only drawback is working at the relatively small size of 768px. But cutout and defringing is not difficult at that size. And if it’s headed for a comic-book frame in a larger page, and the page is headed for a 10″ screen and not print, then the relatively small size may not matter much. Of course, one could try the experiment at 1024px instead, which might work.

Release: Framepack

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Relatively easy ‘video diffusion’ AI is here, and working on relatively low-end PCs. Framepack is fully open source and can be run locally. Feed it a source image and a simple instructional prompt, and generate up to a minute of video at 30FPS. With reasonable speed, and without needing a stupid amount of VRAM. Impressive. It’s from lllyasviel, the guy who made the SD Controlnets, Fooocus and WebUI Forge.

Animated PNG demo, 4Mb.

There is now a one-click Windows installer for Windows 10 (though I guess it might be hacked to use CUDA 11.x + an earlier compatible Pytorch, for Windows 7 users). Note that, once installed, it then fetches 40+Gb of models and controlnets etc. (Models are here for separate download). So you’re likely to need 50Gb+ of space for a local install. There’s no standalone .torrent at present.

It can do widescreen as well as square and phone-screen format. Appears to be limited to about 640px in generation size, so upscaling would be needed. No pristine 4k footage, then. Since it works from any pre-made image, the potential for animating Poser and DAZ renders seems obvious. No whining about ‘piracy’ either, that way.

And the fact that it’s free and can speedily generate somewhat lengthy clips means it has potential for generating lots of possible clips and then stitching a YouTube movie together from the best (though of course there’s no lip-sync).

ShareCG Download Project

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The ‘Poser and DAZ Studio Free Resources Wiki’ has launched a new ShareCG Download Project page, listing ‘who has saved what’. This is in addition to the mega .torrent on Archive.org, which also includes the accompanying Web pages for the freebies (often vital for install and/or use instructions).

Sadly, ShareCG is now closed…

Looks like Blender Nation is also gone and deleted.

New for Poser and DAZ – February and March 2025

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Welcome to another page of my judicious ‘picks’ from the wealth of new releases, for use with the Poser and/or DAZ Studio software. My last such survey was in mid February, so here I cover six weeks.

As you may have heard, the large freebies website ShareCG is about to vanish. The new owners no longer want it around. Indeed, it had appeared to vanish earlier today, in a welter of PHP error messages… but is now back up. How long it will stay up is unknown. As such it’s being archived as a partial archive at Archive.org. Among other freebies, all Poser Python scripts have been archived. Including those of the master-scripter Structure, who did not put his scripts under the ‘Scripts’ category. See below for links to the rescue archives. I’ve also fixed the ShareCG links in my scripts directory pages for Poser 11 and Poser 12/13.

Science fiction:

Stonemason’s new Arctic Outpost scene.

Sci-fi Force Field with a number of variants.

Sci-fi Hover Car for Vue.

Multi Purpose Pick-up, also working via anti-gravity, for your spaceport loading-bays. Similar in design to those in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Corruption Builder for DAZ, alien plants for a creepy planetscape. Or perhaps a subway infestation.

Need to blast those nasty corrupt pods? Currently free on DAZ, Secret Underground Props.

Gothic and horror:

Gargoyles of Notre Dame – Set 1: Northwest Tower and Old Stone for Gargoyles of Notre Dame Set 1 (requires the other set). Nice.

Need a gargoyle-master, who sculpts/controls the gargoyles? Weird Neighbour for G8.1M.

Need to destroy the gargoyles? Just pop ’em in the RuralCottage Oven for Poser for a bake-to-smithereens.

Steampunk:

Steampunk Mask-goggles for G8F.

Free, a Curious Street Bin in .OBJ format.

Fantasy:

Round Barrow for Simple Grasslands Expanse (requires Simple Grasslands Expanse).

Currently free on DAZ, Giant Lore for Genesis 3 Male. Body and head presets for giant trolls etc.

A free Wreath Decor Crown in .OBJ format. Possibly useful for wood-gods, etc.

D&D Book with cover, clasp and simple open/close.

EArkham’s ZWorld Vile Crawlers II: Dungeon Monsters. Various forms of snake-monster.

Toon:

Veggies Collection for DAZ. I assume this isn’t close to fan-art, but check before commercial use.

A simple low-poly Cartoon Spaceship, free. Suitable for backgrounds, not close-ups.

Cozy Cartoon World – Kitchen Props.

Figures and parts:

Hair Pack for G9 Male, strand-based for DAZ.

13 Single Hand Poses, props scanned from real hands and packaged in a high-res .FBX format.

V4/M4 still rocks! Free, V4-M4 Rockstar Poses – Guitarists.

Show and Hide Partial Body Poses for G8 and G9.

Lon for M4, a distinctive male head-morph.

Currently free at DAZ, David 5 for the original Genesis figure.

Klyngar for Genesis 9. Fairly obviously a Star Trek Klingon male, so non-Trekkies beware of accidental commercial use.

Landscapes and environments:

Japanese Garden and see also the free Japanese Shrine maiden costume for G9F.

Need moss for your Japanese garden? The new Moss System for DAZ.

EVERYPlant Rope Bridge for Vue. Also available for Poser and DAZ. See also the new freebie Jungle Bridge for DAZ, with its own HDRI file.

Animals:

Nature’s Wonders Beetles and Nature’s Wonders Beetles of the World Volume 1. Plus the free Nature’s Wonders Beetles – Extras.

Songbird ReMix Cool & Unusual Birds 4. A pack of the most attractive and fave birds.

Anniemation’s Capybara. Similar in look to the one in the new must-see Blender animated movie Flow, but one can’t copyright a Capybara… so commercial use should be ok.

A new DA Sheep for DAZ Horse 3. Looks as though it’s suited to flocks rather than close-up cuddles.

flLittle Leopards for the Hivewire Housecat. DAZ iRay ‘spots and stripes’ materials for the Hivewire Housecat.

Historical:

A complete and detailed Medieval War Camp for DAZ.

Retro 1930s pulp sci-fi Ajax Spacewoman for La Femme 2.

Rooftop Base, which with a little adaptation could be 1940s Hell’s Kitchen in New York city. Most of Brooklyn’s kids didn’t have rooftop access, but Hell’s Kitchen kids did… and they often made the rooftops their ‘gang HQ’.

Archives:

On 28th March 2025 it was announced that the long-running freebies website ShareCG was soon to close. It appeared to have closed today 4th April 2025, but is now back up again. How long it will stay available is unknown, but it looks like it’s teetering and may be going down very soon. Save anything you want locally, now.

Given this, the site has been selectively archived and is currently uploading (hopefully) to Archive.org as a 1.6Gb .torrent. This includes the Web pages associated with the freebies (often giving vital instructions for use), plus the thumbnailed category-browsing pages (with page URLs, which will perhaps enable the WayBack Machine to show the full page). Here: SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb. Please note this is a new upload, being attempted via .torrent upload, and thus may take a few days to be ingested. Then it should ‘seed fast’ via Archive.org’s servers — though you should still be able to get the .torrent running, just over several days rather than downloading in 30 minutes. The rescue collection as such is Creative Commons Attribution, which seemed the best balance among Archive.org’s limited options. But please note and respect restrictions for individual items.

Also separate bundles for PhilC’s ShareCG Poser scripts and software and Flufz’s ShareCG freebies and Poser scripts. These enabled me to fix the Poser scripts directory pages at this blog.

Tutorials:

SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb has a backup of the site’s Poser and DAZ tutorials.

How to attempt taking a Poser Firefly line-art only render, to Stable Diffusion 1.5, in InvokeAI. With settings.

Make Things Look Handcrafted in Blender (Blender Geometry Nodes Tutorial).

Optimize iRay Renders Guide for DAZ.

Using AI to Texture 3D Blockout Renders & Transform into Key Art, for the free InvokeAI.

ArtSquirrel tests the state of 3D digital sculpting in the latest Blender.

Also, note that it’s been discovered that Library drag-and-drop works from Poser 12 and 13 across to the Poser 2014 stage. Since Poser 12 is only $29 now (from Clip Studio’s Graphixly store), effectively this means old-school users of Poser 2014 have an alternative library option. Install both, run both, then use Poser 12 simply as an efficient drag-drop Library.

Scripts and other auto-helpers:

SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb has a full backup of the site’s Scripts pages and files.

My pages for Poser 11 scripts and for Poser 12 and 13 scripts have been updated. ShareCG links, likely to be broken very soon, now point to archived versions. Not much I can do about older ShareCG links in my content surveys etc. But at least you can still plug the URLs into the Wayback Machine and see what the page looked like.

A survey of tools for extracting individual panels from comics in an automated way. It’s a surprisingly knotty AI/computer problem.

New software releases:

VoicePal, Windows freeware with quite reasonable offline text-to-speech (TTS) in US and UK and other free voices, plus the promise of more advanced AI voices ‘coming soon’. Tested, and it does what it says. But… no AI voices yet. Still, perhaps of use to animators and YouTube tutorial makers.

Test review: AKVIS Coloriage AI 15.x. Basically, it now offers the DeepAI Image Colorizer… but locally and for the Windows desktop with no Python-hassle. Which is nice. Interestingly, it also understands b&w comic-book pages that have a reasonable amount of greyscale on them, and keeps the page-gutters white at the same time. There’s a hefty price tag on it though, $90 + local sales tax. And the Black Friday discounts are usually paltry.

“Diffusion Self-Distillation for Zero-Shot Customized Image Generation”, a paper demonstrating another large step towards AI-generation for comics, which for regular comic-book readers will require hyper-consistent characters, hair and clothing. Though given ChatGPT’s new method of using AI like a Photoshop stylising filter (not yet released as local open source), such things may be moot fairly soon. On that you’ll likely have heard the headlines about all the ‘President Trump, Studio Ghibli-style’ memes ‐ that was the new AI-filter in action. Once that AI-tech hits local PCs, comics-makers sitting on vast Poser/DAZ runtimes are going to be very happy.

The fiddly but very capable comics production software Clip Studio 4.0 has been released, with an underwhelming “Draw directly on 3D models” feature. Which is not like Grease Pencil in Blender, it turns out. Pity.

That’s for now, more later in the springtime!

ShareCG is closing

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ShareCG is closing, which is very sad. “Important Announcement from Internet Business Systems, Inc.” (28th March 2025).

My Poser 11 scripts and Poser 12 scripts links-pages have both been updated today, and former ShareCG links now point to new Archive.org backups (not Wayback, the actual Archive.org).

I am in the process of creating a larger backup destined for Archive.org, but ShareCG is vast and this will necessarily be selective.

AI plugin for Blender

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A plugin for Blender, that auto ‘renders’ the 3D scene with generative AI, and it appears to be a third-party plugin and not official. Looking a bit rough at present (the Christmas tree is flubbed, in the image below, and the box is not round), and currently in a rough beta and with a waiting list. But it’s a glimpse of what’s going to be possible in terms of auto-rendering without typing out descriptive prompts. Especially if another AI ‘pre-processes’ to work out what the shapes are (‘girl, round box, plant, tree with baubles’), before the generative AI image work takes place.

ShareCG removes ‘for sale’ items

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ShareCG: Team ShareCG Closure of ShareCG store.

February 28th, 2025

Effective March 1st [2025], we will remove the option to sell uploads through ShareCG.

No huge loss, as the ability to sell at this long-running freebies site was a fairly new feature, and nearly all items were also available for purchase elsewhere.

One hopes they will be continuing the original free downloads side of the store (it seems they are, at 7th March). But it may be a good idea to go and get any freebie you haven’t yet downloaded, and also save the freebie’s page alongside it as an encapsulated .MHTML file.

Another Poser Library option

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Library content drag-and-drop works from Poser 13 to the Poser Pro 2014 stage, when both are loaded at the same time. I assume drag-and-drop will also work from Poser 12, which means that old-school Poser Pro 2014 users now have another option for a runtime indexing-and-finding Library, at relatively low-cost (Poser 12 is currently $29 from Graphixly, and will install happily alongside older/newer versions).

Small Poser update to 13.3.1009

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A new Poser 13 update, to 13.3.1009. Mostly small bug fixes, but note…

“Added translucence to the physical root node”.

Three seats for a Poser licence, so you can run two or more instances simultaneously (e.g. on a laptop for the Library + desktop for the work + a server rendering in the garage).

Also, the “Mac OS broke OpenGL”, so the developers of Poser have “Disabled shadow for OpenGL preview of point lights”.

Firefly line-art only render, to Stable Diffusion 1.5

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Set up and pose your 3D figure, in Poser 12 or 13. Use this Disconnect bump maps script and Poser render preset for P13 to get a clean old-school Firefly ‘line-art only’ render with ‘the speckles’ removed, rendered at maybe 1800px. The advantage of this, over Poser’s Comic Book mode, is that Firefly shows all lines.

Reduce it to 768px, take it into a good Stable Diffusion 1.5 model and use with ControlNet ‘Canny’ and suitable prompts (seen here). Here the free model/checkpoint is ADAM v4.5. Don’t forget Clip Skip 0, which seems to help in getting a plain background.

The 3D figure used here is from Nursoda. Very difficult to get the hippy ‘pebble glasses’, and the head shape and hair ‘go manga’. It’s also difficult to prevent SD from trying to make everything female. If you could find a Poser character which didn’t go manga/female, and which 99% kept the shape/outline, then you could use a colour render from Poser as a base colorising blending-layer in Photoshop. Doing that could give you consistent colouring for comics etc.

New for Poser and DAZ – January and February 2025

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Time for another survey of the new releases for Poser and DAZ Studio, and also a nod to other notable software, utilities and tutorials. My last such survey was at Christmas 2024, so this covers about the last seven weeks. Just my picks, as usual.

Science fiction:

DMs Hexa Zone, a rare sci-fi setting from DM. For DAZ. See also the new SE Futuristic Hall.

Hover Vehicle for Poser. Nice, in that I can almost believe that’s some kind of Hyperloop-compatible flying car of the future.

Retro-cycberpunk XI Neo Noir Car. Possibly going to gatecrash the new Sci-Fi Transport Tunnel.

Peep Box, for a sleazy ‘lower levels’ sci-fi setting. For Poser and DAZ.

Colony Meat Locker for body/robot storage on a space colony. Poser and DAZ.

Gothic and horror:

Poisen’s new Elysium. 30 different .OBJs for creating unique combinations for your celtic/tribal walls, shrines etc.

A free Catbus, sort of Miyazake fan-art, so I guess it shouldn’t be used commercially.

Currently free on DAZ, the i13 Library Pose Collection, half of which are non-sexy poses suitable for gothic libraries etc.

JW ShapelessM Morphs for Genesis 9. For when your guy gets stuck in the teleporter.

High-quality sheet Draped Ghosts.

Steampunk:

AJ Steampunk Lighthouse for Poser and DAZ.

Steampunk Mask for GF8.

dForce Princess Petra’s Gothic Dress for Genesis 9.

XI GSB Classroom, a Steampunk classroom. Possibly near to fan-art (? Harry Potter etc), so check before commercial use. Also a matching XI GSB School Courtyard. See also the new Punting on the River and Cathedral Hallway Restaurant which could easily serve as the headmaster’s office/staff-room. All for DAZ.

Fantasy:

DMs Hidden Treasure for DAZ Studio.

SY Essential Creature Morphs Genesis 9. Hooves, three fingers etc.

Storybook:

KT Child for G9.

Cozy Cartoon World Living Room for DAZ Studio.

RA Warm and Cute K4, warm winterwear for Kids 4 figures.

Toon:

Free Kappa-kun for Poser, a Japanese-influenced standalone figure.

Free, Tobby elfkin preset for Genesis 8 Male.

Free, toon vampires for Genesis 9 Toon.

Characters, figure clothing and figure animations:

Elon for M3 LowRes. Free.

Free hair and eyebrows meshes for Genesis 9.

Landscapes and environments:

Isis Lock, a classic set of British inland canal locks, with a Millennium-style cast-iron bridge.

Industrial Warehouse Environment for DAZ. Possibly useful for making workplace training videos and graphics. Though it’s quite small (no long aisles for the pickers to race around on electro-trolleys).

EVERYPlant US Great Basin Biome for Poser, a complete plant set. Also for DAZ.

EVERYPlant Great Basin Bristlecone Pine for Poser. Looking like just the sort of thing you might want to export to Vue. Vue export still works, you just need to also have Poser 11 on the PC, so Vue can see the Poser 11 SDK.

A free Dragons Lair and bridge. For DAZ.

Waterfall Builder kit for DAZ. See also the new Riverstone Gorge for DAZ.

Animals:

Nature’s Wonders Mantises and Nature’s Wonders Mantises of the World Volume 1 expansion. Biologically correct posable models. For Poser and DAZ.

Wombat by AM, with wearable fur preset.

Quoll by AM, with wearable fur preset. Apparently these are real, but with a little recolour could easily be fantasy/sci-fi.

Herbie, a sandy desert style chicken.

Emperor Penguins for DAZ, with furry chicks.

Historical:

A huge but rather believable castle for Bryce, Bryce_Castle_1. Free. Could be exported to Vue.

MS24 Abandoned Train Depot for Vue.

BV141 Asymmetrical Reconnaissance Aircraft. A wartime German spy plane. For Poser and DAZ.

Tutorials:

Creating texture overlays in Poser and fixing any broken Python scripts.

Optimize iRay Renders in DAZ.

Tutorial: Where and How to Install Poser Content for DS – Part 1 and Part 2.

How to photobash (combine multiple assets into a final image) 10x faster using the ‘Photoshop of AI’, the free Invoke AI.

“Weird black and white blobs might be the secret to controlling AI images”. Again, a tutorial for the free Invoke AI. Stark contrast changes can ‘guide’ the underlying image formation process, along with correct prompting.

David Revoy tells you all about All about LIQUIFY in Krita on YouTube. Krita is the free painting and drawing software, and now quite mature.

Updated, the AI list for artists using Stable Diffusion 1.5. New LORAs which offer particular non-photoreal styles in painting, sketching, illustration etc.

Scripts and other auto-helpers:

A script for DAZ Studio that tells you what version of Genesis character is, in your saved scene.

A useful Python script for Stable Diffusion users who have collected large local LORA stashes. The script reads the LORA name from the plaintext .PNG metadata, as found in an old image you might want to recreate. It then looks in your local LORA library, finds the LORA required to recreate that image, and copies it into your active Stable Diffusion LORA folder. You’re then ready to go, without a lot of faffing around trying to manually find the required LORA.

Got an Amazon WishList? Your personal notes on your items all became unreadably small and grey, recently. The browser UserScript ‘Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix’ fixes the problem.

New software releases:

The new release Audiblez 4.0, now with a graphical user-interface. Free and open source. Create local AI audio voice readings and audiobooks, using the CPU rather than your graphics card. Possibly useful for animators who require non-robotic voices and long-form audio, produced locally.

The excellent freeware Anytxt Searcher has a new release and can now also run on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows. It quickly searches across the text inside your desktop PC’s documents. You can use regex for proximity search, by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search-type drop-down and then using (for example)…

\b(?:billboard\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?script|script\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?billboard)\b

This regex will find all instances of billboard occurring within nine words of script. You can see how useful proximity search might be if you have one of the local archives of Poser forums, such as those available on Archive.org.

The Poser 12 for $29 offer is still on, at Clip Studio’s web store Graphixly.

That’s all for now! More picks in the springtime.

Release: Audiblez with GUI

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Audiblez is a free open-source AI audiobook maker using AI voices, and (as of this week) it has a graphical user-interface (GUI). It runs locally and installs on pure Python 3.x with no CUDA or PyTorch dependencies (unless you want them). It runs on the PC’s CPU not the graphics card, and (though slow) even older PCs should be able to ‘read’ a book to an audiobook audio-file overnight.

This may interest those otherwise unable to run local text-to-speech AI systems, for instance because they have an antique graphics card or Windows 7 on the target PC.

Requires: Official Python 3.7.1 64-bit or higher, or use the current Python fork for Windows 7.

Background information: Windows 7 users are blocked from running almost all local AIs due to the impassable combination of requirements for: i) NVIDIA graphics cards drivers, ii) CUDA; and iii) the PyTorch add-on for Python. The above audiobook-making software only requires pure Python 3.x and enough CPU power.

Use case: Generating AI commercial-use audio voices at length, for free, to accompany an animation, videogame, motion-comic etc.

Due in May, your $10,000 AI virtual movie-studio?

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Available in May 2025, the new Digits off-the-shelf AI box direct from NVIDIA, starting at $3,000.

Inside will be a special AI-tuned Linux system, NVIDIA’s special GB10 processor and 128GB of memory, and it should easily run local AI models of “up to 200B” in size. 70B would usually be the maximum for a local PC, so this is effectively a doubling of that capability, plus some overhead left over to run other software. Such as audio voice recognition/synthesis, potentially meaning that models such as an advanced human-ish roleplaying LLM could have real-time fluid voice conversations with a human.

The box can run as a standalone, or be plugged into a normal PC. Two can be placed side-by-side to make an ‘AI super-processor’ capable of running the largest and (arguably) the most powerful AIs. Two boxes should come in at under $10,000, thus superpowered AI becomes affordable for many small businesses. Provided they can afford the electricity — I’ve heard nothing about power consumption as yet.

It would be very interesting to see what creative hackers and tweakers can do with a $10,000 setup and the ability to run multiple AIs and other software, and have the AIs control the software (e.g. Poser, which ‘talks Python’ just as the AIs do) and talk to each other. A complete virtual movie-studio, with voice-actors, in your garage?