The SIGGRAPH 2025 Technical Papers Trailer video is now available. Quick short visual demos of the graphics wizardry that is coming down the pipe soon, to a PC near you.
Release: Keyshot adds AI
KeyShot Studio 2025.2 is the latest version of the 3D object renderer Keyshot. Mostly used for super-photoreal 3D renders of commercial products in various use settings (e.g. kettle in kitchen), suitable for use in magazine ads and catalogues. The new version has added AI editing. The AI can replace the background with a new one, or give the whole picture a new colour style.
New for Poser and DAZ – June 2025
Time for another survey of what’s new for Poser and DAZ, plus items of interest in AI-land. I’m now running on Windows 11 Superlite, so I now have access to more advanced AI software. Indeed, to the very latest goodies such as Flux Kontext, so my OS change was nicely timed!
As usual, my picks of the new releases.
Science fiction:
Owl Bot, a futuristic robot owl for Poser. Likely an enemy of the Space Coop.
The Owl possibly assists with piloting the new ExoNaut ship.
Moonbase Alpha Uniform for G8.1M. Fan-art, so no commercial use.
The Cube for DAZ. A generic sci-fi mysterious space cube. Possibly similar to the Borg in Star Trek, at a guess, but I haven’t seen that series of Trek.
Retro Future for Genesis 2 Male, currently free at DAZ.
Morphing Cyber-Googles for G8.
Easy Environments: ExoPlanet IX.
Fantasy:
Fantasy Helmet Collection for G3F through G9
Gift Guardian stone sculpture.
Ruined Mage Towers 1 for DAZ.
Halloween:
Moreau’s Freaks for DAZ.
Storybook:
1971’s Quiet pier for Poser, also available separately for DAZ.
A handy Old Cobblestone Path as free .OBJ and Vue .VOB file. 8k textures plus displacement.
Toon:
Free Poses for Cat Noodle, the toon cat.
Figures and poses, props:
RA Rory M4 for Poser.
Camper Accessories. See also the Rigged fantasy backpack for G8 and G9.
In Good Hands – Hands poses G9F-G8F-G3F.
Animals:
Nature’s Wonders Butterflies of the World Volume 4, with eight endangered species.
Nature’s Wonders Snakes for Poser and DAZ, plus Nature’s Wonders Snakes of the World Vol. 1 (common snakes). Also Nature’s Wonders Slithering Expressions (paired sperpent / human poses).
If you have the above there’s also Nature’s Wonders Snakes Extras as a freebie pack.
Scenes and places:
Car Scrapyard for Daz Studio, an unsual scene. The car models look as though they were made with a hand-held scanner from real wrecks.
Quick Rocky Vignette 4, a good looking beach scene.
Historical:
Temple of the Nile for Poser, also available separately for DAZ. The free Feathers Conditioner looks like it would match well with this.
Frontier Grace Outfit and Props for Genesis 9. American pioneer outfits with bonnets.
British Rail MK1 TSO Coach by DryJack. His British railway starter freebies are in the SHARECG-backup torrent.
Second World War British Army headgear as the free WWII UK Mk II Airborne Helmet Pack for M4.
Scripts and software:
Remove All Modifiers – DAZ Studio DUF Cleaner.
Pose-Save-Utility for DAZ Studio.
Nomad Sculpt 2.3 for Windows. Formerly popular for digital sculpting on Android, now for Windows.
Stable Audio Open 1.0 WebUI Portable for Windows. A powerful free audio FX generator, distilled from the zillions of public-domain field-recording clips at Freesound. Like Stable Diffusion, but for sound effects, you tell it what you want (e.g. “a distant rolling thunderstorm is heard across a vast plain”) and it generates a .WAV file. Free, tested and working.
Poser matcap script. Blurs the textures so each becomes more of a uniform single colour aligned to the underlying colour. Handy if you want to de-grunge mucky textures, ready for filtering the render into a watercolour look.
Tutorials:
How to make low poly billboards to populate backgrounds in Poser.
Use Collapse to simplify your material templates in Poser.
A vital autosave feature in Poser.
POW! Biff! KAPOW! Comic-book FX upscale and extraction using Gigapixel, Vector Magic and Stable Diffusion 1.5.
Cruising Canals in 3D – Modelling Narrowboats and Water Scenes. A paid in-depth tutorial on 3D modelling for the English canals and narrowboats. Related is UltraScenery 2 – Marinas and Moorings.
Local AI, Poser and Python:
The new Flux Kontext Dev has been released, a new free local AI for image editing and filtering, rather than for image-generation. Perfecting 1:1 watercolour with Poser to Flux Kontext shows how to use it with a Poser render. With a Flux Kontext Dev workflow. Run in ComfyUI Windows Portable, after updating the portable to the very latest version.
My tests show Kontext Dev is no good as a local free auto-coloriser, more’s the pity. But it is excellent at watermark removals from public domain artwork (e.g. old postards on eBay, museum images which have no right being watermarked). It can also do image editing (“remove the rabbit ears, change the dress to green”), style makeovers, place a face in a completely new context, join two characters together in a scene, and probably more that users have yet to discover.
How to speed up CivitAI page loading when browsing and searching the site for free AI models and LoRA add-ons.
SD-Categorizer 2000, a free… “Python script to organize a folder containing all your images into folders and export any Stable Diffusion generation metadata.”
Set up Microsoft Visual Studio Code for Poser python coding. Speaking of which, I’m disappointed to learn from several tests that local sub-14B AI’s won’t cut it as Python script-coding assistants on a 3060 12Gb card. It seems one really needs one of the big beasts (30b and above), that runs in the cloud. However, note the Translate ComfyUI workflows into executable Python code free node for ComfyUI. This is local and could be used, I think, to have Poser call and run Comfy from a script. Watch this space.
Oh, and I reckon that Msty is the best ‘local AI library and model-runner’ for the desktop. I tried several.
That’s it for now. More later in the summer.
Perfecting 1:1 watercolour in Flux Kontext – getting better watercolour with a LoRA
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Posted in Companion software, Natural media emulation, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion
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Further to my Flux Kontext Dev experiments of the last few days, for filtering Poser renders… here I show how to get better watercolour by using a LoRA. Add the Aurelle v2 LoRA at 0.8. Specifically, this is designed to give an imperfect ‘human-made watercolour’ look for Flux. No garish day-glo colour (as with the default Flux Kontext), and no colour instructions or later Photoshop adjustments needed. And it’s much more subtle. It does want to swish down the hat-brim, and the 1:1 registration is lost there. But that’s easy to fix and otherwise it’s great. We also get rid of the dark 3D shadow under the hat.
The 1024px is slightly fuzzy, fuzzier than the default watercolour output. Possibly that’s because I’m using a regular Flux LoRA, not a Flux Kontext LoRA. But even so, a Firefly line-art render could be layered and blended in Photoshop, to bring back a little harder definition of the shapes and on the edges. That’s not been done here, on this quick demo.
I was however using the real-time character render from Poser that was .PNG and masked with transparency, which seems better than one with a white background. Another test showed 2048px gives clearer and larger results with more detail (e.g. fingernails), but takes far longer and is not so watercoloury. Try working in 1024px to test ideas, with 2x upscale. Then move to pure 2048px for a second pass, which is later blended back into the first in Photoshop?
The ComfyUI workflow shown is the official GGUF demo, adapted for a LoRA and with elements moved around. Note that FluxGuidance (CFG in Stable Diffusion -speak) is at 1.0 rather than 2.5, and apparently this favours a traditional artwork style.
Moho 12.5 is in a Humble Bundle again
The Moho 12.5 Humble Bundle is back, but this time without Poser 12 or Paintstorm. 12.5 was the last version that could import from Poser. Formerly Smith Micro’s Anime Studio.
I also noticed that MediBang Paint, a free rival to Clip Studio, is no longer free in its latest version. It’s now $50 on the Windows Store. There is however still a download link to the “old version” for now, which is v29.1. I seem to recall that the free version was ad-supported, though.
PzDB R.I.P.
Moving to Windows 11 means losing the venerable PzDB Poser Library database / manager, which regrettably no longer works on Windows 10/11. Which for me means moving back to using Poser 11 as my main Poser, so that I can run Shaderworks Library Manager 2. Library Manager builds a runtime database like PzDB did, so its search is reasonably fast on a vast runtime. It also docks into the Poser UI. As a bonus, I get my XS-Toolbar and Scene Toy back. The Library Manager UI is a bit painful (subtle colour-coding might have helped), but not impossible once you get the hang of it and better than the native Library.
To build the database you first need to undock the native Library and close it. Then build the Library Manager 2 database of your runtime. Otherwise you’ll get crashes on a vast 20-year runtime. Also, Library Manager 2 needs the AVfix to run.
In Poser 11 there’s no Superfly for 30-series graphics cards, unless one renders on CPUs. But actually I find a CPU render with 2 x Xeons (24 threads) at 1024px is quite bearable. Currently, I’d only want SuperFly for a colour blending layer in Photoshop. I can always go over to DAZ or Poser 13, if I want to build a super-photoreal picture at a large size.
The only thing Library Manager 2 lacks is a “what’s new” view, showing the stuff you just spent time installing into the runtime. Although Everything can approximate that (Large Thumbnails / View By Path / Search for Picture / Date Created), after a re-indexing of the runtime. ‘Everything’ is also especially useful for quick “do I already have it?” lookup when shopping. The filetypes list to exclude from its search are: *.lnk;~$*;$*;*.xmp;*.jpg;*.obj;*.tif;*.bmp;*.txt;*.bat;*.py;*.pyc Sadly the one thing you can’t do with it is add keyword tags to individual or selected search-results — for that one would need DigiKam.
Those with Poser 2014 also have the option of launching that alongside Poser, then reducing it to the taskbar while just keeping its fast floating Adobe AIR library to lay over the Poser 11 interface. Both AIR and Library Manager have drag-and-drop onto the Poser stage. But AIR has the disadvantage of tiny, almost inscrutable, thumbnails until you click on an item. Also, it won’t dock into the Poser 11 interface, and you have to have two versions of Poser running at once.
Perfecting 1:1 watercolour in Flux Kontext
Could Flux Kontext Dev handle a backdrop as well as a character, thus bypassing the need to composite later? To find out I threw together a basic garden around Nursoda’s Ronk figure and his snail. Obviously, one would spend a lot more time constructing a garden that was destined to appear in many scenes in a storybook or comic. But this is just for a workflow demo.
Pretty ugly from Poser (Comic Book mode lineart and a bright light preset helps it along, but like all 3D it’s desperate to go ‘dark and grungy’). Yet Kontext handles it nicely. Note the new word at the start of the prompt, ‘Filter …’
The problem is then the garish day-glo nature of the colouring on the new image. But because we have 1:1 registration with the Poser source-image, we can easily lay the colours back in by using it as a colour blending layer in Photoshop. Here that’s been done. Then just a little of the Kontext colour has been brought back in. The layer was then flattened and auto-contrast applied, then desaturated slightly to take account of the colour-boost caused by the auto-contrast. The final result…
And since it’s come from Poser, we can have easy-select masks galore via a clown pass / toonID render, should any further postwork be needed. And if a holding-line around the character, or a blurring or fading of the background, is needed… then Poser can also supply the masks needed.
1:1 watercolour in Flux
A quick Poser experiment with the new Flux Kontext Dev. Nursoda’s Ronk and his snail, in Poser. Render to real-time Preview at 2048px, with high texture quality and a little Comic-Book applied. Lay this Poser render on white in Photoshop, reduce to 1024px and use this as the seed image.
The prompt gives a pencil and watercolour effect, but does not cause the layer-registration to shift. It remains an exact 1:1 match, despite the style change. In other words, Kontext can act exactly like a Photoshop filter would. Takes about 70 seconds on a 3060 12Gb graphics-card, at 1024px. This speed is comparable with intensive Photoshop filter plugins such as Reactor or G’Mic. There is a ‘turbo’ version from a third party, said to give a 2x speed up, but it appears to require intense Python wrangling and lots of tracking down dependencies to get it to work.
A 1:1 match means we can restore the Poser colour, by using the original render as a colour-blending layer in Photoshop. Which means we can have consistent colour from panel to panel and page to page, when storytelling in a comic or storybook.
We get a little drop-out of definition. For instance, the spiral of the snail’s shell is lost. If we had a lineart only Firefly render from Poser, we could bring it back by layering in Photoshop.
Update: It appears that if you go back to it then next day, and experiment with style descriptions, then try to go back to the original prompt, the earlier styled generations somewhow adversely affect the later output (more hard and cartoony than it should be). Possibly old latents are being partly re-used? Anyway… start from a fresh launch of Comfy, then go to the workflow and don’t tinker or change anything before starting your output.
Update: It seems a Poser .PNG render with transparency is the best to drop in as the seed image. Rather than needing to first place it onto a white background. Also, “filter” rather than “convert” seems a better choice of words for the prompt.
Exact 1:1 registration in Flux Kontext Dev
Kontext is wayward in terms of wanting to resize things. But it’s a matter of getting the prompt right, for exact 1:1 registration.
Add a layer of simple black and white lineart, while showing the photo beneath and keeping identical subject placement, camera angle, framing and perspective.
Layer the result in Photoshop, and blend via Multiply. Brush a soft eraser over teeth etc. Then filter the base photo to lighten it up. I imagine it would blend nicely with a Poser real-time comic-book lineart render, for added line variation. You’re welcome.
Source image from the official test workflow. Using the official default GGUF workflow, but made compact by moving things around and with upscaling nodes removed.
Flux Kontext
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I’m downloading the free Flux Context and its various dependencies now, and it looks like it will void all previous local Stable Diffusion attempts at ‘style makeover while keeping the content fixed’. In other words, ‘work like a Photoshop filter’.
But, a super-powered one that also knows how to make precise image edits (e.g ‘work like a Photoshop filter, but add a hat and change nothing else’). It’ll thus be very interesting to see what this new form of local AI can do with some basic real-time Poser renders.
Oh, and I also have a ComfyUI node which outputs a workflow as a Python script, which would seem to offer potential to have Poser grab a just-made render and feed it straight into Flux Kontext. The drawback on that is the render-time (1min+ for Kontext, per 1024px image), which is not so turbo-charged. So, near-instant basic Stable Diffusion style-change methods will likely still have their place.
Watch this space.
Set up Microsoft Visual Studio Code for Poser python
My guide to this free replacement for Notepad++, for writing and hacking Python code…
Written a few years ago. A slight wrinkle, since this was written. To turn off ‘code linting’ (i.e. the wiggly red lines under certain parts of the code)…
Settings > Python: Language Server > None
Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI, now at 16 fps
Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI (YouTube Video, six minutes with hardcoded ad at the end). They ingested 16 million ray traced 3D images, to make an AI that simply infers (from its past knowledge) what the play of real light in a 3D scene should be. Then the AI applies it and ‘renders’ the scene in a microsecond. You can tweak materials, and it updates instantly.
Animated? Yup, their pseudo-raytracing currently clocks in at 16 frames per second (on MS’s research labs hardware, admittedly). Quite respectable, and there are also frame-interpolation AIs out there that might boost it to 30FPS.
Physics? Yup, they even added that too. Even dynamic water.
Generative AI overlay? Not yet. But if this gets a general open-source release and isn’t locked away as an exclusive for Microsoft Flight Simulator, someone will add generative AI imaging to the mix. Imagine not only AI raytracing, but AI raytracing + a layer of SD ‘style change’ based off the 3D scene (but still faithful to it). The ‘Hollywood-real look’ for your 3D scene, in near real-time and beautifully lit.
What a time to be alive. Indeed, what a time to have a huge Poser runtime. Poser has such massive possibilities ahead, if only it can shrug off the AI-haters. The devs don’t even have to develop for it, I would imagine. Just open up some general hooks in Python, to let users hook into whatever local AI they choose to run.
Windows 11 on a HP Z600
Given my new aim of a stripped-down no-bloat no-nonsense Windows 11 superlite install, the next question was… can the latest version of the OS be installed on a HP Z600? The old workstation has the SSE 4.2 on the CPU, required by the latest version. And the superlite ISO can bypass the hardware checks by default. But a Z600 lacks UEFI in the BIOS, which is a roadblock to getting the bootable USB recognised. Turns out the OS can be installed, and it’s a myth that Windows 11 requires EUFI and GPT. You just need to configure the bootable USB maker (the freeware Rufus) to use legacy BIOS and MBR. Then use an installer ISO that turns off the hardware requirements.
Here’s proof that it can install and run.
A London executive is selling their dual-Xeon Z600 this week on eBay… “My IT team installed Windows 11 by CMD command as an Administrator, skipping the software compatibility tests.” Which means they bypassed the hardware requirements. In her seller images she shows proof of having the latest 24H2 version booted and working…
And from back in 2022, a forum post stating a successful install of an earlier version of 11 on a Z600…
So it looks promising. There’s nothing to be lost by taking out the existing primary SSD, slotting in a new blank one and seeing if the Z600 can install/boot into Windows 11. Of course, a nice brand-new £600 PC would be nice, but I can’t afford that right now.
So… maybe not Linux
After looking closely at Linux Mint for two weeks, I’m coming to the conclusion that Linux has just one too many drawbacks when it comes to drivers, Windows software etc. Not to mention all the learning of its arcane ways which would be needed, and how apparently easy it is to break the OS entirely just by trying out the wrong bit of software.
So…. I’ve recently discovered how far the ‘debloat’ of Windows 11 has come in the last few years. I’m impressed. What used to be a little script that turned off some settings, has become a range of robustly de-bloated ISO installers. Installers that rip out all the crap, not just politely flick at a few switches.
These ISOs go by names such as Nano11, Tiny 11 and Ghost Spectre Superlight. The latter appears to junk the most junk, along with the need for a Microsoft account, telemetry, privacy invasion, ads, hardware snootiness and more. Not just ‘turning it off’, but (judging by what I read) actually ripping it out. Also taking down all the hardware barriers, so it can basically be installed on any x64 PC (even old ones, though note the CPU does need to support SSE 4.2). And yet still run very well. Automatic forced Windows updates can even be turned off until 2077!
Hmmm… all sounds very nice, and videos and benchmarks show it leads to a very lean fast OS (these ISOs are aimed mostly at gamers who want that ‘Win 7 feel’ to their PC). But… such ISOs don’t sound all that trustworthy.
Perhaps better to run the freeware debloater utility NTLite on the official Microsoft ISO, which creates your own custom debloat installer ISO. Doesn’t look too hard.
So that looks like the way to go. The freeware Rufus is thus the initial starting point, just as it would be for Linux Mint, being a free utility for putting the installer ISO onto a properly bootable USB. Then you’d disconnect the existing SSD, slot in a fresh new SSD, boot and install the OS.
And, handily released this week… BetaNews reports “Windows 7 Reloaded solves Windows 11’s biggest problem”…
“Windows 7 Reloaded Edition is a custom theme built for Windows 11 that transforms the look and feel of the OS, restoring the classic left-aligned layout and other design elements. It’s completely free.”
Requires Windhawk, a handler for Windows tweak-mods. Not perfect by the look of it on the video, but Reloaded appears to fix several likely Windows 11 annoyances. The Start menu needs instead to be the Windows 7-like StartAllBack (included with Ghost Spectre Superlight SE version). Then OldNewExplorer would be needed to modify Windows 11 File Explorer. But all the above is now looking like the most viable route — a fast ripped-down Windows 11 with a light Windows 7 makeover.
KAPOW!
A practical tutorial in comic-book FX upscaling and extraction using AI, using local Windows tools…
