News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: May 2025

Script completed

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I’ve now completed an automated Python script for the bulk of the Poser to Stable Diffusion workflow…

The one-click automated output is the .PNG files, plus the same .PNGs automatically stacked into a Photoshop .PSD file and saved.

For later work in Photoshop: Firefly AO (Ambient Occlusion pass, adds subtle shadows if needed), a real-time Preview faux ‘clown pass’ (aka ToonID) (easy masking, though the Meshbox HP Lovecraft figure doesn’t have much to mask here), and a Preview colour render (for blending back colours, so they’re consistent from panel-to-panel in a comic, and for dropping in a backdrop). Their folder is datestamped and also has the name of the Poser scene file. Then the Poser scene is reverted to where it started, safe and sound.

The Comic-Book Preview and the Firefly lineart layers are then merged in Photoshop, with an Action, and the result is then dropped to the desktop and from there manually dragged over to be used as the Img2Img source in SD.

The SD result then gets saved and manually opened in Photoshop, and an automated Action takes over and restores the Poser Preview render colours. After that it’s optional to add a holding line, mask areas, add very subtle 3D shading of the ligne claire (clear line) comic style, or cut out the plain backdrop and add a new one.

Had to go back to Poser 11 for this script, because Poser 13 doesn’t appear to support options.BucketSize(256) in Python. Without having Firefly set a big bucket size, the three passes of Firefly rendering are rather slow.

New for Poser and DAZ – May 2025

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Welcome again. Here’s my pick of what was new for Poser and DAZ in May 2025, plus links to selected other useful software and tutorials.

Science-fiction:

dForce Elite Squadron for DAZ. Motorcycle, outfit and poses.

SE Animal Osa, a space insect. Also a less convincing but cuter SE Animal Strubyn.

Moonbase Alpha Uniform for G8M. I’m guessing this is Space 1999 fan-art, or close to it. Thus only for use in non-commercial renders.

A free 1953: War of the Worlds Martian for Poser. Fan-art from the 1950s movie.

A Stargate-like Cosmic Gate for DAZ. Again, probably risky to use in commercials renders.

A futuristic Spider Chair with GF8 poses. So far as I know, not fan-art.

Steampunk:

With the new Renderosity Steampunk Contest in view, you may be wanting an Antique Bicycle (a ‘Penny Farthing’ type).

Useful for cycling to the Steampunk Lab, perhaps.

Halloween:

A high-res cemetery for Poser.

The Cemetery Keeper probably lives in Ash’s Cabin for DAZ Studio, a creepy olde wooden cabin.

And perhaps he turns out to really look like EArkham’s ZWorld Otherworldly Abomination.

Fantasy:

Monster Tree for DAZ Studio.

Monster Tree likely to be walking through the new Gate Of The Ancients.

Naga, a Harry Harryhausen style snake-monster for DAZ Studio. See also the new Medusae for Genesis 9.

A Tom Bombadil-like Father Mushroom – Character and separate clothing pack. The blurb on the Character page is misleading, implying he comes complete with clothing. It seems he doesn’t, and it’s a paid extra?

Storybook:

1971s’s Quiet pier for Poser, and there’s also a separate DAZ version.

Modular 3D Kits: Overgrown Mansion Garden for Poser.

The mansion possibly surrounded by the new High-res Hedge Maze for Poser.

Animals:

Nature’s Wonders. Moths of the World Vol. 4 for Poser and DAZ. Includes delicate white ‘plume moths’. I never knew what they were called, before now.

Deer for DAZ Horse 3

Mammoth 2 by AM.

SY The Constrictor 2.

Felidae by AM – Tiger.

Interiors:

FG Packing Warehouse Bundle, possibly useful for making training videos.

Historical:

Babylonian Houses 1

Another MD Greek Warriors Bundle for DAZ. Plus Props and Poses.

GNBD Indian Wooden Masks Props, from India.

Tutorials:

New YouTube videos on Changing Poser’s interface scale and How to create a simple looping animation in Poser.

Also on YouTube, a look back at 12 Months of The Creative Cart.

The UK’s Art Squirrel blog has a new in-depth review of the TourBox Elite Plus, a hardware controller device aimed at digital creatives. The review is so in-depth that it counts as a tutorial.

Stable Diffusion:

Free, CRM Preprocessor For Poser, a node for ComfyUI. Not for our Poser, but seemingly for use with general 3D posing applications (there are several ‘car-crash dummy’ -type posers for Android, for instance) which produce 3D renders destined as source images in AI image generators. This pre-processes them by making sure they’re the right size etc.

On YouTube, “We Asked a Skeptical Illustrator to try Invoke. Here’s his honest take”.

An official Invoke video on how to Fix the “CUDA Error” on Invoke AI. This has been happening with some of the brand-new 50 series NVIDIA graphics cards, which Invoke supports from 5.12 onwards.

C4D to ComfyUI, a video trailer for new Cinema 4D generative AI plugin. Appears to be available here, though with very uncertain pricing (what does “$13, 4 per month” mean?).

Software:

LowPi PathTool Extension for DAZ. Send your Low-poly Crowd Generator people along paths you lay out for them.

Easy Geometry Hider for DAZ.

Another Pose Transfer Manager for DAZ Studio.

Maxon has discontinued ZBrushCore and ZBrushCore Mini, their free ZBrush ‘digital sculpting’ offerings. To be removed today, 30th May 2025.

A free Userscript for your browser, to backup all your Reddit comments to a local .TXT or .CSV file. Tested, and it works well. The GitHub is here.

The UK’s Linux Format magazine (July 2025) has a vital and detailed multi-page tutorial for those planning to move from Windows to Linux Mint (or its variant Winux7) in the near future.

That’s all for now, more next time!

Source DPI, SD controlnet, and the ‘jaggies’

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More on my devising of a Poser to SD workflow. I was happy with the look I had got. But I took time to look into the ‘jaggies’ in my Poser to Stable Diffusion success. The relatively small 786px input .PNG, used for both Img2Img and the Controlnet was thought to be the problem. The output is too jaggy on many lines, despite Poser’s real-time Comic Book Preview render being anti-aliased. How to fix it?

First I ran the source through Vector Magic at medium detail level, which includes smoothing along with the vectorisation.

Much better linework from SD with this as the source, and the dotted suit-lapels vanish. Though it’s lost definition on the suit buttons, and there’s a weird long fingernail. Also the sleeve is a little rough. There are other glitches elsewhere.

Though the edges – such as that sleeve – are not a problem — just add a centered ‘holding-line’ outline stroke in Photoshop and the bobbliness is covered up. But things changing shape and glitching is not good for replacing the colour, via a full Poser Preview render used as a blending-layer in Photoshop. So vectorisation of 768px is perhaps not the way to go. Though it did at least seem to confirm that it’s not some inherent limitation in the Img2Img or Controlnet process that causes the problem.

Nor was the free anti-aliasing filter for Photoshop, Japan’s OLM Smoother, found to do anything. It’s quite subtle and there’s very little difference in the end result.

What about the G’MIC Repair / Smooth options? Nope. Though there is a way to use a G’MIC custom filter on the SD output, to get an anti-aliased ‘inked’ layer that might overlay the SD output lines, in Photoshop. Nice, but it’s not consistent across images and moves things further way from replicability across different images on a comic-book page.

A custom variant of FXEngrave.

In the end, after further tests, I appear to have discovered that… source DPI affects style in Stable Diffusion 1.5. Who knew? 72dpi source and Img2Img = roughly drawn comic book (seen at the start of this post). Exactly the same settings with a 300dpi source give a far more refined and also smoother-lined style. I guess the added DPI gives SD even more ‘wiggle room’ to add the style, in an Img2Img process that moves the source from 768px to 1024px?

Next step, then, is to experiment with 120dpi and 150dpi to find a balance point. But even before that, a Python script to automate the testing and save time/gruntwork.

Final Lovecraft

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I think I’ve hit the final balance in my Poser to Stable Diffusion workflow. The H.P. Lovecraft head, formerly too shaded and photoreal looking, now better matches the rough drawn style of the suit and body. Without getting too sketchy or losing the likeness. The lovely expressive eyes are kept. The result is 1024px and replicable.

Lovecraft hails a New York taxi-cab, or something…

As before, I should state that this was a deliberately bad pose and hands, to test the styling capabilities of SD 1.5 in Img2Img. Thumbs are obviously a problem at this level of denoising, and would ideally be artfully hidden.

The result can have colour consistency from panel to panel. It can be greyscaled, overlaid in Photoshop with a colour Poser render, and then colour-blended. The suit will thus darken down, so the crease-lines and dotted-line lapels won’t be so obvious.

Details, details…

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More progress with my experiments with style changing from a basic Poser real-time render. Up the CFG to 9, up the Embedding strength to 1.2, up the Img2Img Denoising to 7. Keep Canny at 87%. Specify dotted_line in negative, and change Steps to 42, with together remove some of the granulation of the lines that would otherwise occur.

Apart from the thumbs and a stray line below the buttons, the layer registration with the original is exact. Meaning easy re-colouring in Photoshop, via a normal Poser render and the ‘Color’ layer blending-mode.

The face is now too chiselled, and a H.P. Lovecraft character LoRA may be called for. But worth the extra work, since the eyes now especially benefit. There is a slight painterly smudge on the white, which you may be able to see here on a good monitor. But the original outline should be able to be selected in Photoshop. If not, one could use a mask from Poser. Or just do the scene with a backdrop straight from Poser.

The subtle 3D shading being auto-added could interfere with any light-direction shading you wanted to add later (perhaps by dropping a Smooth Shaded Poser render into the layer stack, in Photoshop).

Poser 14?

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Email from Bondware and the Poser dev team, 17th May 2025….

Something HUGE is on the horizon! We’re working on something game-changing, and you’ll hear it here first! Keep an eye on this newsletter — you won’t want to miss what’s next!

This alongside a 30%-off coupon (now expired) for Poser 13, which kind of suggests Poser 14 is coming? It would make sense to launch in midsummer, and have it bug-fixed and ready for the ‘back to school / university’ crowd in September. Just my guess.

Hopefully the “HUGE” is something really game-changing like Poser 14 with a local-&-free AI ‘style change’ module to render Poser scenes in different styles. And not just another base figure such as La Femme 3. I know they’re concerned about copyright in terms of the back-in-the-day training of the Stable Diffusion AI image-generators, but ‘style makeover’ options are emerging which would presumably bypass such concerns.

More success with a Poser to Moebius look

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I’ve finally been able to get back to my Poser to Stable Diffusion 1.5 experiments. More immediate success, this time by starting with a Brian Habelin style ‘darklight’ lit Preview render (very low single light, Comic Book lineart in b&w, textures showing through just a bit) and then a Firefly lineart-only all-lines render. Combine these two in Photoshop, and you deal with the dark suit and the lack of definition of the suit detailing, at the same time. Nice. Img2Img as before, with the Poser render also dropped in the Canny Controlnet.

Deliberately awkward M4 pose and hands on the Meshbox Lovecraft figure, and rendered at just 768px, to see how SD handles such awkwardness.

The 1024px result stays nice and light, and doesn’t immediately start veering into the grungy ‘black on black’ territory which bedevils 3D work. And there’s no need to lift the gamma or adjust textures in Poser. The contrast is easily adjusted later in Photoshop. There’s also more of a Eurocomics ‘ligne claire’ (clear line) look than my previous highly detailed Moebius attempt. I like this simpler look. Interestingly, SD is colourising without being asked to do so.

Quite a high CFG for this, so SD 1.5 had more room to wiggle. Which means both the thumbs have gone wonky, and the eyes have been adjusted to look away rather than up. However, everything else is locked and we still have the Photoshop-accurate layer registration otherwise. So one could colourise the result by layering a Poser render on top in Photoshop, and simply setting the layer blending mode to ‘Color’. This would give you a base of consistent colours from panel-to-panel in a comic-book page.

Comics & AI – one-day conference in London

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Comics & AI: Critical Prompts, an academic conference in London, 4th September 2025. Could just be hand-wringing about ethics, copyright, political theory etc + angsty anti-AI students hijacking the Q&As. But I guess it may have some practical ‘make comics’ side to it. The programme has yet to be announced. The venue is in Clerkenwell, north London, so should be fairly easily reachable by train and tube.

Poser 13 on Linux with Wine – some findings

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Windows 10 support is ending on a cliff-edge, and 11 appears to be a nightmare of privacy intrusion + ads + hardware requirements + wonky updates.

Thus, many will be thinking of getting a new PC and installing Linux as the OS. It would be nice to stay with Windows 7, but the paucity of local AI support is going to be more and more annoying in the next few years.

Here’s what I found out, which may also help others.

The PC? Here in the UK, I see that one can now get a perfectly reasonable new PC, inc. a Saturday delivery, for a relatively modest £435 (Intel i5-14400 10-core CPU, 32Gb DDR4 RAM, 650W PSU – as specced at pcspecialist.co.uk). Then, on arrival, fit your existing SSD drive and graphics card. Then install Linux. I can’t afford that much at present, but it might be possible by September. So I’m thinking ahead here. Apparently a recent Intel i5 10-core CPU and 32Gb of system memory is perfectly adequate for Stable Diffusion AI work on Linux, since it’s the graphics card that matters for SD. I’d also like to try various other local ‘AIs’ such as speech/music generation, creative writing assistants, maybe a Python code-writing assistant etc.

Poser? But what about the 3D rendering in Poser, which I hope to pair with Stable Diffusion by using SD as a ‘style renderer’?

The WineHQ directory – Poser information page(s) unhelpfully stops at Poser 2014 on Linux. But in the Renderosity forums in 2024, one usefully reads…

“I have installed Poser 13 successfully on Linux Mint Cinnamon with the latest version of Wine. Everything works perfectly fine, even the Firefly render engine does, which was not functional in Poser 12. The only downside is the dependency on CPU rendering only, because Wine isn’t able to pass through to the GPU.”

So, it sounds like Poser 13 should be fine… if you only want renders from Poser’s Preview, Comic-Book Preview, Sketch and Firefly. Fine by me in this case, as Stable Diffusion doesn’t need to be fed a Superfly render.

Wine runs Poser 11 too, according to a 2019 forums comment…

“newest Poser 11.2 worked right out of the box [with Wine, though also restricted to CPU Firefly rendering]”

11.2 was the first Bondware edition, and restored the .PSD output from the Firefly rendering panel. Meaning you could potentially maintain a Poser running old Python 2 scripts, DSON import of Genesis 1 & 2, E-on Vue compatibility etc.

Linux version? ‘Linux Mint Cinnamon’ is one of the most popular versions for Linux newbies, and has the slight variant Winux7 (which makes Linux Mint 20.3-Una look and feel exactly like Windows 7). Like Linux, Winux7 is free and comes with Wine pre-installed. Wine lets you stay inside Linux, but still run a large range of Windows software. Apparently the Linux version doesn’t matter, for running Wine. Winux7 also includes a “Windows 10 VM”, or ‘virtual machine’ (which requires a valid paid Windows key to activate). This allows Windows 10 and Linux to run at the same time, and to have basic things like clipboard cross-over with Linux-native software. Apparently vital for things like Microsoft Word, Excel and Publisher, since Wine doesn’t handle MS Office software well. And I assume a VM could also run Poser with Windows driver access to the GPU, for SuperFly renders. Update: an article in The Register suggests that’s not the case, and the VM can’t natively ‘see’ the graphics card. Thus a dual-boot Win/Linux system would be required, which is not ideal.

Drivers? Apparently the Linux NVIDIA graphics-card drivers were iffy and sniffed-at a few years back, but that’s changed in 2025. They’ve since embraced both Linux and open source. So I should be able to use the latest drivers, which have Stable Diffusion enhancements. Presumably the Windows 10 VM installs its own Windows NVIDIA drivers.

RAM: Linux OS ideally has 8Gb, a Windows VM a further 8Gb, and then add the software and extras on top. It thus seems like 32Gb would be the ideal, especially for those working with 3D + AI (who knows what may come along in a few months, that will need the extra?).

Photoshop? No longer a problem, apparently, as long as you’re happy to stay with Photoshop CC 2018. Which I am. Photoshop CS6 is apparently the fallback option, and works fine under Wine.

DAZ Studio too? Yes, apparently it mostly works on Linux. Install with Wine then also install nvidia-libs so it can see the GPU for iRay rendering. The downsides are said to be that the Viewport is sluggish when using iRay, and dForce clothing doesn’t use dForce. You also need to make Linux’s file-system not be case-sensitive (e.g. Dog is understood to be the same as dog and doG), since your runtime is likely littered with content creators who didn’t bother about case-sensitivity. It’s never been a problem on Windows, but can be on the default Linux (depending on version).

I’ve no idea if nvidia-libs would also work for Poser and Superfly rendering. I guess it’s “try it and see”.

Update: Also found wine-nvoptix which is… “a library to be used with Wine. It aims at allowing Linux users to launch Windows software using the OptiX API”. The maker also recommends installing nvidia-libs (see above, already mentioned). Also a couple of others, plus “WINE-NVML for hardware function detection from NVIDIA GPU”.

Release: Pencil Pro, for Blender

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I’m all for natural media emulation from 3D scenes. So I was pleased to see the new $15 Pencil Pro add-on for Blender, allowing your 3D scene to emulate a pencil drawing. The result is obviously not great at long distance (e.g. a city scene), where it looks like a point-cloud with the points mapped to tiny graphite strokes. Better for medium and close animation shots, though there’s still a distinct Rhubarb & Custard-style wobble. Which is charmingly old-school in its way, and would be acceptable to young kids watching shorts.

Suitably rough and sketchy and believable, if you overlook the polygonal angles from the 3D. No per-frame autocolour, but something that auto-colours greyscale (e.g. Akvis Coloriage AI) might give colourisation that is not too wobbly, when run frame by frame.