News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: July 2025

iClone goes full AI, with robust ComfyUI integration

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry 1 Comment

Reallusion’s iClone embraces AI image rendering, with a new official ComfyUI integration. It looks like they’re going all-in for AI, regardless of the AI doom-moaners. Good for them.

We’re excited to launch the Open Beta of AI Render plugin, a powerful and completely free tool that bridges real-time 3D animation with AI-powered rendering, seamlessly integrated into the ComfyUI workflow. … AI Render uses custom nodes that connect Reallusion’s 3D environments directly into the ComfyUI ecosystem.

Now in Open Beta. Officially supports only Stable Diffusion 1.5 and WAN 1.3b video, though node-wranglers may find information about other types of AI image-gen on the Reallusion forums. Likely the new Wan 2.2 relatively lightweight 5B model will be of most interest there.

Seems to have a standard approach. The Comfy nodes appear to take Depth, Pose, Normals and Edge preprocessor data simultaneously from iClone’s real-time viewport, also marrying them with one-click style presets (it’s an IP-adapter) for refinement of output. The two comics presets are manga style, so there’s no western comics style as yet.

Interestingly also… “AI Video Generation models optimized for consistent frame-by-frame results”

How consistent? That would be the worry there. Still images are one thing but, even with four Controlnets working at once, are we still going to get slightly “wobbly” faces? One would also have to worry about shifting colours.

New DAZ to/from Blender plugin

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

A new DAZ to/from Blender plugin for Windows, and on the DAZ Store.

Import or export complete scenes with full material and lighting setups … automated import/export systems

Sounds good, especially now that Blender has ComfyUI integration for AI image generation. For DAZ Studio 4.23 or higher, Blender 4.0 or higher.

DAZ to Blender Bridge is free, though it turns out it’s still the older version. The new one is actually in a package called FAST Animation Studio Tools: DAZ to Blender Pipeline. Which is $150(!), currently discounted.

The Blender to DAZ plugin is $50, but also currently discounted.

Keep in mind that Blender now has robust new .FBX import for free, so try that before paying $150.

Back to Lovecraft gazing at the stars

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion Leave a comment

More fun with ‘Poser to Stable Diffusion’, now that I’ve moved to Windows 11 Superlite and have the AI stuff mostly set up.

This time I can use SDXL rather than SD 1.5. I think regular readers of this blog will recall the previous attempts with the same Poser source, and see quite a difference in the result. I’m using the same test render.

To get this I made a ComfyUI workflow featuring an SDXL turbo model powering Img2Img, plus three LoRAs, and a lineart Controlnet. Not sure the latter is really needed (a relic of the old workflow), provided the colour stays steady from image to image and thus from panel-to-panel and page-to-page in a comic. Or I guess I could go all-in and try four different Controlnets working at once, and see how stable the results are compared to the Poser render.

But this is just a first experiment, and it’s encouraging to get this far immediately.

On the other hand, it’s inventing things like the suit pockets and a waistcoat. Which is annoying since consistency is needed. The reason to use Poser is to have the results be consistent, not full of little differences that either take a lot of postwork to fix, or which are lazily left in and annoy the heck out of the reader. (Update: prompt to “dark 2-piece suit” to get rid of waistocoats)

The result comes in at a healthy 1432px (in about 12 seconds), from a 768px starter Poser render. Meaning that cutout and de-fringing is easier in Photoshop. Here the result is cutout, defringed, and given a Stroke to firm the holding-line. The shadows have also been lifted a little, to give it a more graphic look.

Next step will be to get some more SDXL Controlnets, and output a variety of different Poser renders and then see what combination works the best with this workflow.

Working OpenPose with face and hands, from any image, in ComfyUI

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Poser to Stable Diffusion, Tutorials 1 Comment

Working OpenPose with face and hands, from any image, in ComfyUI. Works with quick real-time renders from Poser.

1. Use your existing ComfyUI or, if new, then try the ComfyUI Windows portable. For the Portable, cut the entire custom_nodes folder and place the more immediately useful individual custom_nodes folders back one-by-one, if ComfyUI fails to load all its UI elements on startup. I found that one of the custom_nodes was stopping the full UI from loading.

2. Into your ComfyUI you install ComfyUI’s ControlNet Auxiliary Preprocessors packages, which come in a big bundle… and one of these is for openpose processing.

3. Into your ComfyUI you also install DWPose as ComfyUI-Dwpose-Tensorrt to speed things up. You’re on Windows and NVIDIA, I assume.

4. Download two required Torch files dw-ll_ucoco_384_bs5.torchscript.pt and yolox_l.onnx. About 500Mb in total, and they’re open on HuggingFace. There are two folders to manually put these in, for me…

C:\ComfyUI_Windows_portable\ComfyUI\custom_nodes\comfyui_controlnet_aux\ckpts\yzd-v\DWPose\

C:\ComfyUI_Windows_portable\ComfyUI\custom_nodes\comfyui_controlnet_aux\ckpts\hr16\DWPose-TorchScript-BatchSize5\

I was told to put the files in the first yzd-v folder and then the workflow gave me a ‘not found, download from Huggingface’ error. However, I then also tried copying the same files to the second hr16 folder and… the Openpose workflow worked.

5. My simple Openpose workflow for Comfy, working. Just drop an image in and ‘Run’. Should take about five seconds to produce an Openpose image.

As you can see, you can switch off face and/or hands if they’re not required.

You then save out this special image, and drop it into a Controlnet workflow which has an openpose model (here for SDXL models) linked to it…

Once downloaded I renamed this openpose model to openpose-sdxl-diffusion_pytorch_model.safetensors so that I know it’s for SDXL. It is copied into C:\ComfyUI_Windows_portable\ComfyUI\models\controlnet\SDXL_controlnet\

On more powerful PCs you can link these two workflows together in the same workflow. But with more basic PCs, it seems best to try to limit how much the workflow is being asked to load all at once.

The resulting suitably-prompted image then conforms to the input Openpose pose. Use a setting of 0.85 to give the Controlnet more wiggle-room than a strict 1.0 setting.

All free. There’s also a paid plugin on Renderosity, which does this for Poser 12 and 13.

I also tried to get depth (aka depthmap) Controlnet working, but with no success at all. I must have downloaded 20 workflows and countless models, custom_nodes and preprocessors, and not a damn one worked. Errors every time. I give up on depth in ComfyUI, and will just work with the working MistoLine lineart and OpenPose Controlnets.

Release: Blender 4.5 final LTS

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

The Blender 4.5 Long-Term Support (LTS) release is now available in its final version.

Yes, yet another UI makeover. Ugh.

But of special interest to Poser and DAZ users may be the new “robust” .FBX importer. However, note that the new faster importer is still “experimental”. Having moved away from using Python, it apparently doesn’t encounter many of the usual roadblocks encountered when trying to move 3D models + textures from one software to another. It can import “very old” .FBX files which may have been saved a decade or more ago, but can also handle newer OpenPBR textures. Can even handle animations. It’s many times faster. Nice.

Note that the OBJ import-export also gets an overhaul.

Potentially then this could open up a robust and much faster Poser/DAZ -> .FBX -> Blender -> ComfyUI rendering pipeline.

Update: I now find that ComfyUI has native import of .OBJ and .FBX and nodes that can visualise them rotating in 3D space. There is a question-mark over size and robustness, though, for me. Seeing a demo of a simple lightweight mesh of a garden gnome is one thing, but I suspect that displaying and manipulating a La Femme .FBX export is quite another.

Update: Yes, I tested the 3D node in Comfy. It imports fine, but the basic window is obviously not meant for anything big and complex. Thus Blender + Comfy running as an in-UI plugin seems worth exploring. Ideally we could do this with Poser, but the Comfy integration would likely have to be done via a script calling a set of real-time renders, rather than an in-UI window.

Completed the move to a new OS, these are the goodies that now become possible…

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Poser Leave a comment

Having made the leap to Windows 11 Superlite, I now have it nailed down and the AI image generators I wanted. I’m working on ComfyUI Portable, which was updated to the latest version for Flux Kontext Dev. I suspect I won’t be going back to InvokeAI much, now that I have Comfy made… comfy. It’s not so daunting once you get the hang of it. Here’s what I now have…

* SDXL:

Can be made blisteringly fast with realvisxlV50_v50LightningBakedvae.safetensors or the amazingly fast/good-quality splashedMixDMD_v5.safetensors. From the latter, four seconds on a 3060 12Gb for this image at this 1280px size. No postwork…


H.P. Lovecraft in New York City, 1922. A bit too ‘film-star’, but a character LoRA would fix that.

Four seconds! Works with mistoline_rank256.safetensors as the single universal lineart controlnet (not used in the above image). There are two slight disadvantages to the otherwise awesome splashedMixDMD_v5 model. 1) you get no negative prompt — since you have to work at CFG 1.0 and thus the Negative prompt is ignored; and 2) not all SDXL LoRAs appear to work with splashedMixDMD. Still, some nice ones do, such as the comics one you see in action above. I think I have a new favourite go-to for experimenting with style-changing Poser renders with Controlnet. Maybe also OpenPose Controlnet, since there’s at last a good one for SDXL.

Theoretically, since I also have the original vanilla SDXL base model, I could also now train up some LoRAs myself.

Also of note is the SDXLFaetastic_v24.safetensors which is dedicated to western fantasy artwork (painting, lineart, charcoal etc). Perhaps useful as a backup when a LoRA fails to work in a turbo model.

* Illustrious (SDXL):

Illustrious models are supposed to be ‘SDXL for illustration’ but appear to be overwhelmingly anime (ugh), but at least that makes the good ones excellent at poses and action. I’m not hugely impressed by using the more interesting LoRAs with Nova Flat XL v3, the model that I was recommended to try for making ‘flat’ comics images. The model is indeed great for what it’s meant to do, but I didn’t get much from using it with LoRAs such as Ligne Claire (clear line Eurocomics style) or the Moebius style LoRA. But maybe that’s because I haven’t played around with them long enough or got them in a good Illustrious workflow with suitable prompts that shift it away from anime. Or maybe I need another Illustrious base model.

* Flux Kontext Dev:

Somewhat slow, but with the AurelleV2 LoRA it can take a Poser render and generate a very convincing watercolour + lineart which exactly aligns when laid over the top of the starting Poser render. And which keeps the base colours. Good for illustrating children’s storybooks then. It can also do its other ‘I am a Photoshop Wizard’ magic, albeit slowly — such as merging two images and re-posing, removing items including watermarks, removing or changing colour, re-lighting, placing a face into a new environment and position, etc. Useless for auto-colourising greyscale, compared to online services such as Palette and Kolorize.

* WAN 2.1 Text to Video / Single Image:

Yes, I even tried WAN on a humble 3060 12gb card. Working, with two turbo LoRAs running in tandem. 80 seconds for a nice 832 x 480px single frame, with a workflow optimised for single images. Slow, but it can be done and the results are very cohesive and convincing as photography. This success suggests that a 16fps text-to-video at that size would take maybe 2 hours for five seconds, and making a single-image preview first would reassure one about the eventual results.

* WAN 2.1 Image to Video:

Working, with a turbo LoRA. 36 minutes for 5 seconds at 480 x 368px (81 frames at 16fps). Initial tests show it works well and looks good (spaceship entering planetfall from orbit), and it’s feasible in terms of time. So 820 x 480px, with more quality, might at a guess be three hours for six seconds at 16fps? That would be perfectly feasible to run overnight. After a week one would have some 40 seconds of video. And a hefty electric bill in due course, no doubt. Though, Wan 2.2 is due soon and will add a lightweight 5b model with better camera shot-name and camera movement understanding, and may it well also be quicker.

There’s a lot more to explore, such as tiled upscaling, facerestore, character adapters, normal map Controlnets etc. But for now I’m pleased I’ve made the leap to an OS where I can use more than SD 1.5 and SD 2.1 768. I’ll still go back to them in due course, especially now I can use them with turbo workflows. They can also be used in tandem with other types of model, such as Illustrious for coherent action scenes and then try to get the result into photoreal + nice faces with SD 1.5. It’ll also be interesting to see what ‘SD 2.1 768 to Illustrious’ can do with a Syd Mead landscape.

And I got all the above just in time, since CivitAI is to be effectively banned here in the UK, from tomorrow!

Release: Winxvideo AI 4.1

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Films, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

Winxvideo AI 4.1, now greatly improved and speeded up. Basically, it’s a poor man’s Topaz Video AI for the desktop PC, for a reasonable $50. If you just want speedy upscaling from Wan2.1 480p to 720p with detail enhancement, it’s worth a look, though it can do more. There’s a free trial so you can test it out. You need to let it go online and then the AI upscaling models are fairly speedy to download, they’re not like multi-Gb in size. They have two main models, and there’s no hassle with graphic-card detection — it just works.

In Kontext…

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Poser Leave a comment

Not a bad haul for today, with learning the AI called Flux Kontext. I learned how to…

* Speed up the slow Flux Kontext x 2 (turbo LoRA for 12 steps rather than 24, no noticeable difference in output).

* Combine two images into a new prompted composition. That was a feature I hadn’t yet investigated. Got a cat and dog running along a beach (a stress-test it just about managed, from two random stock photos), but the more mundane use would be two talking heads for comic-book yak-yak dialogue. Poser can do this anyway, but the widescreen Poser render you might ideally need for that might not be suitable for input/output in Kontext.

* Zoom the camera in and out in Kontext via a LoRA + prompt, while keeping the central character fixed and any background more or less similar. Again, you’re duplicating what Poser can do anyway in a render, but it’s good to know how to do it in Kontext.

* Generate convincing ‘rough pencils’ line-art from a Poser render, which can then be combined in Photoshop to firm up outlines on a Kontext watercolour render of a Poser figure. Registration is exact when the layers are blended in Photoshop.

Here the source is a Poser render of Nursoda’s ‘Ronk’ Poser figure and his snail, which I’ve shown here before. The above is the ‘rough pencils’ output at 1024px.

* Earlier in the week I also got a universal Controlnet (mistoLine_rank256.safetensors) working for Kontext.

And I now have saved ComfyUI workflows for the above.

Also, it looks like I moved up to Windows 11 just in time, which over the last few weeks has caused me to go get the best of SDXL, Illustrious and Flux style LoRAs and accessories. CivitAI is to be effectively banned here in the UK, from next week.

Cheap Sketchy for DAZ

Posted on by Posted in Special Offers and Discounts Leave a comment

Currently a bargain on the DAZ Store.

Works with iRay, and found in your runtime as Shader Presets | DimensionTheory | iRayToon Shader, it offers relatively simple drag-and-drop or one-click shaders including edge shaders. There is an excellent intro video on YouTube, also linked from the sales page at the DAZ Store. Note the pack’s main straightforward lineart has a gloopy edge-style is not all that convincing as “hand-drawn”, and the look is far more difficult to control than the real-time Comic Book mode in Poser 11. However, I’m guessing it may produce nice results when fed through an AI filter such as Flux Kontext Dev. Or even G’Mic for Photoshop.

Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI – now in ComfyUI

Posted on by Posted in 3D Utilities, Companion software, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry Leave a comment

Life moves fast in AI-land. Last month I blogged here about Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI. This month — courtesy of Paul Hansen of Germany — Microsoft’s new tech is now free in ComfyUI. Along with an outstanding install guide and documentation. All free. Currently, 2 seconds of finished raytraced animation takes 22 seconds on a 4060 card. Import of .FBX is coming soon.

Release: Keyshot adds AI

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

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

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

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.

Sci-Fi City.

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.

Ancient Arena for DAZ Studio.

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.

The Workbench for DAZ Studio. (No longer active at DAZ, but now at Rendersosity).

Second World War British Army headgear as the free WWII UK Mk II Airborne Helmet Pack for M4.

Scripts and software:

iRay Cinematic Cameras.

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:

Motion blur basics in Poser.

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. [Update: here I meant Msty 1.9.x, not the flaky new Studio version].

That’s it for now. More later in the summer.

Perfecting 1:1 watercolour in Flux Kontext – getting better watercolour with a LoRA

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Natural media emulation, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion 1 Comment

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.