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.
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 (No longer active at DAZ, but now at Rendersosity).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:
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. [Update: here I meant Msty 1.9.x, not the flaky new Studio version].
That’s it for now. More later in the summer.