I’ve had time to get back to experimenting with my Poser renders to Stable Diffusion workflow. As you can see, I can now use SDXL and prompting for expressions is possible (even if not present in the Poser render). A Firefly lines-only render is used in the Controlnet, and a very basic Comic Book real-time render is used for the Img2Img. The next big problem to solve is the “stare at the camera” problem. The last thing you want in a comic is the characters looking at the reader.
Posted in Automation, Companion software, Freebies, The Animation Industry
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The original Msty (1.9.2, not the flaky new Studio version) is a fine free desktop host for running local offline LLMs (‘AIs’). But it has no offline text-to-speech. Your AIs can’t talk, unless you get an API key and are always online.
One offline solution is the freeware Simple TTS Reader 2.0, which reads whatever gets sent to the Windows clipboard. Very very simple, it just does the job — anything copied to the clipboard gets read aloud. Great, but sadly it can only use Microsoft Speech voices, which are rather robotic and limited. It appears Microsoft has moved on from these, to its new and far better Azure TTS voices.
However, there’s a hack to get these Azure voices locally. There’s a handy NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter from GitHub, with a straightforward Windows installer. This freeware makes Microsoft’s Azure natural (aka ‘neural’) TTS voices accessible locally to some of the SAPI5 compatible TTS desktop software packages. On Windows 11, these more advanced voices are otherwise locked to the Windows Narrator for local use, and no other software can use them (booo…). But now Simple TTS Reader can use them too.
As well as NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter you also need to get your target Azure voice from this selection of free voice downloads. Unzip it as directed and put it somewhere sensible. When you install NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter, you need to tell the software where the voice is on your PC, e.g. C:\TTSVoices\ Remember: Un-zip, don’t install in the usual installer manner.
After that, restart Simple TTS Reader 2.0 and you have a good local Azure TTS voice for automatically reading whatever is sent to the clipboard. Now when you hit ‘Copy to Clipboard’ at the end of a Msty LLM response, the text will be read in a reasonably good AI voice.
Regrettably Msty can’t automatically ‘Copy to Clipboard’ at the end of each LLM response. It has to be done manually, by clicking the icon. Ideally, Msty would add a “copy each new sentence to the clipboard, on completion” option.
Having Azure voices locally on your PC may also interest animators who’d like to have such quality voices without going online. Of course, there are also dedicated TTS AIs now… but they can be very fiddly to set up, require many Gbs of downloads and disk space, and also a good graphics card to run them. The above fast Windows 11 solution requires a mere 80Mb in total and no graphics card.
The Balabolka TTS freeware can also see the Azure local voices, but note that it’s 32-bit software and thus you will need to install both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter.
More progress in my learning ComfyUI for use with Poser renders. It’s not just about plugging in a character LoRA and hoping for the best, I’ve found. Automatic face masking and facefix + a character LoRA can be added to the SDXL workflow.
Here we see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ effect on a scene with H.P. Lovecraft in the middle-distance. Before it’s sort of vaguely like H.P. Lovecraft but also more like William Burroughs, and then after it’s much more recognizable as Lovecraft. The face in the picture is automatically identified and masked, then that area is regenerated at a higher size — so that the face can become more refined. And the LoRA tags along with that process, also making the character more recognizable.
Of course the problem is that it only works if the figure is alone. Otherwise every face in the scene gets a makeover. Another reason, I think, to make character cutouts and backgrounds separately and composite them in Photoshop. That said, I haven’t yet learned how to set up a way to manually paint-in a face mask (update, seems to be impossible while the workflow is running – easier just to output before/after images and Photoshop them together later).
Brian Haberlin has a produced a Faster That Light 3D Treasury Edition. 3D here means ‘red-blue glasses’ 3D. It’s actually two new stories from his Faster Then Light sci-fi world, not a collection of the old Faster That Light series converted to stereoscopic 3D.
Presumably Brian’s sophisticated ‘Poser to comic-book’ method is used here as before, but now the Poser 3D models + scenes + a PoserPython script all give the ability to produce a stereoscopic (red and blue glasses) ‘3D view’. Aka ‘stereo anaglyph’.
Basically to get this effect you lower the camera dolly X value to something quite low (0.020) and then make a ‘right eye’ and ‘left eye’ render, then combine in software for making stereo anaglyphs. World of Paul has the details and the free PoserPython scripts.
Just a thought. Given the fast-growing climate of censorship here in the UK, it’s probably best for a UK user to change their DeviantArt setting to read ‘United States’, ASAP. Ideally you’d do that once you have your VPN set up, and you appear to be surfing from the USA.
This is because DeviantArt are bound to be next in terms of having to block/remove all their UK users.
I find I can get to DeviantArt with the Mullvad VPN without any problems at all. Changing my region setting, while using VPN USA connection, didn’t trigger an email challenge.
Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Poser, Python scripts, Spotted in the News
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AVFix is now at the Internet Archive, following the demise of the PoserLounge domain in the Netherlands. The little fix was a vital one for Poser 11 users, and loading it then allowed a number of older Python scripts to also load. I’ve also gone through the MyClone blog and fixed all the URLs that were pointing to the now domain-expired poserlounge.nl site.
Not needed for Poser 12 or 13.
Hurrah! Yes, another round-up of the new items for Bondware’s Poser or DAZ Studio. This time covering releases in July 2025.
As always these are ‘just my picks’ and I also try to warn of any pitfalls re: people not knowing something is fanart and thus not for commercial-use. Also, at the end, I note the the usual extras in terms of software, scripts, tutorials, and also some Stable Diffusion image-generation items.
Science-fiction:
Cybotaur for G8 and G9. Would also suit steampunk, suitably re-textured.
Antwan for Genesis 9, a fairly convincing ‘insect alien’. I assume it’s not close to being some Star Wars fan-art.
SE Animal Korch, a strange alien swamp creature, and there’s also SE Animal Lityn for the skies of your alien planet.
Steampunk:
Steampunk Owl for DAZ Studio. I assume it’s not fan-art.
Time Traveller Props for DAZ Studio. Be aware that the Time Machine is effectively fan-art, closely derived from the George Pal movie of the famous novel The Time Machine, and should not be used commercially.
The Cerebral Orb, plus a simple but nicely-done control-cap.
For a more ornate control-cap for the Orb, how about the new Halo Headdress?
A free Aeolipile for DAZ and also in .OBJ format. Five parts.
Fantasy:
Medieval Forest Village for DAZ. There’s also a home interior and forest shine, separately.
Free for Poser, ColorHUe Layers for LF2/LH2/LF/LH, and also for ColorHue Layers for Poser 11. Basically, give your faery La Femme a suitable skin shade.
Storybook:
Not much this month, just Ice Cream Bars for DAZ.
Toon:
Little creepy Bot for DAZ Studio.
Halloween:
DoubleD for DAZ Studio, a two-headed hell-dog with pose controls.
Dungeon Hound for DAZ. Probably looks better in deep shadow with rim-lighting.
Figures, accessories, and everday scenes:
FG Poker Night, a complete modern-day room with table and all accessories. Possibly useful for making tutorial animations for learning the game?
Animals:
Goat by AM Bundle for DAZ. Doesn’t require a dependency, and you can age it, add curly horns etc.
Nature’s Wonders Snakes of the World, Vol. 2, for Poser and DAZ. Includes a Boa Constrictor.
Need to have your character fend off the giant snakes? There’s now a Fully Poseable Bull Whip.
Raw Capybara for DAZ Dog 8, with fur.
Landscapes:
Undergrowth for DAZ Studio, a sort of ‘Florida swamp’ miniature.
Butterfly Garden, plants for your Ken G. butterflies. For Poser and DAZ.
Historical:
Vanishing Point’s Renaissance Courtyard for Poser. Probably a bit basic by modern standards, but good geometry and AI can now do wonders with even a basic render.
dforce Short Morphing Hair for Genesis 9. Early 1960s hair styles.
Soviet-era Helicopter for DAZ.
Japanese Backstreets for DAZ, 1990s otaku style.
Tutorials:
In Poser, a trick to get the brow material settings to render a black brow on figures. Potentially useful for filtering the render for comics, where you’d want a clear black brow.
For Poser on YouTube, useful tips on saving poses to the Library, with morphs.
For Poser on YouTube, why the group tool is better than parenting.
Also on YouTube, using DAZ Studio and DaVinci Resolve (the free powerful video-editor).
Scripts and Plugins:
For Poser, an update to one of the nodes in EZSkin, used to give older Poser figures the ability to be rendered in SuperFly. (Scroll down the forum thread to “Here is an update to the EZ_CycleSkin (PrincipledBSDF) plugin.”)
BJ Layers Plugin for DAZ. Can’t quite work out what it would do, but I guess seeing it working in a video might help.
Software:
Winxvideo AI 4.1, effectively a poor man’s $50 Topaz Video AI for the desktop PC. Now greatly improved as an AI-powered video upscaler, in the new 4.1 version.
Ultimate TTS Studio for Windows / NVIDIA. A sort of ComfyUI, but for generating text-to-speech (TTS) rather than images. Though note that Comfy has audio capabilities too, if you install Torch Audio.
Blender 4.5 final LTS is now available, with updates that potentially offer a more robust and faster Poser/DAZ -> .FBX -> Blender -> ComfyUI rendering pipeline.
iClone now officially has robust ComfyUI integration, for rendering with AI. I see that Keyshot has also officially added AI editing, probably Kontext based.
The ComfyUI rival Invoke 6.0 is now available. They appears to be getting Blender-itis, in that the UI is constantly being changed and thus it becomes a horrible ‘shifting target’ in terms of learning the software or making tutorials. Anyway, I’ve moved to ComfyUI now and have deleted Invoke, so it no longer affects me.
I see MediaChance’s Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP) image filter system, and its excellent NovelForge AI for writers both have a $10 discount. Incidentally I can report that NovelForge can easily connect to Msty-hosted local AIs (‘LLMs’). In NovelForge just select “LLM Studio” as your LLM host option but input the Msty local URL of http://localhost:10000 – then press ‘get models’ and choose a model to use. “Save” the settings.
Stable Diffusion learning:
My new tutorial on setting up Working OpenPose with face and hands, in ComfyUI. Should work with any Poser/DAZ render of a figure. I believe there’s also a four-legged Openpose model, and I assume my workflow will also work with that. So theoretically you could get horses etc into Openpose.
Ultimate Openpose editor, for when you need extreme fine-tuning.
Removing colour from comic-book lineart with Flux Kontext. Kontext can also remove hatch and dash shading (see naked Moebius!).
Endless-Nodes for ComfyUI had a major update in June 2025. It includes the useful Fontifier — change the fonts in your Comfy workflows. Useful for those who, as the author says, have a “4K monitor and old eyes”.
The important WAS Node Suite for ComfyUI is now ‘WAS Node Suite – Revised’ at a new GitHub location, and the old one should be replaced. The Suite is important partly because it’s so widely used in shared workflows. But also because it has a “Save Image” node which can force 300dpi final output — important for those generating images destined for print.
Several useful Stable Diffusion models are on torrents at the Internet Archive, which are possibly useful for those starting out and on slow connections or who are blocked from CivitAI by censorship. The ‘Photon v1’ model is an excellent starter for Stable Diffusion 1.5 photography emulation, and also very useful as a base test for LoRAs since it’s not going to interfere with them in terms of style. While ‘RealVisXL v50 Lightning Baked VAE’ is your starter turbo/lightning fast SDXL model, and the vanilla ‘Realism Engine SDXL v3.0 VAE’ is for when your SDXL workflow needs wiggle-room that the fast version can’t offer.
Services:
Here in the increasingly-censored UK, I’m now using the always-running Mullvad VPN for all online work. A reasonable £48 for a year and a flat no-nonsense fee, paid for anonymously via a simple scratch-card sold and delivered by Amazon. It works lovely, and seems to be giving me faster Internet in some cases (YouTube, Archive.org and a few others)! I guess that’s because I’m now bypassing some ISP congestion in London, by hopping up to Manchester and then over to the east coast of the USA and thence to… free-speech and freedom! Something which seems increasingly rare here in the UK, and is likely to get scarcer. I recommend the service, but be warned that it doesn’t support huge streaming services (Netflix etc) and that Hostinger rented websites (such as this MyClone blog, regrettably) are unreachable until you turn off the VPN. It appears that Hostinger blocks all VPNs, which regrettably I wasn’t aware of when I purchased the web space from them. Here’s the workaround…
1) In Mullvad’s settings click on “split tunnelling”, where you can easily allow non-VPN Internet access for a secondary Web browser of your choice.
2) Install and set the freeware Browser Tamer to route / auto-switch any Hostinger-hosted URLs to your secondary browser, instead of the usual browser.
3) From the Firefox or Chrome Store install the free Browser Tamer extension / add-on in your main browser. Re-start.
4) Now you simply change your main Web browser’s ‘VPN un-reachable’ bookmark URL to read as follows: x-bt://https://ur_lovely_site.com/ (or whatever you want to reach). The x-bt:// is the prefix that tells the Browser Tamer extension to send the clicked bookmark URL to Browser Tamer, which now knows that it must launch your secondary browser to that URL. The Edge browser, with almost no extensions installed, is superfast to launch and thus may be a good secondary browser to use.
That’s it for now. More in August/September!