A new $35 procedural fractals software that works inside of Blender, Vectron Fractals Blender Edition. You also need Octane for Blender, apparently, to do them justice when rendering.
Monthly Archives: March 2026
Contest: Clip Studio Global Comic Awards 2026
Pixiv & Clip Studio Global Comic Awards 2026, with a submission deadline of 31st March 2026.
Contest: $3.5m Future Vision XPrize film-making contest
The Future Vision XPrize is now live, a $3.5 million film-making contest. Submit a three minute trailer for a film that tells a story about an optimistic future. Specifically, show how good things will become real in a technologically-advanced future that is happening because of us (not being done ‘to us’). Animation and AI tools can be used. Deadline: 15th August 2026.
Release: LTX Desktop Beta
LTX Desktop Beta has been released. It’s a free video generator and non-linear video editor, with a slick but simple GUI. Under the hood it’s powered by the new LTX 2.3 model. It’s the official LTX desktop software, open-source (Apache2.0) and fully local. No proprietary layers, full access to the models and their weights.
A simple interface, but with a powerful and cutting-edge AI video generation model underneath it. Can do ‘image to video’ as well as ‘prompt to video’, so the AI-haters don’t have to freak out about copyright. Just drop in your 3D render and watch it being restyled and/or animated. If you have the required VRAM of course. 32Gb is apparently optimum.
Expect long one-time downloads of the required multi-Gb models, once you have the LTX Desktop software installed.
It will need a powerful graphics-card to run it, of course, as well as masses of hard-drive space. 24Gb of VRAM on the graphics-card is usually thought of as needed for worth-having video generation, and 32Gb(!) is recommended here. Though note there’s also a mention of the option in LTX Desktop to use “an API key”, which suggests the software can also hook into a paid LTX cloud service. In that respect, those familiar with the ComfyUI node-based interface should also look at Comfy Cloud — which does not lock you into the LTX model only.
A DAZ Studio quickstart for ComfyUI users
A quick tutorial for those new to DAZ Studio and wresting with lighting, aiming for a nice image to take into a Stable Diffusion model. Solution: Don’t add preset lights at all! Auto-headlamp, and then adjust Exposure and Shutter Speed to get a nicely-balanced and real-time viewport. This provides a good evenly-lit starting render, better than Smooth Shaded.
Things change here (expressions, head-angle, hair added), but it’s possible to prompt to get more of a 1:1 match. Thus enabling re-colouring with the DAZ render in Photoshop, for consistent colouring in comics.
Release: Free Tier for Comfy Cloud
Free Tier Arrives in Comfy Cloud, with a simple no-fuss Google login/signup. 400 credits a month, no roll-over. Apparently that gets you about 20 minutes worth of generation on a fast GPU. Enough to try the latest ‘hot new’ model each month, maybe even a couple of times, and see if it’s for you or not. Or perhaps very slowly generate a short film, a bit each month. There are no free workflows/models, everything consumes credits.
Alongside the usual it offers tools useful for the 3D crowd, such as ‘sketch to 3D model’, or relighting of a rendered scene without re-rendering. Note also the presence of ElevenLabs TTS in there, via a partnership agreement.
Drawbacks: your favourite local custom-nodes may not be available; you may not be able to run very long workflows; possible wait-times and queues.
What’s New for Poser, DAZ and more, in February 2026
Posted on
by
Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion
Leave a comment
Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion
Leave a comment
Welcome to my regular pick of goodies for Poser and DAZ, and my round-up of other interesting software. This covers February 2026. As usual, just my picks, and with a focus on commercial-use items.
Note that Renderosity’s website is becoming very flaky, to the extent that the site is often unusable. You may need several tries to get a page to load, or just have to wait for several minutes. The same also goes for DAZ…
Science fiction:
An old-school Cryo-Vault: HS-2000 Command Center, perhaps of use for Doctor Who scenes?
Fantasy:
No fantasy picks this month.
Gothic and horror:
The Eldritch Sovereign Throne, with G9 pose.
Gothic Lamps Collection for DAZ.
Stitched Scars-for-G8F-and-G8M.
Jadis for G9F, a lookalike for the young Tilda Swinton.
Steampunk:
Pistolero Automata, a robo-cowboy.
Police Enforcer Helmet for DAZ Studio.
A free Ensemble Dress for G8F, potentially suitable for steampunk.
Chronos Mechanica Watch for Genesis 9.
Storybook:
A free Woodmood Coffee Table, potentially adaptable for a woodland tea-party scene.
A free simple-but-pleasing Witch Hat for Poser.
Free simple Toyboxes for Poser.
Toon:
Somewhat stylised Underwater Toon Props 2, suitable for toon and semi-toon fish.
Free, a bumper pack with a decade’s worth of poses for Nursoda’s Poser characters. Also some facial morphs.
Figures and parts:
A free C. Lloyd head for G8M.
Free floppy Hair For G8F.
Free, 2,600 Carnegie Mellon .BVH files for Poser, as animated .GIF previews.
Landscapes, seascapes and environment props:
Stonemason’s The Classical Gardens.
Spring Daffodil Flowers for DAZ.
A dramatic XI Root Bridge.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Antpittas. Cute little ant-eaters.
Songbird ReMix Parrots v7: Pacific Parrotlet Breeds.
Cat got your birds? They’re probably wearing one of the new T3d Meow Xpress for DAZ House Cat expressions.
A free Cat Wheel Pro for your Poser / DAZ moggies.
3DV Cat Accessories Big Bundle For DAZ.
Historical:
Classic Mature Hair Set for Genesis 9, looking suitable for ‘Biblical patriarch’ art.
The Templar for DAZ Studio and Templar Horse.
A free Waterpipe.
A Outpost Ruins Standalone for jungle scenes. Plus Outpost Kitbash for additional clutter and decay.
1930-50s dForce British game shooting outfit.
German Anti-Aircraft Searchlight for DAZ.
Scripts and other auto-helpers:
A free POV-EyeCam for Genesis 9.
DAZ LOD System and Cleaner. LOD is one of the methods by which videogames load huge scenes into a relatively small PC memory.
Tutorials:
* At YouTube, the new How to manually download and install DAZ content.
* Also useful is this image (see below), for those who install a new DAZ Studio version and find all their content has gone AWOL. It shows the convoluted process of getting your content library back again.
Software:
* Poser 14.0.227, with the new ‘Poser Cloth’. There’s been another release since then. The changelog suggests that Poser Physics has been getting a lot of attention, presumably to align it with the new Cloth.
* A wholly free desktop YoutubeDownloader that works. Useful for getting tutorial videos running locally and offline.
AI and similar helpers:
All free, as is the way with local AI.
* A group-test to discover which Z-Image Turbo style LoRAs work with the fast Z-Image Turbo Nunchaku r256 variant.
* ComfyUI LayerDivider for automatically creating layered .PSD files inside ComfyUI. Looks a bit hit-and-miss, but potentially it gets you Photoshop layers containing auto-masks for skin, hair and shadows. These then have obvious uses in postwork.
* A 360-degree VR image maker for Flux.2 Klein 4B. Uses automatic outpainting to seamlessly fill gaps between several images.
* Have Flux.2 Klein 4B extract Color Palette from an image. Just a basic one. See also 2020’s detailed survey “Some tools for extracting a limited colour palette from a picture”.
* Also for the amazing and fast Flux.2 Klein 4B, an Attach Outfit & Try On LoRA. Presumably it should work with Poser /DAZ renders, potentially opening up a whole realm of new free costumes?
* Restyling demos for Poser to Klein 4B and iRay to Klein 4B. 100% repeatable characters for comics production. Though it’s only likely to interest a few people. As with the 3D crowd, the Stable Diffusion crowd are overwhelmingly interested only in hyper-realistic 8k skin and animations of dancing girls with jiggling breasts.
* ComfyUI-Execute-Python: A single ComfyUI node for executing arbitrary Python code. Don’t worry… the node gets the PC’s unique GUID when installed, and thus makes your install of it unique and far safer. This means a shared workflow (i.e. downloaded from the Internet) can’t use it to run some nasty Python code. The legitimate use-case is obvious… you can have ComfyUI load external software as part of the workflow, and have that software run its own script on the ComfyUI output image. For example…
import subprocess
subprocess.call([r'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Photoshop.exe',r'C:\do_something.jsx'])
* ComfyUI-Yedp-Mocap, for capture from your webcam. Lightweight javascript extracts openpose frames from your video feed, and sends the frames to Controlnets, leaving your graphics-card free to run the image generation / restyling.
* A font generator for Flux.2 Klein 9B. Smart generation of… “1280×1280px font atlases from a single reference image and using the same font style”. Stable Diffusion for fonts, basically.
* The free Nichey, the only software I could find that automatically generates a full wiki from a set of local documents. You can plug in any capable online AI that has an “OpenAI compatible API”, and which isn’t going to freak out at being asked to ingest the documents and make a wiki from them. Potentially very useful if you have obscure creative software that needs a wiki, but you don’t have the time to make one.
Coming soon:
* Official massive RAM optimization fixes for ComfyUI Portable. And the new official NVIDIA Studio driver should greatly speed up the already-fast Flux.2 Klein, though I’m unsure if it will only benefit the latest 50-series graphics-cards. Releases soon, for both. Already here in speed-ups, ComfyUI-CacheDiT.
Qwen 3.5 is out and now has GGUFs. Potentially meaning a more powerful replacement for Qwen 3 4B as a standard prompt text-encoder in ComfyUI.
That’s it for now.