News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Monthly Archives: June 2026

Release: iClone Personal

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Interesting. iClone goes free. Sort of. The new iClone Personal appears to be almost uncrippled. It never times out, and is a perpetual freebie.

“It has the complete toolset of the paid edition of iClone [currently 8.78], has the same render resolutions, and can be used on commercial projects.”

What you can’t do with Personal includes…

    — exporting to “3D software or game engines” via FBX or OBJ etc, more than 30 times.
    — local AI rendering via the built-in ‘AI Studio’ (need access to their Cloud, pay $$$s for credits).
    — “purchase Content in Reallusion Content Store & Marketplace”.
    — their Character Creator and several advanced animation packages are only included as Trial versions.

Note also that the comparison table has no mention of the vital AccuLIPS plugin at all — it lip-syncs your character to an audio file. I have to assume it’s included in none of the packages, and it’s just a paid plugin.

Some further questions that arise: Will your Character Creator-made free characters all stop working when the CC trial expires? Will Personal users at least be able to download freebies from Reallusion’s free content store, or will getting a freebie count as a “purchase” (not allowed for Personal users). Will it ‘stick’ at 8.7, when 9 comes out?

Sign-up/account/Internet needed to get it and also to activate it. Windows 10 or higher (only).

Nice to have to free and legit. But your problem is going to be getting all the content you need for a project. In that sense, DAZ 4.x is by far the better free choice, giving access to a vast content ecosystem. Ditto Poser 12 (at just $29), which has a somewhat friendlier UI than DAZ and also has all the animation tools you need built-in.

That said, iClone 8 is slick, built for animation, and for some users the UI’s learning-curve will be a lot easier than learning DAZ + plugins for animation. If all you need is block-out some stock human figures for a storyboard, with some motion on them, it might be for you.

So… I went to get it, with the old login details that were still valid about a year ago. But now I get… “Your password does not meet our minimum security standards”. And then I got bounced back to the main page. Oh well. Maybe Personal is not for me, then. They blew the chance to get me back into iClone.

HiveWire Forums to close

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Sad news, “HiveWire 3D Forums Will Be Closing”. The Poser-friendly forums had continued for several years after the closure of the HiveWire Store, with a strong focus on supporting the high-quality HiveWire content and various incarnations of the Dawn/Dusk/Luna figures. The forums are set to close on 31st July 2026, according to the post.

I have now locally saved the following forums complete, in the form of per-post encapsulated .MHTML files (pages plus images plus page-design intact). Follow-on sub-pages for threads are included.

– Poser
— Poser Scripts
— Poser Shaders

– DAZ Studio
— DAZ Scripts
— DAZ Shaders

– Photoshop

Plus just four selected items from the freebies section of the forums, as .MHTML pages along with their download .ZIPs. I won’t be doing a full archive of all the freebies, so feel free there to do it yourself.

My saves total 2Gb, which compresses down to a 280Mb .7z ZIP file. I’ll upload the ZIP to Archive.org in due course. You will then be able to add this rescue archive to my earlier rescue archives of the RuntimeDNA and Smith Micro Poser forums, and ShareCG, and keyword search across them with desktop freeware such as AnyTxt Searcher or paid software such as dtSearch.

Active Poser forums remain at Renderosity and there’s also a slow sub-forum for Poser at the official DAZ Studio site.

New for DAZ and Poser, May 2026

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Time for my regular pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items released in the last last month. I also add some software picks at the foot of the post.

Science fiction:

Trash Bot from TheAntFarm.

FAC-CH18-07 for DAZ Studio, a flying aircraft carrier. Aircraft not included, but you’ll probably want to add more futuristic-looking planes.

SE Cyborg Maintenance Bay for DAZ.

LI Space Cadet Hair for Genesis 9.

Gothic and horror:

Creature HD Morphs Collection for Genesis 9. Looks a bit more useful for horror than sci-fi.

Steampunk:

Steampunk Alley by Stonemason.

Fantasy:

RawArt’s Grundlebukk Troll for Genesis 9. Not HD, which is good.

Koara Koala for Genesis 9. Perhaps more ‘horror’ than ‘fantasy’. But you may be able to make the face less alarming.

Faeryl’s Horns for Genesis, M4 and V4. Free.

A fantasy Battlefield for DAZ, free.

Free Centaur 8 GF8 ‘skins’. Including giraffe and leopard.

Storybook:

Boutique Front Wonderland for DAZ.

dForce MB Peasant Dress for G9F including the shoes.

Toon:

Free TDSOA Toons poses.

Figures and parts:

James 9, a free figure preset for Genesis 9. Clothes not included.

Z Pose Library Old Age Mega Set for Genesis 9 and 8 Female. Despite the name, the previews also shows males taking the poses.

Swim Goggles for Genesis 9 and for G8 Male.

Shaders:

Wrinkle It! for DAZ Studio. A wrinkle cloth shader.

Landscapes and environments:

LOWREZ People At The Beach, for populating modern beach scenes.

Animals:

Sloth by AM. A real creature.

Songbird ReMix: Orioles of the Old World.

Historical:

Ancient Greek Wall Segments, only suitable for background use.

AJ Ancient Roman Pool for Poser. A touch basic, but now we have AI makeovers.

Wooden Church Ruins 1. A Viking stave church, collapsed.

400 BCE, though more useful for a Wild West scene ‘down Mexico way’.

Caribbean Street Bundle, also useful for the southern seafront cities of the USA.

dForce Long Sleeved Business Suit, 1940s style.

Building On Fire for DAZ Studio. Would suit historical events such as the London Blitz during the Second World War.

Scripts and helpers:

Auto Rigger Pipeline for DAZ.

The new SDK beta for DAZ Studio 6 beta, for plugin makers.

DAZ 2 RizomUV and back… “send any mesh from your DAZ scene directly into RizomUV for UV editing, then seamlessly reimport the updated UVs without losing your materials, morphs, pose, or Sub-D settings.”

Ghost Dynamics 2 for figure interactions that involve touching.

A free Nursoda figures and clothing filter for Everything v1.5 beta. Quickly view all Nursoda items in your Poser runtime, using Everything, with drag-drop to Poser.

Tutorials:

The freeware Everything 1.5 beta setup tutorial, for use with Poser and DAZ.

dForce Weight Maps in DAZ Studio: Better Cloth Control.

Resources:

Need inspiration for your movie / comic scene etc? Frame By Frame offers scene by scene breakdowns of well-known movies. For more inspirational screencaps see the websites at caps-a-holic and FilmGrab.

There’s a new Blender ‘open movie’, Singularity. Screengrabs are freely re-usable, but the source assets are only available to Blender Cloud members.

Five free commercial-use Tolkien fonts and a fine free Photoshop script to jitter the baseline for your lettering, so it looks more handwritten. Tested and works well.

Software:

DAZ Studio 6 beta (free) and Poser 14.0.372. (paid).

Poser 12 is still $29 at Clip Studio’s Graphixly store.

Everything 1.5 beta adds drag-and-drop to Poser/DAZ, tagging and more. Makes setting up a Poser scene so much more pleasant. Free, and effectively a replacement for the much-missed PzDB.

The venerable 3D software Modo is no more, but now offers a Modo End of Life Perpetual License to its paid users… “for a limited time, a Modo EOL perpetual license exclusively for perpetual licence holders who had an active Modo maintenance agreement as of November 7, 2024, the date of our wind-down announcement.” Not to be confused with the 2D animation software Moho, which is still alive.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools.

At last, the ‘holy grail’ for Flux2 Klein in Edit mode! ComfyUI-PixelDriftFix: a Comfy node that fixes pixel drift for image editing AIs. What goes in now matches what comes out, in terms of an exact 1:1 overlay when brought back into Photoshop, so long as you don’t add tiled upscaling to the mix. Tested and working nicely with Klein 4B GGUF (commercial use). 4B GGUF workflow is here.

Flux Klein 4B/9B Multiple Angles workflow for ComfyUI. Works wonderfully once you fix an OS-specific bug in the file-paths of one of the generation modules, which breaks the workflow in Windows. My fixed version of the ComfyUI workflow is here.

Untested by me as yet, ComfyUI-Image-Conveyor a… “ComfyUI image queue that lets you drag in unlimited images, organize them visually, and process them sequentially across queued runs”.

Also untested by me, but some reader may be interested in a working Flux2 Klein pipeline for real-time webcam stream processing.

ShrinkComfy, new software to shrink your ComfyUI .PNG output images while keeping your workflows inside them. For this also look at the mature Windows desktop freeware imBatch which does the same resizing, but can also blur or add a watermark if required.

In generative audio, the wonderful Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX for prompt-to-SFX generation. Tested and working. Commercial use. The larger 9B also works nicely for electronica / Eno-style ambient music production (up to six minutes), and is super-fast enough to be fun.

The model Ideogram 4.0 has been released and is causing a lot of fuss for its exact typography and ability to place elements exactly in a picture composition. Sadly it requires large twin models running at once, as well as a huge Clip, plus a VAE. It can only sensibly be run by those with an expensive 24Gb VRAM graphics card.

That’s it for May 2026. More picks next month!

Release: DAZ Studio 6 beta

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DAZ Studio 6 is out in beta, going from 4.x to 6.x seemingly without a version 5. Still free. The new version is a surprise to all, and touts…

– smoother scene loading, with big textures continuing to load in the background even as you start to work with the scene.

– support for newer NVIDIA 50 series graphics-cards.

– newer version of iRay, 2025.0.3 (NVIDIA drivers update required).

– updated Texture Shaded mode, if you use that rather than iRay for your Viewport.

– ability to hide or show Library content, custom re-labeling, and apparently other content-finding improvements.

– adjust hair strands while still in your full scene, seems to be strand-based hair only.

– the Help system is now run by an AI chatbot. No other AI is in the software. No AI renderer or ComfyUI bridge.

Frankly, such a huge version-leap seems barely justified by the changes. If you work with huge scenes and textures, on a 50-series card, and fiddle with hair a lot, then it may be worth it. Many others will stick with 4.x.

Noted in the changelog…

– “Tweaked the minimum OpenGL version message”, though the newer version was not specified anywhere. Presumably an OpenGL bump is why Texture Shaded mode is now better looking in the Viewport?

– Some changes to formatting of scripts for version 6, and expansion of what they can do.

– A new SDK, so many older third-party plugins won’t work until updated by their makers, if they’re still around e.g. there’s said to be no Animate 2 plugin for version 6.

– “Fixed a regression in the script that backs the ‘Create Poser Companion Files…’ action!” “Backs” rather than “breaks”. That could just be a typo, or it could mean this script broke from version 4.23.1.42 onwards?

Gone with version 6, among other losses…

– 3Delight rendering
– the Collada Exporter (no great loss)
– Mimic and Mimic Live!
– the Photoshop 3D Bridge

Release: Poser 14 updates

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A new update for the latest Poser 14, now at 14.0.372. The web page states…

– a modern real‑time viewport … next‑generation OpenGL previewing.
– cinematic lighting tools.
– smarter cloth simulation, one‑click cloth materials.
– workflow refinements.

The release-notes add, among bugfix and other items…

Lights/Shadows:
– Hierarchy Editor now has light bulb icon to turn on and off lights.
– Gobo spotlight implemented for Cycles using Cycles native image node as input.
– Shadow Blur Radius correctly works in Cycles.
– Eliminated pixelated shadows.

Physics/Cloth:
– Added Cloth Type presets Silk, Rubber, Cotton, Wool/Fleece, Denim, and Leather.
– Added Rigidity Constraints to fine-tune clothification.
– Added painted-on Rigidity Constraints for Poser Cloth simulation objects.
– Added smoothing for soft-body/cloth dynamics during simulations.

Forum chat suggests the real-time Viewport is noticeably improved by the OpenGL upgrade.