I’m pleased to see that 2024 brought a new unified patch for one of my favourite videogames, the first Risen (2009) on the PC. The ‘Elusively Patched’ uni-patch (May 2024) can be downloaded at ModDB. No sign-up required. It bundles all previous patches and community patches, and adds even more fixes. However, note that it does require a standard ‘original release’ older GOG Risen install. Or perhaps an old DVD had from eBay, or an extrication from the dustiest shelf of your old games collection. It won’t work with the newer buffed-a-bit 64-bit version now on Steam and GOG. But since that new version doesn’t support mods, it’s no loss.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
New for Poser and DAZ – November and December 2024
Once again, a page of my personal pick of the recent releases for Poser, DAZ Studio and similar software. As usual, freebies are only listed if commercial use for renders, or are obvious fan-art. Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
Science fiction:
Baja Bot, a well designed mono-wheel bot for DAZ. Possibly hangs out at the Old Factory which is also a new release.
The fab robot from the original Robocop movie, Robocop ED-209, for fan-art use only.
Star Trek original series TOS Phaser for DAZ and Poser. For fan-art only.
A free space station for DAZ Bryce and DAZ Carrara.
Need a creepy-crawly alien to invade your space station? Take a look at EArkham’s ZWorld Vile Crawlers I: Grubs.
Gothic and horror:
A free Vampire Hunter for Genesis 9.
Giger Dining Set, for a late supper with the vampires.
Steampunk:
Smoking Pipes. Note also the vampire-friendly skull pipe.
Fantasy:
Stonegorge Mountain Troll for Genesis 9.
Storybook:
A free classic little storybook sloop, Pemaquid Friendship Sloop. Also a sweet little Motor Boat.
Unusual Nutcracker Props with rigged mouths/beards.
A free Xmas Cat Tree.
Toon:
A new toony Venus Flytrap Monster from Darkseal.
A free Chibi 9 for Genesis 9.
Figure clothing and figure animations:
Bootzengluvs 008 MMKB Genesis 9, stylish superhero gloves and boots.
Ecstasy motions for Poser – updated link. Contains 2,600 .BVH motion files, cleaned and tailored for Poser human figures. All free and public-domain.
Landscapes and environments:
A timely and free Snow Truck for Poser. Also a dump truck, for carting away garbage about ‘global boiling’.
Nordic Lumberyard for Poser.
A Fashion Show Photoshoot Studio.
FG Business Office Bundle, possibly useful for those making training videos etc.
A free decorated Christmas Tree for Vue.
Animals:
Nature’s Wonders Salamanders & Newts and Vol. 1 expansion.
Nature’s Wonders Phasmids (‘stick insects’).
A free Rugged Wooden Horse for HiveWire Horse, with rockers.
AniMate Animations 2 for DAZ House Cat.
AniMate Animation for Horse 2 and Horse 3 and for Millennium Horse.
Historical:
EVERYPlant Carboniferous Biome for DAZ, for your prehistoric creatures. I seem to recall this was before the gigantic dinosaurs, but there were lots of other cool creatures such as giant dragonflies and centipides the size of a tiger.
Free Ancient Battle, sets of matched and ensemble poses.
dForce Lowland Pharaoh Outfit for Genesis 9. See also the new AJ Pharaohs Palace On The River and AJ Pharaohs Boat.
Bohemian Highwayman for G8M. Possibly also useful for items of hobbit garb?
Renaissance Helmets for G8M, G8F and G9.
Electric Bucket Bike and Textures Add-On.
A finely-crafted 6 Wheel Milk Wagon for Poser, for British railways.
Free Pour-Over Coffee Makers for Poser.
Fletcher Bridge, a detailed scene for the bridge control room of a U.S. warship.
Scripts and helpers:
Anilip3 Bundle, Anilip being a new lipsync and AI voices bundle for DAZ.
Python script to batch render MP4 video files from a set of saved Poser scene files.
Bone Minion for Millennium Horse Poses in DAZ Studio.
I think raw FilaToon renders looks horrible, but I can see some may just want them for ‘artist reference’ and a manual ‘draw over’ on a new layer in Photoshop. Thus some readers may appreciate the V3D FilaToon Converter, Manager and Tools pack.
Tutorials:
A full Introduction to Footwear Design & Shoe Rigging for DAZ Studio.
Always do this one thing when saving expressions in Poser and DAZ. It’s about the morphs.
For Cartoon Animator, (previously CrazyTalk Animator), Integrating Game-like Character Controls with Cartoon Animator 5.
How to set a default custom zoom level in Photoshop when you open an image. Stop the right-edge of the image being hidden under side-panels.
For InvokeAI, Advanced Techniques for Controlling Color with Generative AI.
How to bulk-extract metadata from a folder of PNG files, on Windows. Useful for archiving all your AI image experiments as a simple searchable .TXT file, with all prompts and metadata needed to later recreate the same image.
New software releases:
Darktable 5.0.x is out, the open-source Adobe Lightroom alternative for batch processing RAW camera images and more.
Invoke AI continues to develop into ‘the Photoshop of AI’ and is now at 5.5.x. The free AI image generation software designed for artists.
The list/directory “I battled through 20,000 anime girls… so you don’t have to” has updated. Tracking the best of the new artistic add-on LORAs for Stable Diffusion 1.5 and 2.1.
And don’t forget you can currently get Poser 12 for £20 in a Humble Bundle. Along with Moho 12.5, which was the last to support Poser import.
That’s it for now. More picks in the new year!
£20 Humble Bundle: Poser 12, Moho 12.5 (old, but imports from Poser), Paintstorm and more
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A very good £20 Humble Bundle, currently live. The Ultimate 2D and 3D Artist Bundle.
* Moho 12.5. An old version (formerly Smith Micro’s Anime Studio). The Poser Moho import was bjorked in Moho after Moho version 12.5. I assume the 12.5 they’re now selling will interface with Poser, and that feature hasn’t been freshly removed for the bundle.
* Poser 12. Again, I assume Moho will recognise it? I seem to recall it just imports saved Poser scene files, rather than hooks into the runtime?
* Painstorm Studio and its more hand-holding sister Realistic Paint Studio. Two most-excellent digital painting applications for the desktop. Though I have to say I’m still waiting to get to the registration servers for my recently purchased Realistic Paint Studio. I tried absolutely everything, and it was always unresponsive. So you may not be able to get Realistic to register. I had no such problem with Paintstorm on the same PC, which uses exactly the same registration system and is from the same maker.
It’s for a medical disaster relief charity, so you can of course pay more if you can afford it. A Poser 12 licence alone would cost you $29 (currently) from the Clip Studio store Graphixly.
Pick up the new free Vue as well, as it can still talk to Poser 12 (if you also have 11 installed) and you’d thus get easy export of saved Poser scenes to a wide range of formats and software.
Flow (2024)
YouTube playlist for the award-winning made-with-Blender animated movie Flow (2024). Includes three interviews with the maker, and two long “making of” videos.
Ecstasy motions for Poser updated
Ecstasy motions for Poser updated. The .ZIP file download now goes to a new Internet Archive page, where the .ZIP is now available again. Contains 2,600 .BVH motion files, cleaned and tailored for Poser figures. All public-domain.
Black Friday: Poser 12 for $29
Black Friday deal-of-the-eon, Poser 12 for $29. This is the full ‘Pro’ version, as there’s no longer any division between Pro and Standard.
DAZ Freebies
A good haul of DAZ freebies, for once. They just updated.
Contest: design an interstellar generation ship
Design an interstellar generation ship, win a slice of $10,000 in prizes. Live now. Phase 1 deadline for entrants is 2nd February 2025.
NASA design for a warp-drive ship. Not big enough for a colony ship, but hey… in space these things can scale up.
Wonder Animation
Autodesk Unveils Wonder Animation. Interesting…
* Film your sequence as live-action…
* … then an AI translates what is sees to 3D polygons and rigs (3D scene, figures, mo-cap, cameras, camera movements)
* … then you can render the 3D consistently and quickly as a toon in 3D (Maya, Blender, Unreal game engine).
The drawback appears to be that it’s an online cloud service. Not local desktop software. Still, I like the idea.
New for Poser & DAZ – October 2024
New for Poser & DAZ – October 2024. My personal pick of the new releases and similar for Poser, DAZ Studio and Vue, for October 2024.
Science-fiction:
We’re a bit future-lite this month…
Hologram for G8F and G8M and add-on.
Halloween:
A free Steampunk-Halloween Carriage.
Free Glowing Eyes MAT for DAZ Studio.
A very unusual podcasting desk, The-Author for DAZ Studio.
FPE Fantasy HD Skins Suite for Genesis 9.
Toon and semi-toon:
A new figure from Darkseal is always welcome. His latest is Mandrake-Root. Also new is his Bobbit-Worm.
Free poses and SuperFly materials for Toon Chicken for Poser.
A free One Eyed Spider, as a companion for the old Poser Eye-plants etc.
Mrs. Pumpkin for DAZ Studio. Also at 3D SHARDS.
Free Anime LIE Tattoos for Genesis 9 Toon. Also G9 To Toon Shaders.
Mirai Anime Hair for Genesis 9 Toon, one of the few that regular comic readers might not scream and run away from.
Characters (for non-commercial fan-art only):
A free James T. Kirk 2.0 for Poser and M3 LowRes.
Erik for Genesis-9 plus Outfit. Magneto, from the X-Men movies.
A free Vin Diesel For Genesis 8 Male.
Storybook:
Free, a Froufrou_Dynamic Clothing for Victoria 4.
Figure morphs and add-ons:
2nd Face for Michael 3, possibly useful for those who want to draw in the face later, e.g. in a comic-book page. Since you would then be erasing this prop, the no-commercial use thing would presumably not then be a problem.
Dawn 2 Expression and Viseme Morphs.
hisBodyFX Morphs for L’Homme2 and face morphs, for the current flagship Poser male figure.
Free Fiber Mesh Eyelashes for Dawn 2.0.
Animals and Plants:
European Otter by AM for DAZ Studio.
Nature’s Wonders: Frogs of the World Vol. 4. The Bullfrogs.
Corgi for Daz Dog 8, one of a selection of new breeds for DD8. The DAZ Store also has Buckingham Palce and interiors.
Poser Art Shader Series (P.A.S.S. Ultimate Bundle), still free on the ArtStation Marketplace.
Hedgerow Kit 3 – Fall Hawthorne Hedges Brambles and DogRose for DAZ Studio.
Historical:
Stonemason’s new The Streets of the Middle East.
dForce Louis Hair for Genesis 9, a loose periwig.
Free, the Kings German Legion KGL for DAZ, from the era of the Napoleonic Wars.
MS24 RAF FEb2 with Control Dials for Poser.
A 1930s dustbowl dForce Travelling Salesman for G9.
A 1950s/60s de Havilland Vampire Jet Fighter.
A cool van that looks like it’s from France in 1958, via a Bilal graphic-novel, XI NA Van.
A British Canal Narrowboat.
MD Classical Guitar for Genesis 9.
Scripts:
New this month, a free PoserPython script to batch render PNG animation frame-sequences, from a folder of saved Poser .PZ3 scene files.
Old but new to me, free DAZ Studio Rotation Scripts. Use an old-school gaming joystick to move figures, props etc.
Software:
On YouTube, PD Howler 2025 – What’s New? and Introducing watercolor FX in Howler.
HeadShop 2025 Full Bundle, plus an ‘Identikit’ based on G8 and G9.
Poser 13.3.864 is released (October 2023). I’m impressed by how much they’ve fixed and added since 13.0. And it’s currently just $99 for Poser 13, if you have a licence for any previous version. Which suggests that Poser 14 may be around the corner.
How to Restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software ‘PzDB’, if you’d lost it through Windows upgrades which affected MS Office 2007’s mso.dll.
DAZ Studio Premiere – a new subscription version.
Free, the ComicRack Community Edition. Your fave old-school comic-book reader desktop software, restored to life again.
Inkscape 1.4, the free vector drawing software. Filters gallery with adjustable thumbnail previews. Unified fonts browser. Opens Affinity Designer files. Now only for Windows 8.1 or higher.
The new 3DCoat 2024.12, now with “AI Assistant”.
Topaz AI Gigapixel 8.0, with much better ability to ‘recover’ faces that are turned to the side.
The free InvokeAI 5.3, for Photoshop-like (layers) local AI image-generation on your desktop PC.
How to get a Stable Diffusion 1.5 landscape to 1536px, easily and without horrible-ness.
Tutorials:
The AntFarm at Digital Art Live. 90 minutes exploring the capabilities and wrinkles of AntFarm’s great content, guided by the man himself.
On YouTube, fixing render crashes in Poser when rendering large scenes, and fix plant transparency problems and ambient light problems.
On YouTube, Improve the look of Poser skin textures by switching the lighting attenuation-mode away from its ‘Constant’ default.
And the Internet Archive is back online, which means old Poser manuals, how-to books and also some choice bits of old abandoned software.
That’s all for now, more in due course.
Poser 13.3.864, but 11 vanishes…
Poser is newly at Poser 13.3.864 as of 16th October 2024. Includes a September release which…
“Fixed issue where number of cores used for CPU renders was limited to 4”.
Ouch. Yes, rather useful for those with 12 or more! Check the big list of previous fixes, since it may be you still have an older version of 13 and thus are missing out on a huge amount of polish and hard-work by the dev team. Also fixed is a “memory leak” for SuperFly renders of more than 2048px.
Note also that Poser 11 has now regrettably vanished from the “Downloads Purchased” option on the official downloads page. Which seems a pity for late-comers, since 11 can happily co-exist with later versions, and a Poser 11 runtime is looked for by E-on Vue when you integrate the two softwares. Vue is now free, and I assume E-on didn’t remove the Poser SDK from their final release — but I can’t download the newly free Vue to check if 11 is still looked for / required. Since there’s region-blocking on the download and no .torrent for it.
Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition
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Now on, the Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition. Deadline: 7th January 2025. Prizes, including XP-Pen ‘drawn on the screen’ pen-monitors.
Categories include “Best Use of CTA5”. I read that as “Best Use of Cats” at a glance, which would be a fun category if it existed. But no, CTA5 is version 5.x of the worthy and very well-documented desktop software Cartoon Animator (formerly CrazyTalk Animator). All entrants get a two-month free licence for CTA5.
I see the latest CTA 5.3 as a $90 upgrade from CTA3 Pipeline, at the Reallusion software store…
The “first purchase offer” coupon is because I haven’t logged in for a long time, I guess. It takes the price down to $90. The facial mo-cap bundle sounds fun, but knowing Reallusion it’ll only work with new characters which require expensive additional packs to make them work. That’s their long-time business model — low cost for the core software, and then charge like heck for all the additional stuff you need. Though admittedly, as I recall, there’s just the one version (no more ‘Pipeline’) which is something.
$99 for Poser 13, if you have a licence for any previous version
Come Home to Poser offer…
Until 4th November [2024], users of any previous Poser version can upgrade to Poser 13 for just $99.
A good deal, and I guess it will also put you on much higher on the upgrade track for the forthcoming Poser 14. By “any previous Poser version” I assume they also mean Smith Micro versions?
I doubt it will go lower than this on Black Friday (29th November, this year). Of course, once Poser 14 has been out a while, it might become a $50 bargain at some third-party cyber-store. But I’m guessing that may be a while yet.
Renderosity Halloween 2024 contest – with prizes
The news completely passed me by, but I now see that Renderosity has a big Halloween 2024 contest with lots of prizes. Photography, 2D and Writers categories, as well as 3D. Deadline 28th October 2024.
3D World, RIP
The Christmas issue of 3D World, the magazine for 3D industry pros and wannabe-pro students, appears to be their last. Out now.
Following the recent demise of Digital Art Live, which faithfully served the hobbyist / amateur artist end of the same market for years, the demise of 3D World now leaves 3D creatives with no regular magazine. There’s still Imagine FX, I think, though it’s not much interested in 3D and in recent years its software news and reviews have become very sparse.