Confirmed on the forums from Nerd3D, for the latest version of Poser… “The 50xx [Nvidia graphics] cards should all be working” with it.
Author Archives: jonahjameson
Successful test – the Moebius variant
More testing of Poser to Stable Diffusion 1.5. This time the aim was 1024px output with a Moebius style that wasn’t his later super-slick poster/art-print style and was more like his old Heavy Metal comics linework and dash-shading. Combining the WASMoebius embedding with a LORA, and juggling the various settings for a few hours got me a repeatable workflow — not perfect and a bit chunky (i.e. the main lines are too thick, the dash-and-dot shading is too thin), but it’s as close as I can get while keeping it as Poser-render compatible as possible (for later masking and re-colouring).
Auto-brightness and reduce from 1024px to 768px…
Still not ideal, but it’s moving towards a Moebius look.
$20 on the Wishlist
My Renderosity Store Credit finally nudged above $20. Hurrah. This is the nice haul for Poser that I got with it. A Sixus1 ‘Beorn’ fantasy bear, old but AI can fix that. Caudipteryx, a prehistoric proto-bird, just because it was dead cheap and I didn’t have it. Again, old but AI can fix it. The Mari Lwyd, an unusual and archaic Welsh folk figure with M4 support. Natures Throne, a tree-throne that looks great. And AJ’s Pharaohs Boat, because I want to eventually illustrate an Ancient Egyptian myth when I retire, and it may not still be available by then. The boat also has DAZ Studio MATs.
The $1.58 Caudipteryx. As usual, the prehistoric Poser 6 renders don’t do the product any favours in the Store. Seen here, instead, installed and with a quick Superfly render in Poser 13…
Thankfully, they mostly ate plants…
Still not great, as the textures were for Firefly not Superfly. No short fur on parts of the body (as the real creature would have had), but that could be added in the Poser Hair Room. No space-suits for it either, so you can’t call it a Space Turkey alien.
But here is the Superfly render ‘AI enhanced’ in Stable Diffusion 1.5…
Successful test – adding LORAs
Adding a LORA to the recent Poser to SD 1.5 workflow.
Vintagecomic at 0.63 strength.
Crab Grass at 0.35 strength.
Moebiuscolor at 0.55 strength
All managed to keep the registration with the original render, in terms of re-coloring via Photoshop’s layer blending.
There are many more LORAs to experiment with. But these three suggest the workflow is robust enough not to be thrown too far out by adding a LORA.
Successful test – restore the Poser colour
Another Poser to SD experiment.
1. Take the final from the Poser to SD 1.5 workflow shown earlier…
2. Give it a simple “desaturate” in Photoshop (better b&w conversions are available).
3. Have Photoshop enlarge the crude original source for the Img2Img input, to 1024px. Then paste it over the top of the 1024px final.
4. Set the Poser render’s Photoshop layer blending mode to ‘Colour’…
The colours of the original Poser render are thus restored, which across a comic-book page and pages will give you the Holy Grail of consistent colouring across different SD images. You’re welcome.
5. Flatten layers, tweak Curves and Brightness in Photoshop, to add more graphic ‘pop’ and/or suit the intended lighting for your story.
Obviously the Poser source we used here is a bit crude…
… and you might get better making another finer render to be used only for Colour blending in Photoshop. If sticking with the real-time Preview render, note you’ll get better colouring by rendering Preview using more than the default 512px material textures.
Don’t forget you might also lay on a 30% blending layer with a Smooth Shaded render from Poser, made under a suitable light, which will add back some shadow and volume (for those hankering desperately for ‘the 3D look’). Then there’s Poser’s Sketch renders too, to play with.
Successful test – the final
A follow-on to my earlier tutorials, using two Poser renders and an SD 1.5 model (in InvokeAI) as if it were a Photoshop filter — keeping everything in the Poser renders stable, but having SD change the style to something that regular comics readers wouldn’t laugh and jeer at.
Here the background stays stable because the 786x Firefly lineart-only render, being used in the Controlnet at 87%, now includes the background as well. This stops the background from getting ‘SD gloopy’. The figure outline can be masked in Photoshop, because it stays the same as a figure-only Poser render.
Quite a nice strong graphic style, I think, that would be suited to a four or five-panel comic-book page. Obviously you’d work it over a bit with the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop, and re-ink some bits. And you’d power up the lens choice, camera angles, figure expressions and suchlike. Maybe also experiment with lighting in Poser, since you can’t prompt for it in SD when used like this.
The SD 1.5 model Photon is meant for photography, but it’s an excellent early model that isn’t polluted by manga/anime and does what you tell it to. Unlike ADAM it doesn’t get in the way too much, when you push it towards a graphic illustration. The WASMoebius embedding is not really needed, strangely, but I left it in anyway as some may want to experiment with pushing it further. The problem with doing that, though, is that you’d lose panel-to-panel consistency in the comic, which is the whole point of this workflow.
Enjoy.
Sale at Graphixly – Poser 12 and Clip Studio Ex for $49
CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX Ver. 1 & POSER 12 Bundle for $49.
EX is the multi-page version, but this is a very early v1 version (now at 4.x, I think?) that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. Know that the official Poser to Clip Studio export script stopped working in Poser 12, due to the Python upgrade. Also note that Graphixly have Poser 12 for $29 separately, and then you can spend the rest on the vastly easier comics production software called Comic Life.
Successful test – the background
Definitely getting there, in the quest to use Stable Diffusion 1.5 like a Photoshop filter. This is another follow-on from my two previous tutorials for Poser with SD.
The final result
To obtain this final result, for the Img2Img source I started again with exactly the same Poser scene, camera and light as before, but this time I dropped AS’s Hanyma Platform for Poser (now no longer sold) to the scene as a background prop. Poser’s Comic Book inking applied to both.
Raw scene in the Poser UI.
Then I made a quick Preview render of this scene at 768 (remembering to boost the texture sizes from 512), and then in Photoshop used the Glitterato plugin to add a quick starry sky.
In InvokeAI this replaced the previous figure-only Img2Img image, but the Firefly lineart Controlnet image stayed the same, thus giving a fixed figure outline that matches that of the Poser render — possibly important for later consistent colouring.
In this experiment I also added a Moebius LORA, which knows what our hero Lovecraft looks like. No additional prompting is needed to account for the backdrop, since the CFG is so low.
The final result at 1024px
It’s all going a bit ‘black on black’ (arrgh!) for this quick demo, but a non-background SD generation of the figure alone can then be used in Photoshop to mask (Crtl + click on layer, invert) and then fade or lighten the background a touch (as I believe Brian Haberlin does) so as to make the character stand out a little more. And ideally your comic script would try to avoid ‘black cat in a coal cellar’ settings, for this reason.
Simply using the new Img2Img as the Controlnet, replacing the Firefly outlines render? Nope, that doesn’t keep the detailing on the character or keep him consistent across a quad of generations. The Canny Controlnet needs to be focused just on the character, in the same way the comic reader’s eye is. Going from 768px to 1024x in the Img2Img seems to give SD some creative wiggle-room, despite the low CFG. Since it’s a low CFG for the Img2Img, there’s not much shifting in the details of the background. This seems to be the sweet spot: good model, Img2Img with a low CFG but slight upscale, and use the Controlnet with pure Poser Firefly lineart to keep the figure stable and in lockstep with your Poser renders. Presumably all this would also work for two characters interacting.
By having both character and backdrop generated by SD, there’s some SD gloop and later a loss of flexibility when putting the frame together in Photoshop. But one also avoids the need to mask, extract, defringe, colour-balance etc. It may be possible to prompt for lighting and get it, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Obviously for a comic you’d also start breaking free of the stock camera lens and use foreshortening etc for a more dynamic look. Poser has a special camera dial that makes that very easy.
New for Poser and DAZ – April 2025
What was new for Poser and DAZ, and related software, during April 2025? Here’s my personal survey of choice items, appearing since by last post on 4th April.
Science-fiction:
XI Cyber Hackers Room for DAZ.
KuJ Transporter for DAZ. And KuJ Headquarters / landing bay.
Lantressa Outfit for Genesis 9.
Underwater City in a sort of ‘1980s TV series’ style.
Steampunk:
Powerage’s complete Steampunk LAB for Daz Studio.
Fantasy:
Poisen’s new Nirvana set for Poser and DAZ. Combine the flat 3D objects into new and unique designs in 3D.
Cerberus HD – The Hound of Hades plus poses.
Halloween:
‘Lovecraft’ by KitBash3D is a new mega-set of quality 3D models, allowing you to fully recreate Innsmouth or some other creepy New England town from the master’s imagination.
A free Modular Concrete Wall with crude graffiti-scrawl. Also a free Industrial Gates Collection.
Currently free on DAZ, The Garbage Pile. A suitable spot for the entrance to some forgotten secret crypt or suchlike.
IBL Unlimited – Lighting Variety for Daz Studio. Dramatic lighting styles, suited to horror.
Storybook:
1971s’s Seaside town for Poser, and also available separately for DAZ. His work always looks good in Poser Comic Book line-art.
Horse Drawn Carriage in an Eastern European fantasy style.
Free Bead Animals.
Free, JK’S Room, a children’s loft-room. Plus a free morphing pillow prop for Poser.
A toon Stylized Pack in .FBX format.
Mole Arcade Game. A Whack-a-mole game for DAZ.
Figures and poses etc.
Alpha King body textures and armour props for Sanctum Art’s RD Phenotype 003 (ALPHA). The latter is off-the-market so far as I know, but those who have him may want this pack of extras,
G9 upgrade head morphs and specific actor head morphs.
Smoking Poses 2 and Props for DAZ.
Free Flying G8 poses, for superheroine G8s. Plus free Capes and Cloaks dForce G8F.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix: Birds of the Mesozoic. Prehistoric feathered birds, that are not scaly dinosaurs!
Nature’s Wonders: Turtles of the World Vol. 3, including the European pond type.
Low Poly Zebras, so you can animate herds of them.
A complete Fishing Rod set with bits and bobs. Plus PW Boathouse and a no-frills modern Fishing Kayak. Perhaps good for making ‘how to fish’ tutorials?
Landscapes:
XI African Wildlands desert gorge for DAZ. Also of use for emulating various videogame scenes in deserts.
PW Subterranean River for DAZ.
Stonemason’s new A Village by the Sea.
Jet aircraft vapour-trails as free .OBJs.
Large High Voltage Pylon, free.
Ship Wakes Vol. 1, free.
From Above: Low Poly Forest. Possibly useful for rendering tabletop RPG adventure-settings.
A free Wheelbarrow Update.
Historical:
Quetzalcoatlus by AM, a very ugly prehistoric ‘proto-bird’.
Holy Family Bundle with Nativity scene. You’d need to scale up Joseph, since Mary would have been smaller than him.
Horse Drawn American Pioneer Waggon.
Second World War German Flak Cannon for use during air-raids.
Scripts and helpers:
G3/G8/G9 Pose Converter Plugin for DAZ Studio 4.2x, free.
Software:
Release: DAZ Studio 2025 alpha.
Release: Lightwave 2025, with new and rather crude-looking lineart tooning capabilities.
Paint + 3D software PD Howler 2023, currently full and free. The current version is 2025. Windows 10 or higher.
Free video editor DaVinci Resolve 2025 update, now with many AI assistant tools.
Stable Diffusion:
“I battled through 20,000 anime girls… so you don’t have to” has updated, noting the worthy new artistic add-ons (‘LORAs’) for Stable Diffusion 1.5 and 2.1 768.
SDXL image-generation models are huge. So where are the handy .torrent files, for those with slow or frequently-dropped Internet connections? Almost nowhere to be found, regrettably. But there are two handy torrents at Archive.org, for the basic RealVisXL v50 Lightning with baked VAE, and Realism Engine SDXL v3.0 with VAE. Which should at least save you the hazards of some 30Gb of downloading. Also there on a .torrent is the SD 1.5 photographer’s model Photon v1, a great starter model for those new to SD.
Saving the ShareCG freebies:
Recently the popular and venerable 3D freebies site ShareCG, specialising in Poser and DAZ, was taken offline by new owners. Here are some links to free community backups.
SHARECG-backup mega-torrent with item pages containing instructions and tips. Help with seeding the .torrent would be appreciated, since Archive.org has not picked it up and seeded it as expected. Includes all of DryJack’s starter freebies for his vintage British railways items, among a great many others.
PhilC’s free scripts and software at ShareCG, saved at Archive.org.
Flufz’s freebies at ShareCG, saved at Archive.org.
ShareCG Download Project – Poser and Daz Studio Free Resources Wiki.
Bryce Material Collection re-uploaded to Renderosity Freestuff.
Some is also being slowly uploaded to Renderosity Freestuff by several prolific makers.
All links on my Poser scripts page(s) have been updated accordingly.
That’s it for now, expect another survey or two during the summer.
Successful test – the ‘proof of workflow’
Here’s a follow on from last night’s Successful test – Poser to Stable Diffusion enhancement, a proof-of-concept (or perhaps more accurately proof-of-workflow for the compositing. It’s crude, and he’s meant to be on an airship which isn’t shown, but it shows it can all work.
1. Rerender the Poser Firefly line-art at 4 x the original 768px (i.e. 3027px square) as a .PNG file.
2. In Photoshop I then run this render through GMIC and a custom filter for line-art (very similar to Dynamic AutoPainter’s Comic filter, but free). This turns the thin lines into chunkier ‘inked’ lines. Takes about 40 seconds, but does the job.
3. Size the GMIC result back to 1024px and place it over our final 1024px outcome from the successful test. Set the new layer to Multiply blending mode, and adjust opacity to suit. Flatten, and then select and cut out the figure from the white background. Defringe. Then have Photoshop add a thick ‘holding-line’ around the figure’s outline (Stroke 5px, black). This latter item helps subtly isolate the figure from the background it’s going to be pasted onto.
4. Reselect the resulting cutout figure and drop over a suitable backdrop. Here for speed I’ve merely selected a SD landscape experiment and given it a very crude tooning effect via a Photoshop filter — a final frame would have a much better lineart background. But it serves for now. Make a white layer behind, and fade the background a little by simply opacity-blending it with the white. This is why, ideally, you want figures and backgrounds as separate elements.
5. Colour balance the figure with the background. Flatten layers, tweak the Curves in Photoshop to add contrast and ‘pop’ (without things getting all ‘black on black’). Slot into the page-layout’s frame and add a text box. You’re done.
The demo is very basic and crude, especially the pose and background. But it proves that one can go from a Poser render to a finished comics panel and have it look somewhat acceptable for storytelling purposes. Especially considering the start point was this…
The workflow may sound fiddly, but once nailed down a Poser Python script could handle the renders in one click. Then a set of custom Photoshop Actions would handle much of the rest. Regrettably Stable Diffusion software, despite being built on Python, omitted to add Python scripting for UI and rendering automation.
Successful test – Poser to Stable Diffusion enhancement
Another experiment in using Stable Diffusion on a Poser render, as if it were a Photoshop filter.
1. Load and pose the figure and any figure-props in Poser. Here the standard Meshbox H.P. Lovecraft figure is being used, with a brass telescope from Steampunk Balloon. The M4 pose applied is meant to be gripping some rigging rope (not visible here) on a steampunk airship.
2. In Poser, use the Materials python script that ships with every copy of Poser, to lift the scene’s Gamma to 1. For comics you might also apply, as I did here, a good bright even light that tends to flatten things out (a ‘flat light’ as I call them). These measures means the dark suit can now be seen properly — one of the most fatal problems in making comics from 3D is the unfathomable tendency for makers to accept lots of ‘black on black’. Add a Comic Book outline via the Comic Book Preview panel, and render in Preview. This will help the Canny edge detection later on. Output to .PNG format at 768px square.
3. In Poser’s good old Firefly renderer, use my lineart-only render preset to just get the lines. This type of render gives you all the lines, not just the ones Comic Book Preview chooses to show. Render to 768px square, .PNG file. We do lose the hair, which is just an image texture. But the next step will bring it back.
4. Combine the two .PNGs in Photoshop. Do this by dropping the Firefly lineart on top of the Gamma-lifted Preview render, set the layer to Multiply, and adjust to taste. Here I also set a white backdrop layer, since the PNGs otherwise have embedded transparency. To lighten things up a bit more, I also blended a little into the white background.
5. Now start the free InvokeAI. Import your final Step 4 .PNG and use it for both Img2Img and also in the Canny Controlnet. Use the settings seen in the screenshot-combo above, making sure to get them all. You may of course need to juggle the prompt and negative prompt, if using your own test render. The Stable Diffusion model being used is the free Another Damn Art Model (ADAM) 4.5, available at CivitAI.
That’s it. Upscale the best 1024px result 2x so you can mask, cutout and defringe cleanly in Photoshop, if planning to composite the character onto a background. The intended destination is as part of one frame in a comic-book page, thus the roughness and a few imperfections (visible when the image is scrutinised at a large size) don’t really matter. The lack of contrast and colour vibrancy is also a good thing, as it can be tweaked up later on — it would be trickier to try to subdue garish colours / high contrast.
Should also work nicely (not yet tested) if you start with a figure + lighting-matched backdrop render. But obviously having the figure and backdrop separate could make adjustments on the comics page easier in Photoshop (slightly blur or lighten the background, to make the characters stand out etc). You may also want two very different characters interacting, and thus would likely want to deal with them separately and then bring them together in Photoshop.
The Stable Diffusion result is of course not perfect, but you can pick the best from 4 or even 8 image-generations. Here he’s acquired a ring on his finger, and the jawline is too ‘1930s heroic’ and not really ‘Lovecraft deformed’ enough. But the silhouette of the figure and prop match perfectly with the Poser renders, which means you can get consistent colour throughout a comic-book page (here’s how: greyscale, get a full colour render from Poser, size it to fit and lay on top, then set Photoshop’s blending mode to Colour).
One thing I tried along the way was prompting for Cary Grant (the 1930s movie actor). It does pretty well, and SD must have been trained well on his images. Consider using an M4 with a ‘somewhat-Cary morph’ and just prompting for the old movie star, for a more or less consistent head. Or try some other big movie star of the 1920s and 30s. I think the difficulty I had with getting an exact (Lovecraft) was that the ADAM model doesn’t really ‘know’ him well. But it’s the best I’ve yet found for this sort of ‘SD as Photoshop filter’ workflow, being very strong and thus working well at low Img2Img settings.
Part two: Successful test – the ‘proof of workflow’.
Release: DAZ Studio 2025 alpha
The DAZ Studio 2025 is now available in an “alpha” version. Includes among others things…
* Faster asset loading (approx. 3x), with noticeable improvements when working with Genesis 9 content.
* Completely rebuilt viewport architecture that utilizes modern graphics libraries – OpenGL 4.1 minimum on Windows, Metal 1.2 minimum on macOS.
– Completely rebuilt DrawStyles that offer better out-of-the-box visuals.
– Support for NVIDIA 50XX series graphics cards and new driver requirements for them.
– New scripting engine that expands the capabilities of the scripts you can write in DAZ Studio.
Release: Framepack
Relatively easy ‘video diffusion’ AI is here, and working on relatively low-end PCs. Framepack is fully open source and can be run locally. Feed it a source image and a simple instructional prompt, and generate up to a minute of video at 30FPS. With reasonable speed, and without needing a stupid amount of VRAM. Impressive. It’s from lllyasviel, the guy who made the SD Controlnets, Fooocus and WebUI Forge.
Animated PNG demo, 4Mb.
There is now a one-click Windows installer for Windows 10 (though I guess it might be hacked to use CUDA 11.x + an earlier compatible Pytorch, for Windows 7 users). Note that, once installed, it then fetches 40+Gb of models and controlnets etc. (Models are here for separate download). So you’re likely to need 50Gb+ of space for a local install. There’s no standalone .torrent at present.
It can do widescreen as well as square and phone-screen format. Appears to be limited to about 640px in generation size, so upscaling would be needed. No pristine 4k footage, then. Since it works from any pre-made image, the potential for animating Poser and DAZ renders seems obvious. No whining about ‘piracy’ either, that way.
And the fact that it’s free and can speedily generate somewhat lengthy clips means it has potential for generating lots of possible clips and then stitching a YouTube movie together from the best (though of course there’s no lip-sync).
ShareCG Download Project
The ‘Poser and DAZ Studio Free Resources Wiki’ has launched a new ShareCG Download Project page, listing ‘who has saved what’. This is in addition to the mega .torrent on Archive.org, which also includes the accompanying Web pages for the freebies (often vital for install and/or use instructions).
Sadly, ShareCG is now closed…
Looks like Blender Nation is also gone and deleted.
Release: Lightwave 2025
LightWave 2025 has released. Includes…
– new real-time Viewport preview rendering system (NVIDIA cards only)
– a new Toon Filter “for cel-shading effects”
– OctaneRender plugin upgraded
– a move to using Python 3, but keeps support for Python 2
The toon filter looks basic, and is definitely not as pleasing as Poser’s Real-time ComicBook.