News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Author Archives: jonahjameson

Poser 14?

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Email from Bondware and the Poser dev team, 17th May 2025….

Something HUGE is on the horizon! We’re working on something game-changing, and you’ll hear it here first! Keep an eye on this newsletter — you won’t want to miss what’s next!

This alongside a 30%-off coupon (now expired) for Poser 13, which kind of suggests Poser 14 is coming? It would make sense to launch in midsummer, and have it bug-fixed and ready for the ‘back to school / university’ crowd in September. Just my guess.

Hopefully the “HUGE” is something really game-changing like Poser 14 with a local-&-free AI ‘style change’ module to render Poser scenes in different styles. And not just another base figure such as La Femme 3. I know they’re concerned about copyright in terms of the back-in-the-day training of the Stable Diffusion AI image-generators, but ‘style makeover’ options are emerging which would presumably bypass such concerns.

More success with a Poser to Moebius look

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I’ve finally been able to get back to my Poser to Stable Diffusion 1.5 experiments. More immediate success, this time by starting with a Brian Habelin style ‘darklight’ lit Preview render (very low single light, Comic Book lineart in b&w, textures showing through just a bit) and then a Firefly lineart-only all-lines render. Combine these two in Photoshop, and you deal with the dark suit and the lack of definition of the suit detailing, at the same time. Nice. Img2Img as before, with the Poser render also dropped in the Canny Controlnet.

Deliberately awkward M4 pose and hands on the Meshbox Lovecraft figure, and rendered at just 768px, to see how SD handles such awkwardness.

The 1024px result stays nice and light, and doesn’t immediately start veering into the grungy ‘black on black’ territory which bedevils 3D work. And there’s no need to lift the gamma or adjust textures in Poser. The contrast is easily adjusted later in Photoshop. There’s also more of a Eurocomics ‘ligne claire’ (clear line) look than my previous highly detailed Moebius attempt. I like this simpler look. Interestingly, SD is colourising without being asked to do so.

Quite a high CFG for this, so SD 1.5 had more room to wiggle. Which means both the thumbs have gone wonky, and the eyes have been adjusted to look away rather than up. However, everything else is locked and we still have the Photoshop-accurate layer registration otherwise. So one could colourise the result by layering a Poser render on top in Photoshop, and simply setting the layer blending mode to ‘Color’. This would give you a base of consistent colours from panel-to-panel in a comic-book page.

Comics & AI – one-day conference in London

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Comics & AI: Critical Prompts, an academic conference in London, 4th September 2025. Could just be hand-wringing about ethics, copyright, political theory etc + angsty anti-AI students hijacking the Q&As. But I guess it may have some practical ‘make comics’ side to it. The programme has yet to be announced. The venue is in Clerkenwell, north London, so should be fairly easily reachable by train and tube.

Poser 13 on Linux with Wine – some findings

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Windows 10 support is ending on a cliff-edge, and 11 appears to be a nightmare of privacy intrusion + ads + hardware requirements + wonky updates.

Thus, many will be thinking of getting a new PC and installing Linux as the OS. It would be nice to stay with Windows 7, but the paucity of local AI support is going to be more and more annoying in the next few years.

Here’s what I found out, which may also help others.

The PC? Here in the UK, I see that one can now get a perfectly reasonable new PC, inc. a Saturday delivery, for a relatively modest £435 (Intel i5-14400 10-core CPU, 32Gb DDR4 RAM, 650W PSU – as specced at pcspecialist.co.uk). Then, on arrival, fit your existing SSD drive and graphics card. Then install Linux. I can’t afford that much at present, but it might be possible by September. So I’m thinking ahead here. Apparently a recent Intel i5 10-core CPU and 32Gb of system memory is perfectly adequate for Stable Diffusion AI work on Linux, since it’s the graphics card that matters for SD. I’d also like to try various other local ‘AIs’ such as speech/music generation, creative writing assistants, maybe a Python code-writing assistant etc.

Poser? But what about the 3D rendering in Poser, which I hope to pair with Stable Diffusion by using SD as a ‘style renderer’? The WineHQ directory – Poser information page(s) unhelpfully stops at Poser 2014 on Linux. But in the Renderosity forums in 2024, one usefully reads…

“I have installed Poser 13 successfully on Linux Mint Cinnamon with the latest version of Wine. Everything works perfectly fine, even the Firefly render engine does, which was not functional in Poser 12. The only downside is the dependency on CPU rendering only, because Wine isn’t able to pass through to the GPU.”

So, it sounds like Poser 13 should be fine… if you only want renders from Poser’s Preview, Comic-Book Preview, Sketch and Firefly. Fine by me in this case, as Stable Diffusion doesn’t need to be fed a Superfly render.

Wine runs Poser 11 too, according to a 2019 forums comment…

“newest Poser 11.2 worked right out of the box [with Wine, though also restricted to CPU Firefly rendering]”

11.2 was the first Bondware edition, and restored the .PSD output from the Firefly rendering panel. Meaning you could potentially maintain a Poser running old Python 2 scripts, DSON import of Genesis 1 & 2, E-on Vue compatibility etc.

Linux version? ‘Linux Mint Cinnamon’ is one of the most popular versions for Linux newbies, and has the slight variant Winux7 (which makes Linux Mint 20.3-Una look and feel exactly like Windows 7). Like Linux, Winux7 is free and comes with Wine pre-installed. Wine lets you stay inside Linux, but still run a large range of Windows software. Apparently the Linux version doesn’t matter, for running Wine. Winux7 also includes a “Windows 10 VM”, or ‘virtual machine’ (which requires a valid paid Windows key to activate). This allows Windows 10 and Linux to run at the same time, and to have basic things like clipboard cross-over with Linux-native software. Apparently vital for things like Microsoft Word, Excel and Publisher, since Wine doesn’t handle MS Office software well. And I assume a VM could also run Poser with Windows driver access to the GPU, for SuperFly renders. Update: an article in The Register suggests that’s not the case, and the VM can’t natively ‘see’ the graphics card. Thus a dual-boot Win/Linux system would be required, which is not ideal.

Drivers? Apparently the Linux NVIDIA graphics-card drivers were iffy and sniffed-at a few years back, but that’s changed in 2025. They’ve since embraced both Linux and open source. So I should be able to use the latest drivers, which have Stable Diffusion enhancements. Presumably the Windows 10 VM installs its own Windows NVIDIA drivers.

RAM: Linux OS ideally has 8Gb, a Windows VM a further 8Gb, and then add the software and extras on top. It thus seems like 32Gb would be the ideal, especially for those working with 3D + AI (who knows what may come along in a few months, that will need the extra?).

Photoshop? No longer a problem, apparently, as long as you’re happy to stay with Photoshop CC 2018. Which I am. Photoshop CS6 is apparently the fallback option, and works fine under Wine.

DAZ Studio too? Yes, apparently it mostly works on Linux. Install with Wine then also install nvidia-libs so it can see the GPU for iRay rendering. The downsides are said to be that the Viewport is sluggish when using iRay, and dForce clothing doesn’t use dForce. You also need to make Linux’s file-system not be case-sensitive (e.g. Dog is understood to be the same as dog and doG), since your runtime is likely littered with content creators who didn’t bother about case-sensitivity. It’s never been a problem on Windows, but can be on the default Linux (depending on version).

I’ve no idea if nvidia-libs would also work for Poser and Superfly rendering. I guess it’s “try it and see”.

Update: Also found wine-nvoptix which is… “a library to be used with Wine. It aims at allowing Linux users to launch Windows software using the OptiX API”. The maker also recommends installing nvidia-libs (see above, already mentioned). Also a couple of others, plus “WINE-NVML for hardware function detection from NVIDIA GPU”.

Release: Pencil Pro, for Blender

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I’m all for natural media emulation from 3D scenes. So I was pleased to see the new $15 Pencil Pro add-on for Blender, allowing your 3D scene to emulate a pencil drawing. The result is obviously not great at long distance (e.g. a city scene), where it looks like a point-cloud with the points mapped to tiny graphite strokes. Better for medium and close animation shots, though there’s still a distinct Rhubarb & Custard-style wobble. Which is charmingly old-school in its way, and would be acceptable to young kids watching shorts.

Suitably rough and sketchy and believable, if you overlook the polygonal angles from the 3D. No per-frame autocolour, but something that auto-colours greyscale (e.g. Akvis Coloriage AI) might give colourisation that is not too wobbly, when run frame by frame.

Successful test – the Moebius variant

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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, rather too ‘busy’, but it’s moving towards a Moebius look.

$20 on the Wishlist

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.