News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Companion software

Liveportrait in ComfyUI

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An update to yesterday’s post on the LivePortrait standalone/portable for Windows. The poor quality and different-sized .WebP output spurred me to get it working in ComfyUI. And hurrah, I now have a simple Liveportrait expression/gaze-direction changer working in ComfyUI. With .PNG output of the same size as the input.

The controls are not so intuitive as in the portable, so I’ve added a note explaining what the settings do.

Models are already in the portable, if you downloaded that yesterday after seeing my post. Just copy them over to their relevant ComfyUI ../models/liveportrait sub-folders.

You then only need ComfyUI, these custom nodes, and the extra face detection models linked to there.

Slightly slower than the portable, four seconds rather than one, but then there’s no low-grade .WebP in the mix. The above workflow should (theoretically) also work on Macs and Linux.

Update: I hear there is now a newer alternative, China’s HunyuanPortrait, but it takes far longer, needs a powerful graphics-card, and is said to lack ‘human-ness’ in the output.

Even more progress in Poser to Stable Diffusion

Posted on by Posted in Automation, Comics, Companion software, Freebies, Tutorials 1 Comment

At the end of the summer I was very happy to get the ‘Lovecraft as a Zombie’ result, using a successful combination of Poser and ComfyUI.

That was back at the end of August 2025. But then I hit a seemingly insurmountable problem, re: potentially using the process for comics production. Head and shoulders shots, of the sort likely to appear rather often in a comic, were stubbornly impossible to adjust the eyes on in ComfyUI. Even a combination of a Poser render with the eyes looking away, and robust prompting could not shift the eyes very far. This, I think, was a problem with my otherwise perfect combo of Canny, Img2Img, three LoRAs with a precise mix, and other factors. The workflow was robust with different Poser renders, but on ‘head and shoulders’ renders the eyes could only be forced slightly away from looking at the viewer/camera. It’s the curse of the “must stare at the camera” default built into AI image models, I guess.

But of course the last thing you want in a comic is the characters looking at the reader. So some solution was needed, since prompting was not going to do it. Special LoRAs and Embeddings were no use there either. Good old CrazyTalk 8.x Pro was tried, and (as many readers will recall) it can still do its thing on Windows 11. But it required painstaking manual setup and the results were not ideal. Such as tearing of the eyes when moved strongly to the side or up.

But three months after the zombie breakthrough I’ve made another breakthrough, in the form of a discovery of a free Windows AI portable. The 5Gb self-contained LivePortait instantly moves the eyes and opens the mouth of any portrait. No need to do fiddly setup like you used to have to do with CrazyTalk. You can’t control it live with a mouse, like you could with CrazyTalk, but it’s very simple to operate.

LivePortait for Windows was released about 16 months ago, with not much fanfare. Free, as with all local AI. Download, unzip, double-click run_windows_human.bat and wait a few minutes while it all loads. You are then presented with a user-interface inside your Web browser…

Scroll down to the middle section, “Retargeting and Editing Portraits”. As you can see above, it’s very simple to operate and it’s also very quick with a real-time update in microseconds. Works even on ‘turned’ heads. I’d imagine it can run even on a potato laptop.


Poser – to – SDXL in ComfyUI – to LivePortrait.

One can now start with Poser and more-or-less the character / clothes / hair you want, angle and pose them, and render. No need to worry if the eyes are going to be respected. In Comfy, use the renders as controls and just generate the image. If Comfy has the eyes turn and the prompted expression works, fine. If not, no problem. LivePortrait can likely rescue it.

The only drawback is that the final image output from LivePortrait can only be saved in the vile .WebP format. Which is noticeably poorer quality compared to the input. Soft and blurry, and as such it’s barely adequate for screen comics and definitely not for print comics.

I tried a Gigapixel upscale with sharpen, then composited with the original, erasing to get the new eyes and lips. Just about adequate for a frame of a large digital comics page, but not ideal if your reader has a ‘view frame by frame’ comic-book reader software.

However there may be better ways. One might push the .WebP output through a ComfyUI Img2Img and upscale workflow, but this time with very low denoising. I’ve yet to try that. It might also be worth trying Flux Kontext.

For those with lots of Poser/DAZ animals, note the LivePortrait portable also has an animals mode. Kitten-tastic!

New for Poser and DAZ, November 2025

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Once again here’s my regular page of picks for the Poser and DAZ Studio software, as released more or less in November 2025. I also add in a small survey of other useful software and tutorials etc.

Science fiction:

1971’s Diesel Disc, now for DAZ Studio.

Sci-Fi Submarine Ship.

The ships probably deploy Military Heavy Mechs.

Want to escape from the mechs? Don the Gravity Boots for G8. I assume they do anti-gravity, as well as clamping you to a metal spaceship.

Gothic and horror:

1971’s Futuristic Temple for DAZ and Poser.

And behind the door? Possibly the Theta Black alien display cases.

The Curator of this alien museum? Perhaps the new AB Master of Horror for Genesis 9. Hmmm, now there’s a familiar face. Which could no doubt be tweaked into even more of a resemblance to the master, especially by adding suitable new hair and a 1920s suit. Neither of which yet exists for G9 specifically, I find.

Fantasy:

Hogwarts style FG Magic Classroom. I forget the movies, so I’m not sure how close to fan-art this is. But maybe not for commercial use?

Dragon Wings and Tail for Genesis 9. Plus an impressive Dragonscale LIE Textures Add-On.

Toon:

Bernard the Hermit Crab for DAZ, free.

Basted, a toon turkey for Poser.

Free Polly – Morph Preset for Aiko 3.

3D figures, poses, parts and clothes:

Fully opening dForce Classic Umbrella with materials, poses and hand poses.

Free Chorus poses for K4, Christmas carol singing poses for Kids 4.

A free female Santa Costume for G8F.

Landscapes and environments:

Shattered Ground, possibly especially useful for super-heavy superhero landings.

UltraScenery2 – Snake Bridge, a sort of English Midlands canal-bridge with a twist.

Simple Debris mound props in .OBJ and E-on Vue format.

Free, 75 crop circles in .OBJ format.

Giant Kelp for Vue, for your underwater ‘kelp forest’ scenes.

Animals:

Songbird Remix Shorebirds Vol 5 – Storks of the World.

Free Songbird ReMix Bundle of Joy, for storks bringing babies.

Historical:

XI Desert Port, nicely done and could be slightly adapted for Conan by hiding the minarets and adding some fantasy-style clutter.

Free Firefly Mats for Snood Hair, a mediaeval hair style. Also for Poser SuperFly.

A free Early 18th Century English Martial Musket.

A pleasing small Painter’s Workshop for DAZ Studio, for starving artists everywhere.

Want to keep your starving artist warm? Just add the free Ross Stove 01 stove and props.

DryJack’s GWR Saddle Tank Engine, complementing his extensive railway range. His Share CG freebies are in the ShareCG-backup bundle.

Tutorials:

A new 45 minute YouTube tutorial on Understanding Lighting and tips on lighting 3D scenes in Poser.

Scripts and other auto-helpers:

DAZ Studio 4 Scene Tools 4 – Morph Tools.

BJ Shelf Plugin for DAZ.

New software releases:

Poser 14 has been released. Has the latest version of Blender Cycles (aka SuperFly in Poser), and more. The $100 Upgrade for Windows is here. Last I heard it should upgrade from any paid licenced version of Poser, but that may have changed with 14?

* The Poser-friendly E-on Vue, now wholly free, has a further chance to go open-source if enough potential guardians/developers are interested.

* A new Web page for all the free/libre fonts used for David Revoy’s Pepper & Carrot Creative Commons comic-strip and books.

* The desktop edition of ZBrush is finally getting a new User Interface. The notoriously unintuitive UI seems set to gets its makeover early in 2026. The new UI will also be customisable.

* Those with large websites may be interested in LibreCrawl: free open-source desktop SEO crawler. Similar to the go-to Screaming Frog software, it can auto-check for bad or redirected links and output a spreadsheet.

Local generative AI:

All free, as is the way with local AI.

* Stable Audio 2.5 Official Prompt Guide. Most of these will also work for generating audio clips with Stable Audio 1.0, which can run in ComfyUI or there’s a slower Windows standalone on the Internet Archive.

* Flux Fill. Who knew? It seems this Edit model got lost and forgotten about in the tidal wave of new models in the summer/autumn of 2025. An Edit version of Flux dedicated to perfectly erasing (‘infilling’) items in a picture, or expanding (‘outpainting’) the picture by taking into account what’s already there. There’s a Flux Fill Workflow Step-by-Step Guide and note also the GGUF’s at OneReward-GGUF. This offers not only .GGUF files for those with lesser graphic-cards, but at the same time also a slightly later fine-tune by ByteDance Research — which greatly ramped up the model’s abilities to reach the paid-for Flux ‘Pro’ levels! (Update: My tests show it’s not a way to shift eye-gaze direction, and thus reliably get around the “must stare at the camera” problem).

* The new Gausian Video Editor, which looks like the first “local video editor for AI video production”.

* The amazing Z-Image Turbo was released last week, and such is the community enthusiasm that a unified Controlnet and over 300 LoRAs are already available.

That’s for now, more after Christmas.

Test: Z-Image Turbo Controlnet and a basic Poser render

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Success with a quick initial setup and test of the new unified Controlnet for Z-Image Turbo, using a Poser render as the source image. My source render here is the Meshbox H.P. Lovecraft figure for Poser, with an M4 ‘shambling zombie’ pose applied, rendered as a basic greyscale + some Comic Book lines, Preview render.

The workflow is ComfyUI. Z-Image Turbo is very responsive, so this prompt could be refined for facial expression and eye-direction. Also, there are no style LoRAs being applied here.

Turns out Z-Image Turbo does know the names of classic Marvel comics artists, but you have to do Jack_Kirby instead of Jack Kirby, or Steve_Ditko etc. Sadly it has no idea who H.P. Lovecraft was, under any variant of the name. Hence the different-looking head.

Very precise adherence to the basics of the source image. A reasonable 26 second render time. Apparently the ideal with this particular Controlnet is to stop it a few steps short of the final image, so that Z-Image has more of a chance to do its magic. That’s not happening here. But I’ll investigate that option at the weekend, so be aware that the above workflow is just a first try and is not optimal.

Z-Image Turbo is local and under a full permissive Apache 2.0 license, which means it can be used commercially and so can the outputs.

Stable Audio 1.0 in ComfyUI

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Stable Audio 1.0 is a free “prompt to sound-fx” generator, based on an ingestion of the well-tagged sound FX files at the huge public-domain Freesound website. As such it produces royalty-free sound FX clips, of up to 47 seconds in length. Here it is, working in ComfyUI portable.

Workflow:

1. Copy the 4.7Gb model.safetensors from the Archive.org standalone’s ..\Stable-audio-open-1.0-webui-portable-win\stable-audio-tools\models folder. The standalone’s .torrent file is the easiest and most hassle-free / re-startable way to get this huge file. Then you put it in ../ComfyUI/models/checkpoints and after that you rename it as stable_audio_open_1.0.safetensors

2. Download the 800Mb Google T5 encoder model.safetensors file from HuggingFace, rename it t5_base.safetensors and copy that into ../ComfyUI/models/text_encoders/

That’s all you need. Just set up the workflow as seen above, and you’re ready to generate. All the other guff in the Archive.org Stable Audio portable is now taken care of by ComfyUI. ComfyUI audio generation also feels faster than the standalone.

In the above workflow, setting “batch” higher than “1” seems not to work.

I found it is possible to multitrack/mix more than one FX, via the prompt rather than nodes…

A balanced mix between a good field recording of a man walking through dry leaves in winter, and a recording of small birds calling plaintively in the surrounding Canadian boreal forest.

New for Poser & DAZ – October 2025

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Welcome to another page of picks for the Poser and DAZ Studio software. Also links to notable new graphics and 3d software, plus some choice AI freebies. This survey covers around five weeks, mostly October 2025. As usual, just my ‘picks’ of commercial-use items and I try to warn about possible fan-art.

Halloween:

Flinks Rolling Hills – Scary Forest for Poser.

Fantasy:

DA Dragon Wrath Poses for DAZ Dragon 3.

Storybook:

A free Pied Piper Flute, with four poses for G9.

Free Pin Cushion with pins.

Free Milkshakes.

Toon:

Nirv MiMi for Genesis 9, and her Short Hair and Dress.

A comedy Rubber-Chicken prop for DAZ. Not rigged, but has morph poses including for the hands.

Pulp Sci-fi Living Room, in a 1950s Jetsons style. For Poser and DAZ.

Figures and clothing:

Walther 2.0 for Genesis 8 Male. I’m fairly sure this was at ShareCG. Now free at 3D Shards.

Conforming BDU Pants for M4, free. Military style baggy trousers.

Dynamic Wind Rigs for dForce Cloth in DAZ.

Landscapes and environments:

Hammerdeep for DAZ, a pleasingly believable little mining scene suitable for dwarves etc.

Flowering Trees – Laburnum for walkways.

Animals:

Bald Eagle by AM.

Saltwater Crocodile by AM.

Songbird ReMix Sea Birds 4 for Poser and DAZ, a set of ‘Gulls of the World’.

Are your seagulls feeling hungry? Feed them Nature’s Wonders Crabs and Crabs vol 1.

Free Running Poses for AMV_Fawn for Poser. Also for DAZ.

Historical:

GNBD Egyptian Masks Kings for Genesis 9.

Ancient Greek Statues for DAZ.

Viking Churches 2 from the era of Christianisation.

Vannozza Snood for G8F and G9, a medieval lady’s hat.

Pilot for V3, a complete free Second World War outfit, which could be adapted for dieselpunk.

Tutorials:

Using AI to enhance your Poser scenes.

A detailed tutorial on How to use Genesis 9 characters in Poser 13.

Scripts, shaders and other auto-helpers:

Artistic Shader Presets for DAZ.

Prop Rescaler – An Alienator Pro Companion for DAZ. Think “giant mushroom forest”.

E-On PlantFactory2Blender (PF2Blender) add-on. Both Plant Factory and Blender are now free. Note that E-on Vue, also free, also has a wealth of built-in export options.

zCamera Tools for Blender3D, free.

New software news:

The rendering plugin OctaneRender 2025.4 is now available.

FreeMoCap desktop, offering local “markerless motion-capture software to everyone” for free.

The DTP software QuarkXPress 2026 is released. Note also that their rival Affinity Publisher is now wholly free, bundled into the new free Studio.

AI software:

All free, as is the way with local AI.

The commercial side of InvokeAI has departed for Adobe, and has ceased altogether. InvokeAI, the other big rival to ComfyUI in AI image generation, now continues free for now as ‘Community Edition’ open-source project run by two unpaid developers and various occasional code contributors. The latest free version is 6.9.0. I assume there will be a 7.0, but after that the future is uncertain.

ComfyUi-Load-Image-And-Display-Prompt-Metadata, a custom node for ComfyUI. With this you can auto-load prompts from an image, drag-drop loaded into an Img2Img workflow, without having to copy-paste manually. The workflow below uses it, and also results in a batch of four Img2Img generations with each using slightly more denoising than the last.

ComfyUI-Layers, a custom node for ComfyUI. Save images, layers and masks together as a layered Photoshop .PSD file. See also ComfyUI_Layers_Utility.

inkscape-comfyui-extension, a custom node for ComfyUI. Turn the free Inkscape into a Comfy-powered vector image generator. Though note that the free painting software Krita now has reasonable vector tools, and that can also integrate with Comfy.

comfyui_pacchik_window, a custom node for ComfyUI. Use any visible window on your Windows desktop as a real-time input.

Beeble Studio’s Switchlight 3.0 desktop, free local re-lighting of 3D scenes, locally on your desktop.

Suza Voice Studio, a free local desktop “Eleven Labs alternative” for generating the spoken word.

Wan2GP. A local, free and… “fast AI Video Generator for the GPU Poor. Supports Wan 2.1/2.2, Qwen Image, Hunyuan Video, LTX Video and Flux.” Possibly also the latest SeedVR 2.5 as well, if you wait a few days for that to be added, at a guess. But video generation is moving so fast it may be better to wait until after Christmas become slogging through a lot of multi-Gb downloads and workflow wrangling. That’s what I’m doing. I had early WAN set up and running, but a few weeks later it was way out-of-date (in terms of speed, quality etc) and so I deleted it all to free up a big chunk of space. Wait while they all battle it out and then pick the winner, is my advice.

Image-MetaHub, a free offline… “desktop application for browsing, searching, and organizing AI-generated images locally”. Showing prompts, settings etc. “Designed for performance with large collections, focusing on powerful metadata filtering and complete privacy.” Has an 80Mb Windows installer. Installs nicely and does what it says. Excellent freeware, though you can’t right-click on a .PNG in Windows Explorer and “Open with…”.

An Isometric Game Graphics embedding for SDXL. Potentially useful not only for those emulating videogames, but also for those creating historical “bird’s eye” views for infographics. It should be fairly easy to get a starting isometric render from Poser / DAZ / Vue, for lighting and detailing enhancement with this.

And finally, makers should note that Fantasy Attic’s 2025 Annual Christmas Community Gift Gathering is now a’gathering Poser/DAZ freebies for the annual online Advent Calendar of freebies. Deadline: 30th November 2025.

That’s for now, more shortly after Christmas.

New for Poser and DAZ – August / September 2025

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Welcome to another round-up of the new items for Bondware’s Poser and/or for DAZ Studio. This time I survey releases in the quiet month of August, together with the busier month of September. At the foot of this post there are also link to notable software updates, and some relevant AI developments that should not be overlooked.

As usual these are ‘just my picks’, and I also try to warn if something is (or may be) fanart and thus not for commercial-use.

I welcome your support via Patreon.

Science-fiction:

* A free Modular Sci-Fi MegaKit, 190 low-poly modular environment pieces, generic future-industrial and “designed to fit perfectly in a grid”.

* XI Salt Lake, potentially suitable for enhancing an alien landscape.

* The Cog Regime Bundle, being the robot and its repair-shop.

* Phogron for Poser. Now with Superfly textures. I’m surprised that DAZ have let a “pure Poser” figure on their store, and wonder if it heralds a change in policy? I see a range of other Poser-only sci-fi alien Vanishing Point figures are also newly on the DAZ store.

* Simple, but effective and believable. H1 Hauler is a deep-space cargo hauler for DAZ.

* The cargo-ship is probably manned by the Synthoids for Genesis 9.

* A free simple SciFi Tablet.

Steampunk:

* Steampunk Display Pedestals for DAZ.

Fantasy:

* Oso Hippochera for DAZ Horse 3. A feathered horse. Also includes optional bird-beak.

* Ruined Mage Towers 2 and matching Medieval Bell Towers 1 / Medieval Bell Towers 2.

Storybook:

* A free simple Rocking Horse.

* A free Sailor3 Winter Set for G8F.

* 1stB Backyards Pool, of the collapsable type.

* FG Camping Time for DAZ. Everything you might need for a DAZ camping trip, apart from sleeping-bags.

* A free simple Piggy Bank.

Toon:

* Rocksteady figure for Poser. Fan-art, so no commercial use.

* Free styles for G9 Toon Brows. Requires the “Toon Brows Paint” eyebrow prop found in the Genesis 9 Starter Essentials pack.

* Hanging Out Retro Space Lounge, in the early-1960s Jetsons style.

Halloween:

* Figaro, a theatrical horse head for Poser and DAZ.

* Fangs for LaFemme2 in Poser.

* Freak Show for DAZ. The waggon is suitable for adding to your Lenore and The Raven matching props collection.

* Monster Skulls and Back to Skull packs.

* 2025 Fantasy Attic’s Annual Halloween Gifts for Poser and DAZ. Fabulous freebies throughout October, one per day in an ‘advent calendar’ layout.

Figures, accessories, and everyday scenes:

* SY Free Morphs Merchant Resource G9 giving sliders for various body-builds.

* FM Cave Crawling Poses for Genesis 9 and 8 Female. Plus matching FM Claustrophobia Caves.

Animals:

* Songbird ReMix Characters v4, popular North American ‘character’ birds.

* A free standalone low-poly AMV_Fawn for DAZ. With 4k textures.

* Megatherium by AM, a giant hairy prehistoric Ice Age sloth.

* Whale Shark by AM.

Landscapes:

* Overgrown Outpost total makeover for Stonemason’s Ministry And Return To Enchanted Forest.

* A simple Sandbank for Vue. Aka an ‘eyot’ when a few bushes start growing on one. From the same maker, there’s also a worn concrete River Enclosure for Vue.

* An old Weathered Retaining Wall for Vue and Bryce, and there’s also an .OBJ file. Phototextures, but presumably these could be replaced with a matching Vue ecosystem.

* Derelict Dune Outpost, a total makeover for Stonemason’s Urban Future 3… “Gone are the neon-filled streets at night and futuristic glamor. Instead, you’re facing an abandoned outpost in a desert setting with a cinematic feel.”

Historical:

* Viking Churches 1, Christian-era ‘stave’ churches built purely of wood.

* Old Bakery Interior for DAZ.

* Obliterated. 22 urban warfare scene props for DAZ.

* A classic usherette Cinema Tray for DAZ with G8 pose.

Tutorials:

* Efficient Crowd Animation in DAZ Studio: A LowPoly Workflow.

* Comparing conforming vs. dynamic vs. dForce clothing.

* Six things that ruin your Poser scenes… and how to solve them.

* How to create a background speed blur in Poser.

* Now that iClone has embraced AI, they have a new video tutorial on how to AI Render Custom Workflow with Flux and their 3D figures. Free on YouTube. Flux is not to be confused with Flux Kontext.

Scripts and Plugins:

* Structure’s Easy_DoF for Poser, now working in Poser 13. Easily setup camera focus and depth-of-field blurring.

* Structure’s Light Manager for Poser, free and fixed for Poser 12 and 13.

* AVFix for Poser 11 is now at the Internet Archive, along with a small tutorial on how to get it to load at startup along with Poser. It enables other older Python scripts to run in Poser 11. Not needed for Poser 12 and 13, due to the move to Python 3 for scripts.

* Free, Discomfort (alpha): Control ComfyUI with Python. “With Discomfort, you can write simple scripts to automate complex image generation tasks, turning your workflows into reusable, programmable components”. Another possible tool for integrating with Poser’s Python, to make a one-button Poser-AI render system.

* BJ Selection History Plugin for DAZ.

* 3D Universe’s Idle Designer for Genesis 9… “generates fully randomized, organic idle animations in seconds”. An “Idle” animation means subtle motions when at rest, such as a blinking and breathing.

Software:

* A video review of Go Physical which converts older Poser Firefly materials into SuperFly ready PBR materials.

* 3D clothes designer Marvelous Designer has a new Linux edition, which also incudes a “Python API” for studio work. Sadly it’s only available at their Enterprise-tier subscription level.

* Newly released is PD Howler 2026, with AI enhancements.

* n8n is an free open-source Zapier alternative which can be self-hosted. Zapier is commonly used to create custom workflows that automate complex repetitive tasks, especially across different online services. Likely to be especially useful for small production studios.

AI software:

Note that some links here are unavailable in the UK, due to what is effectively government censorship of CivitAI.

* Topaz has seen ‘the writing on the wall’ re: the threat to it from local AI, and is going subscription-only before Topaz becomes irrelevant. Topaz Gigapixel, Video AI and Photo AI are no longer available standalone and offline, and all of their software is now subscription-only.

* The free AI image auto-editor Flux Kontext now has controlnets of a sort, via a free LoRA and workflow. Also works with an Openpose render as the control image, which can be had from either DAZ or from Poser (with hands) via Ken’s plugin.

See also the new free Kontext LoRA RefControl which… “fuses a reference image with a lineart map, preserving the identity and style from the reference while following the lines and contours from the lineart control image”.

* The new free Kontext LoRA Change Camera Angle v2 moves the camera around the subject while auto-filling background. Working from a 2D image, which is auto-projected into 3D and rotated, then flattened back to 2D.

* Also for Flux Kontext, Game2Reality is a free LoRA plugin that may be of special interest to even the most AI-phobic Poser and DAZ users. It’s a LoRA that helps to give a more faithful result when using Kontext to make a 3D figure render into a ‘reality render’.

Also appears to fix the “must… stare… at… the… camera” problem.

* A simple Photoshop connector node for ComfyUI.

* Selector and switch ComfyUI nodes to make the ComfyUI UI interactive. See also the ComfyUI custom node to pause a workflow.

* Comfy’s more Photoshop-like rival InvokeAI is now at version 6.8. Now supports Segment Anything v2. Still free.

* An easy local LLM-assisted prompt generator, by using the free Msty 1.9.2 desktop (not the flaky new ‘Msty Studio’) with the Mistral-7B model.

Stable Diffusion learning:

* A free StableDiffusion CheatSheet 1.2. 833 Artist-Inspired Styles known to exist as named entities in Stable Diffusion 1.5, and their prompts and visual look.

Models used for the demos are either Deliberate v2 or DreamShaper 3.2 (current equivalent is 3.31 Baked VAE), two of the best early SD 1.5 models. This was before DreamShaper versions got pushed toward anime and photoreal to please the mob. Also, note that later Stable Diffusion base models (e.g. 2.1, SDXL and 3 etc) removed most artists and celebrities.

* A good set of ComfyUI extension tutorials with free workflows.

* Basic fast inpainting using any SD 1.5 model. Simple workflow, with no extra nodes or dependencies required.

That’s it! More later in the autumn.

Vue 2024 at last

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I’ve finally managed to get the free Vue 2024. The UK was region-blocked from the downloads, for some reason. But I’ve managed to get it, now that I have a stable fast VPN that doesn’t balk at a 2Gb download.

I can confirm that the Poser .pz3 scene import still works fine. Just tell Vue where the Poser 11 install folder is. It has to be Poser 11, as that’s the last one which had the required SDK. Vue can then import a .pz3 made by any version of Poser.


Two Poser ‘Andy’ test-dummies in Vue.

Real-world terrain-import works too, with world map. Just give Vue access to the Internet. Worth having just for this feature, even if you don’t think you’d use anything else.

Local Microsoft Azure AI voices

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The original Msty (1.9.2, not the flaky new Studio version) is a fine free desktop host for running local offline LLMs (‘AIs’). But it has no offline text-to-speech. Your AIs can’t talk, unless you get an API key and are always online.

One offline solution is the freeware Simple TTS Reader 2.0, which reads whatever gets sent to the Windows clipboard. Very very simple, it just does the job — anything copied to the clipboard gets read aloud. Great, but sadly it can only use Microsoft Speech voices, which are rather robotic and limited. It appears Microsoft has moved on from these, to its new and far better Azure TTS voices.

However, there’s a hack to get these Azure voices locally. There’s a handy NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter from GitHub, with a straightforward Windows installer. This freeware makes Microsoft’s Azure natural (aka ‘neural’) TTS voices accessible locally to any SAPI5 compatible TTS desktop software. On Windows 11, these more advanced voices are otherwise locked to the Windows Narrator for local use, and no other software can use them (booo…). But now Simple TTS Reader can use them too.

As well as NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter also get your target Azure voice from this selection of free voice downloads. Unzip it as directed and put it somewhere sensible. When you install NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter, you need to tell the software where the voice is on your PC.

After that, restart Simple TTS Reader 2.0 and you have a good local Azure TTS voice for automatically reading whatever is sent to the clipboard. Now when you hit ‘Copy to Clipboard’ at the end of a Msty LLM response, the text will be read in a reasonably good AI voice.

Regrettably Msty can’t automatically ‘Copy to Clipboard’ at the end of each LLM response. It has to be done manually, by clicking the icon. Ideally, Msty would add a “copy each new sentence to the clipboard, on completion” option.

Having Azure voices locally on your PC may also interest animators who’d like to have such quality voices without going online. Of course, there are also dedicated TTS AIs now… but they can be very fiddly to set up, require many Gbs of downloads and disk space, and also a good graphics card to run them. The above fast Windows 11 solution requires a mere 80Mb in total and no graphics card.

Automatic Facefix

Posted on by Posted in Comics, Companion software, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion Leave a comment

More progress in my learning ComfyUI for use with Poser renders. It’s not just about plugging in a character LoRA and hoping for the best, I’ve found. Automatic face masking and facefix + a character LoRA can be added to the SDXL workflow.

Here we see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ effect on a scene with H.P. Lovecraft in the middle-distance. Before it’s sort of vaguely like H.P. Lovecraft but also more like William Burroughs, and then after it’s much more recognizable as Lovecraft. The face in the picture is automatically identified and masked, then that area is regenerated at a higher size — so that the face can become more refined. And the LoRA tags along with that process, also making the character more recognizable.

Of course the problem is that it only works if the figure is alone. Otherwise every face in the scene gets a makeover. Another reason, I think, to make character cutouts and backgrounds separately and composite them in Photoshop. That said, I haven’t yet learned how to set up a way to manually paint-in a face mask (update, seems to be impossible while the workflow is running – easier just to output before/after images and Photoshop them together later).

AVFix fixed – now at Archive.org

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Poser, Python scripts, Spotted in the News Leave a comment

AVFix is now at the Internet Archive, following the demise of the PoserLounge domain in the Netherlands. The little fix was a vital one for Poser 11 users, and loading it then allowed a number of older Python scripts to also load. I’ve also gone through the MyClone blog and fixed all the URLs that were pointing to the now domain-expired poserlounge.nl site.

Not needed for Poser 12 or 13.

New for Poser and DAZ – July 2025

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser Leave a comment

Hurrah! Yes, another round-up of the new items for Bondware’s Poser or DAZ Studio. This time covering releases in July 2025.

As always these are ‘just my picks’ and I also try to warn of any pitfalls re: people not knowing something is fanart and thus not for commercial-use. Also, at the end, I note the the usual extras in terms of software, scripts, tutorials, and also some Stable Diffusion image-generation items.

Science-fiction:

Cybotaur for G8 and G9. Would also suit steampunk, suitably re-textured.

Antwan for Genesis 9, a fairly convincing ‘insect alien’. I assume it’s not close to being some Star Wars fan-art.

SE Animal Korch, a strange alien swamp creature, and there’s also SE Animal Lityn for the skies of your alien planet.

Easy Environments: Space II.

Steampunk:

Steampunk Owl for DAZ Studio. I assume it’s not fan-art.

Time Traveller Props for DAZ Studio. Be aware that the Time Machine is effectively fan-art, closely derived from the George Pal movie of the famous novel The Time Machine, and should not be used commercially.

The Cerebral Orb, plus a simple but nicely-done control-cap.

For a more ornate control-cap for the Orb, how about the new Halo Headdress?

A free Aeolipile for DAZ and also in .OBJ format. Five parts.

Fantasy:

Medieval Forest Village for DAZ. There’s also a home interior and forest shine, separately.

XI Fantasy River Village.

Free for Poser, ColorHUe Layers for LF2/LH2/LF/LH, and also for ColorHue Layers for Poser 11. Basically, give your faery La Femme a suitable skin shade.

Storybook:

Not much this month, just Ice Cream Bars for DAZ.

Toon:

Little creepy Bot for DAZ Studio.

Halloween:

DoubleD for DAZ Studio, a two-headed hell-dog with pose controls.

Dungeon Hound for DAZ. Probably looks better in deep shadow with rim-lighting.

Dagonae for Genesis 9.

DMs Gothic Vibes.

Figures, accessories, and everday scenes:

FG Poker Night, a complete modern-day room with table and all accessories. Possibly useful for making tutorial animations for learning the game?

Frames and Display Cases.

Animals:

Goat by AM Bundle for DAZ. Doesn’t require a dependency, and you can age it, add curly horns etc.

Nature’s Wonders Snakes of the World, Vol. 2, for Poser and DAZ. Includes a Boa Constrictor.

Need to have your character fend off the giant snakes? There’s now a Fully Poseable Bull Whip.

Raw Capybara for DAZ Dog 8, with fur.

Horse 2 UVs for DAZ Horse 3.

Landscapes:

Undergrowth for DAZ Studio, a sort of ‘Florida swamp’ miniature.

Butterfly Garden, plants for your Ken G. butterflies. For Poser and DAZ.

Historical:

Vanishing Point’s Renaissance Courtyard for Poser. Probably a bit basic by modern standards, but good geometry and AI can now do wonders with even a basic render.

dforce Short Morphing Hair for Genesis 9. Early 1960s hair styles.

Soviet-era Helicopter for DAZ.

Japanese Backstreets for DAZ, 1990s otaku style.

Tutorials:

In Poser, a trick to get the brow material settings to render a black brow on figures. Potentially useful for filtering the render for comics, where you’d want a clear black brow.

For Poser on YouTube, useful tips on saving poses to the Library, with morphs.

For Poser on YouTube, why the group tool is better than parenting.

Also on YouTube, using DAZ Studio and DaVinci Resolve (the free powerful video-editor).

Scripts and Plugins:

For Poser, an update to one of the nodes in EZSkin, used to give older Poser figures the ability to be rendered in SuperFly. (Scroll down the forum thread to “Here is an update to the EZ_CycleSkin (PrincipledBSDF) plugin.”)

BJ Layers Plugin for DAZ. Can’t quite work out what it would do, but I guess seeing it working in a video might help.

Software:

Winxvideo AI 4.1, effectively a poor man’s $50 Topaz Video AI for the desktop PC. Now greatly improved as an AI-powered video upscaler, in the new 4.1 version.

Ultimate TTS Studio for Windows / NVIDIA. A sort of ComfyUI, but for generating text-to-speech (TTS) rather than images. Though note that Comfy has audio capabilities too, if you install Torch Audio.

Blender 4.5 final LTS is now available, with updates that potentially offer a more robust and faster Poser/DAZ -> .FBX -> Blender -> ComfyUI rendering pipeline.

iClone now officially has robust ComfyUI integration, for rendering with AI. I see that Keyshot has also officially added AI editing, probably Kontext based.

The ComfyUI rival Invoke 6.0 is now available. They appears to be getting Blender-itis, in that the UI is constantly being changed and thus it becomes a horrible ‘shifting target’ in terms of learning the software or making tutorials. Anyway, I’ve moved to ComfyUI now and have deleted Invoke, so it no longer affects me.

I see MediaChance’s Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP) image filter system, and its excellent NovelForge AI for writers both have a $10 discount. Incidentally I can report that NovelForge can easily connect to Msty-hosted local AIs (‘LLMs’). In NovelForge just select “LLM Studio” as your LLM host option but input the Msty local URL of http://localhost:10000 – then press ‘get models’ and choose a model to use. “Save” the settings.

Stable Diffusion learning:

My new tutorial on setting up Working OpenPose with face and hands, in ComfyUI. Should work with any Poser/DAZ render of a figure. I believe there’s also a four-legged Openpose model, and I assume my workflow will also work with that. So theoretically you could get horses etc into Openpose.

Ultimate Openpose editor, for when you need extreme fine-tuning.

Removing colour from comic-book lineart with Flux Kontext. Kontext can also remove hatch and dash shading (see naked Moebius!).

Endless-Nodes for ComfyUI had a major update in June 2025. It includes the useful Fontifier — change the fonts in your Comfy workflows. Useful for those who, as the author says, have a “4K monitor and old eyes”.

The important WAS Node Suite for ComfyUI is now ‘WAS Node Suite – Revised’ at a new GitHub location, and the old one should be replaced. The Suite is important partly because it’s so widely used in shared workflows. But also because it has a “Save Image” node which can force 300dpi final output — important for those generating images destined for print.

Several useful Stable Diffusion models are on torrents at the Internet Archive, which are possibly useful for those starting out and on slow connections or who are blocked from CivitAI by censorship. The ‘Photon v1’ model is an excellent starter for Stable Diffusion 1.5 photography emulation, and also very useful as a base test for LoRAs since it’s not going to interfere with them in terms of style. While ‘RealVisXL v50 Lightning Baked VAE’ is your starter turbo/lightning fast SDXL model, and the vanilla ‘Realism Engine SDXL v3.0 VAE’ is for when your SDXL workflow needs wiggle-room that the fast version can’t offer.

Services:

Here in the increasingly-censored UK, I’m now using the always-running Mullvad VPN for all online work. A reasonable £48 for a year and a flat no-nonsense fee, paid for anonymously via a simple scratch-card sold and delivered by Amazon. It works lovely, and seems to be giving me faster Internet in some cases (YouTube, Archive.org and a few others)! I guess that’s because I’m now bypassing some ISP congestion in London, by hopping up to Manchester and then over to the east coast of the USA and thence to… free-speech and freedom! Something which seems increasingly rare here in the UK, and is likely to get scarcer. I recommend the service, but be warned that it doesn’t support huge streaming services (Netflix etc) and that Hostinger rented websites (such as this MyClone blog, regrettably) are unreachable until you turn off the VPN. It appears that Hostinger blocks all VPNs, which regrettably I wasn’t aware of when I purchased the web space from them. Here’s the workaround…

1) In Mullvad’s settings click on “split tunnelling”, where you can easily allow non-VPN Internet access for a secondary Web browser of your choice.

2) Install and set the freeware Browser Tamer to route / auto-switch any Hostinger-hosted URLs to your secondary browser, instead of the usual browser.

3) From the Firefox or Chrome Store install the free Browser Tamer extension / add-on in your main browser. Re-start.

4) Now you simply change your main Web browser’s ‘VPN un-reachable’ bookmark URL to read as follows: x-bt://https://ur_lovely_site.com/ (or whatever you want to reach). The x-bt:// is the prefix that tells the Browser Tamer extension to send the clicked bookmark URL to Browser Tamer, which now knows that it must launch your secondary browser to that URL. The Edge browser, with almost no extensions installed, is superfast to launch and thus may be a good secondary browser to use.

That’s it for now. More in August/September!

iClone goes full AI, with robust ComfyUI integration

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, Real-time animation, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry 1 Comment

Reallusion’s iClone embraces AI image rendering, with a new official ComfyUI integration. It looks like they’re going all-in for AI, regardless of the AI doom-moaners. Good for them.

We’re excited to launch the Open Beta of AI Render plugin, a powerful and completely free tool that bridges real-time 3D animation with AI-powered rendering, seamlessly integrated into the ComfyUI workflow. … AI Render uses custom nodes that connect Reallusion’s 3D environments directly into the ComfyUI ecosystem.

Now in Open Beta. Officially supports only Stable Diffusion 1.5 and WAN 1.3b video, though node-wranglers may find information about other types of AI image-gen on the Reallusion forums. Likely the new Wan 2.2 relatively lightweight 5B model will be of most interest there.

Seems to have a standard approach. The Comfy nodes appear to take Depth, Pose, Normals and Edge preprocessor data simultaneously from iClone’s real-time viewport, also marrying them with one-click style presets (it’s an IP-adapter) for refinement of output. The two comics presets are manga style, so there’s no western comics style as yet.

Interestingly also… “AI Video Generation models optimized for consistent frame-by-frame results”

How consistent? That would be the worry there. Still images are one thing but, even with four Controlnets working at once, are we still going to get slightly “wobbly” faces? One would also have to worry about shifting colours.