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.
Welcome to another page of my judicious ‘picks’ from the wealth of new releases, for use with the Poser and/or DAZ Studio software. My last such survey was in mid February, so here I cover six weeks.
As you may have heard, the large freebies website ShareCG is about to vanish. The new owners no longer want it around. Indeed, it had appeared to vanish earlier today, in a welter of PHP error messages… but is now back up. How long it will stay up is unknown. As such it’s being archived as a partial archive at Archive.org. Among other freebies, all Poser Python scripts have been archived. Including those of the master-scripter Structure, who did not put his scripts under the ‘Scripts’ category. See below for links to the rescue archives. I’ve also fixed the ShareCG links in my scripts directory pages for Poser 11 and Poser 12/13.
Science fiction:
Stonemason’s new Arctic Outpost scene.
Sci-fi Force Field with a number of variants.
Multi Purpose Pick-up, also working via anti-gravity, for your spaceport loading-bays. Similar in design to those in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Corruption Builder for DAZ, alien plants for a creepy planetscape. Or perhaps a subway infestation.
Need to blast those nasty corrupt pods? Currently free on DAZ, Secret Underground Props.
Gothic and horror:
Gargoyles of Notre Dame – Set 1: Northwest Tower and Old Stone for Gargoyles of Notre Dame Set 1 (requires the other set). Nice.
Need a gargoyle-master, who sculpts/controls the gargoyles? Weird Neighbour for G8.1M.
Need to destroy the gargoyles? Just pop ’em in the RuralCottage Oven for Poser for a bake-to-smithereens.
Steampunk:
Steampunk Mask-goggles for G8F.
Free, a Curious Street Bin in .OBJ format.
Fantasy:
Round Barrow for Simple Grasslands Expanse (requires Simple Grasslands Expanse).
Currently free on DAZ, Giant Lore for Genesis 3 Male. Body and head presets for giant trolls etc.
A free Wreath Decor Crown in .OBJ format. Possibly useful for wood-gods, etc.
D&D Book with cover, clasp and simple open/close.
EArkham’s ZWorld Vile Crawlers II: Dungeon Monsters. Various forms of snake-monster.
Toon:
Veggies Collection for DAZ. I assume this isn’t close to fan-art, but check before commercial use.
A simple low-poly Cartoon Spaceship, free. Suitable for backgrounds, not close-ups.
Cozy Cartoon World – Kitchen Props.
Figures and parts:
Hair Pack for G9 Male, strand-based for DAZ.
13 Single Hand Poses, props scanned from real hands and packaged in a high-res .FBX format.
V4/M4 still rocks! Free, V4-M4 Rockstar Poses – Guitarists.
Show and Hide Partial Body Poses for G8 and G9.
Lon for M4, a distinctive male head-morph.
Currently free at DAZ, David 5 for the original Genesis figure.
Klyngar for Genesis 9. Fairly obviously a Star Trek Klingon male, so non-Trekkies beware of accidental commercial use.
Landscapes and environments:
Japanese Garden and see also the free Japanese Shrine maiden costume for G9F.
Need moss for your Japanese garden? The new Moss System for DAZ.
EVERYPlant Rope Bridge for Vue. Also available for Poser and DAZ. See also the new freebie Jungle Bridge for DAZ, with its own HDRI file.
Animals:
Nature’s Wonders Beetles and Nature’s Wonders Beetles of the World Volume 1. Plus the free Nature’s Wonders Beetles – Extras.
Songbird ReMix Cool & Unusual Birds 4. A pack of the most attractive and fave birds.
Anniemation’s Capybara. Similar in look to the one in the new must-see Blender animated movie Flow, but one can’t copyright a Capybara… so commercial use should be ok.
A new DA Sheep for DAZ Horse 3. Looks as though it’s suited to flocks rather than close-up cuddles.
flLittle Leopards for the Hivewire Housecat. DAZ iRay ‘spots and stripes’ materials for the Hivewire Housecat.
Historical:
A complete and detailed Medieval War Camp for DAZ.
Retro 1930s pulp sci-fi Ajax Spacewoman for La Femme 2.
Rooftop Base, which with a little adaptation could be 1940s Hell’s Kitchen in New York city. Most of Brooklyn’s kids didn’t have rooftop access, but Hell’s Kitchen kids did… and they often made the rooftops their ‘gang HQ’.
Archives:
On 28th March 2025 it was announced that the long-running freebies website ShareCG was soon to close. It appeared to have closed today 4th April 2025, but is now back up again. How long it will stay available is unknown, but it looks like it’s teetering and may be going down very soon. Save anything you want locally, now.
Given this, the site has been selectively archived and is currently uploading (hopefully) to Archive.org as a 1.6Gb .torrent. This includes the Web pages associated with the freebies (often giving vital instructions for use), plus the thumbnailed category-browsing pages (with page URLs, which will perhaps enable the WayBack Machine to show the full page). Here: SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb. Please note this is a new upload, being attempted via .torrent upload, and thus may take a few days to be ingested. Then it should ‘seed fast’ via Archive.org’s servers — though you should still be able to get the .torrent running, just over several days rather than downloading in 30 minutes. The rescue collection as such is Creative Commons Attribution, which seemed the best balance among Archive.org’s limited options. But please note and respect restrictions for individual items.
Also separate bundles for PhilC’s ShareCG Poser scripts and software and Flufz’s ShareCG freebies and Poser scripts. These enabled me to fix the Poser scripts directory pages at this blog.
Tutorials:
SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb has a backup of the site’s Poser and DAZ tutorials.
How to attempt taking a Poser Firefly line-art only render, to Stable Diffusion 1.5, in InvokeAI. With settings.
Make Things Look Handcrafted in Blender (Blender Geometry Nodes Tutorial).
Optimize iRay Renders Guide for DAZ.
Using AI to Texture 3D Blockout Renders & Transform into Key Art, for the free InvokeAI.
ArtSquirrel tests the state of 3D digital sculpting in the latest Blender.
Also, note that it’s been discovered that Library drag-and-drop works from Poser 12 and 13 across to the Poser 2014 stage. Since Poser 12 is only $29 now (from Clip Studio’s Graphixly store), effectively this means old-school users of Poser 2014 have an alternative library option. Install both, run both, then use Poser 12 simply as an efficient drag-drop Library.
Scripts and other auto-helpers:
SHARECG Backup 1.6Gb has a full backup of the site’s Scripts pages and files.
My pages for Poser 11 scripts and for Poser 12 and 13 scripts have been updated. ShareCG links, likely to be broken very soon, now point to archived versions. Not much I can do about older ShareCG links in my content surveys etc. But at least you can still plug the URLs into the Wayback Machine and see what the page looked like.
A survey of tools for extracting individual panels from comics in an automated way. It’s a surprisingly knotty AI/computer problem.
New software releases:
VoicePal, Windows freeware with quite reasonable offline text-to-speech (TTS) in US and UK and other free voices, plus the promise of more advanced AI voices ‘coming soon’. Tested, and it does what it says. But… no AI voices yet. Still, perhaps of use to animators and YouTube tutorial makers.
Test review: AKVIS Coloriage AI 15.x. Basically, it now offers the DeepAI Image Colorizer… but locally and for the Windows desktop with no Python-hassle. Which is nice. Interestingly, it also understands b&w comic-book pages that have a reasonable amount of greyscale on them, and keeps the page-gutters white at the same time. There’s a hefty price tag on it though, $90 + local sales tax. And the Black Friday discounts are usually paltry.
“Diffusion Self-Distillation for Zero-Shot Customized Image Generation”, a paper demonstrating another large step towards AI-generation for comics, which for regular comic-book readers will require hyper-consistent characters, hair and clothing. Though given ChatGPT’s new method of using AI like a Photoshop stylising filter (not yet released as local open source), such things may be moot fairly soon. On that you’ll likely have heard the headlines about all the ‘President Trump, Studio Ghibli-style’ memes ‐ that was the new AI-filter in action. Once that AI-tech hits local PCs, comics-makers sitting on vast Poser/DAZ runtimes are going to be very happy.
The fiddly but very capable comics production software Clip Studio 4.0 has been released, with an underwhelming “Draw directly on 3D models” feature. Which is not like Grease Pencil in Blender, it turns out. Pity.
That’s for now, more later in the springtime!
Library content drag-and-drop works from Poser 13 to the Poser Pro 2014 stage, when both are loaded at the same time. I assume drag-and-drop will also work from Poser 12, which means that old-school Poser Pro 2014 users now have another option for a runtime indexing-and-finding Library, at relatively low-cost (Poser 12 is currently $29 from Graphixly, and will install happily alongside older/newer versions).
Set up and pose your 3D figure, in Poser 12 or 13. Use this Disconnect bump maps script and Poser render preset for P13 to get a clean old-school Firefly ‘line-art only’ render with ‘the speckles’ removed, rendered at maybe 1800px. The advantage of this, over Poser’s Comic Book mode, is that Firefly shows all lines.
Reduce it to 768px, take it into a good Stable Diffusion 1.5 model and use with ControlNet ‘Canny’ and suitable prompts (seen here). Here the free model/checkpoint is ADAM v4.5. Don’t forget Clip Skip 0, which seems to help in getting a plain background.
The 3D figure used here is from Nursoda. Very difficult to get the hippy ‘pebble glasses’, and the head shape and hair ‘go manga’. It’s also difficult to prevent SD from trying to make everything female. If you could find a Poser character which didn’t go manga/female, and which 99% kept the shape/outline, then you could use a colour render from Poser as a base colorising blending-layer in Photoshop. Doing that could give you consistent colouring for comics etc.
Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser, Tutorials, Vue
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Time for another survey of the new releases for Poser and DAZ Studio, and also a nod to other notable software, utilities and tutorials. My last such survey was at Christmas 2024, so this covers about the last seven weeks. Just my picks, as usual.
Science fiction:
DMs Hexa Zone, a rare sci-fi setting from DM. For DAZ. See also the new SE Futuristic Hall.
Hover Vehicle for Poser. Nice, in that I can almost believe that’s some kind of Hyperloop-compatible flying car of the future.
Retro-cycberpunk XI Neo Noir Car. Possibly going to gatecrash the new Sci-Fi Transport Tunnel.
Peep Box, for a sleazy ‘lower levels’ sci-fi setting. For Poser and DAZ.
Colony Meat Locker for body/robot storage on a space colony. Poser and DAZ.
Gothic and horror:
Poisen’s new Elysium. 30 different .OBJs for creating unique combinations for your celtic/tribal walls, shrines etc.
A free Catbus, sort of Miyazake fan-art, so I guess it shouldn’t be used commercially.
Currently free on DAZ, the i13 Library Pose Collection, half of which are non-sexy poses suitable for gothic libraries etc.
JW ShapelessM Morphs for Genesis 9. For when your guy gets stuck in the teleporter.
High-quality sheet Draped Ghosts.
Steampunk:
AJ Steampunk Lighthouse for Poser and DAZ.
Steampunk Mask for GF8.
dForce Princess Petra’s Gothic Dress for Genesis 9.
XI GSB Classroom, a Steampunk classroom. Possibly near to fan-art (? Harry Potter etc), so check before commercial use. Also a matching XI GSB School Courtyard. See also the new Punting on the River and Cathedral Hallway Restaurant which could easily serve as the headmaster’s office/staff-room. All for DAZ.
Fantasy:
DMs Hidden Treasure for DAZ Studio.
SY Essential Creature Morphs Genesis 9. Hooves, three fingers etc.
Storybook:
Cozy Cartoon World Living Room for DAZ Studio.
RA Warm and Cute K4, warm winterwear for Kids 4 figures.
Toon:
Free Kappa-kun for Poser, a Japanese-influenced standalone figure.
Free, Tobby elfkin preset for Genesis 8 Male.
Free, toon vampires for Genesis 9 Toon.
Characters, figure clothing and figure animations:
Elon for M3 LowRes. Free.
Free hair and eyebrows meshes for Genesis 9.
Landscapes and environments:
Isis Lock, a classic set of British inland canal locks, with a Millennium-style cast-iron bridge.
Industrial Warehouse Environment for DAZ. Possibly useful for making workplace training videos and graphics. Though it’s quite small (no long aisles for the pickers to race around on electro-trolleys).
EVERYPlant US Great Basin Biome for Poser, a complete plant set. Also for DAZ.
EVERYPlant Great Basin Bristlecone Pine for Poser. Looking like just the sort of thing you might want to export to Vue. Vue export still works, you just need to also have Poser 11 on the PC, so Vue can see the Poser 11 SDK.
A free Dragons Lair and bridge. For DAZ.
Waterfall Builder kit for DAZ. See also the new Riverstone Gorge for DAZ.
Animals:
Nature’s Wonders Mantises and Nature’s Wonders Mantises of the World Volume 1 expansion. Biologically correct posable models. For Poser and DAZ.
Wombat by AM, with wearable fur preset.
Quoll by AM, with wearable fur preset. Apparently these are real, but with a little recolour could easily be fantasy/sci-fi.
Herbie, a sandy desert style chicken.
Emperor Penguins for DAZ, with furry chicks.
Historical:
A huge but rather believable castle for Bryce, Bryce_Castle_1. Free. Could be exported to Vue.
MS24 Abandoned Train Depot for Vue.
BV141 Asymmetrical Reconnaissance Aircraft. A wartime German spy plane. For Poser and DAZ.
Tutorials:
Creating texture overlays in Poser and fixing any broken Python scripts.
Optimize iRay Renders in DAZ.
Tutorial: Where and How to Install Poser Content for DS – Part 1 and Part 2.
How to photobash (combine multiple assets into a final image) 10x faster using the ‘Photoshop of AI’, the free Invoke AI.
“Weird black and white blobs might be the secret to controlling AI images”. Again, a tutorial for the free Invoke AI. Stark contrast changes can ‘guide’ the underlying image formation process, along with correct prompting.
David Revoy tells you all about All about LIQUIFY in Krita on YouTube. Krita is the free painting and drawing software, and now quite mature.
Updated, the AI list for artists using Stable Diffusion 1.5. New LORAs which offer particular non-photoreal styles in painting, sketching, illustration etc.
Scripts and other auto-helpers:
A script for DAZ Studio that tells you what version of Genesis character is, in your saved scene.
A useful Python script for Stable Diffusion users who have collected large local LORA stashes. The script reads the LORA name from the plaintext .PNG metadata, as found in an old image you might want to recreate. It then looks in your local LORA library, finds the LORA required to recreate that image, and copies it into your active Stable Diffusion LORA folder. You’re then ready to go, without a lot of faffing around trying to manually find the required LORA.
Got an Amazon WishList? Your personal notes on your items all became unreadably small and grey, recently. The browser UserScript ‘Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix’ fixes the problem.
New software releases:
The new release Audiblez 4.0, now with a graphical user-interface. Free and open source. Create local AI audio voice readings and audiobooks, using the CPU rather than your graphics card. Possibly useful for animators who require non-robotic voices and long-form audio, produced locally.
The excellent freeware Anytxt Searcher has a new release and can now also run on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows. It quickly searches across the text inside your desktop PC’s documents. You can use regex for proximity search, by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search-type drop-down and then using (for example)…
\b(?:billboard\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?script|script\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?billboard)\b
This regex will find all instances of billboard occurring within nine words of script. You can see how useful proximity search might be if you have one of the local archives of Poser forums, such as those available on Archive.org.
The Poser 12 for $29 offer is still on, at Clip Studio’s web store Graphixly.
That’s all for now! More picks in the springtime.
Audiblez is a free open-source AI audiobook maker using AI voices, and (as of this week) it has a graphical user-interface (GUI). It runs locally and installs on pure Python 3.x with no CUDA or PyTorch dependencies (unless you want them). It runs on the PC’s CPU not the graphics card, and (though slow) even older PCs should be able to ‘read’ a book to an audiobook audio-file overnight.
This may interest those otherwise unable to run local text-to-speech AI systems, for instance because they have an antique graphics card or Windows 7 on the target PC.
Requires: Official Python 3.7.1 64-bit or higher, or use the current Python fork for Windows 7.
Background information: Windows 7 users are blocked from running almost all local AIs due to the impassable combination of requirements for: i) NVIDIA graphics cards drivers, ii) CUDA; and iii) the PyTorch add-on for Python. The above audiobook-making software only requires pure Python 3.x and enough CPU power.
Use case: Generating AI commercial-use audio voices at length, for free, to accompany an animation, videogame, motion-comic etc.
Posted in Companion software, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
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Available in May 2025, the new Digits off-the-shelf AI box direct from NVIDIA, starting at $3,000.
Inside will be a special AI-tuned Linux system, NVIDIA’s special GB10 processor and 128GB of memory, and it should easily run local AI models of “up to 200B” in size. 70B would usually be the maximum for a local PC, so this is effectively a doubling of that capability, plus some overhead left over to run other software. Such as audio voice recognition/synthesis, potentially meaning that models such as an advanced human-ish roleplaying LLM could have real-time fluid voice conversations with a human.
The box can run as a standalone, or be plugged into a normal PC. Two can be placed side-by-side to make an ‘AI super-processor’ capable of running the largest and (arguably) the most powerful AIs. Two boxes should come in at under $10,000, thus superpowered AI becomes affordable for many small businesses. Provided they can afford the electricity — I’ve heard nothing about power consumption as yet.
It would be very interesting to see what creative hackers and tweakers can do with a $10,000 setup and the ability to run multiple AIs and other software, and have the AIs control the software (e.g. Poser, which ‘talks Python’ just as the AIs do) and talk to each other. A complete virtual movie-studio, with voice-actors, in your garage?
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!
Posted in Companion software, Poser, Poser 12, Special Offers and Discounts, Spotted in the News
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
How to restore Drag and Drop from the Poser and DAZ library software PzDB, on an older Windows OS.
Problem: Likely you have been installing various Microsoft updates and C++ redistributables and so on, on an older version of Windows. These may have overwritten elements which enable drag and drop of files from software which uses an underlying MS Access 2007 database. As a consequence, your PzDB may have lost its ability to drag-and-drop from the search results, to load the chosen file into your Poser viewport.
Solution: Get the Microsoft Office Access Runtime and Data Connectivity 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) at the Microsoft Update Catalog. There get the accessrtsp3-en-us cab.
Once downloaded, right-click on and unzip the .cab as if it was a normal .zip file. Once done, double-click the accessrtsp3-en-us.msp installer. The Access 2007 components will be updated. There will be no ‘success’ message, but you can tell if it worked. No need to reboot now.
Launch PzDB and your drag-and-drop capability should have returned. It worked for me. Also seems to have repaired some lost functionality on the top menu icons.
Be aware that this will overwrite the core mso.dll in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12 with a possibly older version than you have. This may affect Office 2007 programs such as Word and Excel.
The alterative for drag-and-drop is to use the bare-bones but excellent external AIR library in Poser Pro 2014. This does, however, require that Poser 2014 be running first. You also need to update AIR to the latest version, for security.
New for Poser and DAZ, in August and September 2024. My last such survey was on 1st August. So this is a two-month personal pick of what’s new in Poser and DAZ Studio, and also in some of the more interesting AI tools. As usual, freebies are listed only if commercial-use for renders.
Science-fiction:
Perhaps Earth’s last link with the Alpha Centuri relay-beacons, the old abandoned Parabolic Dish!
A free MegaCity Wall for DAZ.
Colony Surfaces II for Poser and DAZ…. “two 360-degree environments and 11 building and structure props” for the first pioneer colony on another world.
Squat Bot for DAZ. Probably destined to battle the also-new Cat-bot for supremacy of the alley-way.
Flinks Space 2 – Planets Add-On and Flinks Space 2 – Planets 2 Add-On for Poser and DAZ.
Power Worm for DAZ, a Dune / Star Wars sandworm lookalike. Plus the matching Danger in the Sand environment.
Futuristic Headdress Volume 2 for Genesis 9.
Oso Robot Servant for Genesis 9.
A Jetson’s style Retro Future scene for Poser. And a Retro Sci-Fi Spaceship to park on the lawn.
James T. Kirk 2.0, free for Poser. A head morph for M3 LowRes.
Steampunk:
XI Steampunk City, probably crawling with XI Steam Bots released by the dastardly moustache-twirling villain.
Lake Village set for Poser, by 1971s.
Magic Keys for Poser and DAZ. Including some with wings.
XI Fantasy Ornithopter. The NASA-style landing legs could probably be adapated to make it more steampunky.
FG Clock Collection of vintage clocks.
Fantasy:
Free base set of G8 Fantasy Shapes.
A somewhat hobbit-like Barnabus Ragwort figure for DAZ.
Halloween:
Sewer Lair for Poser from 1971s.
And deep in the sewer? Probably a pack of the new Worm Creatures for Poser. Great to see a new standalone unique Poser-monster released.
Worms probably controlled by the guy wearing the new Mad Scientist Outfit for G9.
HF Plutonium for Genesis 9, an Arabian-style Genie / Jinn figure for DAZ. For the clothes see Cybertenko’s new Three Kings – King Balthasar for Genesis 8 Males outfit.
There are also various Vanishing Point monsters going through the Renderosity store, which I think are either D&D or from permissive videogames. Careful of commercial use, on these.
2024 Fantasy Attic’s Annual Halloween Gifts freebies page. Live now, but as yet unfilled. I imagine that, as usual, quality donations of Poser / DAZ free content are welcome.
People and clothes:
The big release of the month is the base figure and newly quad-mesh Dawn 2 for Poser, plus Dawn 2 Head & Body Shapes and RigControl for Dawn2. Also a large number of items of clothing and so on, too many to link. She’s aka “D2” for short.
The forum threads for Dawn 2 help and demo renders are over on the HiveWire 3D Community.
Taking your characters off to an election rally? Then you’ll be wanting the free pack of 21 poses for G8M for the Zeddicuss Pickup Truck.
SuperHero Ready for G8M Volume 3 and Volume 4. Looking good for posed pin-ups for fan-art, as well as for use in making comics.
Storybook:
Arah3D Sunflower Summer Hats for G8F and G9.
Wood Anemone for DAZ. One of the plants that in the British Isles heralds the coming springtime. Plus a complete EVERYPlant European Oak Forest Biome for DAZ to put it in.
Edna, a free older female for G8F. Possibly a grandma storyteller.
Architecture:
Daycare Room. Specially designed for hyperactive sugared-up tots, by the look of it.
And when the daycare room’s hideous strip-lighting and eye-burning psychedelic colours have caused intense nausea, whisk the kids off to the new Hospital for DAZ. Designed in the Eastern and Southern European style.
STZ Shoe shop for Poser, and the maker also has various G8/G9 shoe shopping pose packs which match. Also for DAZ.
And over on the DAZ Store, Shoe Closet 01 Bundle for G8F and G9F.
KFE Japanese Office Vignette for DAZ. Possibly useful for manga creators.
A complete Thai-style River Village for DAZ.
Animals and their environments:
Songbird ReMix Trogons. and Songbird ReMix Barbets.
Peepachu the chicken.
A complete Carboniferous Biome for Vue, suited to your DAZ dinosaur exports.
DAZ UltraScenery2 – Australia.
Vermin Pack for DAZ, larvae, scorpions and more. Might be combined with Photo Props: Hollow Rocks as the setting.
Breed and age Phenotypes for DAZ Horse 3.
Historical:
MS24 Viking Ship for Poser. I think this may be the same one that vanished a while back. Now also available for DAZ and for Vue.
A mediaeval outfit, The Minstrel for Genesis 9, with unvarnished lute.
dForce Kazakh Costume for Genesis 9, traditional costume, and there are also jewellery and tent/yurt packs.
Free HM Airship R34 Colors for the L-1 Zeppelin.
Free 1920s Flapper shoes for G8F, and dforce Flapper Dress.
New York Fire Station in a vintage style.
Willy’s Station Wagon for Poser. Also available for DAZ. 1940s or 50s, by the look of it.
A small home Vegetable Garden for Poser and separately for DAZ. Probably best rendered as a Poser export to Vue, re: the Vue atmospheres.
Scripts, helpers, and special shaders:
A useful free Universal Blackout Box for DAZ. Remove the walls of a space to get a better camera angle, but… the light will come in. Use this box, and the light doesn’t come in.
Bone Minion for HiveWire Horse Poses. Bone Minions are now also for DAZ horses.
MD List of Products Used script, for listing what’s in a DAZ scene.
Tutorials:
Gradient Bump: Fixing a legacy texturing problem in old M4 clothes. Some old bump maps don’t work with SuperFly (Cycles) rendering. Fixing it just needs a few disconnect / connect changes in the Material Room, which are shown in the video.
HDRI control update for Poser. Native handling of HDRIs, and Python scripting control of them, has been implemented in the latest Poser. One of the benefits is a thumbnail preview of the HDRI when you load it for use with a Poser scene, which is shown here.
Software:
The comic-book production software Clip Studio 3.x is out, with the ability to import .BVH motion files.
PD Howler 2025, a budget-priced but powerful drawing and painting software, now even more 3D friendly.
AI:
A free tutorial on taking a rough sketch to nicer lines, automatically.
Newly released is Kalavai – your personal local AI cloud network. Similar to a render farm, by the sound of it. But for local AIs. Freeware.
Invoke 5.0 final is released. The best UI for artists and creative teams who want to run Stable Diffusion locally. Still free.
Other than that, note that the DAZ Freebies page has updated at last.
That’s it for now. More before Christmas!
Playbook is an online service-based Stable Diffusion, trained specifically to generate output that looks like it was 3D rendered from textured meshes.
You can already do this on a local install of the free Stable Diffusion, with free LORA ‘plugins’. There thus seems no reason to pay for such a thing, unless Playbook…
– is remarkably better than normal Stable Diffusion;
– is more stable (at following text prompts);
– can generate 100% stable characters along with stable outfits and clothing colours;
– can also generate textured 3D meshes which can be exported.
I guess we test it and see.