2023 Fantasy Attic’s Christmas Gifts, now online and all set to pop, as a Christmas ‘advent calendar’ style freebie page. Donations of Poser or DAZ freebies are most welcome, right though Christmas and the New Year. Contact details are on the page.
Category Archives: Freebies
G8F to Stable Diffusion Openpose
Free and easy, G8F to Openpose, for Stable Diffusion UIs with ControlNet. Available now.
1. Get the free Daz Studio G8_OpenPoseRig V1.0. The end result is intended for Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet / Posenet module, which accepts images of poses in the Openpose format.
(InvokeAI is probably currently the most user-friendly and ControlNet-capable UI for Stable Diffusion on a desktop, and is about to go to 3.4. You’ll want to wait for that version (next few days) since it will include a new LCM module which will super-charge generation speeds to near real-time).
2. Once unzipped and manually merge-installed to the DAZ top-level content folder, open DAZ Studio and find G8_OpenPoseRig in the Library. It’s not under People | G8 Female. Instead it’s under Figures | Rogue Pilot | Open Pose Rig.
3. Load the G8F via !FullScene and switch the DAZ Studio viewport’s real-time rendering to Smooth Shaded. Apply a pose. Add another figure, if you want a two-person picture from SD. Tweak the bone positions in Posing / Shaping, if required. You can also load a proper G8F alongside, to see the pose on a more human figure.
Ideally you’ll then render this special Openpose skeleton at the standard SD image-generation size of either 512px, 768px (for SD 1.5) or 1024px (for SDXL), output to a .PNG file. It doesn’t matter if figures are highlight-selected or if viewport widgets are visible. The viewport clutter won’t be in the render.
(Yes, they look like .BVH stick-figures, but are not. So far as I can tell the only way to convert .BVH to Openpose is by dropping the .BVH onto this special G8F and then rendering a frame).
4. That’s it. Drag and drop the .PNG render into your ControlNet’s input window. Your subsequent Stable Diffusion image generation will then, assuming you have a suitable workflow and a pose-aligned prompt, ‘more or less’ conform to the figure poses in your Openpose guide-image. It’s not going to be exact, the Openpose being more of a guideline for SD.
Expressions are instead controlled with a prompt, and perhaps guided by the addition of a LORA. SD is weak at generating several things, and subtle controllable expressions is one of them.
Note the comment on the G8_OpenPoseRig page asking for this freebie to be updated for ControlNet 1.1, which he says can handle finger-bones and thus hands. This freebie doesn’t support these 1.1 style hands, and it hasn’t yet been updated for them. Thus… for 1.1+ hands support you would instead need Poser 12 or 13 with Ken’s paid OpenPose for Poser 12 plugin script.
Note that Ken’s scripts are encrypted and thus require Windows 10 or higher. Note also that Poser 12 can currently be had for $49.
Free scripts and workflows to convert older poses to G8F:
Many old poses in .PZ2 Poser format can just be drag-dropped to a G8, and may be ‘good enough’. But if you need more precise conversion, try…
V3/A3 Pose Transfer to G8F (Victoria 3, Aiko 3). Also try these scripts.
V4/A4 Pose Transfer to G8F (Victoria 4, Aiko 4).
G1F Pose Transfer to G8F (Genesis 1)
G2F Pose Transfer to G8F (Genesis 2).
G3F to G8F Pose Adjust Scripts.
You might also look at the DAZ Pose Converter (Standalone), also free. Half the many commenters just can’t get it to work, the other half think it’s ‘the best thing since sliced bread’. Apparently it can do batch conversion, if you can get it to work.
Blender 4.0 due next week
It’s the start of the pre-Black Friday, pre Christmas big releases. A biggie, the Blender 4.0 Release Candidate is expected on the 14th November 2023. New is…
– An updated UI (again, will it never end?). There’s even a whole new UI font. Huge UIs menus can now be searched, which is something.
– The vital Principled BSDF node “had a full rewrite”, seemingly enabling slightly better shading and shadows. Hair shading is also a little more realistic, at least considering it’s 3D hair.
– The Anisotropic shader is gone, and Specular BSDF is on the way out.
– The Asset Library is now an ‘Asset Shelf’, under your workspace and viewport.
– Developers can now hook external render engines into Blender.
– User-colored wireframes for 3D meshes.
– Lights now can be textured, and also made to only affect specific parts of a model or figure.
– Nodes can now have collapsible sections.
– “Transparent images in the File Browser now have a checkered background” like in Photoshop. Thumbnail previews for .SVG vector images.
– “Mesh to Volume” node now creates proper volume fog, via OpenVDB.
– Various modelling and rigging changes, which are breaking people’s rigs.
– The minimum OpenGL requirement is now 4.3.
Some of these will likely feed through into Poser 14 in due course, since Poser’s SuperFly is Blender’s Cycles re-branded.
DAZ Freebies
A much better-than-usual DAZ Freebies page, this month, as we head today Black Friday.
Wild Hunt: Wildenlander for Michael 3 is a fine go-to fantasy outfit if you’re still using M3.
Five chairs + quality Genesis 2 poses for them. Also FBX versions.
A fairly good set of sci-fi weapons for V4/M4, which are not too ‘videogame’ in looks. There’s also a .ZIP file with Blender versions.
DAZ Dimension Lights 2. HDRI lights with presets. Seems to be geared for larger scenes? (Dragons are shown).
IDL2 Burlesque for Poser. Saved ‘preset’ .PZ3 Poser scenes, with lights set up for you. Possible useful for Noir lighting as well.
Faces of Teens presets for the original Genesis (Genesis 1). With Poser CF files. Any Genesis 1 expression sets are worth having, and these look rather good.
Terra-Tropolis are future-city heightmaps for Bryce. 2D, which can be extruded into 3D. At a guess, they might also work in Vue or PD Howler?
Track Amazon price changes on an item, over time
A new UserScript for Amazon Historical Prices. Useful for those tracking big purchases such as graphics cards over time, and months ahead of any possible purchase. Perhaps also useful for spotting trends (e.g. “a three-day discount, every six weeks”). The open-source code looks fine to me.
PD Howler 2022 for free
PD Howler 2022 for free, in a ‘probably time limited’ summer offer. The last such offer was time-limited and in the summer. The download is build 52 buy the look of it.
PD Howler is a fine 2D painting software, but uniquely has a wealth of mature 3D-friendly features.
The last Windows 7 version was PD Howler 2021.3 build 85. In my experience, later versions will install on Win 7 but then they do things like fatally crash on exit, will not allow setting the number of CPU threads, and possibly have many other problems.
Mandelbulb3D updates
I see that Mandelbulb3D updated in spring 2023.
2023-03-05: Mandelbulb3D V1.99.37 released: (optional) generating of z-buffers, including batch renders
2023-02-07: Mandelbulb3D V1.99.36 released: support of network rendering for batch renders
The Batch rendering module appeared in the version released last July.
TurboSquid Free, free
A new UserScript for your Web browser, TurboSquid Paid Asset Tile Remover In Free Sections.
Release: OIDN 2.0
Intel’s excellent Open Image Denoise (OIDN) has been released in version 2.0. OIDN offers a superb free AI model that’s specially trained to clear 3D renders of noise and grain.
This 2.0 release mainly adds GPU acceleration and support for newer GPUs, along with expanded API features. No speed boost in 2.0, so far as I can tell, other than that which might be added by using your NVIDIA CUDA or AMD graphics card to drive the denoising.
I guess it’ll be added to Poser and Vue relatively soon, as they both have OIDN plugged in by default. There’s still no Photoshop plugin for it though, so far as I know.
Update: Now at the 2.01 update, with better speed.
Ka-boom!
A big Hollywood sound FX library lands at Archive.org. Including, magic spells, sci-fi, explosions, fireworks and so on.
DAZ Freebies, updated
The DAZ freebies page has updated.
Bike Eleo. Has some basic mono-colour textures though no-one ever made a texture set for it. Comes with rider poses for M4 and Genesis 1. And a Poser version! Nice.
After install, find it in Poser under Figures | Bike Eleo. Works rather nicely in Poser’s real-time Comic Book mode…
Yes, I know… I didn’t take time to dress M4 properly. He’s headed for the beach.
Release Blender 3.51 for Windows 7, no installer needed
Blender 3.51 for Windows 7 (early May 2023).
Now needing no installer, it will at last launch for me! Hurrah. Everything works, and it renders to Cycles using 12 CPUs with fair speed… while ignoring my unworthy GPU.
Previously the 3.x installers had decided my graphics card was unworthy, and totally refused to install Blender. Yes… I more than meet the minimum OpenGL 3.3 requirement, having 4.4.
Of course, not really needed now for most people. Since Poser 13 uses the latest Blender Cycles as the photoreal renderer. But still, nice to have it tucked away.
Renderstudio for Poser 11
DAZ’s time-limited freebies have updated with a new set.
Worth having, “To the Beat Poses” dance-exercise poses set for Genesis 2, with Poser CF files (for DSON import to Poser).
Also two large IBL light-probe environment sets for Poser, including Renderstudio – Skylight And Atmosphere which has 8,000px sky panoramas and atmosphere presets. “Extremely fast rendering”, according to the original RuntimeDNA blurb…
The included Atmosphere module will not put any strain on your rendering times as it is generated by Poser’s very own ‘Depth Cue’ cue system. I have found that using these atmospheres adds no extra rendering time at all!!!
Tested and working in Poser 11, and as it uses no scripts I assume it would also work in P12 and P13.
It’s true, it’s pleasingly fast. But it’s also only able to use the old Firefly engine, since the depth-fogging atmosphere and sun-colour don’t appear in the newer SuperFly (i.e. Blender Cycles).
Simpler and quicker than Poser to Vue. Here are comparisons…
Simple English terraced houses with Renderstudio set up in Poser. Very quick Firefly render, less than a minute at 1800px.
Simple English terraced houses with saved Poser scene to Vue import. Slow even at 1800px (8 minutes), textures now look a lot better but more grungy.
Note that Vue’s default Final preset was possibly using high bumps and displacement, which with a different render setting I might have been able to add to the Poser render to make it more grungy and 3D textured.
Anyway, it’s not SuperFly or Vue… but yes, it’s fast as well as easy in Poser. You get fast Poser atmosphere presets with an easy sunlight position dial and sun colour presets. Which may be just what some Firefly users need for a big outdoor backdrop, for a finished product in which the foreground is going to be the focus of attention.
By comparison, the same prop/scene is so horribly unwieldy in the DAZ Studio viewport as to be essentially unusable. I didn’t even get as far as rendering, before I gave up on it.
Shap-E
Shap-E, a basic ‘prompt to 3D object’ generator. Fast and free. Tested and working.
Fan-art G8 figures
Testing Shinteo’s free fan-art G8 figures. There’s a lot of them, but he has a handy page which groups them by game, movie or whatever. Sadly, no Gravity Falls (no game?) or Lord of the Rings.
Click through to the one you’re interested in. There are hundreds of game characters. Click to a character, click the Patreon link, and there on the .ZIP file link.
I got Tintin, Doctor Doom (Marvel), Classic Spiderman (Marvel), Capt. Jack Sparrow, and Godzilla (I think he’s public domain now?) with no problem.
My quick pose and render of Capt. Jack. Responds to G8M expressions.
They’re low-poly game rips, so you probably shouldn’t expect to do pore-probing close-ups on the face. Also, I imagine you should expect texture atlases, so no re-texturing. Some require commercial morph packs to be present. Some of the eyes are a bit glazed and filmy, so may need tweaking.
Once installed they show up in Characters | @Cosplay, not G8. I haven’t tested if they can be mixed with other G8’s via sliders.
Note also the Tutorial on posing with my converted models, re: facial expressions. And the Eyes Offset Tutorial.