News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Poser

What’s New for Poser and DAZ, April-May 2023

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Slightly early this month, but it’s time for another pick of what’s new for Poser and DAZ Studio users.

Science-fiction:

Teleportation Effects VFX for DAZ Studio. 36 of them, with 4K textures.

DZ BSuitZ for G8M & G9. Usefully generic and plain, for when you want the focus on the character and not the suit.

Bomb place set for Poser, and separately for DAZ. A 33 part set. It’s by 1971s, so you know it’ll toon well in Poser’s Comic Book renders.

Need a control unit for the bomb? There’s a new free HX Console for DAZ. A retro 1970s style computer/radar console. Also looks suitable for Doctor Who remakes and suchlike. See also this new GMDSS 6000 Series Communication equipment freebie. If you need the complete caboodle, take a look a this monster control-centre…

The Corridor, a 2001 style corridor. If you enlarged the corridor and stripped out some bits you might even get a 3D roadway for some of the new Luxor Poser Prop flying cars.

Valvepunk:

A ramshackle Radio Watchtower, evocative of Fenton Wood’s Yankee Republic series.

DD PBR Painted Wood Shaders for iRay Vol. 2. Faded, cracked and scuffed.

Fantasy:

Shattered Steel. Breakable sword blades, for Poser.

CW_Michael for Genesis 8 Male, with an interestingly ‘almost semi-toon’ face and head.

Techno-Wizard Weapons SW for G3 and G8.

Fan-art:

Thri-Kreen for Poser. A Dungeons & Dragons creature.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate for Poser. A custom character for the stock ships-with-Poser figure Jessi, based on a game character. The description says “standalone”, but that can’t be if she requires Jessi.

Harrison Ford for Poser for the M3 LowRes figure. Could be useful if you have a big heavy scene, and you don’t want the crash it by adding a high-res figure.

Halloween:

Movie Mummy for G8M. You also get the ancient coffin.

Enakh Outfit for G8M.

Pyrotechnica 2. Burning, black smokes, plus a fireworks burst, for DAZ Studio.

Suds. 3D models of soap suds, for DAZ Studio. Could also be useful for alien landscapes, horror labs, or scenes where nano-technology runs amok.

Photo Props: Candles, with texture that make them suitable for close-ups.

Figures, poses and clothes:

Malikai and Hair for Genesis 8.1 Male.

AMV_Glasses, basic cheap reading-glasses for G2 to G9.

Lina for Antonia, an Eastern European look for the Antonia figure for Poser.

AniBlock animations:

10 x ‘in bed’ AniBlocks for Genesis 9. Couples lying in bed.

21 Action & Gun AniBlocks for Genesis 8/8.1.

Ready To Fight 2 AniBlock animations for the Genesis series. Specifically, ring boxing and kick boxing.

Toon:

Flix for Genesis 8 Male. Might also be used with the free Prof Hair for G8M.

Speaking Dishes and teapots for DAZ Studio.

Chull Clothes 2, for Nursoda’s new Chull figure.

Storybook:

SAMANT Pastry Shop, for Poser and DAZ.

A free DollBox for Poser, with La Femme fit. Also the Pretty Doll Vintage Dress.

Dino 03, a free cute stuffed-fabric toy dinosaur. Plus Food for Dino 03, which might also be used with other rotund beasts of burden.

A free Swimming Ring. Might be made to fit Dino…

Hr-257 hair, suitable for a ‘girl adventurer’ type character. For V4 and others.

Penny & Dress for G8F.

FG School Pack Supply plus backpack, for the FG Elementary Classroom.

A free Cheap Fountain Pen for DAZ Studio.

Tuscan Kitchen Accessories set.

Hobby Props Pottery, for all your potter’s wheel needs.

Animals:

Songbird ReMix Kingfishers, for Poser and DAZ.

Komodo Dragon by AM, for DAZ Studio.

Arkeno for Moshi The Kitten and Soffancska: Moshi, both material addons for the kitten.

UV Templates for DAZ Horse 3.

Landscapes:

3D Scenery: Lush Gate from ShaaraMuse3D, for Poser and DAZ. A useful wooded summertime arch, which also has a low-spec PC version. No Autumnal makeover MAT, but I guess you just tweak the colours.

Simple free Railings of the sturdy sort you might see on the sea-front of a coastal town. For Poser and DAZ. Includes old and sea-worn MATs.

Bastion Fortress – Brick Walls for Poser and DAZ. A texture addon for the Bastion Fortress Construction Kit.

Historical:

Very little this month, in Historical.

Second World War Jeep for Poser. 13 figures, poses, props.

Utilities and similar:

Explosion Debris FBX.

A free Mosaic MT5 material for Poser

Formation-X for DAZ Studio. Billed as “Configuration and Alignment Scripts for Large Groups”. Such as spacecraft battle formations. Released summer 2019, but it’s new to me.

Expandable Color Ramp for Poser 12 & 13, for SuperFly. “It will allow between 2 to X number of color points simply by daisy-chaining the nodes together.”

A free Cubic To Linear add-on for MojoWorld 3.11.

30 Realistic Fur & Hair Brushes for Photoshop.

Software:

UVMapper 4.0 for Windows, May 2023.

Blender 3.51 for Windows 7, no installer needed. The installer having been a roadblock before now, when Blender refused to install if your graphics card was unworthy. Now you can install anyway and run it on the CPUs.

PD Howler 2024.

At last, a dark mode for Paint Tool SAI 2, aka SAI2.

Poser 13 has had a number of updates since the initial release in March.

Tutorials:

Essential Introduction to Genesis 9 for Content Creators. With Esha.

Toolbox Treasures : Super Scripts for DAZ Studio. With Code 66.

New video tutorials on Poser 13 Installation and Poser 13 : Installing included content.

Making advanced Pixelart in Blender, a tutorial for a free addon. Looks quite effective.

Beginner’s Guide to Texturing in Poser: The Diffuse Node.

VUE scene breakdown: Making of “Fresh Water” with Vue expert Barry Marshall. Also a new Quicktip video: Duplicating Assets in E-on’s Vue.

That’s it. More next month.

DAZ Freebies, updated

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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.

Recent Poser 13 updates

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Poser 13 Early Access has had a number of updates since release, which was back at the end of March 2023. Here are some highlights I spotted on the Windows version, since “Poser 13.0.287 – 2023-03-29″…

* Added new Legacy Scatter checkbox to PrincipledBSDF node [aka “the Cycles super-node”] to avoid SSS glow.

Sounds useful for getting SSS skin looking right, at a guess?

* Sped up cancelling of Superfly renders. No longer waits for the whole scene actors and materials to set up.

* Gamma shift no longer shifts at end of SuperFly render.

* Maximum Undo limitation increased to 200.

* Improved render presets based on feedback.

* Light meshes no longer disappear in the preview. Lights property Auto Hide removed and now just stays visible or not visible depending on the visibility check box.

Some people were having problems finding them. Toggling them on and off, vital for Comic Book Preview renders, should not be affected.

* “Make Movie” no longer attempts to apply 2D Motion Blur when it shouldn’t.

* Fixed broken IBL lights. IBL lights now work. IBL correctly turns on ambient occlusion when prompted. Creating an IBL now automatically connects the image map.

* Corrected Post FX Exposure and Saturation – default to 0 instead of -1

Yes, I was seeing that. Fixed now, by the sound of it.

* Fixed Atmosphere so it correctly displays volume in SuperFly.

A new Brian Haberlin comic

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I see there’s a new Brian Haberlin comic, since February 2023. Currently in episodic mode. The covers are part- painted, but the interiors are his usual style of art made with the assistance of Poser and highly polished. The Last Barbarians is a high/dark fantasy tale with a D&D vibe and some gore, and is currently up to #4… with #5 announced. I’d guess it might run eight issues, as his series usually do?

Vanishing monsters

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Oh that’s a pity, Poser dinosaur maker Dinoraul has removed his some of his items from Renderosity. Gone from my wishlist, with no chance of grabbing them via discounted $3 retirement sale are…

Kroger DR
Branchenia DR
Kraba DR
Devilop DR
Mantyx DR
Zomora DR
Grandor DR

He’s still on Rendo with a store, but these early monsters are gone.

Renderstudio for Poser 11

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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.

CodeWhisperer

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Possibly interesting for Python-coders who craft Python scripts for Poser, Vue, Blender, and others. The new Amazon CodeWhisperer, a free code-generator from Amazon, that appears to be genuinely free and supposedly “unlimited”. Although you do need an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.

It’s powered by AI, of course. Be warned that the ‘free’ tier of AWS is only a 12 month trial, last I heard. Then you have to pay to keep the AWS account.

What’s New for Poser and DAZ, April 2023

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It’s time for another monthly round-up, offering my pick of what’s new for Poser and DAZ users.

As usual, freebies are not noted if they’re ‘non-commercial use’, unless they’re such obvious fan-art that no-one would consider using them commercially. Indeed, there’s a new fan-art sub-category this month.

There’s also a new G8/G9 store, 3D Shards, with some freebies. Takes quite a while to load, but looks great.

Science-fiction:

A generic futuristic Billionaire’s Office. Plus 30 cool hi-tech props.

A free CyborgLuna for Baby Luna, the free creepy baby which ships with Poser. There are some earlier Baby Luna’s Creature Heads morphs, but I see that only two of these might pass muster for a sci-fi look. Probably now needs a pack of cyborg head morphs.

Coflek-Gnorg’s Hostile Surface I and Hostile Surface II. Basic ‘first landers’ pioneer-era surface space-cabins for Poser, with quality interiors.

A big futuristic comic-book style Tank Model-X for DAZ. Needs some “Hulk… SMASH!” punch-blow morphs, I’d suggest.

Colony Control Tower, looking like it could be of use for re-making lost episodes of classic 1970s British TV sci-fi?

Sci-fi Fan Art:

James T. Kirk for Poser, which requires M3 Low Res and the David 3 texures. No hair, but I’m fairly sure there’s some Kirk hair around somewhere for Poser.

Marvel Ultimate Galactus Outfit for Genesis 8 Male. Looking pretty much like the original Kirby Galactus, as far as I can see. Rather cheekily, there’s a Marvel logo and also an Extended Licence for sale.

Desert Spaceport for DAZ, a large Mos Eisley a-like town from Star Wars with lots of angles. Not identical, and there’s clear prior-art, so commercial use as a standard desert town would probably pass the Disney lawyer sniff-test.

A Twi’lek for Genesis 8 Female, and Twi’lek Headpeice for Aiko 4, for non-commercial Star Wars fan-art.

Steampunk and Dieselpunk:

A pleasing retro-look helmet Protective Gear 018 MMKB.

Christmas Steampunk Car for Poser. An old model from Meshbox, but new on Renderosity. Likely to have a single texture-atlas texture, making it difficult to re-texture.

Fantasy:

FireShow, an unusual addition to a circus or medieval hall with jesters and minstrels. Though you’d need some wooden planking to cover the modern struts.

Halloween:

Free Fangs for LaFemme/L’Homme.

Morphing Skull together with Stands for Morphing Skull and Morphing Candle for Morphing Skull.

Leviathan for Daz Studio, a gloopy monster with tentacle sliders for posing.

Figures and poses:

A free pack of sitting and kneeling CRP Floor Poses 1-12 for G8F & G9.

40 x G8 expressions on sliders, in the Ross_Expressions G8 01 pack.

Young Anime Heroes for Genesis 9, stylised manga/anime type morphs.

Storybook:

Essential Stationery Props.

Coin-Operated Rides Mega Pack for DAZ. You could probably hide bits, such that the plane really takes off and flies the passenger through the clouds.

Smoking Pipe. With smoke and holding poses for G8/G9. For your old-school Tolkien-type storyteller, with a pipe by the fireside.

Toon:

Toon Horse for Daz Horse 3.

Animals:

Songbird ReMix Bee-eaters of the World, for Poser and DAZ.

Snitch, a strange creature for Poser and DAZ. Likely to appeal to those who have enjoyed playing the videogame Spore.

Landscapes and settings:

City Waterway by Predatron, looking useful for action-movie type scenes.

A2Z SciFi Loading Dock and Warehouse I v1 for Poser. A bit sci-fi, but could also be of use for those who need to make modern-day warehouse worker training videos.

Historical:

A free dForce 1940s Men’s Suit for G8M. Also a tweed trousers and pullover set. Also get the 1940’s inspired suspenders and bowtie for the free G8M men’s suit. “Suspenders” = “braces” in British English.

A free Sniper U.S. Ranger standalone, a low-poly figure for M3 Low Res and Poser, so you can have many soldiers in your scene.

DryJack’s Match Truck and Crane, the sort of thing you might see in a mid 20th century heavy industry rail-yard.

Those who like DryJack’s excellent British railway models and tracks/stations may also want the free Sign 14, the new British ‘Men at Work’ road-sign. Part of a larger free set of such things.

VZ-9 Avrocar Flying Saucer, which was really made (though barely flown) in the 1950s by the U.S. Air Force. Complete with interior, controls, smart-props, poses. For Poser and DAZ.

A free classic mid/late 20th century Cinema Part 1, with iRay textures. Also get Part 2.

A manky Industrial Warehouse Scissor Lift of the sort you might have found in an old abandoned warehouse in the early 1990s.

Utilities, scripts and similar:

A free Simple POV Camera for G3 & G8. Your scene shows what the figure sees.

A Procedural Braid Generator for Blender.

Free AND / OR / XOR Logic Nodes for the Poser Material Room, for Poser 12 and 13. Also an accompanying “Wondering how to use Logic Nodes for Poser material room?” tutorial.

A free Value Viewer for Poser SuperFly, a node for Poser 12 and 13.

A paid MAT Tiler for Poser 12, which… “automates working with seamless textures in Poser”.

A free Poser script ShowLightsInPreview, for Poser 12. I’m not sure I even understand the user problem it’s trying to solve, and I think it may already have been solved by an earlier Poser 12 script (‘Remove Wires in Preview’) which toggles the visibility of the lights wireframes on the scene lights. But you may be interested.

Also, there are now Renderosity gift certificates, starting at a $150 Gift Certificate.

The free script Lock & Unlock them all from here for DAZ Studio. For example, lock everything below the wrist. There’s also a similar Hide & Show parts of a figure below a certain point.

Software:

Poser 13 for Windows, in Early Access. Ignore the “Windows 10” spec, as it runs fine on Windows 7 (although it won’t then load encrypted store-purchased scripts). SuperFly is now the new Cycles 2 for much faster x2 rendering, especially for animations and this can also work on CPUs. The Intel Denoiser is updated, and PostFX is expanded and can now do Glow. An updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer, and more.

The 2D paint software SAI2 has a dark mode at long last. For fast painting with big brushes on a big canvas, there’s SAI2, PaintStorm, and the superb vector brushes in the free Microsoft Expression Design 4.

Tutorials:

How to convert DAZ to Poser – Part 1 Geometry and Part 2 – Materials and lights. But first watch Converting DAZ scenes to Poser the super easy way, which involves going through (shudder) Collada. Don’t forget there’s also the Automatic OBJ Exporter for figures, with poly-reduction in the streamlined semi-automated pipeline.

How to Bring all your Poser 12 scripts to P13 without re-installing.

E-on Vue – controlling materials and EcoSystems with the wetness index node, a new 20 minute video tutorial.

Controlling camera-angles in AI-generated image production, a YouTube playlist.

That’s it for April 2023. More picks next month.

Tutorial: Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy

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Blank Boi to storybook Space Boy:

Requires:

Blank Boi base figure.
BlankDolly.
Elf Basics.
Blank Boi Nose freebie prop.
Blank Boi in Space freebie clothing set.

1. Load the Blank Boi base figure in Poser. To be found installed in Poser (totally counter-intiuitively) under Figures ..\3DZToonz\BlankBoi\BlankBoi.cr2

2. Load Elf Basics hood and clothing to head and body. Found under Figures ..\Elf Basics. Conform if needed.

3. Load Pose ..\BlankDolly\ Normal Shader | Dolly body gets you the eyes seen here.

4. Props | Blank Boi Features | Nose. Load to head.

5. Adjust DollyEars morphs on ears (from BlankDolly) for pointiness. Set ears slightly off-centre for added quirkiness. A little postwork clean-up will be needed re: the conjunction of the ears and the hood, when seen at at certain angles.

6. Hide (make ‘not visible’) the end of the elf boots. This makes him less obviously a generic fantasy figure. Set the “Feet swap” morph to “2” for the new ‘toon feet’ seen added below.

7. Props ..\Blank Boi In Space | BB Space Pack for an oxygen backpack. If the .OBJ is lost on loading, it’s to be found in ..\Runtime\Geometries\treasurechest\bboiclothes

8. Apply Aiko 3 poses. V3 also, but those poses will tend to reposition the figure somewhere else on the stage.

9. Change the material diffuse colours to a more space-y colour scheme.

10. Render in flat colour and lineart, and combine these two renders in Photoshop…

Not ideal. The ears are sometimes seen inside the hood. The neck-joint needs more of a spacesuit-like air-seal. The feet are ok, but not great. There are probably better figures with which to make a whimsical space-adventure storybook, but the Boi is fairly cute and it could be done. The lack of a mouth is a great advantage, since you wouldn’t have to be constantly tugging at that to get it to look right, or manually drawing it in.

Release: Poser 13

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Poser 13 has been released for Windows. Available now at Renderosity. There’s also a 21-day free trial.

Upgrade from Poser 12 is $99, full-price for 13 is $250. Poser 12 is still on sale at $150. There doesn’t seem to be an upgrade offer from Poser 11 to 13, curiously. But I imagine that anyone who wants to has already done the Poser 11 to 12 upgrade.

Poser 11 is still on sale thankfully… but is now hiked up to $150 at Renderosity (was $52 for a long time). However, note that Neowin still has it for $80, an ongoing roll-over offer officially approved by Poser’s parent company Bondware.

The “Windows 10” system spec probably doesn’t mean much, since Poser 12 and now 13 run fine on Windows 7. But note that Windows 7 users can’t install Ken’s store-purchased Python utilities due to lacking the encryption needed. Note also that ZBrush 2022.7 or higher is now required for GoZ round-tripping to Poser 13.

A Mac version of 13 is also set for release, soon-ish… “We expect the Mac version to follow the Windows release in a few weeks as a free update for Poser 13 license holders.”

Also due is “an exciting new figure” but this is still “in the works for Poser 13”. The existing free 25Gb content bundle is the same, but it seems it’s now split into more manageable download bundles.

Installers for 11 / 12 / 13 are now all available at the posersoftware.com site.

As usual, expect any new version to break a few Python scripts, because Python “knows nurthing” about any ‘Poser 13’ version. There is one forum report that EZSkin 3 won’t run on Poser 13, for instance. But there’s already a fix for the script. However, the dev team also quickly posted a “new installer” that may fix this without the need for the new fixed script.

Also as usual, new users of a vanilla Poser 13 may have to tweak their rendering settings to get the optimum configuration for their particular hardware setup. There’s a lot to digest there, several things have changed with the new Cycles/SuperFly, and it will pay to study the new settings for a few hours.

Ok, so… new items for Poser 13 which caught my eye in the list were:

* The “latest open source Cycles engine” from Blender, which in Poser is branded as SuperFly. Not all Blender Cycles nodes are present. It’s a slightly cut-down version, plus some Poser-specific nodes. The new version in Poser 13 gives much faster rendering, especially on animations and complex scenes… “GPU renders of complex scenes benchmark at under half the time required for the same scene on Poser 12.” Also works on CPUs, I hear. Also has “Improved adaptive sampling for faster renders” and an “Updated animation rendering system for better productivity [when] rendering movie sequences.” The new “GPU rendering on remote nodes” can speed things up even more, if you have the kit and ability to pay the electricity bills and can wire up a local render farm.

* “Updated Walk Designer and Talk Designer, for better compatibility with all figure types and support of imported libraries.” Again, animators will likely be happy at that.

* New ‘Post FX’ post-render options… “denoise, exposure, saturation, gamma, brightness, contrast, bloom, blur and pixelate.” Nothing you can’t do in Photoshop, but nice to have. Bloom may be interesting. If it looks good, is consistently controllable, and has enough light spillover to become ‘glow’.

* Improved Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) module. One of the best features of Poser 12, and now also in Poser 13. Good to see they’ve integrated a more recent version, though no version number is given. It works wonders on either CPUs or the GPU, which suggests it is indeed the latest version (previous versions were GPU-only).

* “Improved morph and weight-map copying system makes creating clothing easier.” Clothing makers will no doubt welcome that. (Update: Two bug-fix releases to 13.0.287 focused largely on these features). PoserPython scripting now “includes Match Centers to Morph, Joint Order, and Copy Morphs From”.

* Downloadable full PDF manual. Useful for those who locally index and search an archive of PDFs and forum-captures, using full-text desktop search software such as dtSearch or Docfetcher. The manual is not quite up-to-date. For instance, the new Enhanced Shadow Catcher in P13 does work with SuperFly, though the manual says it won’t.

There are unconfirmed forum reports that the Preview viewport / rendering “has improved”, but no comparison screenshots. For this reason, it may be unwise for those in mid-project on a Comic Book Preview rendered animation or comic-book to switch to Poser 13 because they assume that the Viewport / Preview rendering will look exactly the same. It may not.

So, overall it looks like a big must-have upgrade for 3D photoreal animators. It’s also a must-have for those who have a new fast RTX NVIDIA graphics card and want the latest greatest fast software to pair with it. Costly, true, but if the user has the cash for a big shiny new card then they also have the cash to get Poser 13.

I imagine clothing makers may well stick with the workflow they know for now, unless the improvements in 13 are dramatic (I’m not qualified to judge such things).

Overall, the team is to be congratulated. They’ve done enough to justify the version upgrade, and have given 13 a clear focus on animation and a big boost in render speed. There are genuine and useful improvements here.

Of course, it would have been great to see a version that focused on non-photoreal and some Python tweaks to help it (e.g. having Python able to address the Post FX box and plug in any .8BF Photoshop filter at that point in the render process). But that’s a much smaller market than photoreal/animation.

In the meanwhile, don’t worry… the world-leading non-photoreal stuff is still in there: Firefly (with Photoshop auxiliary render layers if required) inc. outlines, real-time Comic Book, Sketch.

Onward to Poser 14!

Install test:

* As expected, Poser 13 installs without overwriting previous Poser versions or runtimes.

* Content directory created at C:\Users\Public\Documents\Poser 13 Content

* No .PDF manual in the install, as that’s now a download.

* Poser 11.x and 12.x still launch after install of the 13 Trial version. Import of a Poser 13 scene to Vue 2016 and the latest Vue both work, is Poser 11 is told where the 12 and 13 runtimes are.

* As usual, the new Poser user will need to fix the ever-accumulating light presets problem by tweaking a setting in Preferences.

* Yes, Blender’s Cycles X (here branded as ‘SuperFly’) happily renders on CPUs. There’s no nonsense at install time about “your graphics card is not worthy, so I’m not even installing”, as there is with Blender.

* The new version of the Intel OIDN Denoiser is packaged as a .DLL, so I can’t find what version number it’s now at in Poser 13.

* Checks how many threads Poser is using on a multi-core PC. Poser 13 defaults to 12 threads for me, but in Edit / Preferences I tell Poser 13 I have 24 threads available for its use (12 Xeon cores = 24 threads) in CPU rendering. And if you have that much power, don’t accept Firefly and Sketch render presets that use the old minimum 32 buckets. Tweak this setting up to 128, for a vastly improved rendering speed. Superfly renders are a whole different ballgame, and you’ll need to study and test to get the best for your PC.

* You add your previous runtime to the Library by targeting ../content/ not the ../content/runtime/ folder. When you’ve done this, your old saved scene files should load fine — because Poser 13 will know where to load the content from.

What’s New for Poser and DAZ Studio, February/March 2023

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It’s nearing the end of the month, so here’s another round-up of interesting items for Poser and DAZ Studio, released since my last round-up in mid-February.

As usual, freebies are only noted if commercial-use, or if such obvious fan-art that no-one would think to use them commercially.

Science-fiction:

UniBot 09 a free retro bot for Poser. Old, but only just found by me.

Exotic chairs set for DAZ and Poser. Several with a sci-fi feel. And the big metal one is probably powered by anti-gravity.

The free Artdress for G8F has a Moebius-like sci-fi feel to it.

Steampunk:

LBLC_Steampunk Bar.

Nautilus Boat. Simple but effective.

Rusted Metal for DAZ iRay, a merchant resource.

Scrappy the Robot for DAZ Studio.

Fantasy:

Forest Spirits, Tree and Mushroom for Genesis 9, and poses.

Great to see Poisen back. His latests packs are Evil Trees, Elden and DireStones.

Varg 8 for Daz Dog 8. A Middle-earth movies style warg for DAZ Studio. Requires DAZ Dog 8. You’ll also find new warg-riders on the DAZ Store, though they’re distinctly beefier and more Warcraft than Tolkien’s generally small and wiry orcs.

Iron Mask for G8M. A medieval-style ‘man in the iron mask’ mask.

Storybook:

A free Winter In A Bottle. A home-made snow-shaker for Christmas.

See also the free Christmas Lighthouse, which would also fit the bottle.

Wooden Mecha. Pinocchio style wooden puppet for DAZ Studio.

Old Giant Wood Blackboard Chalkboard.

The new Hr-255 hair.

Skateboarding Bundle, being skateboards and G9 poses. There are also G8 poses in other earlier packs.

Toon:

Free, Dear Me for Sakura & Genesis 8. A free (for a limited period) DAZ Studio remake of the classic Japanese Poser base-figure NearMe, aka Near Me. Near enough, by the looks of it. With DAZ you’d get the wide range of clothes and hair, but you won’t get Poser’s excellent real-time Comic Book mode. Needs G8F base (free) and Sakura 8 (currently on a 60% discount).

Update: Nope, sorry, I just cannot get this to load on Sakura 8 (or G8F) as advertised. No instructions in Documentation folder. Shaping sliders are present, but they just make a mess of Sakura. File under: “the maker knows how it works, but no-one else does”.

The unusual semi-toon Tabbie for La Femme. It doesn’t look like the hair is included, but it’s Hr-162 with a dark leopard material on it.

King Of Frogs, low-poly for M3 Low Res. Might be just what you require if you need a stage full of dancing frog-men.

Sleepy Chull, a clothing add-on for Nursoda’s recent Chull figure.

Animals:

Reindeer for DAZ Horse 3. Also comes with white fur.

Nature’s Wonders Dragonflies & Damselflies of the World Vol. 2. Requires Nature’s Wonders Dragonflies & Damselflies.

Also Nature’s Wonders Turtles of the World Vol. 2, with the same proviso.

History:

An Ice Ages Prehistoric Tar Pit for your mammoths and woolly rhino.

An old traditional Middle East Town for DAZ Studio. Perhaps founded 12th century, and decayed to the 16th.

The Celestial Corsair for DAZ. A 16th-17th century sailing ship with a variety of MATs.

Boat 65, a free Pacific style rafter.

A free Old tobacco pipe.

Wolmol has a fine range of free SuperFly MATS for his railway models and rail sets.

A floppy Arah3D Lucky Hat, also looking suitable for a 19th century milkmaid etc.

An Elegant Billiard Room from the mid/late Victorian era.

A free Vintage dForce sailor dress and jacket for G8F, and Vintage sailor hat.

Apollo Mission Control room, for Poser.

Shaders, materials:

Feeling like going out on the terrace, in the first warm spring sunshine? You’ll be needing the Soda Pop! Shaders. 20 shaders for pop drinks, as DAZ .DUF files. You may also be needing some Orange Juice and a pair of fab sunglasses.

MP Realistic Hands for G8F.

Character poses and presets:

Free G8F Saucy Sitting Poses.

Two Gun Man Pose Bundle for G3M and G8M. Two-gun ‘action movie’ poses.

British TV buffs will recall Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. Together they were the British Avengers in the 1960s. Both free, but requires M3 Low-Res.

Utilities, plugins, software:

A free 7 Color Color Ramp for Poser SuperFly.

MAT Tiler for Poser 12. There’s a Demonstration video on YouTube.

PD Howler 2023 is now on the DAZ Store.

Tutorials:

Horror Lighting: A Definitive Guide.

The free G’MIC for Photoshop now has its digital camera emulation filters all documented.

That’s it for this month. As always, a few dollars for my Patreon will be of great help in these difficult times.

Raffael for Poser

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A brief note on Raffael for Poser, for the benefit of future searchers. I didn’t know this existed. Raffael is a flexible ‘base figure’ with several unique character morphs, and his Renderosity store page says he now ships free with Poser 11. He’s quite low-poly, but looks pleasing and ships with a great many sub-morphs.

To load after install, he’s not under !Raffael or Raffael or 3D Dream (the maker), in the Library listing. Actually buried deep, under…

Library | Figures tab || Figures folder | Raffael | 3Dream | Raffael

Also loads in DAZ Studio…

Poser | Figures | 3DDream.

To make the most of this freebie you should install his vital Raffael – Freebies collection 1, which among others includes neanderthals (male and female), a stylised doll, and two unique youth presets (unique for Poser).

Here we see my quick render of the Neanderthal with Creepy Kid hair. Backdrop photo by Toby Speight.

After install, the freebies are then all found under Poses | ! Raffael with a good range of figure types as one-click morphs. There are also MATs and more, all nicely organised. Renders in SuperFly with no problems. Has a paid but rather fabulous male skin pack along with others.

Takes Hiro 3 action poses, I found, more or less. But make sure you first save a T-Pose to get back to. There’s no T-pose in the freebie pack. Elbow crease-bending is definitely not great on some poses, like many older figures. Otherwise anatomically correct, though.

Commercial renders OK on all content.

Raffeal appears to have a completely unique face rig, since none of my existing expression presets will move it at all. There are many face part control dials, but no dials for expressions (happy, sad etc).

What this (now free) figure totally lacks is clothing, other than a basic one-click photo-mapped body suit (to remove this, reload the skin MAT in Poses | ! Raffael). And there’s no CrossDresser licence for Raffael either, so clothing can’t be had that way. Only by wrestling with the Fitting Room. Ugh. Such a pity… what a waste of a nice friendly figure. There is one basic clothing maker’s ‘merchant resource’ for sale on Renderosity, though, for making basic clothing.

More news about Poser 13

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More official details about Poser 13, due for release soon.

* The Poser 13’s SuperFly rendering will use “Cycles X” from Blender.

* New “robust light bloom” option in the PostFX module.

* New “tools for morph and weight mapping transfer between figures”, for content creators.

* Unspecified “improvements to Talk Designer and Walk Designer”.

* Newly “added support for HDRI domes”.

Last I heard, in April 2021, Blender’s Cycles X was “NVIDIA-only”. On looking into this again, I see that AMD (HIP) support was added November 2021.

Marketplace changes are rolling out at Renderosity

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The Marketplace changes are rolling out at Renderosity. Quite subtle so far, but some nice ones. For instance it’s now easier to tell if a coupon won’t apply to an item. There’s a little red block indicating “no coupons”. If it’s green, coupons are good. Very useful.

The WishList feels nicer and less cramped, but I already created a UserScript to remove the dangerous “Clear List” button (I never want to clear the entire 760-item list), and to make the ‘% discount’ font much larger. It’s a pity you have to scroll back to the top of the WishList page, to move to the next page. Logically, the ‘advance to next page’ option should be at both the bottom and top. There still no way to save a single-file backup of the list.

Gone is the WishList’s eye-boggling total of what it would cost to buy the entire list at one go. Which is a pity. It might have been kept when I filter by Vendor, so I could see what it would cost me to buy all of my missing stuff for that one vendor.

My Wishlist – lowest price has a different URL now. It would be nice to filter the WishList by: On Sale / Coupon Accepted / Lowest Price first. But that can’t be done. Instead you do Lowest Price and then scan by eye for the ‘Coupon Accepted’ icon. Yes, I know… I’m cheap, and I like it cheap when I buy.

Various Marketplace URLs have changed at Renderosity, along with the new store improvements. Some will redirect, some only redirect to the home page. The Marketplace item and Vendor store URLs have all changed, but have re-directs. Vendors are now at ../marketplace/vendors/NAME. The address for the general Lowest price page has also changed. Always worth a look to see what’s slipped under $3, even if it’s not on your WishList.

The URL to buy Poser 11 is still the same. Still $52, a bargain for the power and unique/quick Comic Book and Sketch non-photoreal rendering. And you’re getting what was Poser 11 Pro.

Vital Python add-ons for Poser 11 such as XA – Toolbar are still there and for sale, but the seller Dimension3D seems to have lost the store images on many of his utilities.

Freestuff and Forums URLs appear unaffected by the URL changes.