News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: Spotted in the News

ShareCG removes ‘for sale’ items

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ShareCG: Team ShareCG Closure of ShareCG store.

February 28th, 2025

Effective March 1st [2025], we will remove the option to sell uploads through ShareCG.

No huge loss, as the ability to sell at this long-running freebies site was a fairly new feature, and nearly all items were also available for purchase elsewhere.

One hopes they will be continuing the original free downloads side of the store (it seems they are, at 7th March). But it may be a good idea to go and get any freebie you haven’t yet downloaded, and also save the freebie’s page alongside it as an encapsulated .MHTML file.

Due in May, your $10,000 AI virtual movie-studio?

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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?

Risen, arisen…

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I’m pleased to see that 2024 brought a new unified patch for one of my favourite videogames, the first Risen (2009) on the PC. The ‘Elusively Patched’ uni-patch (May 2024) can be downloaded at ModDB. No sign-up required. It bundles all previous patches and community patches, and adds even more fixes. However, note that it does require a standard ‘original release’ older GOG Risen install. Or perhaps an old DVD had from eBay, or an extrication from the dustiest shelf of your old games collection. It won’t work with the newer buffed-a-bit 64-bit version now on Steam and GOG. But since that new version doesn’t support mods, it’s no loss.

£20 Humble Bundle: Poser 12, Moho 12.5 (old, but imports from Poser), Paintstorm and more

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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.

Poser 13.3.864, but 11 vanishes…

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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.

Reallusion 2024 ‘Animation At Work’ Competition

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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.

3D World, RIP

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The Christmas issue of 3D World, the magazine for 3D industry pros and wannabe-pro students, appears to be their last. Out now.

Following the recent demise of Digital Art Live, which faithfully served the hobbyist / amateur artist end of the same market for years, the demise of 3D World now leaves 3D creatives with no regular magazine. There’s still Imagine FX, I think, though it’s not much interested in 3D and in recent years its software news and reviews have become very sparse.

Filatoon fail

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DAZ Studio at last has a real-time comic-book mode, somewhat like Poser. ‘Filatoon’ works with the Filament render-engine (I knew there had to be a use for it, eventually). It’s included as standard in DAZ Studio 4.23, and is not restricted to the new subscription DAZ Studio version. Note that the Filament engine can’t run on a Mac.

Judging by user try-outs and the official video trailer, it is definitely not as ‘artistic’ as Poser’s real-time tooning (which was made with the aid of comic-pros like Brian Haberlin). For instance, Poser makes its comic-book inking lines appear thicker as they near the camera. The DAZ real-time is definitely CAD-like, similar to what you can get with plugins at present with DAZ. Absolutely not going to satisfy any regular comic-book reader. Still, we have AI now, so it may be interesting to see what Stable Diffusion can do with the DAZ output, in terms of cohering it and fixing uglification, opacity map snaggles, and same-width outlines.

So, how to get DAZ Studio 4.23 with FilaToon?

On navigating the DAZ website to My Products / search ‘DAZ Studio’ / and then downloading the 756mb DAZStudio_4.23.0.1_Win64.exe — remember to also get the 48Mb IM00013176-42_DefaultResourcesForDAZStudio423.zip file which has the required Filament toon shaders. Copy the “Contents” in this .zip to your main folder path (if you have two paths, it seems it must be the first) and allow it to overwrite the existing Contents folder. Re-start DAZ.

Regrettably, Filament just doesn’t work for me in 4.23. All I get is a grey Viewport, despite doing everything correctly…

NVIDIA Drivers – yes
OpenGL 4.1 or better – yes
Load valid scene – yes
Set Viewport to Filament – yes
Set render to Viewport – yes
Filament Draw Options Node added to Scene – yes
Draw settings to ‘Style: Filament’ and ‘Bounding Box and Surface’ – yes
Distant and spotlight added to Scene – yes
Hardware anti-aliasing off – yes

… and absolutely nothing. Just a totally grey Viewport and a figure-control widget. I’d love to test and refine the new FilaToon, but… I can’t on my main workstation PC.

Filament does work fine for me in the older DAZ 4.21, which I did not allow to be uninstalled on installing 4.23. So it’s not like I can’t run Filament. It’s something in 4.23 that’s the problem.

I can also get the latest 4.23 Filament/ Viewport working fine on my Windows 10 Surface 3. But how then to get the FilaToon effect? Even after applying the shaders to a sample scene… I get nothing that looks like a toon. Nope… Filatoon seems to need a painfully detailed and long step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to set it up and get the effect. Quite the opposite of Poser, which makes the real-time Comic-book mode so simple that a small child can do it instantly.

DAZ Studio Premiere – subscription version

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DAZ Studio has split into free and subscription versions. DAZ Studio 4.23 Premier ($18.98 a month at present, with auto-renew) has features not present in the free version. “Available exclusively to DAZ Premier members, this enhanced version…” etc. The paid features mentioned are…

    – “batch rendering”
    – “new dForce management tools”
    – “advanced sculpting tools”
    – G8 to G9 “pose converter” and G3, G8 to G9 “shape transfer”.

That’s it. Though add-ons also in the subscription are…

* the various game-engine rig exporters
* a Blender “environments exporter”
* the DAZ to Blender Bridge
* the DAZ to Maya Bridge

* There are also various monthly discounts on content, offers, etc.

The Premier web page also appears to imply that the DAZ Install Manager is now Premier-only. Though that would be strange if it were true. Why would DAZ lock their ‘content installer for dummies’ away from the mass of buyers? Anyway, never used it myself… so no loss.

In fact, no loss at all. I wouldn’t use any of the above, don’t much care about G9, or about exports. As for the bundled discounts, I prefer to snipe the 70%/80% discount bargains as they pop up on my Wishlist.

Now, if they’d have had seamless AI integration, that would have been something. With depth and OpenPose renders plugging straight into ControlNet slots, even. Maybe Poser 14 will beat them to that?

Release: Playbook (beta)

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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.