News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Category Archives: The Animation Industry

Local Microsoft Azure AI voices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iClone goes full AI, with robust ComfyUI integration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI – now in ComfyUI

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Life moves fast in AI-land. Last month I blogged here about Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI. This month — courtesy of Paul Hansen of Germany — Microsoft’s new tech is now free in ComfyUI. Along with an outstanding install guide and documentation. All free. Currently, 2 seconds of finished raytraced animation takes 22 seconds on a 4060 card. Import of .FBX is coming soon.

Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI, now at 16 fps

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Microsoft’s New Ray Tracing AI (YouTube Video, six minutes with hardcoded ad at the end). They ingested 16 million ray traced 3D images, to make an AI that simply infers (from its past knowledge) what the play of real light in a 3D scene should be. Then the AI applies it and ‘renders’ the scene in a microsecond. You can tweak materials, and it updates instantly.

Animated? Yup, their pseudo-raytracing currently clocks in at 16 frames per second (on MS’s research labs hardware, admittedly). Quite respectable, and there are also frame-interpolation AIs out there that might boost it to 30FPS.

Physics? Yup, they even added that too. Even dynamic water.

Generative AI overlay? Not yet. But if this gets a general open-source release and isn’t locked away as an exclusive for Microsoft Flight Simulator, someone will add generative AI imaging to the mix. Imagine not only AI raytracing, but AI raytracing + a layer of SD ‘style change’ based off the 3D scene (but still faithful to it). The ‘Hollywood-real look’ for your 3D scene, in near real-time and beautifully lit.

What a time to be alive. Indeed, what a time to have a huge Poser runtime. Poser has such massive possibilities ahead, if only it can shrug off the AI-haters. The devs don’t even have to develop for it, I would imagine. Just open up some general hooks in Python, to let users hook into whatever local AI they choose to run.

Release: IK Studio for After Effects

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New to me, Richard Rosenman’s $50 IK Studio – Inverse kinematics plugin for After Effects (February 2025). Apply IK to the joints of your 2D cutout cartoon characters. He also has a survey of The Best Rigging Tools for After Effects for 2D characters and props. Probably far easier to do such animation in Moho or Cartoon Animator. But if you have to use After Effects, this appears to fill a gap.

Release: Pencil Pro, for Blender

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I’m all for natural media emulation from 3D scenes. So I was pleased to see the new $15 Pencil Pro add-on for Blender, allowing your 3D scene to emulate a pencil drawing. The result is obviously not great at long distance (e.g. a city scene), where it looks like a point-cloud with the points mapped to tiny graphite strokes. Better for medium and close animation shots, though there’s still a distinct Rhubarb & Custard-style wobble. Which is charmingly old-school in its way, and would be acceptable to young kids watching shorts.

Suitably rough and sketchy and believable, if you overlook the polygonal angles from the 3D. No per-frame autocolour, but something that auto-colours greyscale (e.g. Akvis Coloriage AI) might give colourisation that is not too wobbly, when run frame by frame.

Release: Framepack

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Relatively easy ‘video diffusion’ AI is here, and working on relatively low-end PCs. Framepack is fully open source and can be run locally. Feed it a source image and a simple instructional prompt, and generate up to a minute of video at 30FPS. With reasonable speed, and without needing a stupid amount of VRAM. Impressive. It’s from lllyasviel, the guy who made the SD Controlnets, Fooocus and WebUI Forge.

Animated PNG demo, 4Mb.

There is now a one-click Windows installer for Windows 10 (though I guess it might be hacked to use CUDA 11.x + an earlier compatible Pytorch, for Windows 7 users). Note that, once installed, it then fetches 40+Gb of models and controlnets etc. (Models are here for separate download). So you’re likely to need 50Gb+ of space for a local install. There’s no standalone .torrent at present.

It can do widescreen as well as square and phone-screen format. Appears to be limited to about 640px in generation size, so upscaling would be needed. No pristine 4k footage, then. Since it works from any pre-made image, the potential for animating Poser and DAZ renders seems obvious. No whining about ‘piracy’ either, that way.

And the fact that it’s free and can speedily generate somewhat lengthy clips means it has potential for generating lots of possible clips and then stitching a YouTube movie together from the best (though of course there’s no lip-sync).

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?

Wonder Animation

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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.

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.

Stable Diffusion in 3DSMax

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tyFlow 1.111 adds Stable Diffusion in 3DSMax, with its tyDiffusion module “matching simple guide geometry” and “depth” from the 3D scene, to make “detailed” generated images that closely follow the 3D scene. The SD UI being used is ComfyUI. SD 1.5 Models, LORAs and ControlNets are supported.

Interestingly, it appears to be free…

tyDiffusion is available in both the Free and Pro editions of tyFlow, with users of the Free edition getting support for GPU acceleration. Requires 3ds Max 2018 or higher [tyFlow = “Max 2018”, but tyDiffusion = “Max 2023+”].

Yup, and on an open 435Mb download.

Theoretically then, one could take a Poser scene to Vue, then to Max, then ‘render’ it with AI. Though you can do something similar manually, rendering line-art and a depth map from a Poser scene and using them in ControlNet slots. Unless tyDiffusion is extracting some extra ‘secret sauce’ from the 3D scene, such as PoseNet poses from figures, or light maps for scene lighting.

However, I’m still hoping Renderosity has the sense to save Poser, by making a similar free and robust SD ‘rendering’ plugin for Poser 12 through 14.

Beware of InsightFace

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Beware of integrating any AI face-swopping technology from the open-source InsightFace developers. Because they appear to be getting very screwy on the legal side of things, for instance issuing several takedown notices for benign third-party YouTube videos… in which a well-known and respected YouTuber simply shows the technology. InsightFace’s products are thus not something you would want to use in your animations or graphic novels, I’d suggest, in case of legal problems with future licencing and distribution of your work.