News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

AI plugin for Blender

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A plugin for Blender, that auto ‘renders’ the 3D scene with generative AI, and it appears to be a third-party plugin and not official. Looking a bit rough at present (the Christmas tree is flubbed, in the image below, and the box is not round), and currently in a rough beta and with a waiting list. But it’s a glimpse of what’s going to be possible in terms of auto-rendering without typing out descriptive prompts. Especially if another AI ‘pre-processes’ to work out what the shapes are (‘girl, round box, plant, tree with baubles’), before the generative AI image work takes place.

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.

Another Poser Library option

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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).

Small Poser update to 13.3.1009

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A new Poser 13 update, to 13.3.1009. Mostly small bug fixes, but note…

“Added translucence to the physical root node”.

Three seats for a Poser licence, so you can run two or more instances simultaneously (e.g. on a laptop for the Library + desktop for the work + a server rendering in the garage).

Also, the “Mac OS broke OpenGL”, so the developers of Poser have “Disabled shadow for OpenGL preview of point lights”.

Firefly line-art only render, to Stable Diffusion 1.5

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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.

New for Poser and DAZ – January and February 2025

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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:

KT Child for G9.

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.

Release: Audiblez with GUI

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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.

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.

New for Poser and DAZ – November and December 2024

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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.

Animal Furnitures.

Toon:

A new toony Venus Flytrap Monster from Darkseal.

Rocket Girl.

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:

Heron by AM.

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.

Viking Conquest for DAZ.

Bohemian Highwayman for G8M. Possibly also useful for items of hobbit garb?

Renaissance Helmets for G8M, G8F and G9.

Victorian Medicine Cabinet.

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.

Old Basement.

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!