A new $35 procedural fractals software that works inside of Blender, Vectron Fractals Blender Edition. You also need Octane for Blender, apparently, to do them justice when rendering.
Contest: Clip Studio Global Comic Awards 2026
Pixiv & Clip Studio Global Comic Awards 2026, with a submission deadline of 31st March 2026.
Contest: $3.5m Future Vision XPrize film-making contest
The Future Vision XPrize is now live, a $3.5 million film-making contest. Submit a three minute trailer for a film that tells a story about an optimistic future. Specifically, show how good things will become real in a technologically-advanced future that is happening because of us (not being done ‘to us’). Animation and AI tools can be used. Deadline: 15th August 2026.
Release: LTX Desktop Beta
LTX Desktop Beta has been released. It’s a free video generator and non-linear video editor, with a slick but simple GUI. Under the hood it’s powered by the new LTX 2.3 model. It’s the official LTX desktop software, open-source (Apache2.0) and fully local. No proprietary layers, full access to the models and their weights.
A simple interface, but with a powerful and cutting-edge AI video generation model underneath it. Can do ‘image to video’ as well as ‘prompt to video’, so the AI-haters don’t have to freak out about copyright. Just drop in your 3D render and watch it being restyled and/or animated. If you have the required VRAM of course. 32Gb is apparently optimum.
Expect long one-time downloads of the required multi-Gb models, once you have the LTX Desktop software installed.
It will need a powerful graphics-card to run it, of course, as well as masses of hard-drive space. 24Gb of VRAM on the graphics-card is usually thought of as needed for worth-having video generation, and 32Gb(!) is recommended here. Though note there’s also a mention of the option in LTX Desktop to use “an API key”, which suggests the software can also hook into a paid LTX cloud service. In that respect, those familiar with the ComfyUI node-based interface should also look at Comfy Cloud — which does not lock you into the LTX model only.
A DAZ Studio quickstart for ComfyUI users
A quick tutorial for those new to DAZ Studio and wresting with lighting, aiming for a nice image to take into a Stable Diffusion model. Solution: Don’t add preset lights at all! Auto-headlamp, and then adjust Exposure and Shutter Speed to get a nicely-balanced and real-time viewport. This provides a good evenly-lit starting render, better than Smooth Shaded.
Things change here (expressions, head-angle, hair added), but it’s possible to prompt to get more of a 1:1 match. Thus enabling re-colouring with the DAZ render in Photoshop, for consistent colouring in comics.
Release: Free Tier for Comfy Cloud
Free Tier Arrives in Comfy Cloud, with a simple no-fuss Google login/signup. 400 credits a month, no roll-over. Apparently that gets you about 20 minutes worth of generation on a fast GPU. Enough to try the latest ‘hot new’ model each month, maybe even a couple of times, and see if it’s for you or not. Or perhaps very slowly generate a short film, a bit each month. There are no free workflows/models, everything consumes credits.
Alongside the usual it offers tools useful for the 3D crowd, such as ‘sketch to 3D model’, or relighting of a rendered scene without re-rendering. Note also the presence of ElevenLabs TTS in there, via a partnership agreement.
Drawbacks: your favourite local custom-nodes may not be available; you may not be able to run very long workflows; possible wait-times and queues.
What’s New for Poser, DAZ and more, in February 2026
Posted on
by
Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion
Leave a comment
Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion
Leave a comment
Welcome to my regular pick of goodies for Poser and DAZ, and my round-up of other interesting software. This covers February 2026. As usual, just my picks, and with a focus on commercial-use items.
Note that Renderosity’s website is becoming very flaky, to the extent that the site is often unusable. You may need several tries to get a page to load, or just have to wait for several minutes. The same also goes for DAZ…
Science fiction:
An old-school Cryo-Vault: HS-2000 Command Center, perhaps of use for Doctor Who scenes?
Fantasy:
No fantasy picks this month.
Gothic and horror:
The Eldritch Sovereign Throne, with G9 pose.
Gothic Lamps Collection for DAZ.
Stitched Scars-for-G8F-and-G8M.
Jadis for G9F, a lookalike for the young Tilda Swinton.
Steampunk:
Pistolero Automata, a robo-cowboy.
Police Enforcer Helmet for DAZ Studio.
A free Ensemble Dress for G8F, potentially suitable for steampunk.
Chronos Mechanica Watch for Genesis 9.
Storybook:
A free Woodmood Coffee Table, potentially adaptable for a woodland tea-party scene.
A free simple-but-pleasing Witch Hat for Poser.
Free simple Toyboxes for Poser.
Toon:
Somewhat stylised Underwater Toon Props 2, suitable for toon and semi-toon fish.
Free, a bumper pack with a decade’s worth of poses for Nursoda’s Poser characters. Also some facial morphs.
Figures and parts:
A free C. Lloyd head for G8M.
Free floppy Hair For G8F.
Free, 2,600 Carnegie Mellon .BVH files for Poser, as animated .GIF previews.
Landscapes, seascapes and environment props:
Stonemason’s The Classical Gardens.
Spring Daffodil Flowers for DAZ.
A dramatic XI Root Bridge.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Antpittas. Cute little ant-eaters.
Songbird ReMix Parrots v7: Pacific Parrotlet Breeds.
Cat got your birds? They’re probably wearing one of the new T3d Meow Xpress for DAZ House Cat expressions.
A free Cat Wheel Pro for your Poser / DAZ moggies.
3DV Cat Accessories Big Bundle For DAZ.
Historical:
Classic Mature Hair Set for Genesis 9, looking suitable for ‘Biblical patriarch’ art.
The Templar for DAZ Studio and Templar Horse.
A free Waterpipe.
A Outpost Ruins Standalone for jungle scenes. Plus Outpost Kitbash for additional clutter and decay.
1930-50s dForce British game shooting outfit.
German Anti-Aircraft Searchlight for DAZ.
Scripts and other auto-helpers:
A free POV-EyeCam for Genesis 9.
DAZ LOD System and Cleaner. LOD is one of the methods by which videogames load huge scenes into a relatively small PC memory.
Tutorials:
* At YouTube, the new How to manually download and install DAZ content.
* Also useful is this image (see below), for those who install a new DAZ Studio version and find all their content has gone AWOL. It shows the convoluted process of getting your content library back again.
Software:
* Poser 14.0.227, with the new ‘Poser Cloth’. There’s been another release since then. The changelog suggests that Poser Physics has been getting a lot of attention, presumably to align it with the new Cloth.
* A wholly free desktop YoutubeDownloader that works. Useful for getting tutorial videos running locally and offline.
AI and similar helpers:
All free, as is the way with local AI.
* A group-test to discover which Z-Image Turbo style LoRAs work with the fast Z-Image Turbo Nunchaku r256 variant.
* ComfyUI LayerDivider for automatically creating layered .PSD files inside ComfyUI. Looks a bit hit-and-miss, but potentially it gets you Photoshop layers containing auto-masks for skin, hair and shadows. These then have obvious uses in postwork.
* A 360-degree VR image maker for Flux.2 Klein 4B. Uses automatic outpainting to seamlessly fill gaps between several images.
* Have Flux.2 Klein 4B extract Color Palette from an image. Just a basic one. See also 2020’s detailed survey “Some tools for extracting a limited colour palette from a picture”.
* Also for the amazing and fast Flux.2 Klein 4B, an Attach Outfit & Try On LoRA. Presumably it should work with Poser /DAZ renders, potentially opening up a whole realm of new free costumes?
* Restyling demos for Poser to Klein 4B and iRay to Klein 4B. 100% repeatable characters for comics production. Though it’s only likely to interest a few people. As with the 3D crowd, the Stable Diffusion crowd are overwhelmingly interested only in hyper-realistic 8k skin and animations of dancing girls with jiggling breasts.
* ComfyUI-Execute-Python: A single ComfyUI node for executing arbitrary Python code. Don’t worry… the node gets the PC’s unique GUID when installed, and thus makes your install of it unique and far safer. This means a shared workflow (i.e. downloaded from the Internet) can’t use it to run some nasty Python code. The legitimate use-case is obvious… you can have ComfyUI load external software as part of the workflow, and have that software run its own script on the ComfyUI output image. For example…
import subprocess
subprocess.call([r'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Photoshop.exe',r'C:\do_something.jsx'])
* ComfyUI-Yedp-Mocap, for capture from your webcam. Lightweight javascript extracts openpose frames from your video feed, and sends the frames to Controlnets, leaving your graphics-card free to run the image generation / restyling.
* A font generator for Flux.2 Klein 9B. Smart generation of… “1280×1280px font atlases from a single reference image and using the same font style”. Stable Diffusion for fonts, basically.
* The free Nichey, the only software I could find that automatically generates a full wiki from a set of local documents. You can plug in any capable online AI that has an “OpenAI compatible API”, and which isn’t going to freak out at being asked to ingest the documents and make a wiki from them. Potentially very useful if you have obscure creative software that needs a wiki, but you don’t have the time to make one.
Coming soon:
* Official massive RAM optimization fixes for ComfyUI Portable. And the new official NVIDIA Studio driver should greatly speed up the already-fast Flux.2 Klein, though I’m unsure if it will only benefit the latest 50-series graphics-cards. Releases soon, for both. Already here in speed-ups, ComfyUI-CacheDiT.
Qwen 3.5 is out and now has GGUFs. Potentially meaning a more powerful replacement for Qwen 3 4B as a standard prompt text-encoder in ComfyUI.
That’s it for now.
2,600 Carnegie Mellon .BVH files for Poser, as animated .GIF previews
Posted on
by
Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
1 Comment
Posted in Companion software, Freebies, Poser, Spotted in the News, The Animation Industry
1 Comment
I see that Shriinivas has an animated directory for the 2,600 Carnegie Mellon .BVH motion capture files. Released November 2023, you get little munchkins in .GIF animations which show each motion-capture.
The .BVH files are linked with a named link alongside each animation, but note that these don’t lead to the Poser versions. For Poser you want the cmu-ecstasy-motion-bvh-poser-friendly-2012 freebie archive. But the names in each set are the same. Thus Shriinivas’s “90_09” means that in the Poser files you need to look in folder “90” and there find the file “90_09.bvh”.
Scroll down his page to see the link to sub-pages for named ‘Animation Categories’, e.g.
Instructions for loading .BVH to a Poser figure, here. Sadly there’s still no drag-and-drop of .BVH in Poser.
iRay to Klein 4B – tested with leaping leprechauns!
Following last night’s Poser test of Klein 4B, someone asked ‘Do we need Poser’s real-time Comic Book linework?’ in the source image. Well, here’s a test with the Genesis 3 Madgloom figure and some quickly applied steampunk clothing, rendered in pure iRay in DAZ Studio. As you can see, a relatively dark iRay render of an unoptimized figure doesn’t phase Klein.
I added additional prompting to get the green hatband, green eyes and skin, to thus make Madgloom into a sort of ‘Leaping Leprechaun’ comic-book super-villain. The unwanted invented strap across the waistcoat was later removed with an additional prompt telling Klein to retain the clothing exactly. The fixed seed of ’42’ ensures restyling reproducibility.
So, no. When promoting for a comic-book style at least, that’s what you get. Comic-book. With other styles, the comic-book lines from Poser may matter more in the end result.
Poser to Klein 4B – the demo sheet for restyles
I found some time to do a demo sheet for a few of the many restyles that can be prompted for in German’s superb Flux.2 Klein 4b AI model. No LoRAs or Embeddings required. The figure is Nursoda’s Chull, and the quick Bondware Poser render used as the source-image is deliberately very basic, with no attempt to change the grungy fabric or the dark eyes, or to do a fancy full render.
See the full-sized image for the fine detail. I didn’t get around to some of the thicker oil painting or charcoal styles, but it can also do that. Watercolour I don’t like in Klein, it’s too blotchy and splashy.
All generations were made with a static seed of ’42’, for reproducibility.
Poser to Klein 4B – style change without a LoRA
Another ‘Poser to AI’ style success. A while back I made some Poser renders with Nursoda’s Chull figure, to test with Flux Kontext and style transfer. It was a failure. However we now have Flux2 Klein 4B, made in Germany, which is dual-use as it also has a wonderful Edit mode. There are only a few style LoRAs for 4B, but tonight I dug out my Chull renders and I find that the model is so flexible that one can just prompt for a style and get it consistently.
Here we see Chull being given a style makeover by Klein with just a short instructional prompt and a fixed seed. Klein’s Edit mode is working much like an old-school Photoshop filter. The result is a little washed out, but the registration between the original Poser render and the Klein is fairly exact… which means that Photoshop can easily correct that. Just lay the Poser source render on top of the Klein output, and set the ‘Multiply’ layer-blending mode.
The end result is quite appealing. At least when seen at a large size. Like all artwork with very fine lines, it’s not graphic enough to work well at small sizes. Such as in a small comic panel. But for a full-page children’s storybook illustration, it has a lot of appeal.
Problems are that Klein retains the 3D ‘ribbon style’ hair, and that the gaze direction has shifted. Gaze direction was prompted for, asking for it to remain fixed. But in the full-length Klein output we still get the dreaded “must stare at the camera” problem. In the close-up Klein output one of the eye pupils has been squished a little. Possibly Klein doesn’t understand ‘gaze’, though.
Still, not bad for a first proper attempt at a LoRA-less style makeover with Klein.
Release: Poser 14.0.227, with the new ‘Poser Cloth’
Poser 14.0.227, now with ‘Poser Cloth’ which is the replacement for the old Cloth Room. The old Cloth Room had to be removed before Christmas, due the expiry of a long-standing licensing agreement. Usage Tutorial for Poser Cloth.
Release and test: Ace-Step 1.5
I tried out the new Ace-Step 1.5 in ComfyUI. It is local and as fast as is claimed at generating music tracks with lyrics. About three minutes for a two minute track, on a 3060 12Gb card.
The official demos work fine when plugged in locally, but as soon as you depart one iota from these things start to fall apart. Lines of lyrics you specified are not sung. Music is often slightly ‘off’ or ‘wobbles’ for several seconds at a time. The actual genre can start to change. On top of this each generation is different, if you change so much as word in the lyrics. It’s impossible to iterate from a good starting point.
I then tried from scratch to get genres I knew, even with quite sophisticated prompts which worked with the guidelines in the official guide, it repeatedly veered towards rather generic and sometimes outright cheesy canned music. Prompting for Eno-style ambient music failed dismally, as did aiming at a early Gary Numan or Kraftwerk sound. Many times its output reminded me of the old ‘Band in a Box’ software.
Overall, impossible to iterate on and very very difficult to control. Disappointing, given the hype that led up to it. Still, you may be able to generate generic vocal-free soundtracks for animation, slideshows, visual-novels etc. But then again, Suno does have a free-tier that’s very capable and would be the better choice.
Lightwave 26 – due soon
The venerable LightWave 3D software… still alive, and still free for education users. An open beta for the forthcoming Lightwave 26 is reportedly set for spring 2026, with “speed increases for rendering and interface” along with…
“over 50 new features and 30+ interface changes, alongside under-the-hood improvements for speed. Planned features include SDF (non-polygon geometry), glTF, Ripper 2, OpenColorIO, Ocean Boat and Wake, Motor Rig, Chronoscope, USD True Fillet, Rig It tidy-up, a quadruped system, Octane updates, snow and lightning generators with animatable controls, flame fractals, a new fracture tool, Construct update, an asset browser, and AP (physics-based object placement)”.
However it sounds like the Poser 11 -> E-on Vue route to exporting Poser scenes for recent versions of Lightwave could be bjorked…
“due to 26’s focus on utilizing newer technologies, potentially cutting off older systems.”
Though that might just mean it won’t run on older PCs and older graphics cards? My guess.
What’s New for Poser & DAZ & AI – January 2026
Posted on
by
Posted in Automation, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Posted in Automation, Companion software, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion, Spotted in the News
Leave a comment
Welcome to my regular pick of goodies for Poser and DAZ, and my round-up of other interesting software.
Science fiction:
Robo Pack. Lovely looking bots, and currently a lovely $14 price too. But… then you find out that they’re “props” and not rigged, which explains the price. Still, very nice designs.
Need your Area 52 UFOs repairing? dForce Tech Engineer Outfit.
Fantasy:
Stonemason’s Lakehaven, which could make a pretty good Laketown in Middle-earth.
Ashkin and Arboriel probably run the new Lumina Botanica market wall-stall.
Gothic and horror:
Gharton for Poser. Not sure if it’s a D&D monster, so beware of commercial use.
Snake Man for Poser and Blattodacid for Poser. Again, possibly D&D monsters?
Steampunk:
Elven Zeppelin by 1971s. For Poser and DAZ. I don’t recall seeing this one before, and I don’t think it’s a re-release?
Fire Fly by 1971s. Another new release? Moon Observatory not included but it’s here.
Steampunk Operator HD Stylized Clothes for Genesis 9. It seems you don’t also get the stylised hair and beard, so I guess they’ll be in another pack yet to be released?
An unusual Tinheart Clockwork Set.
Storybook:
Cooking Kitchen, a semi-toon kitchen.
The Cog Regime Tinsel Void Automaton. A mechanised helper for Santa.
Toon:
Christmas Delight toon props for Poser.
Pumpkin Ride toon prop for Poser.
Free, Skylab’s Complete Collection of poses and morphs for Nursoda characters for Poser.
Free, Poses for Gruggle Monk from 3D Universe.
Figures and parts:
Free, a collection of Skylab’s pose sets for Poser, that were on the old ShareCG website.
Currently free at DAZ, two large sets of G3 male poses, i13 50 Essential and i13 Elite Collection.
Free, Update: G3/G8/G9 Pose Converter Plugin for DAZ Studio.
Landscapes, seascapes and environment props:
A modular Mountain Pathways set for Poser.
Free, 3D .OBJ models of raindrops on windowpanes.
Animals:
Songbird ReMix Parrots Vol 7 – Parrotlets of the World 2. For Poser and DAZ.
Nature’s Wonders Slugs & Snails. For Poser and DAZ.
DA Bull Terrier for Daz Dog 8.
Torajin for Big Cat 2. A giant fantasy kitty.
Historical:
Free, Skylab’s Decade of Bible Themed Poses, formerly at ShareCG.
Free Holy Spirits for G8F+G8M.
Mediaeval Grindstone, rigged and with two G8 poses.
LOWREZ People 17th century, low poly baroque people.
Camera Noir for Poser, a classic 1930s newspaperman camera.
A Moebius / 1970s style VYK La Pouf for Genesis 9.
Scripts and other auto-helpers:
LowPi Formations Builder. Auto-build formations of military men (low-poly), for large scale battle scenes.
KBXF Slow Motion Player for DAZ. Seems to be a helper for animators.
Software:
* Alpha-Trimmer, a new free… “Windows tool that automatically trims excess transparent areas from .PNG images, via the Windows context menu (i.e. the right-click menu)”.
* Nikse is a free open-source subtitle editor / extractor / converter, able to convert between 300 subtitle formats.
* Blender v5 is now at v5.1. Also note the free Blender-ComfyUI-Bridge, promising… “real-time, bidirectional communication between Blender and ComfyUI” in a round-trip. Python, so one wonders if it could be adapted for Poser.
AI and similar helpers:
All free, as is the way with local AI.
* SD-ppp one of the best known ways to connect Photoshop to ComfyUI, now updated to a late December 2025 version. Sadly it requires the very latest version of Photoshop. There appears to be no ComfyUI connector for Photoshop versions lower than CC 2019.
* Collection of simple fixed user-interfaces for ComfyUI, for the node-phobic.
* Flux2 Klein is the latest hot Edit model. It’s a marvel, and its 4B GGUFs (working workflow) can be run fast on low-spec hardware. See also the vital Official prompting Guide for Flux.2 Klein.
* Flux2 Klein can do face-swaps on its own, with a simple prompt (e.g. “Extract the face from image 1 and paste it into Image 2, completely replacing the face. Retain the exact facial features in image 1.”). But there’s also a dedicated Face-Swap and Head-Swap(!) assistant for Flux2 Klein 4B, with workflows.
* Also for 4B. Flux2 Klein 4B Spritesheet generator, which looks like it may be of interest to those in the early stages of modelling an object in 3D. Since it outputs top-down and side views from a simple photo of an object…
* SAM-3D-Pose-Analyzer is a Python software with GUI. Drop in a photo of a pose, get a .BVH pose output that will then pose a 3D figure in Clip Studio. The possibilities for adapting this to do the same for Poser figures are obvious.
* ComfyUI-face-shape. Detects the face shape/features in a 2D image, then sets these up for your warping. Offering… “extensive control over individual facial features including outer head outline (with separate jaw and forehead controls), eyes (with independent rotation), irises, eyebrows, nose (single merged object), and lips (upper and lower with direction-specific scaling)”. I’m fairly sure there was Windows face-morphing funware that did this, back in the day. But it’s good to see AI catching up.
* “Inochi2D is an open standard for real-time 2D puppet animation”, and it now has ComfyUI-Inochi2d nodes. Never heard of it, but possibly useful for 2D puppeteers.
* ComfyUI nodes for “overlay alignment, colour correction based on a reference image”. In Russian, but easily auto-translated. Related is FluxKontextImageCompensate, an attempt to fix the problem of unwanted image shifting, cropping and zooming. The problem is not unique to Flux Kontext, as all Edit models suffer from it to an extent.
* A huge Celebrity LoRA browser with preview images and links to the whereabouts. Sadly it uses .PNG for images, so loads very slowly.
* ComfyUI-Align, a simple intuitive way to straighten up your messy ComfyUI node workflows.
* And finally, Fixed Clean Styles – DAZ Studio, a LoRA that renders your Z-Image Turbo images like it’s 1999 and you just made a DAZ render that took four hours.
Coming soon:
* TeleStyle, when implemented for ComfyUI. Complete style makeovers for video files (e.g. live-action to rotoscoped-style drawing) with temporal stability (i.e. no flicker / wobble between frames). Some say this can already be done, but this appears to make it much easier to do. Probably in ComfyUI within weeks.
* Intel OIDN 3. Already integrated into Poser, OIDN nicely denoises grainy 3D renders and thus reduces render times. The new 3.0 version promises temporal stability for de-noising of video frames rendered from 3D, which should interest Poser animators looking to render quickly. Due in Q3 2026.
* VNCCS Pose Studio node for ComfyUI. Currently in early beta (see the 0.4 release) and untested by me as yet, but potentially it looks like having a basic mini-Poser inside ComfyUI. Could be a game-changer?
Character reference -> ‘pose and position’ window -> generated image with posed character in the desired position.
That’s it for now.