News about the DAZ Studio and Poser software

Minimax H3 progress

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I’m getting much better results with Minimax, and little quicker, since I moved to the latest 1.1 version of the most popular 4-step turbo LoRA.

I’m now using 32Gb of files in total on a 12Gb VRAM card, an incredible feat made possible by the behind-the-scenes magic of Minimax, ComfyUI and the .W4A8 format (successor to GGUFs)…

Model: minimax_h3_ref2va_hybrid_b20-49_pruned_w4a8_mixed.safetensors (11.6Gb)

Text encoder: qwen3vl_32b_minimax_h3-w4a8_convrot.safetensors (14.6Gb)

Video VAE: minimax_h3_video_vae_int8_convrot.safetensors (2.9Gb) (still the good old fast one)

Audio VAE: still the official one (577Mb)

Turbo LoRA: minimax_h3_fl2v_turbo_4step_v1.1_768p_comfyui_bf16.safetensors (1.8Gb)

Generating in 4 steps, er_sde with sgm_uniform for visual quality.

The audio is bad, due to the turbo 4-steps and the er-sde sampler, but audio would be replaced manually. Tests initially suggest the turbo LoRA should be left at 1.0, regardless of video size.

Tests, 10 seconds:

0.3 megapixels.

 

0.5 megapixels.

 

1.0 megapixels.

 

As you can see, much of the graininess on the complex fast-moving net and dragonfly wings goes away at the native 1.0. Not completely, but apparently such problems are vanquished as one nears 2.0.

I’m still testing and building the text-to-video workflow, and have not yet started using reference images which would fix the owl’s visual character etc. Also, the next version of ComfyUI Portable will add the ability to include keyframes anywhere, which will make generation less of a slot-machine and more of an assembly tool.

Minimax H3 watercolour example

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An example of one of the appealing visual styles possible with the new Minimax H3…

 

Text to video, a quick test at 0.5 megapixel quality, with Nvidia’s official RTX upscaling (so quick, who knew?) to 1440px. Audio is a bit wobbly, but a finished storytelling movie would replace narration, SFX and music.

The prompt’s starting line, to set the visual style:

integrated_multimodal_description: 2D-animated in a European watercolor storybook style with deep indigo night washes and silver moonlight highlights.

Other strong possibilities that are related:

2D-animated in a European watercolor storybook style

2D-animated in soft painterly children’s-book watercolor style

2D-animated in warm hand-painted whimsical style

Note the American spelling of watercolor.

I’ve yet to test the reference model, where you can input character-sheets etc.

Updated: My Minimax workflow for the 3060 12Gb card

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More success with Minimax H3 video generation.


 

At 1504 pixels, five seconds.

The workflow I’m using is now at version 1.4. Please update, if it’s been of interest to you.

Download: MiniMax_H3_megaworkflow-3060-12Gb-v14.zip

I’ve deleted the old GGUF posts and workflow. The above is far better.

I accidentally generated a test at 2.0 (1920px), and it can be done on a 3060 card, but is best left at 3 or 4 seconds. 7 seconds will take 35+ minutes.

 

This is text prompt to video. Upscaling can be done by extracting the first and last frame and re-using them as start and end points. That way you more or less get what the draft showed, even though you’ve moved up from 0.4 to 2.0 in megapixels. This roundtrip is now included in the new workflow.

Next up, sorting out a Minimax Music workflow. Then testing the Minimax reference to video model, with Poser renders.

Success – Minimax H3 video at 1376 x 768px, on a 3060 12Gb card

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Hurrah, success with Minimax text-to-video on my RTX 3060 card! I can now generate video to Minimax’s 1.0 resolution. The sweet spot seems to be 12 minutes to get a seven second video at 0.9 resolution.

Windows 11, RTX 3060 12Gb with just 24Gb DDR3 system RAM (most people run 32Gb of DDR4). It’s amazing I can do large coherent videos on this, in a few minutes, on an old server. How far we’ve come since the days when Stable Diffusion 1.5 was mostly gloopy mis-fires at 512px, and took ages.

Minimax’s prompt adherence is now much better, now I’ve moved on from using a supercrushed Q2 GGUF for the prompt-processing. Next step is to see how well it works in combination with Poser / natural media emulation. But for now, a full setup tutorial.

TUTORIAL:

Here’s how to do it on this humble entry-level card, with the latest software, file-types and turbo boosters. The workflow is linked at the bottom of the post. All free, as is the way with generative AI.

First, install a new ComfyUI Portable, then use the Manager to update ComfyUI to the latest 0.32.x or higher (needed!). If the ComfyUI console throws a polars error from Python when starting up, then also pip install polars-lts-cpu (it’s polars for older CPUs, which lack the latest whizz-bang multimedia processing extensions).

Second, clear 40Gb of space on the SSD for the files you need, and also leave plenty of headroom for the Windows swap-file etc. I have my swap-file capped at 24Gb to match the system RAM.

Models: At HF get minimax_h3_fl2va_pruned-w4a8_convrot_pruned.safetensors (11.6Gb) and minimax_h3_ref2va_pruned-w4a8_convrot_pruned.safetensors (11.6Gb). The first does text-to-video and first frame or first frame/last frame. The second takes character / environment reference images (e.g. Poser character renders), and combines the character(s) and scenes into the video, if you have the prompting done correctly. Correct prompting is everything with Minimax H3. Put the files in ..\ComfyUI\models\diffusion_models\

Clip: At HF get qwen3vl_32b_minimax_h3-w4a8_convrot.safetensors (14.6Gb). Put the file in ..\models\text_encoders\

The above are Winnougan’s highly efficient ‘pruned’ blends of the FP4 and Int8 format, suitable for the 3060 12Gb card and matched with the very latest ComfyUI features.

VAE video: At HF get Kijai’s minimax_h3_video_vae_int8_convrot.safetensors (3.7Gb). This decodes the video frames into a video, and is far faster than the original. Place the file in ..\ComfyUI\models\vae\

VAE audio: At HF get minimax_h3_audio_vae_fp32.safetensors (577Mb). This is the standard from ComfyUI, and works so quickly it’s not worth speeding up. Place the file in ..\ComfyUI\models\vae\

Turbo LoRA: At HF get Abiray’s minimax_h3_turbo_4step_ckpt600_V4.safetensors turbo LoRA (590Mb) and place it in ..\ComfyUI\models\loras\

Having ComfyUI at version 0.32.0 or higher allows you to run the turbo video VAE and also to pair the turbo LoRA with their new ‘Sage Attention replacement’ speed-up called Comfy Kitchen Attention. Simply add their new ModelAttentionBackend node between the model and the LoRA, and toggle it to use ‘Kitchen Attention’. That’s it, though note it’s best for lower-end cards and that 50-series cards may not see much difference. I think I’m getting a 20-30% speed-up from it.

With this setup I get good results at 5 steps with the turbo LoRA at 1.2, Euler / beta. Image quality is still slightly crispy and granulated, but better than smushed and gloopy. The crispiness could be because I’m over-forcing the turbo LoRA, of course.

7 mins = 7 seconds, at 0.6 (1056 x 608px).
12 mins = 7 seconds, at 0.9 (1280 x 736px).
18 mins = 8 seconds, at 1.0 (1376 x 768px) (the model’s native trained resolution) and using 6 steps.

All 24fps at 16:9 widescreen ratio. 0.9 seems the sweet spot for me re: the balance of time / quality / size. That’s the video which heads this tutorial.

Workflow as a .JSON file for ComfyUI: MiniMax_H3_megaworkflow-3060-12Gb-v14.zip (updated, 15th Aug).

New for Poser and DAZ and more, July 2026

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I’m getting back of track for an end-of-month post, so here’s my regular personal pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items recently released. Plus links to interesting software, tutorials etc. Just two weeks worth of goodies, this time, since the last survey went to the middle of July.

Science fiction:

A simple scene from 1971s, Tunnel of Technomages for Poser.

Alien plants are always welcome. Fantasy Plants of de Altus Saltus, by quality plant maker Martin J. Frost.

Horror:

Gothic Gargoyles including a waterspout that would also suit steampunk street scenes.

Fantasy:

* A well-designed ‘Conan-era’ style Sacrificial Ritual Dagger Prop with Poses.

Sacrificial Ritual Book Prop with Poses. Also a Sacrificial Stone Altar Prop.

Need even more mediaeval stuff for your runtime? Powerage has 130 Medieval Props Collection for DAZ, currently at a bargain $10. AI-generated 3D props, but good enough for background clutter.

Storybook:

Lyra Character for DAZ, from 3DUniverse.

Summer Vibes props for Poser and DAZ.

SV’s Whimsical Flowers.

80s Heart Galore Earrings.

Ice Cream Configurator for DAZ.

Toon:

JAF Pear for DAZ.

3DUniverse are now selling on Renderosity. Only the Lyra Character for DAZ and accessories, at present (see above). But they say… “The Entire 3DUniverse Catalog of Products will be added in the coming weeks!”. Which should mean all the toons.

Figures and parts:

dForce Timmy Hair for Genesis 9. Convincing boy hair, which you don’t see every day. Could also suit imps and similar smaller fantasy figures.

Free Moon Men Poses for Genesis 8/8.1, for a classic pulp art scene.

C66 Figure Splitter. A script set to convert 3D figures and props into kitbash / greeble libraries.

Animals:

Terror Bird by AM. A prehistoric bird from the Miocene megafauna era. Very savage apparently, and not a friendly cute duckie.

Landscape:

Arboreal Pond Exocab for near-future pond living. Just invent an electrostatic force-field to keep the insects out!

Historical:

* Babylonian Priestess for Genesis 8 Female. Apparently authentic.

* Lots of free 20th century industrial props for Poser, from TryNationArtist71.

Shaders:

Free ODF’s Skin Shader for Poser 12, 13 & 14… “This package contains the original ODF Skin Shader together with an Enhanced version by hborre, both provided as easy to use standalone material presets for Poser.”

MMX VDB Smoke FX 03, for steaming cauldrons and similar.

Scripts and helpers:

DC Texture Transformer 2, M4 Bundle. Convert M4 body textures to fit Genesis (all) and L’Homme.

BJ Pose Zone Plugin. Easily… “combine full-body and partial poses for all Genesis figures.”

BioFrom – Procedural Biological Materials as a plugin material-maker for Blender. Presumably the materials you make could also be imported into Poser, since it’s the same Cycles engine?

Currently free at DAZ, RunTimeDNA’s Render Studio Modular 1-4 + Scenes for Poser.

SculptTool For DAZ.

ND Cloth Simulation Toolkit for DAZ.

Tutorials:

Poser Meshlight Weirdness and how to fix it.

Want to make a ‘wobbly hand-held camera’ YouTube video watchable, by converting it to a slide-show of extracted stills? There’s a simple tutorial here that uses freeware.

Resources:

Sadly the Hivewive 3D forums were closed on 31st July 2026. On the Renderosity forums, there are currently two continuity threads, “Life after the Hive” and “Hivewire 3D forums… continued!”. Also, note the backup on Archive.org as Hive Wire Forums Backup June 2026.7z (250mb, expanding to 2Gb).

Software:

* Poser is now at Poser 14.0.439 (30th July 2026). I’ve picked out the most notable changes from the changelog.

* Windows Movie Maker 6.0 Setup for Windows 10 and 11. Yes, the classic Movie Maker, now working again on modern Windows!

* The free G’MIC 4.0.x has been released. Includes the usual .8BF Photoshop plugin, which also works with other graphics software that supports the .8BF plugin format. As usual, turn on the internal Internet switch and update after install, to get your custom presets back if they were based on experimental filters. Your custom G’MIC presets are stored in the Windows Registry.

* CorelDraw 2025, currently in a Humble Bundle for charity.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools.

* Aozora Trainer, a free local model trainer for SDXL-derived models, and the software is designed to run on a entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics card.

* Another ComfyUI <-> Photoshop bridge. Looks rather complex, but may appeal to some, and it apparently round-trips.

* Marlin-2B (GGUF) automatically indexes video thus…

Marlin-2B should be supported by the latest freeware Jan.ai local LLM/GGUF runner, as this now supports video input at last. However, note that back-end config is needed. Jan’s underlying llama.cpp requires both ffmpeg and ffprobe installed and on your system PATH in Windows… “without them, video requests will fail”. Theoretically Marlin/Jan.ai can then describe entire videos, but memory limitations mean that clips fed to Marlin 2B are best kept short on local desktop PCs.

* ComfyUI’s competitor InvokeAI has had an important security update. Also, among other important items it adds…

– Video generation support via Wan 2.2.
– Anima controlnets and inpainting.
– Multi-GPU support.

* Voicebox 0.5, a major release for this standalone portable Windows software. The slick GUI-based… “Voicebox stops being just a voice-cloning studio and becomes a full AI voice studio.”

That’s it for the mid/end July 2026 survey. More picks next month!

Release: Poser 14.0.439 (30th July 2026)

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

Poser is now at Poser 14.0.439 (30th July 2026). Updates I noted since the Poser 14.0.227 release include, among many other items in the Changelog…

– Upgraded OpenGL from 2.2 to 4.3.
– Support for 8 lights in scene vs. 5 previously.
– GLSL now previews PrincipledBSDF, DiffuseBSDF, TransparentBSDF, Math nodes, Image Texture with alpha channel.

– HDRI environment maps correctly light and render as a background sphere. Rotation correctly dials 0-360 degrees.

– Area Light shape types in the property pane now contain Rectangle and Square.
– Increased the Shadow Blur Radius for the Infinite light.
– Shadow Blur Radius correctly works in Cycles [SuperFly].
– Eliminated pixelated shadows.
– Shadows from transparent objects no longer broken in FireFly renders.

– Fixed ability to apply animated Poses back to Props.
– Added the ability to save poses for props.
– Props can now save animations.

– Various Physics/Cloth fixes.
– User can now paint Rigidity onto cloth.
– Added Cloth Type presets Silk, Rubber, Cotton, Wool/Fleece, Denim, and Leather.

– Various Bullet Physics / collision fixes.
– Added per frame smoothing option to physics simulation settings and function.

– Focal distance indicator no longer malfunctions when animation keys are added.

– Online reference manual: New Help Topic for Gobo Lights.
– Gobo spotlight implemented for Cycles [SuperFly].
– Poser 14 correctly links to the Poser 14 reference manual.

So, a nice balance between updates for animators, and those who want better lighting and shadows. A major push forwards, by the look of it. Having “8 lights in scene” is reason enough on its own to upgrade.

New for Poser and DAZ, June and July 2026

Posted on by Posted in DAZ Studio, Poser, Poser to Stable Diffusion Leave a comment

A little late, here’s my regular personal pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items recently released. I also add some software picks at the foot of the post. This time it’s covering June and the first half of July 2026.

Science fiction:

Beetle Bot by The AntFarm.

Industrial Sci-Fi Corridor by 1971s.

An unusual Black Kiln for Poser and DAZ, by Coflek-Gnorg.

Moebius-style dForce Fuzz Outfit for Genesis 8 and 8.1 Female. Also has a Textures Add-On pack.

Betelgeuse Mission for DAZ Studio, a near-future rocket launch with rocket, pad and gantry.

Staticon has various alien artifact packs on Renderosity Freestuff.

Sci-Fi Head Gadgets and hi-tech glasses.

Horror:

Mask 021 MMKBProps.

Boldger Badger for Genesis 9

Steampunk:

Parisian Backstreets by Stonemason.

PW Zeppelin exterior and also a luxury 1930s interior.

The Cog Regime Creepy Robot Bambino.

Steampunk Hall Kit for Poser, by 1971s. Also available for DAZ.

Heavenly Zeppelin converted for DAZ Studio.

dForce Dandy Andy Outfit for Genesis 9.

Pants 007 in a steampunk style.

Art Deco Balcony 2 for DAZ.

Fantasy:

Arah3D Cottage Girl For G8F And G9.

JMR dForce Afron Medieval Outfit for Genesis 9 and 8 Male.

There’s another round of Centaurs and Minotaurs on DAZ, and related animal armour.

Storybook:

Seabreeze Coastal Tram for DAZ.

GNBD Beach Toys and Sand Castles.

Get a health-and-safety nightmare (how did we ever survive?), in Retro Playground Set, with Vintage 1950s-70s Park Equipment.

Toon:

Lucy the toon chicken, for Poser and DAZ.

The Fantasy Tree Prop For DAZ Studio. Basic, but looks compatible with Lenore and the Raven, if given a texture makeover.

3D Universe have converted nine toon animals for DAZ Studio, including Noodle the Toon Cat.

Figures and parts:

Hr-284 for Poser and V4.

GNBD Soccer Player Poses and Fan Expressions for Genesis 9.

Shaders:

DAZ Studio Hard Surface Shaders.

Animals:

Turn your horsie into a cow! Bovine DAZ Horse 3 Character Bundle.

Dove for Poser. “Incredibly realistic”, with textures and poses.

Historical:

Classic Film Projector Set for DAZ.

Fusion Motorcycle for Poser, by Cybertenko.

Retro Pinball Machines. A pack of retro 80s arcade games is also available.

Also, note that lots of Bryce freebies are coming through Renderosity Freestuff, many of them historical or vintage in nature.

Scripts and helpers:

Poser_Packer_Combined_v10…

“Poser Packer v10 is a powerful and user-friendly packaging tool designed specifically for Poser content creators. It dramatically speeds up the entire product preparation process by automatically collecting all required files (.cr2 characters, .obj geometries, textures, .pz2 poses, .pp2 props), creating the correct Runtime folder structure (with optional Author folder level), fixing all internal paths, and copying thumbnails.”

Smart Content Finder for DAZ Studio.

BatchFlow Render for DAZ Studio 6.

iRay Light Manager Pro for DAZ Studio 4.2x. Also available for 6.x. There’s also a Scene Manager.

A free G9 to G9 Pose Copy/Mirror Script.

The free dForce Material Master – Updated.

DAZ Script Linter. $99 seems a lot for just a linter, but it may be of use to some.

Tutorials:

Practical AI for DAZ users.

Texture tips and two texture mistakes you should NEVER make in Poser and DAZ.

David Revoy has a new free one-hour tutorial “A Comic strip from A to Z with Krita”. Krita being the free painting software, that incidentally integrates nicely with ComfyUI.

Resources:

As announced earlier on this blog, “HiveWire Forums to close” at the end of July 2026. But now the most important parts of the HiveWire3D forums are safely backed up at Archive.org, as Hive Wire Forums Backup June 2026.7z (250mb, expanding to 2Gb). Download, unzip, keyword-search it locally using AnyTXT Searcher or similar. Also on Archive.org, you’ll find similar archives for the Smith Micro forums, the RuntimeDNA forums, and a selection from the ShareCG website.

Software:

A few months later than planned, but it’s here now. LightWave 2026 final is released.

iClone Personal, a free version. See also the 2026 Reallusion 3D Character Contest.

PD Howler 2027 pre-orders are now open, and there are some details about what’s being added.

Comic artists note that the free Krita Next 5.4.0 (the unstable alpha version of Krita painting software) has the following new feature… “Comic Panel Editing Tool: Close all shapes cut with the tool”.

The open source Blender is now at version 5.2 LTS. New nodes system for hair and cloth, new ‘Thin Wall’ mode for paper and glass emulation (I’m thinking: “shadow puppet theatre”), ‘texture caching’ for the Cycles render engine cuts memory use by “up to 80%”, more changes to Grease Pencil, you can add 3D primitives when sculpting, and there are major Eevee real-time rendering improvements.

A new release for ArcGIS CityEngine 2026.0. Which auto-generates 3D cities. Among others things, it now moves to Python 3 scripting.

The open source DigiKam plans to plug in an AI to help with complex asset searching.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools. This month it’s all about add-ons for Germany’s excellent Flux.2 Klein model, used in ComfyUI.

* Klein Edit Composite is another major Klein breakthrough, as a custom node for ComfyUI. Works with Klien 9B or 4B. With this you can do multiple iterative edits on an image, without the rest of image shifting about or changing. Works fast, too. Tested and working, and my 4B GGUF (commercial use) ComfyUI workflow is here.

* Refcontrol for Flux.2 Klein 4B. Use a depth-map to help guide ‘the style and look’ of your source image into a new shape. it’s best explained as an image…

Since it’s easy to get this sort of depth render out of Poser, it means that even ancient well-modelled figures and props become useful again.

* Flux.2 Klien 4B Zoom LoRA. Draw a red box around the area of an image you want enlarged, and generate a new image that pseudo-zooms into it.

* Flow-upscaler for Flux.2, for when you need slightly better upscaling than normal. Trained on Flux.2 Klein 4B.

* InvokeAI 6.x development continues. Various Flux.2 Klein LoRA formats are now supported, since version 6.12.

And finally, the Halloween Gathering for Fantasy Attic’s Holidays has started. Got DAZ or Poser freebies, for the Halloween give-away pages? Send them in! Submission deadline: 25th September 2026.

That’s it for June-July 2026. More picks next month!

Release: iClone Personal

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Interesting. iClone goes free. Sort of. The new iClone Personal appears to be almost uncrippled. It never times out, and is a perpetual freebie.

“It has the complete toolset of the paid edition of iClone [currently 8.78], has the same render resolutions, and can be used on commercial projects.”

What you can’t do with Personal includes…

    — exporting to “3D software or game engines” via FBX or OBJ etc, more than 30 times.
    — local AI rendering via the built-in ‘AI Studio’ (need access to their Cloud, pay $$$s for credits).
    — “purchase Content in Reallusion Content Store & Marketplace”.
    — their Character Creator and several advanced animation packages are only included as Trial versions.

Note also that the comparison table has no mention of the vital AccuLIPS plugin at all — it lip-syncs your character to an audio file. I have to assume it’s included in none of the packages, and it’s just a paid plugin.

Some further questions that arise: Will your Character Creator-made free characters all stop working when the CC trial expires? Will Personal users at least be able to download freebies from Reallusion’s free content store, or will getting a freebie count as a “purchase” (not allowed for Personal users). Will it ‘stick’ at 8.7, when 9 comes out?

Sign-up/account/Internet needed to get it and also to activate it. Windows 10 or higher (only).

Nice to have to free and legit. But your problem is going to be getting all the content you need for a project. In that sense, DAZ 4.x is by far the better free choice, giving access to a vast content ecosystem. Ditto Poser 12 (at just $29), which has a somewhat friendlier UI than DAZ and also has all the animation tools you need built-in.

That said, iClone 8 is slick, built for animation, and for some users the UI’s learning-curve will be a lot easier than learning DAZ + plugins for animation. If all you need is block-out some stock human figures for a storyboard, with some motion on them, it might be for you.

So… I went to get it, with the old login details that were still valid about a year ago. But now I get… “Your password does not meet our minimum security standards”. And then I got bounced back to the main page. Oh well. Maybe Personal is not for me, then. They blew the chance to get me back into iClone.

HiveWire Forums to close

Posted on by Posted in Poser, Spotted in the News 1 Comment

Sad news, “HiveWire 3D Forums Will Be Closing”. The Poser-friendly forums had continued for several years after the closure of the HiveWire Store, with a strong focus on supporting the high-quality HiveWire content and various incarnations of the Dawn/Dusk/Luna figures. The forums are set to close on 31st July 2026, according to the post.

I have now locally saved the following forums complete, in the form of per-post encapsulated .MHTML files (pages plus images plus page-design intact). Follow-on sub-pages for threads are included.

– Poser
— Poser Scripts
— Poser Shaders

– DAZ Studio
— DAZ Scripts
— DAZ Shaders

– Photoshop

Plus just four selected items from the freebies section of the forums, as .MHTML pages along with their download .ZIPs. I won’t be doing a full archive of all the freebies, so feel free there to do it yourself.

My saves total 2Gb, which compresses down to a 280Mb .7z ZIP file. I’ll upload the ZIP to Archive.org in due course. You will then be able to add this rescue archive to my earlier rescue archives of the RuntimeDNA and Smith Micro Poser forums, and ShareCG, and keyword search across them with desktop freeware such as AnyTxt Searcher or paid software such as dtSearch. (Update: the latest AnyTxt is now cripple-ware, sadly).

Active Poser forums remain at Renderosity and there’s also a slow sub-forum for Poser at the official DAZ Studio site.

Update: now upload as Hive Wire Forums Backup June 2026.7z (250mb, expanding to 2Gb).

New for DAZ and Poser, May 2026

Posted on by Posted in Companion software, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser Leave a comment

Time for my regular pick of Poser and DAZ Studio items released in the last last month. I also add some software picks at the foot of the post.

Science fiction:

Trash Bot from TheAntFarm.

FAC-CH18-07 for DAZ Studio, a flying aircraft carrier. Aircraft not included, but you’ll probably want to add more futuristic-looking planes.

SE Cyborg Maintenance Bay for DAZ.

LI Space Cadet Hair for Genesis 9.

Gothic and horror:

Creature HD Morphs Collection for Genesis 9. Looks a bit more useful for horror than sci-fi.

Steampunk:

Steampunk Alley by Stonemason.

Fantasy:

RawArt’s Grundlebukk Troll for Genesis 9. Not HD, which is good.

Koara Koala for Genesis 9. Perhaps more ‘horror’ than ‘fantasy’. But you may be able to make the face less alarming.

Faeryl’s Horns for Genesis, M4 and V4. Free.

A fantasy Battlefield for DAZ, free.

Free Centaur 8 GF8 ‘skins’. Including giraffe and leopard.

Storybook:

Boutique Front Wonderland for DAZ.

dForce MB Peasant Dress for G9F including the shoes.

Toon:

Free TDSOA Toons poses.

Figures and parts:

James 9, a free figure preset for Genesis 9. Clothes not included.

Z Pose Library Old Age Mega Set for Genesis 9 and 8 Female. Despite the name, the previews also shows males taking the poses.

Swim Goggles for Genesis 9 and for G8 Male.

Shaders:

Wrinkle It! for DAZ Studio. A wrinkle cloth shader.

Landscapes and environments:

LOWREZ People At The Beach, for populating modern beach scenes.

Animals:

Sloth by AM. A real creature.

Songbird ReMix: Orioles of the Old World.

Historical:

Ancient Greek Wall Segments, only suitable for background use.

AJ Ancient Roman Pool for Poser. A touch basic, but now we have AI makeovers.

Wooden Church Ruins 1. A Viking stave church, collapsed.

400 BCE, though more useful for a Wild West scene ‘down Mexico way’.

Caribbean Street Bundle, also useful for the southern seafront cities of the USA.

dForce Long Sleeved Business Suit, 1940s style.

Building On Fire for DAZ Studio. Would suit historical events such as the London Blitz during the Second World War.

Scripts and helpers:

Auto Rigger Pipeline for DAZ.

The new SDK beta for DAZ Studio 6 beta, for plugin makers.

DAZ 2 RizomUV and back… “send any mesh from your DAZ scene directly into RizomUV for UV editing, then seamlessly reimport the updated UVs without losing your materials, morphs, pose, or Sub-D settings.”

Ghost Dynamics 2 for figure interactions that involve touching.

A free Nursoda figures and clothing filter for Everything v1.5 beta. Quickly view all Nursoda items in your Poser runtime, using Everything, with drag-drop to Poser.

Tutorials:

The freeware Everything 1.5 beta setup tutorial, for use with Poser and DAZ.

dForce Weight Maps in DAZ Studio: Better Cloth Control.

Resources:

Need inspiration for your movie / comic scene etc? Frame By Frame offers scene by scene breakdowns of well-known movies. For more inspirational screencaps see the websites at caps-a-holic and FilmGrab.

There’s a new Blender ‘open movie’, Singularity. Screengrabs are freely re-usable, but the source assets are only available to Blender Cloud members.

Five free commercial-use Tolkien fonts and a fine free Photoshop script to jitter the baseline for your lettering, so it looks more handwritten. Tested and works well.

Software:

DAZ Studio 6 beta (free) and Poser 14.0.372. (paid).

Poser 12 is still $29 at Clip Studio’s Graphixly store.

Everything 1.5 beta adds drag-and-drop to Poser/DAZ, tagging and more. Makes setting up a Poser scene so much more pleasant. Free, and effectively a replacement for the much-missed PzDB.

The venerable 3D software Modo is no more, but now offers a Modo End of Life Perpetual License to its paid users… “for a limited time, a Modo EOL perpetual license exclusively for perpetual licence holders who had an active Modo maintenance agreement as of November 7, 2024, the date of our wind-down announcement.” Not to be confused with the 2D animation software Moho, which is still alive.

Generative software:

All free, as is the way of local AI tools.

At last, the ‘holy grail’ for Flux2 Klein in Edit mode! ComfyUI-PixelDriftFix: a Comfy node that fixes pixel drift for image editing AIs. What goes in now matches what comes out, in terms of an exact 1:1 overlay when brought back into Photoshop, so long as you don’t add tiled upscaling to the mix. Tested and working nicely with Klein 4B GGUF (commercial use). 4B GGUF workflow is here.

Flux Klein 4B/9B Multiple Angles workflow for ComfyUI. Works wonderfully once you fix an OS-specific bug in the file-paths of one of the generation modules, which breaks the workflow in Windows. My fixed version of the ComfyUI workflow is here.

Untested by me as yet, ComfyUI-Image-Conveyor a… “ComfyUI image queue that lets you drag in unlimited images, organize them visually, and process them sequentially across queued runs”.

Also untested by me, but some reader may be interested in a working Flux2 Klein pipeline for real-time webcam stream processing.

ShrinkComfy, new software to shrink your ComfyUI .PNG output images while keeping your workflows inside them. For this also look at the mature Windows desktop freeware imBatch which does the same resizing, but can also blur or add a watermark if required.

In generative audio, the wonderful Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX for prompt-to-SFX generation. Tested and working. Commercial use. The larger 9B also works nicely for electronica / Eno-style ambient music production (up to six minutes), and is super-fast enough to be fun.

The model Ideogram 4.0 has been released and is causing a lot of fuss for its exact typography and ability to place elements exactly in a picture composition. Sadly it requires large twin models running at once, as well as a huge Clip, plus a VAE. It can only sensibly be run by those with an expensive 24Gb VRAM graphics card.

That’s it for May 2026. More picks next month!

Release: DAZ Studio 6 beta

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DAZ Studio 6 is out in beta, going from 4.x to 6.x seemingly without a version 5. Still free. The new version is a surprise to all, and touts…

– smoother scene loading, with big textures continuing to load in the background even as you start to work with the scene.

– support for newer NVIDIA 50 series graphics-cards.

– newer version of iRay, 2025.0.3 (NVIDIA drivers update required).

– updated Texture Shaded mode, if you use that rather than iRay for your Viewport.

– ability to hide or show Library content, custom re-labeling, and apparently other content-finding improvements.

– adjust hair strands while still in your full scene, seems to be strand-based hair only.

– the Help system is now run by an AI chatbot. No other AI is in the software. No AI renderer or ComfyUI bridge.

Frankly, such a huge version-leap seems barely justified by the changes. If you work with huge scenes and textures, on a 50-series card, and fiddle with hair a lot, then it may be worth it. Many others will stick with 4.x.

Noted in the changelog…

– “Tweaked the minimum OpenGL version message”, though the newer version was not specified anywhere. Presumably an OpenGL bump is why Texture Shaded mode is now better looking in the Viewport?

– Some changes to formatting of scripts for version 6, and expansion of what they can do.

– A new SDK, so many older third-party plugins won’t work until updated by their makers, if they’re still around e.g. there’s said to be no Animate 2 plugin for version 6.

– “Fixed a regression in the script that backs the ‘Create Poser Companion Files…’ action!” “Backs” rather than “breaks”. That could just be a typo, or it could mean this script broke from version 4.23.1.42 onwards?

Gone with version 6, among other losses…

– 3Delight rendering
– the Collada Exporter (no great loss)
– Mimic and Mimic Live!
– the Photoshop 3D Bridge

Release: Poser 14 updates

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A new update for the latest Poser 14, now at 14.0.372. The web page states…

– a modern real‑time viewport … next‑generation OpenGL previewing.
– cinematic lighting tools.
– smarter cloth simulation, one‑click cloth materials.
– workflow refinements.

The release-notes add, among bugfix and other items…

Lights/Shadows:
– Hierarchy Editor now has light bulb icon to turn on and off lights.
– Gobo spotlight implemented for Cycles using Cycles native image node as input.
– Shadow Blur Radius correctly works in Cycles.
– Eliminated pixelated shadows.

Physics/Cloth:
– Added Cloth Type presets Silk, Rubber, Cotton, Wool/Fleece, Denim, and Leather.
– Added Rigidity Constraints to fine-tune clothification.
– Added painted-on Rigidity Constraints for Poser Cloth simulation objects.
– Added smoothing for soft-body/cloth dynamics during simulations.

Forum chat suggests the real-time Viewport is noticeably improved by the OpenGL upgrade.

An update on Stable Audio 3

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An update on Stable Audio 3. After my success with the Small versions, I tried the Medium in its bf16 version (small 4.6Gb size, slightly less precise output, can do both music and foley sound-effects). Medium can give up to six minutes of music or field-recording style sound-effects, and has better coherence than the two Small models.

Working well and fast, for me. So fast that it’s fun to use. The practical uses for the DAZ and Poser crowd are obvious — soundtracks and SFX for animations and games, soundscapes for still pictures or slide-shows. It was trained on the vast Freesound SFX library, so can do almost any sounds, and they’re commercial-use.

The official advice is that SA3 Medium ‘requires Flash Attention 2’. I have that installed, but Comfy can’t be coaxed to use it. However, despite not being able to load Flash Attention 2, the Medium model still runs fine for me in ComfyUI. Using LCM and Simple, whereas the Small models need PingPong as the sampler.

Restyling an existing track was tried in Medium. A folk-music .midi file was first converted to .MP3 (Windows Media Player -> Audacity -> .MP3) and loaded. SA3 veers off into ‘doing its own thing’ very easily, and having things in the prompt like “… and retain the exact sequencing and pace” seems to help a lot when restyling using different instruments (e.g. MIDI piano to choral).

To locally analyse audio for music description and thus create useful SA3 prompts, I was told you need Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct model. Note however that Jan.ai has only just introduced audio upload, in version 0.8.0 (22nd May 2026). So, users running their GGUF models in the excellent desktop freeware Jan will first need to upgrade to 0.8.0. After that, delete any already-imported Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct and reinstall in Jan along with its MMPROJ to enable the model’s audio comprehension.

I find the Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct model’s useless for my purposes though, as it turns out. Its very short generic responses are useless for converting into Stable Audio prompts (even when told to assume the personality of a professional musicologist), and when asked for anything longer the model’s context runs out. Increasing the context size and restarting the model makes no difference. It’s a fairly small older model, and I suspect it just can’t handle writing 150 words on something the length of three-minute song, even when compressed to a .MP3 smaller than 10Mb. So it’s useless, for both reasons. Deleted.

So Stable Audio3 is a keeper, partly because it produces excellent ambient and electronica. I’m keeping Stable Audio 1 around though, as it seems to handle sound-effect mixes better. e.g. a good field recording of a man walking through crispy autumn leaves, in a balanced mix with the sound of birds chirping.

Finally, note here’s now a local LoRA trainer for Stable Audio 3.

Workflow for Stable Audio 3 ‘Small Music’

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Following on from yesterday’s Stable Audio 3 install / workflow post. I can confirm that the Small Music version of SA3 works and works wonderfully. Super-quick, quality and commercial use. Nice. Fun, too, as it’s so amazingly fast.

I’ve here swopped out the previous standard VAE Decode Audio node for a VAE Decode Audio (Tiled) node, which is apparently better according to Reddit wisdom. Though that node does take longer to process if you go beyond the 47 second default output. Small Music can output up to 120 seconds, but if you go that long then the VAE Decode Audio (Tiled) node will noticeably pause.

There are no vocals, instrumentals only.

Note also that there are now Base versions for the Small models, and that LoRAs can also be trained on them.

How to ‘outpaint’ and ‘inpaint’ audio with SA3 in ComfyUI? That’s still to discover.

Finally, there’s an official prompting guide with a music focus. It obviously helps if you’re conversant with audio terminology, or can find an AI that can describe an audio clip in musicologist terms.

How to install Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX safetensors, and run it in ComfyUI

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How to install Stable Audio 3.0 Small SFX safetensors, and run it in ComfyUI.

Why the Small SFX version of the new Stable Audio 3.0? Because it’s amazingly quick, commercial-use, and also because the larger 3.0 main or base version requires Flash Attention 2. As the official readme states…

“Stable Audio 3 Medium requires Flash Attention 2.”

Good luck with that, then. The rest of us will use the Small models. What follows should theoretically also work for the Small Music model, but I’m mainly interested in the audio ‘foley’ sound-effects generator model.

Here’s the install guide for ComfyUI:

1. Upgrade your ComfyUI portable to the latest 0.22 version or higher (required, not optional) which had zero-day support for SA3 a few days ago. Then also run PIP to install the new requirements.txt as well.

2. From the official ComfyUI HuggingFace, download the stable_audio_3_small_sfx.safetensors (2.3Gb) and put it your local ComfyUI’s ..\models\checkpoints folder and also the t5gemma_b_b_ul2.safetensors (1.2Gb) and put that in ..\models\text_encoders No config file is needed.

3. The official readme for SA3 Small SFX says it needs:

Steps = 8.
CFG = 1.0.
Sampler = Pingpong

Hmm… what, Pingpong?? Never heard of it. Turns out that it’s a custom node and sampler by Blepping, all in one. It’s here as pingpongsampler_node.py. Drop this file in the root of your ComfyUI Custom Nodes folder, and re-start Comfy. It has no requirements.txt.

Once ComfyUI is loaded with PingPong, the new sampler won’t show up on the list of samplers in your regular nodes. Instead you just double-click on a workflow and type pingpong, and then load it via its own node.

4. Now assemble the following ComfyUI workflow thus. This works for me and gives reasonable results with blistering speed. I say “reasonable” because I still think that Stable Audio 1.0 gives a better quality of output and also seems to handle the instruction to ‘mix’ sounds better, but then… 1.0 also takes about 50 times as long to generate an audio clip. If you have a super-ninja graphics card, that may not matter much. But for the GPU-poor it may matter.

You may want to also hook an audio output to Denoised output and compare the two.

Possibly there are going to be better ways to do it. Possibly I’m doing it wrong. But for now, in the first day or so after release, this works for me.