I’ve successfully exported an FBX from Daz 4.5 to 3D Max 2013 with all materials, geometry, animations, AND FACIAL MORPHS in tact!
The scene is a genesis figure with a supersuit who has facial morph animations, hero aniblock animations, and hand animations.
Here’s what I did:
1. Select all items in scene that you want to export under the scene tab. Right Clk>Select>All
2. Export as FBX, but under the Edit Morphs tab I selected the element that said “.CNTLVS” and then clicked on the little square in the
upper right corner of dialgue box that looks like a notepad and selected “Bake.”
3. In the export dialogue box I checked “merge clothing into skeleton” which solved the problem of the supersuit having it’s own skeleton
which doesn’t animate.
4. Then I exported as an FBX in BINARY 2012. I can’t tell you why this works, I just know that it worked in this instance.
I hope this helps and works for all of you as well.
Great info! I’m going to be starting my first major school project soon and need to animate some genesis figures (as car drivers). This is really a big help.
EDIT: Just tried these settings out… FBX is the way to go. Almost perfect import (I just had to run Steve’s material script as always). One thing though, I had better luck changing the morph setting to ‘export’ instead of ‘bake’ for some reason. Max does crash if you select too many morphs as well, but it can still handle quite a lot.
I’ve spent hours tonight trying to find info on exporting animation from DAZ to Max. This post is encouraging but it’s not working for me. I’m using aniMate2 to do a dance move. When the exported file is imported into Max 2013 I do have keys but they are all zero.
Do I need to ‘bake’ aniMate2 motion in DAZ before I export? I can’t find a way to do that so far (new to DAZ). I tried both ‘bake’ and ‘export’ for the .fbx export setting as you both had different ideas about that.
What do you think that I need to do?
—-Edit——
Ok, I found it in case this helps someone else. You guys are correct, it works well. I did in fact have to ‘bake’ the aniMate2 motion by ‘right-clicking’ on a blank area of the aniMate2 menu bar and select “Bake to Studio Keyframes.” After that it worked well and arrived in Max intact.
Thanks guys…
Here’s what it looks like. Even the areas like the right shoulder where the weights are off came across perfectly:
Thanks for all your tips !
If someone could fix also the genesis feet offset (animate2), then that will be perfect.
I’ve done this before and found a post somewhere but I can’t remember now how to fix it.
Here’s the Genesis CAT Rig I’ve been working on. It’s not complete. I still need to wire up the parameters to the Hand Controller.
2) All the bones are named exactly the same using a Hub structure as best to the Genesis figure I could. suggestions always welcome. That means you can save the Weight map from Genesis, then apply it to the CAT Rig skinned Genesis character. I’ve had no problem with this. Again, I can’t include the Genesis figure itself here for licensing reasons. I have started a tutorial on this but can’t finish until the weekend. I think this is huge not having to do the weight painting…. the one on Genesis is already really pretty good.
steve
Hmm… I managed to copy the weights to the cat right figure and it worked. The deformations are pretty good but still far from the quality of the original daz skeleton (probably because I didn’t line up the bones properly or something).
I’ll keep fiddling with it, thanks again mate.
EDIT: Yeah I’m stupid. The reason is wasn’t working right was I didn’t align the skin data mesh exactly with the main one. Also my genesis skeleton was missing foot bones for some reason so I re-imported. Now I just have to add some more features to the rig and it will be almost fully independant! So cool! Now on to skin morphs?
Did you ever finish up the tutorial for your CAT rig? I got to experimenting with it but am apparently awful at skinning and applying weight deformation. I’d love to see the process you’re doing.
A great thread, if not a little bit of a shame so much useful information is tied up in so many pages.
I’ll admit I came to the DAZ to 3DS Max conversion by trial and error and much of what is included above would have saved significant time.
The results so far are acceptable although skin deformation results are somewhat variable needing careful posing to avoid the worst of unsightly joints.
There is no doubt the rendering available through Mental Ray is extremely good….......its just a shame it isn’t a bit faster. Perhaps 2014 will bring improvements.
I take the liberty of attaching the following, being a recent cross platform render, which might be of interest.
I tried this some years ago, and I got broken mesh and unaligned textures on V4. I used DAZ Studio 3 and Max 9 back then, now I use DS 4.5 Pro, and I have 3DS Max 2013 design.
Reading through this thread I think I’ll have a try at this. I uploaded a Max biped based on V4 on ShareCG.Com, but IMHO it might not be useful. Maybe it’s better looking at what you guys have been doing. The scripts looks handy, but I’m at work right now so I can’t try it just yet. Thanks for the break-through in this area!
Edit. I think what I did wrong was not to bake the stuff in DS before export.
I tried this export from DAZ Studio to 3DS Max. First try; viewport got sluggish, and I couldn’t manipulate things, so I ended the session. The second attempt I made sure that viewport used wireframe, and not shaded. And I also made sure to not export animation (though there isn’t any animation). This shrunk the figure to 0.000001% of original size… I scale up and saved when the Genesis figure was around 175 cm’s height.
Though from what I’ve seen, the figure looks decent in the viewport in shaded mode. And there were around 78 pieces!! I export one Genesis female (with texture and morphs), one dress, one shoe on either feet, and one hair-piece. Nothing else.
So, Cobalin, how do you manipulate the figure? Do you weld it, or does it work ‘out-of-the-box’? How about posing the figure? Does the joint break if you pose arms/legs?
I had only 30 minutes to try this out before going to work, so I was just hastily checking things out. My third attempt will be to export with animations (and see if the size is kept), with wireframe only in all viewports, and see if I can pose the figure, then maybe add some background stuff, lights/camera and render in MR.
Render in Mental Ray through import into 3DS Max 2013 Design from DAZ Studio 4.5 Pro using FBX. There are some artifacts, and I didn’t use bump-maps (skin set to ‘Standard’). So there’s lot of possible improvements.
Render in Mental Ray through import into 3DS Max 2013 Design from DAZ Studio 4.5 Pro using FBX. There are some artifacts, and I didn’t use bump-maps (skin set to ‘Standard’). So there’s lot of possible improvements.
nice , why didn’t use the bumb-map. did it give it a shine or make it to glossy? I know sometimes if you FXB into 3ds from poser you have to manually put in the bumb maps which i don’t know why
I was just testing. It’s pretty easy to add bump-maps, but at the time I was trying out rendering in MR and applying new poses inside 3DS Max. I’m still trying to work out where the morphs are…
Edit. After testing import through FBX and Collada, the morph-data doesn’t show up in 3DS Max. I’m stumped as I recall I managed to import those in a previous attempt around 2009 or so. I forgot then to adjust the morph so they are non-zero, and hence usable in 3DS Max. The tutorial I used showed this is possible, but I might have forgotten something in the export-import process.
Edit2. Ok, I added bump-maps and Specularity-maps to the figure. Then I rendered in Mental Ray using Final Gather set to High. Original render size is 2048X2560 if you want to see details.
Some problems:
-No morphs (where?)
-No smoothing (see ear)
I know about these, but I wonder why the smoothing didn’t translate through FBX. In DAZ Studio you can find it in the Parameters-tab. I wonder if it’s something to do with why the expression-morphs aren’t translated either.
Ohhh, and I tried using SSS Fast Skin-shader on Genesis, plugin in the necessary maps into the middle and deep layer. The same scene I posted above rendered like this after a list of errors:
It has something to do with keeping opacity at 100%, or these things happens. But I’m all ears about fixing this problem. Finally after a looong time, I’m able to import into 3DS Max (I use 2013 Design version), render in Final Gather without breaks in the mesh, or mismatched textures. Even the hair looks good, though it’s polygon-planes bent into shape. Remember to tick on “2-Sided” on the hair, though.
