HD Morphs do not export properly with FBX Export
ARealiti
Posts: 135
This can be seen in products like Damien Demon, where the skin HD details are all lost in the FBX export even with baking the morphs. Anyone else ever brought this up with DAZ / had any luck getting a satisfactory solution / answer?
The same issue was discussed by another user here 3 years ago, but no resolution was ever discussed and DAZ may have never fixed this...
Post edited by ARealiti on
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Comments
They never did :) Only base mesh is exported, subdivision levels are lost. .OBJ can export full geometric details, but no motion.
There is also Alembic exporter in Octane plugin.
Not quite true.
if you have the full paid aniMate 2 plugin fo DS,
you have the ability to export MDD files
to drive your HD exported meshes in other
programs that support MDD like:.....
Maya,Modo,MAX,Lightwave,Blender,Maxon Cinema4D
I have 40 minutes of completed footage of a feature length animated film
rendered in Maxon C4D, using MDD animated genesis meshes.
Here is a Daz studio Dynamic Cloth simulation exported to .obj/MDD rendered in C4D.
Oh, yeah, forgot about it (`cause never used :) )
You can export results of HD morphs. You cannot import your custom sculpted figure as HD morph.
Also it needs your low poly morph to import as genesis is only 18K. I'm pointing out that you don't start with a high poly mesh and expect it work, so regular users need a low poly version (so you always have to sculpt from the base genesis) and displacement or normal maps. PAs always start with a low poly version as well.
This is understandable: your low poly morph provides the semantic like 'nose goes to the right, eyes go out of orbits etc.) as importer cannot always guess what becomes what. Especially in case of aliens, monsters etc. Thus initial lowpoly morph is really needed.
Is there a benefit to using MDD over Alembic .abc export?
@RobotHeadArt
Well there is the obvious benefit: alembic -$89 USD
https://www.daz3d.com/alembic-exporter-for-daz-studio
aniMate2 full version: - $60 USD
https://www.daz3d.com/animate2
Also With an object /mdd pipeline I only have to export the obj to C4D ONE
time and can send new animation over to it in diffrent MDD files that I
I generate with Daz studio.
I have tried very hard to find out if alembic can send new animation data only
or does it require a whole new ABC export each time you need new anmiation
on the same mesh, but I cannot find any info on this
perhaps an Alembic user can chime in??
I bought alembic for $3 and animate2 on sale but not as cheap so they do have sales.
However, what is MDD? Some sort of animated via a series of vextex caches variant format?
Thanks all, particularly a-sennov, this is really disappointing after all these years of pushing DAZ to do a proper games developer export the FBX was almost there, I get good results for textures, skinning/rigging, even morph target exports seem to work for facial animation and the products that do normals are great, but those without normal maps that only have HD morphs are really looking bad and only the use of normal maps from other characters makes them look any good at all.
Come on DAZ, just go one step further and Fix the FBX Exporter to properly bake HD morphs! Your models are getting to the point where they are light years ahead of the look of other models in games for sale and computer power is so high now your models are usable at their current poly counts, so just get the darn exporter working properly into Unity3D and UE and you are on a winner, forget the darn Morph3D those guys have no idea how to import your models into Unity and get them looking right, us developers do!
and again I ask as always
why do they not include these maps for other apps?
Morph3d IS DAZ 3D :) Just other side of it. They use Genesis 2 converted to linear skinning.
Epic has plans to implement OpenSubdiv in UE4 so transfer of HD morphs to it will be possible sometime. At the same time JCMs used to correct joint bends in Genesis 3 and 8 are very costly performance-wise even on current hardware. 4-5 Genesis 3 characters with all JCMs on can bring UE4 to it's knees, so you'll need a LOD scheme in anim blueprint if you want to go this route.
I went other way and made my own figure based on Genesis 3 mesh and completely different skeleton. No JCMs, just bones, 4 weights per vertex. This scales well plus UE4 LODs can handle reduced bone count per LOD level. Performance cost doesn't depend on number of bones, only on number of weights per vertex, UE4 can handle up to 65536 bones :)
And my skeleton is compatible with poses and animations down to V4 :) (some offsets required, of cause).
Why should they include something for other apps that they don't have or make something for which the use wasn't intended? A post made on a forum is not a sign of actual demand. If you need to create a map, take a look sickleyield's channel on how to make one.
well then we need a way to bake these HD morphs into a higher rez mesh as many have been asking from DAZ not PA's , not everybody wants to use DAZ studio, as long as HD is a studio only thing most things HD remain unpurchased by me and 137 pages in my library in my account I am no slacker when it comes to buying content.
yes Xnormal will bake if it is a single surface no overlapping UV's but Zbrush creating those HD morphs can also export a map and if you claim it is just as good and HD morphs are available for creation by PA's only, why not give us a map as an alternative?
You can export the mesh and import into a program that will export normal maps if you need them. But the demand isn't such where it needs to be part of a product as there is a cost to do so.
the demand for HD morphs to be available to users seems rather high to me
I was only suggesting the alternative that keeps it proprietary
If I am not mistaken, the "demand" comes from customer feedback and sales. Since we've not had that option in the sales, the only way to create a demand for something not offered is to ask for it. Ironically, people have been asking all over the place ever since it became a thing in Daz, for the tools/ability to make our own HD morphs, and Ive seen many times the request for the maps used to create the wrinkles and skin pores in the HD morph, because their application doesn't have the ability to utilize HD morphs.
Thanks, Google wasn't that helpful
I would love to actually render in DAZ studio too
with iray
but
again the later figures do not support BVH animation import so its a vicious circle.
I think we're treading over already discussed territory again, so I'll leave that discussion to those threads. But if you need to make maps there are references to do so. And I've only seen the same request made by the same 2 or 3 people in a forum as I've seen those same threads... that's not a quantifiable demand. I won't continue the conversation beyond that.
EDIT: My last product had 10 HD head morphs and the previous had 5 HD head morph, 2 HD body shapes and 2 hd gens shapes and hd gens veins, and there's a request to make normal maps to bloat the product to close to 1GB for only a fraction of people to use? That's doesn't seem like a reasonable use of time.
this thread is specifically about exporting to FBX btw
just saying
for those wanting to use DAZ studio, yes everything is perfect as it is no arguments there.
and alternatives without rigging using vertex movement work but must be animated in DAZ studio.
OK I generated 5 normal maps in Xnormal from 10 obj of cut up mesh by shading domain using the base and HD obj exports
iClone 6 renders
on the left is the HD morph obj
in the middle is an FBX export with the maps added to displacement and max tesselation (wireframe illustrates this)
on the right the FBX as is
the HD morphed obj still runs rings around it there is no way I can get that detail from maps I bake in Xnormal
If you are going to use the displacement channel generate displacement maps not normal maps.
I used bent normals in the vector displacement but regardless will never match the HD mesh
Is this because you did not include the extra twist bones on the legs & arms??
I did some experiments this morning with our seat of lightwave 2015
It exports to alembic and I find no options to only export new PLA data
so it seems one has to re-export entire scenes for each animation session
sent to another app.
This makes alembic useless to me
Thankfully I have MDD from Daz with full HD meshes that I can render
in C4D and Lightwave.
I had another go generating 8K maps both normal and vector but they break the mesh
iClone does vector displacement BTW