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I loved the mantra engine, I tried a few months to get a quick reliable workflow of getting daz studio stuff into houdini for rendering. I ultimately gave up once iray came out though, I could never get the skin and hair to look good in houdini, props and scenes were not that hard. If there was a more automated way of doing it, I would likely give it a try again. Mantra was amazingly fast, and I could render at obscenely large sizes no problem as well.
Mantra has lots of great features, many of which people have wished Iray could do, like saving renders mid-render to open later and amazing volumetrics. Mantra hasn't traditionally been used for character rendering so there's really no information online on how to render skin in Mantra. There is sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/vop/skinshadercore but nothing on how to use it. I was never able to figure out how to get this shader to work with textures/colors from Iray. The results always included tons of rainbow colored noise. The Principled Shader had some changes to SSS in H17 which I haven't had time to look at and might be worth exploring instead of the Skin Shader Core.
I had started working on a script that would setup materials exported from DAZ but the problem I ran into was figuring out how to map the DAZ exported surface names to the groups in Houdini since each of the various methods of exporting in DAZ studio rename the surfaces in different ways.
I've gotten my feet wet with Houdini (currently tinkering with Apprentice 18.x) and am now looking more seriously into integrating it with DAZ Studio.
Using the alembic exporter from DAZ Studio and File>Import Alembic scene in Houdini and setting animation to start at frame 0, I can bring in a figure with its animation intact.
1) What's the best way to bring in textures
2) Is there a way to bring in rigging or morphs through alembic (or any other format that DAZ offers)?
3) Is there any role for importing multiple formats such as alembic and fbx or obj - would any of those give you better access to re-texturing?
4) Is there a way to use poses from DAZ Studio within Houdini?
For items such as a desk which might have a few sliding drawers, what's the best way to bring that into Houdini if I want to be able to slide drawers open and closed?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Vellum cloth sim is light years ahead of anything else I've ever used, anywhere.
So I just got back from a Houdini User's Group meeting at USC where the guys at Blizzard who worked on the Diablo IV trailer did a Q&A. While I am beginning to "get" Houdini more and more and the idea that basically EVERYTHING is simulated, and the work that a certain guy did with cellular automata to make the summoning was draw droppingly cool, I did come away with the conclusion that the level of detail in the models for AAA game trailers is not necessarily better than a HD G8.
Right now there's no great way to bring in textures. FBX will set up some materials with textures but they are pretty much useless as you'd have to rebuild the shaders completely to even remotely get a close approximation of the original DAZ shaders. In theory you could write a script that exports the surfaces, channels, and texture paths to a text file in DAZ and write another script that in Houdini imports the text file and rebuilds the shader network to how you'd like to map the textures/channels.
FBX export from DAZ can do morphs and rigging but I do not know how useable to the imported rig is in Houdini since I've never really tried and am no that familiar with the rigging tools to correct anything.
None of the file formats really give good materials so it's either by hand conversions or writing scripts to do the conversion for you.
No poses cannot be applied as pose files are native DAZ DSON and there is no DSON reader for Houdini. Someone could write one in theory but I doubt there is much demand for anyone with the necessary skills to warrant the effort.
For the desk it really depends on how the object/figure is setup in DAZ.
No, I was just pointing out just how good some Daz PAs really are if the boys and girls at Blizzard are not necessarily any better.
But is there something about HDs so that details and subd levels above 2 don't export? It seemed like nodes export at their current level of subd.
The problem is that when you export with Alembic exporter, you need to also export the SubD. Otherwise you break the model's UV.
Exporting with SubD does preserve HD details and UVs.
NO SUBD (it's a common Alembic problem, not just DAZ's):
WITH "PRESERVE SUBDIVISION SURFACES" (UV are there, morphs and animations are also there):
Here is with imported textures, Eye Fix, and Eyelashes Fix [these are the basic G8F textures! No processing whatsoever]
EYE FIX: Just needed to Remap (resize and re-position) the texture around [settings shown bottom right]
EYELASHES FIX: The texture is an Opacity Map (Black = Transparent, White = Opaque). Load the texture in a Texture node, and attach it to the opacity color of the RS Material.
From the RS Material, you can change the Diffuse color to anything you want.
Here is a G8F with Hair (No SSS applied yet): As you can see, there are some black artefacts on the head. Those are caused by the Hair Base (this problem also occurs in DAZ by the way), so just make sure it's not visible.
OVERALL OPINION ON HOUDINI:
1. Hard to learn (very few turtorials on YouTube).
2. Too many deprecated things: If there are tutorials, if they are slightly out of date, you might not be able to follow (Houdini has many updates, which is good, but without too much backwards compatibility, even for coding stuff). Also, things become substituted/deprecated very quickly.
3. Hard to use: Making animated hair in Houdini: 2 hours (if it works), 20 minutes in Maya. Loading textures is very time consuming and tedious (unless you start coding, so no thanks).
4. Not optimized for DAZ characters: working with DAZ models is super heavy WITHOUT Textures, when in DAZ studio it is much lighter WITH Textures. Forget about character disintegration.
5. Very flexible, but very hard learning curve.
Overall, unless you are a pro or have an army of intern, forget about it. There are much easier ways to do things. I'm off to Maya next...