Rendering, Posing or Animating in Blender?
marble
Posts: 7,500
I'm wondering whether there are any advantages to exporting scenes to Blender for either rendering or posing/animating? I tried Casual's Telebelender script some time ago and was disappointed that the materials needed much work to look right. Firstly, I believe it requires 3DL materials which is becoming more difficult these days and secondly the materials still didn't look good and tweaking them involves the absolutely terrifying node system in Blender.
There's another Blender importer called Diffeomorphic but I have not tried it. I'm assuming that it does a similar job to Casual's script, perhaps with the additional facility of being able to pose the figures once exported. I may be wrong about that, however.
One of the reasons for renewed interest in exporting to Blender is the soon-to-be-available Eevee which seems to offer much faster rendering. Again, that looks likely to be attractive for anyone doing animations. But are the tools for export/import to Blender mature enough? I'd be interested to learn from anyone with experience. I've also read that Octane is much faster than IRay but, again, there seems to be debate about how much time it takes to tweak materials and then, of course, there is a significant cost involved and I just don't have that kind of budget. I hope the rumours of a free version are true though.
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Comments
Regardless of what program you start with and which one you want to end with, converting between 3D programs is never a smooth ride.
I've never done animation, so I don't have any opinion of that.
But I've been doing renders and posing in Blender after exporting from Daz and I did that only because I am more comfortable with light & camera set ups in Blender than I do in Daz. Additionally, I found it far easier to deal with more than one character in Blender.
It's never a smooth process and I advise you not to do it unless you know you must.
Thanks for the advice but could you elaborate al little? What is your export/import process? Do you use one or both of the scripts I mentioned in the OP? If so, what is left to do after using the script? It isn't that I must but, as I said, Eevee looks amazing and I do a little animation and render times in IRay just discourage me from doing more.
In all honesty, the time you save in render times in other apps is made up most of the time in trying to set up the lights and materials. I model in 3dsmax ad while it can produce some amazing renders, i spend twice as much time setting up lights, cameras and materials, espcially materials that it is worth it for me to stick with IRay
Blender can do much more than DS can, so it's up to you to decide if it's worth the hassle
No, I don't export scripts. I export only rigs and meshes along with textures. I abandon shaders/materials and re-create them in Blender. It's a huge waste of time trying to make it work. You are better off keeping it simple.
My progress goes like this.
When I export a figure (ex humanoid), I export in *.dae and *.obj. Dae format is for the rigged mesh. OBJ format is for missing texture from Dae export because Dae export doesn't obtain all textures (ex eye lash).
Ok, these responses confirm what I was thinking: that there is no comprehensive export utility that enables DAZ content to be transferred to Blender for rendering and/or animating. Setting up materials was my big stumbling block when I tried the Casual script and that seems to be the consensus experience. Time will tell whether Eevee is enough of a time saver to justify the time and effort setting up materials in Blender so I'll watch developments with interest.
To be fair, it's nigh impossible to have smooth translation from a 3D application to another. It's not an isolated issue with Daz.
Usually, shaders and materials need to be recreated. That happens to pretty much all exports among other 3D applications. This is usually due to different render engines. Each render engines handle everything slightly differently.
Even Blender to Unity isn't smooth, either, and usually shaders/materials need to be redone once exported to Unity. This is when Unity officially supports Blender.
Honestly, shaders/materials are the least of my worries when I do this. I fear rigging being broken the most, following by mesh being screwed up.
It's more about what you want to achieve and the effort you're ready to afford
I never used diffeomorphic but did test Casual's Teleblender script
Both have different goals. Teleblender export a DS Scene as a static object just for rendering. You do all your posing morph etc in DS and just render in Blender
Diffeomorphic allows you to import lots of DAZ stuff to use the in Blender instead of DS. Importing your whole library will be very long and will take a lot more time if you have to tweak each of them after
Diffeomorphic is way better if you really want yo use Blender full potential with DS Stuff
Now about Evee, keep in mind you'll still need a good Gfx Card
If your interest is real time rendering you should also check Unreal Engine as they got Nvidia VXGI and RTX https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/technology-sneak-peek-real-time-ray-tracing-with-unreal-engine
Thanks for explaining the difference between the Casual script and Diffeomorphic - I did wonder about that. In fact I'm still not sure exactly what Diffeomorphic actually does - or the extent to which it does it.
I've seen a YouTube video testing Eevee with almost the same system that I have: Windows 10 with an Intel i7, 32 GB RAM and a GTX 1070 with 8GB VRAM. The speed of render was almost real-time in the video - much faster than the IRay preview in DAZ Studio.
I have never delved into gaming engines so Unreal would be a whole new learning curve for me. Actually, I'm not that familiar with Blender either but I'm getting used to it slowly.
If you have a look at the documentation links at the bottom you can see what diffeomorphic can do
I find the mesh hair conversion to strand hairs particularly appealing http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.fr/p/hair.html
The GTX 1070 should be good enough for Evee
You can download some Evee Demo scene to check by yourself at the bottom https://www.blender.org/2-8/
I find them very convincing
I have expirmented with the diffeomorpic add-on and it's pretty freaking amazing imo (at some point I'm planning to write up a whole effusive write up). It works completely differently than teleblender (or something like the Maya export tools) in that it *actually just reads the .duf files*. In most conversions there are basically 2 points of failure: data lost when you export and things that can't be read when you import, the diffeomorpic add-on basically removes that first failure point.
The only limit is how well the genesis features translate into blender (blender for instance is not set up to store 1000 different morphs in memory or tie bone location to morphs) so you so want to morph your figure how you want it + add your clothes etc and save that as a scene subset, you then load the scene subset right into blender.
But a lot of things are handled *spectacularly* well. Like one click to load pose sets, one click to load morph correctives (that with automatically dial with posing just like in DS), one click to load expressions (that you can dial in and out) also one click to completely change the rigging to a more complex blender style with really nice ik (poses will no longer work afaik, but expressions will still dial)
You still need to tweak materials but it loads in more textures (thanks to not using .objs or fbx which generally will only store the location of a very few textures) so there's a lot less manual texture loading
All in all my bottom line is you definitely need to be familiar with blender to use it, but if you are familiar with blender you get most of the good features of genesis kept while adding the possibility of a whole lot of blender functionality.
And if you're interested in animation between it and Eevee coming with 2.8 there could be a *really* nice workflow.
Wow - that's a lot more encouraging than I expected, thanks. Can't wait for your effusive write-up. :) When I'm done with my present project I will download Diffeomorphic and play. Blender started out as being very scary but the more I work with it, the more sense it makes. The sheer number of things it can do makes it intimidating for (some) hobbyists like me but I just have to overcome my fears. I was in computer support for 30 years before I retired so I should be able to grasp the concepts and procedures.
@j cade
I am indeed interested in animation and have been trying out a few exports from DAZ Studio to Blender in the past couple of days. I'm hitting a few road blocks, however, probably due to my own inexperience and lack of knowledge.
I used Diffeomorphic to get a G3F figure from DAZ Studio to Blender, having first animated her by converting a V4 aniblock (thanks to @zaz777 ) to work with G3F. Sadly, the animation did not transfer with the figure so I ended up with a static object in Blender. I then tried to export the animation separately as a BVH file but importing that in Blender creates a new animated rig and I don't yet know how to apply that to the already existing figure. A little research has suggested using another Blender Add-on called Makewalk but I need to watch a few more YouTube videos on that. I also notice that the exported BVH doesn't include the pectoral bones (perhaps others too). The reason I mention pectorals is because I was also trying out another excellent freebie script which simulates breast movement in DAZ Studio animations.
So some progress but a lot of learning still to do. Any tips and advice would be gratefully welcomed. Of course, I have not yet tried a clothed figure so the difficulties of exporting animated clothing from DAZ Sudio (dForce??) has not yet surfaced but ... baby steps.
I think the pectoralis bones must be part of Breast Control product you have bought because none of my Genesis models have such bones.
You are probably correct because the thread describing the breast movement script says that Zev0's Breast Control is required.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3223481/#Comment_3223481
So I'm wondering whether the DAZ Studio BVH export can only cater for a base G3F figure.