daz importer: importing daz characters to blender 2.8

maura01

I'm trying to import a daz scene into blender 2.8, but it is messing up my textures! The skin material of my characters appears entirely black in the rendered viewport. I've posted my question on blender stackexchange to which I would like to refer: (unfortunately, link has to be removed for nudity as it is against the ToS since there is no means of age verification when going to the site. You can explain what's happening, but not show, if the figures are shown nude.)

Your suggestions for possible solutions are most welcome as I'm eager to render my scenes!

Many thanks in advance

andya_b341b7c5f5

maura01 said:

I'm trying to import a daz scene into blender 2.8, but it is messing up my textures! The skin material of my characters appears entirely black in the rendered viewport. I've posted my question on blender stackexchange to which I would like to refer: (unfortunately, link has to be removed for nudity as it is against the ToS since there is no means of age verification when going to the site. You can explain what's happening, but not show, if the figures are shown nude.)

Your suggestions for possible solutions are most welcome as I'm eager to render my scenes!

Many thanks in advance

To avoid misunderstandings, which 'daz importer' are you using?  Which render engine are you using in the viewport?  What lighting have you got in the scene?

maura01

I'm using blender 2.8 and I render with cycles. I have Daz 4.10 installed on my computer. The lighting consists of a sky texture and a sun lamp. 

maura01

To clearify the problem: the materials are not working equally well on all characters. Some of my figures only appear as black contours in the rendered viewport, but others are totally fine. However, the shader editor shows the same material setup for all characters so that I don't understand why some characters appear black and others have a skin texture. Furthermore the right figure (see image) was morphed into a child, but the morph has disappeared and he is quite grown-up again. What am I doing amiss? I installed he most recent version of the daz importer (https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-14.html) and I use cycles as render engine. I've set the library paths and I'm absolutely at my wit'

Padone

For materials I suggest you to convert everything to the iray uber shader before exporting. This works best both for iray and cycles. It is as simple as selecting all the materials and applying the shader so it's just a couple clicks.

For morphs be sure to save the json file first inside daz studio, that's the export basic data addon. Then select the json option when importing, that should be the default anyway.

If you follow the above instructions and these issues don't fix, then I suggest you to post at diffeomorphic to get feedback from Thomas.

maura01

unfortunately no better result :(

andya_b341b7c5f5

If there are materials defined correctly for an object, but they are not showing in the viewport, my first thought would be to check the UV mapping, just based on always checking the obvious first before looking for anything complicated to explain the issue.

Are both the figures in your scene base G8F? 

As for losing the morph, which morph(s) are you using to make the character into a child?  If I have the same   moprh, I may be able to test it.  Also, what happens if you use the same morph on both figures in your scene?  Or on a single figure alone in a scene?  Trying to determine if it can be transferred at all.

maura01

the uvs are tthe same. I used the growing up for genesis 8 male(s)product and shaped the figure to a resemble a five-year-old

andya_b341b7c5f5

If, as you say, there are materials correctly defined on the character that is rendering black, they are assigned to the correct areas of the mesh, and there is a correct UV map for the mesh, then it seems to me the importer has done everything we can expect it to do.  If all these are present, then it is Blender that is behaving very strangely for you, and I cannot for now offer any explanation for that.

However, if I transfer a G8F model to Blender using the importer, and then delete the 'Base Female' UV map the importer creates, the figure instantly turns completely black. So I still suspect that your figure that is rendering black has no UV map, in which case the importer has perhaps failed to create one for it.

As for the 'lost' child morph, I have the Growing Up morphs for G8F.  I applied an age preset to a single base G8F in DS, made no other changes, and transferred the scene to Blender using the importer.  The character reflects the morph shape correctly in Blender, so I am afraid I cannot reproduce that issue.  Have you tried applying the morph to a just a single figure in a scene to see if it will work for you like that?

andya_b341b7c5f5

I poked at this a bit more, and found a bug in the Import Daz plugin which seems to replicate your problem with some figures rendering completely black.  It occured whenever I put 2 or more figures with the same base in a scene together, e.g. 2 G8F or 3 G3F.  In this scenario, one figure had a correct UV map created in Blender but the others had no UV map at all, which of course means that materials based on image textures cannot be displayed.  A scene with one G3F and one G8F did not have any such issue.

I reported this bug on the Bitbucket repository linked from the download page a couple of days ago, and Thomas Larsson has fixed it already.  You will need to use the development version to get this fix for now.  At some point in the future I am sure it will make it into the stable version.