An Accurate Daz Studio to Blender tutorial/method?
WsCG
Posts: 391
Hi there,
As the title says, I'm looking for a procedure to get characters from DAZ Studio to Blender (2.81) that's actually accurate and consistent. I've followed several YT videos, to the letter, and none of them are working right. So either those people configured some setting they don't include in the video, or something's changed since they created them.
I've tried the customer exporter/importer approach, as well as exporting directly to FBX, DAE and even OBJ. Every one of them comes with problems. None of them import into Blender correctly. The character's pose will be correct, but the clothing and hair won't be adjusted, stuff comes in all warped and crazy looking, etc.
Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone here has found a process that works accurately and consistently?
I was thinking of bringing characters into Blender to build scenes around them, especially for the sake of having a scale reference. And because I hear Cycles is a faster/easier renderer to work with. But if I can't get it to work with DAZ > Blender, then I might just create the objects in Blender and import them to DAZ.. That seems to work consistently at least.
Thanks a bunch
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Since I don't know if I'm allowed to link to products outside of Daz and to avoid my comment getting removed, I recommend searching for "DaztoBlender8" on Gumroad. It doesn't just export Genesis 8 characters to Blender but it also adjusts skins (with options within Blender to adjust even more) and the character is perfectly rigged with IK/FK. Clothes and hair may need some adjustments or you use the tools of Blender to create your own.
Thanks for that, surody. I'll look into that and see if it does the trick.
Thanks!
The figures Daz uses are made within Daz therefore will only work properly within Daz. It is simply impossible to use something created in software A in the same exact way in software B. There are several work-arounds to this by using intermediary formats which both software A and software B can read. OBJ and FBX are the most common. OBJ is to transfer the mesh by itself. You only get a static object with UV's and material set-up, and nothing more. FBX is to transfer poseable figures, i.e. the information found in the OBJ + the skeleton + the weight maps. A lot of information is lost when converting something into FBX like most of the propreties you see in Parameters tab.
Personally I have always had trouble with using custom importer-exporters in programs. I just either export OBJ/FBX from one program, then important manually said export into another program.
Does importing the figure by itself as an FBX with no clothes and hair work? What figure are you using? Genesis 3 and up should more or less work properly, Genesis 2 uses a proprietary weight system which no other program can read so you will have issues with the bends.
The hair and clothes are figures by themselves. There's probably a complicated way of attaching these two your main figures in Blender to be fair. A workaround is to have your finished character in Daz with all the clothes and hair attached. Then go to Geometry Edit > right click > Geometry Editing > Merge Fitted Figures's Geometry. Be sure to back-up your scene file because this is an undoable edit.
The end result of this is a figure with the hair and clothes attached which Blender should be able to read properly.
Don't get your hopes up, though. Even though you do everything corectly the end result will still be unsatisfactory. There's always something missing or not working as expected.
Hi fuzzum (great name by the way),
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking along the lines of - two different programs with two different ways of handling and doing stuff. I don't know if the DAZ > Blender approach would be optimal, and would likely only come with its own set of headaches to deal with.
I've tried with G3 and G8 since I have the most stuff compatible with those two figures. Neither wanted to play nicely, though.
I'm starting to lean more toward using a basic, naked character in Blender as scale reference, and then just bring it into DS and work from there. Characters load fine into Blender. Clothes/hair, not so much, but the character's really all I need anyway.
I gave Hexagon a spin, using the DS bridge. I like how Hexagon is more modeling-focused and doesn't have all the "bloat" Blender has. Unfortunately, it kept randomly crashing on me while doing regular operations. Not a fan of losing work or obsessively saving, so I gave up on that option. So, even as I'm typing this, I'm thinking my idea here is the way I'll go. Produce stuff in Blender, bring it into DS and render from there.
Thanks!
Daz (the company) has a product (amonst others) called Studio; it is NOT a modeller, and anything available for purchase in Daz's store was made in a variety of software - none of which were Studio.
Agreed.
My idea is to either:
A) Export figures from DS into Blender to integrate with a scene (created in Blender) and do the final render there using Cycles.
B) Create the props/scene objects in Blender (using a Daz figure for size/scale reference only), then export them to DS and do the scene assembly/rendering there using IRay
With information I've gotten here, and my own trial-and-error, I'm leaning more toward B.
Modeling stuff in DS itself was never part of either option.
If you have already done the hard work of creating he models, rigging and skinning them, I can't imagine why you would want to export them to DAZ Studio for the final process of rendering. There are lots of people here on this forum who are doing just the opposite and exporting full scenes to Blender for rendering in Cycles (or Eevee if it is an animation). Admittedly, I don't know Blender or Cycles well enough to achieve comparable results to my IRay renders but clearly others do.
I gather that the preferred method of export at the moment is Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer for Blender.
I won't be animating anything beyond posing the figures inside DS. Anything I bring in from Blender will be static. I have no intention of doing animation for now. When I get to that point, I can consider those options. For now, it's a non-factor.
I'd seen people talking about doing the DS > Blender route around here. I was trying that originally, but kept running into issues with things not importing correctly, despite closely following the steps in the different tutorials and videos I used. That's what led me to creating this thread, because I figured there had to be a way of getting it to work that wasn't accounted for in those videos - perhaps some change to Blender since they were published or something like that. The most recent one I'd found was like 5 or 6 months ago, and things can change fast in software.
Getting stuff from Blender into DS is very quick and consistent. Whereas (so far) getting something from DS into Blender takes quite a bit more time and tweaking. I'll favor "quick and consistent" every time :p
Also, I don't want to waste time fretting over which approach to take, when either would work just fine. At this point, I'd rather move forward.
I worked with Daz, Poser, Marvelous Designer, Maya, zBrush, Modo, Blender and 3dsmax. There's no software package that can do evrything, each have their pluses and minuses. I just picked the ones I am most comfortable with and stuck with them. I model in zBrush and Modo, then create characters in Daz.
If you aren't doing animation, I would do the following:
Use the Diffeomorphic plugin on the entire Daz scene. Also, export just the characters via Wavefront OBJ. Be certain to check "Write Surface Names", and "Write Object Statements" (I think that what they are called).
In Blender, switch to Cycles, and import it. The most important thing that the plugin will do for you is to make good guesses for all the materials.
Delete the characters in Blender because the subdivision has introduced unwanted artifacts.
Import the characters via OBJ. You'll have to scale them by .01, flip them about the X axis, and rotate them by 90 degrees. I may be wrong, but all these things are literally one click to fix.
Now, if you exported the OBJ correctly, you can now just replace the crude textures on the characters with the much better ones that Diffeomorphic created for you because all the material zones will have similar names. If you have to do any materials manually, it'll be character's skin, and maybe eyes, but the node setup is quite simple and you can use the same image maps from Daz.
When you are done, go to the outliner, and delete all the orphan data blocks, to get rid of any materials you don't use any more. All that is left to do is to go to File/External Data and pack all the materials into your .blend file, and re-save it.
If you are animating, the whole procedure is the same, but just export with Alembic and don't save the subd information, or MDD. The drawback is that the animation should be perfect before exporting.
If you want to animate in Blender itself, that's the one case I haven't figured out yet because I am unable to export BVH from Blender to Daz. It's probably something simple like rotation order, but I haven't had time to perfect the process. Both Maya and Motionbuilder work flawlessly, though. So you can export the character via FBX (without clothes, hair, JCMs, nothing) to either of those programs, animate it, export the BVH back to Daz, and then export to Blender via Alembic or MDD, and the rest of the process is the same.
There's no one-click solution, but I consider this problem solved, if not a little inconvenient, but the cloth, smoke, fire, water, etc, sim in Blender is totally worth it. With the 2.83 release in May, we'll be able to do hair again, as well.
Here is the simplest comparison I could do quickly between Iray in Daz Studio and Cycles in Blender after transferring the scene using the Daz Importer by Thomas Larsson from his Diffeomorphic blog. There is good documentation on that blog, it is worth studying to get the best possible results.
I used G8F base figure, Toulouse hair, Basic Wear all loaded in Daz Studio entirely at defaults. I have used the 'factory defaults' for the Daz Importer. The transfer took about 30 seconds to do. Both renders took 75 seconds. Same HDRI in both, no other lights, Blender does not 'fake' a ground plane with shadows by default. Camera perspective is different, oddly, despite both being set to focal length of 65mm.
The figure, hair and clothing all look 'accurate' to me. There is a subdivision modifier applied by the Daz Importer to match the Subd level in Daz Studio. I don't see any artifacts caused by this subdivision as suggested by TheMysteryIsThePoint. I have hidden the Daz-style FK rigging for figure, hair and clothing but it is there if you wanted to use them.
The materials in Cycles don't render the same and to my eye not as well, especially the eyes. But the materials are designed, built and tested for Iray and not for Cycles, so the comparison isn't apples and oranges. I don't think it need take very long to adjust the materials to look equally good in Cycles, maybe better, but that depends on your knowledge of Cycles obviously and how much time you want to invest.
I think the largest difference is caused by the SSS, which one could not reasonably expect to function the same way in both apps. I've found very small values, on the order of 0.025 to 0.05 work best (at least on one character of mine) to avoid a waxy, translucent look. But I think @andya_b341b7c5f5 has shown how fast and easy it is, and that the results are pretty accurate in many cases.
As far as skin, I've gotten my best results by creating a simple node setup using all the available maps that came with the skin textures in Daz, and then tweaking some of the coefficients. How to use all the different map types are generally the same, and most textures don't include most of them. Depending on the original, it's not hard to arrive at something that looks subjectively better than the original.
I'd really suggest to the OP that he start with Diffeomorhpic Daz Importer, and experiment with the node system from there.
Thanks for the suggestions, all.
Unfortunately, the Diffeomorphic thing (1.4 version) is one of the options I'd tried, and it just wouldn't work right. Directories are set up right. I'm exporting and importing as it says on the blog. The only thing that comes into Blender is the hair, lights and camera. The figure and all the scenery are no-show. I get that error saying "some assets were not found" and "check that the folders are set up correctly. Thing is, that it can find the hair to bring in indicates the folders are setup correctly, because all my DAZ assets are installed in the same directory structure. So, there's some other problem. I've tried this with Genesis 8 and 3. Neither worked. I've looked it up and others have had the same problem. Couldn't find any solutions to the problem, though.
It's why I settled on modeling the objects in Blender and bringing them into DAZ instead. DAZ handles exported models properly for me. Blender doesn't.
I had the same issue testing Diffeomorphic.
For each Daz asset you are importing, the path of the asset needs to be in Diffeomorphic's directory list.
There's a way in Daz to find the path of each asset that isn't importing.
So, the plugin doesn't know how to "crawl" the directory structure to find the assets? Isn't that why it has to be saved to the same folder as the .duf file? So it can reference that info? That was my understanding.
Sounds like a really tedious process to do. Hopefully it's not something you'd have to do too often lol.
I'll give it a shot and see if it helps, though.
Thanks!
Okay! So it's looking a little like progress...
I got the FBX imported to Blender properly. Took a bit of trial and error, but I got it there.
A few things I need to figure out now..
1. Get the eyes looking right (can't get pupils to show up)
2. Get glossy surfaces to look glossy (eyes, lips, etc)
3. Make the skin look like skin, with subsurface scattering, etc.
4. Figure out why the eyes aren't looking straight ahead in Blender, even though they are when exported in DS
4b. Get eyeballs separate from rest of body so I can rotate them myself in Blender if I want to.
For now, I'm happy to have gotten somewhere with it heh
In the meantime, here's a nifty quick-and-dirty Cycles render using a HDRI environment background. Took about 1:20 to render, on a NVidia 1660, if anyone's curious.
Thanks, everyone, for your advice and input! Looks like DS > Blender can work after all.
Double post - Please delete
As for the cameras just use those imported by the plugin. They will get you the same perspective as in daz studio. If you create the camera yourself it will not work because you need to setup some parameters to match daz studio, the focal lenght alone is not enough.
As for subdivision, blender gets a slightly smoother subdivision than daz studio, unfortunately there is no way to fix it. But luckily enough the issue only shows up in eyes and teeth, where you can easily separate the mesh in blender and turn off subdivision. Or just use a pre-subdivided mesh since these are rigid surfaces and don't deform during animation anyway. This is also good for optimization purposes.
As for material conversion for G8, you may try the auto material option, together with bsdf for opaque and guess for refraction. Guess for refraction is designed specifically for thin glass and eyes. Don't forget to set 1.00 for the brighten eyes option since it is not needed for guess. As for bsdf it is better than principled beacuse the principled shader can't match non-pbr uber shader materials, so bsdf nodes are needed instead.
For assets other than G8 you need to convert the materials to the iray uber shader inside daz studio before exporting. This will deal fine with 3delight materials from G1 to G3. Some difference is to be expected anyway for complex materials, especially for sss and dual lobe that is hard to match fine in cycles.
You need to setup in the plugin the same paths you setup in daz studio.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/setting-up-daz-library-paths.html
I did use the camera created by the plugin. Because the figure looked further away, I moved it towards the camera so that the framing was about the same as in Daz Studio. As you can see the perspective effect is not the same. It's not an issue for me, but for people who don't know Blender well and want to just import a scene, render it immediately and get the same look as in Daz Studio, then it could be a show stopper.
I was attempting to show a comparison between Daz Studio Iray and Blender Cycles using the plugin with the least amount of manual intervention. After using the plugins 'Load Factory Settings' option, both the Opaque and Refraction settings are set to 'Principled' for me, so I used those. I did note above that the materials can be improved significantly, but the idea was to show what the plugin can do 'out of the box' with minimum subsequent tweaking.
For reference, attached is what I get when I use your suggested 'BSDF' for Opaque materials, 'Guess' for Refractive and 1.00 for 'Brighten Eyes'. To me, the eyes look even darker and the skin a bit more flat, pale and plastic than with the factory settings.
I overlooked converting the Toulouse Hair materials to Iray in Daz Studio, but interestingly they seem to match more closely than the skin and eyes. The clothing materials are Iray PBR materials by default like the G8F materials so no need to convert them.
I am using Blender 2.81 and the development version of the plugin, 1.4.1, downloaded on 18th January 2020 so pretty much up to date. I am not criticising what the plugin does at all, it saves a lot of work; I am just realistic about its current limitations.
@andya The imported camera always works fine for me, I can change the focal lenght in daz studio and get a perfect match in blender. Do you change other parameters in daz studio other than the focal lenght ? I may help better if you can share a duf file so that I can test it.
As for the G8F skin, it seems there was some work in the latest commits to better match sss that messed up translucency. And since G8F is translucency based she gets bad luck. I posted a bug report at diffeomorphic with a possible fix.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz-archive/issues/395/major-translucency-bug
@wolf359 fbx is good but can't export pbr materials and jcms, then if you're happy with the basic textures and deformations it's ok. Now since G1-G2 use triax and 3DL then fbx may be good enough. While G3-G8 get much better with diffeomorphic.
Thanks. I used the Default Camera as created by Daz Studio in a new scene, to keep the comparison as simple and reproducible as possible. I didn't change any properties of the camera, just framed the selected figure using the Frame button in the viewport and selected Front on the cube. The only other element you need to reproduce the scene is the HDRI, which is free from the HDRI Haven website under the Studio category, and is called 'studio_small_02_8k'.
As I said earlier, I used the plugin code I downloaded on 18 Jan 2020, which post-dates the last commits in the Bitbucket repo. So I am completely up to date as far as I can tell. No doubt there are bugs to be fixed, that is as certain with software as death and taxes are with life. I've read the report you linked. I'll keep an eye on the resolutions.
In daz studio there's not a default camera in a new scene, if you mean the perspective view then that's not a camera. You need to add a real camera for it to be exported (create > new camera). Then in blender you have to select the imported camera in the scene panel. That is, diffeomorphic doesn't change the default blender camera if this is what you're expecting, it adds a new daz camera to the scene.
Since you didn't add a duf I did, see if you can export this it works fine for me.
@andya I just tested the default camera and it seems to export fine the same as any other camera. I also framed and front-faced as you described. In my tests I use the exported camera for rendering comparisons and I always got a perfect match so far.
@marble Thank you. Does the exported camera work for you ?
SInce I rarely use any other camera (other than the Paper Tiger X-Ray camera for HDRI interior scenes in IRay), I guess I have only exported the default camera.