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Here is a step by step video of it on Streamable. I'm using Daz 4.24.0.4 Public Build and Blender 4.2.3 LTS.
I also noticed that the Sagan Exporter disappears from the Daz Studio interface when I close the application.
OK, now I see and I think I know what's going on. Because geografts and geoshells change vertex order, I optimize the mesh, which changes vertex order. But there's no point in doing that for regular meshes where the vertex count hasn't changed. I suppose I should recognize the cases where the object is unmodified by anything and take the original vertex order. OK, that's on the list, too.
Hi all!
First post on the forums and relatively a noob at all this, so please forgive my ignorance. I installed Sagan V4 the same way I did with V3, but I only seem to have Sagan Express V4 added to my Edit menu. I don't seem to have the full options as I have seen on videos and screenshots here. Is there something I am missing?
Thanks for all the hard work!
That may be just my own slip-up, and the express shows up automatically, but the normal export still needs to be configured manually. Did you try the method on the very first post in this topic?
Ah, I realise what I did wrong. I did install it using the method on the first topic, but I still had V3 installed. So it was preventing V4 from utilising that spot. Apologies for the silly mistake on my part.
No problem, I prefer silly mistakes that are easily resolved :)
Hello TheMysteryIsThePoint I have a question
how to make a collision with the hands like in the photo in the folder of soft breast for genesis 9 a tutorial in this example is a very good help for me please
thanks you in advance
Hello friend,
I think you may misunderstand what Sagan and Alembic is. It exports baked geometry. It doesn't help you with soft body collisions and the like, at all.
That said, I'm sure there is some tool available in DAZ Studio for this sort of thing. It'll probably make easy things difficult and difficult things impossible, but it might get the job done if you don't want to use a more appropriate tool like Blender or Houdini.
you crack me up... glad you're still out there!
--ms
Same to you, MS. I'm going to get Sagan/Hitchens done even if it kills me. And by the way things are going, it'll probably be just in time for no one to use this kind of DCC anymore, anyway :)
...
If old-style SW is anything like old-style music, I'm 'all in' on your projects! Sure, there are some clever folks, tools, and paradigms going on out there these days, but this old dog is plenty happy with his old ways, and if your new stuff is anything like what you've got out there now, I can't wait to play with it.
I sure hope you're enjoying the adventure of writing it, in spite of having to guess-timate the undoc-d APIs, lol! Kind of like a really good puzzle, eh?
best,
--ms
Hiya MS,
No, nothing like a really good puzzle. Not at all :)
But I am beginning to think that the greatest synergy is not between DS and the usual suspects like Blender, Houdini, and Marvelous designer, but between DS and the AI models with LoRAs. Have you seen LTX-2.3, LTX Studio, and to say nothing of SeeDance?
So I think the need for something like Sagan/Hitchens or even Diffeomorphic is going to decrease at an accelerating rate.
Ironically, creating still images directly in DS with IRay to create contact sheets just like an actor uses to land parts to train a LoRA might be the new way forward. And I did not see that one coming :)
...
"...nothing like a really good puzzle..." lol - yer killin' me.
We're getting OT here, but let me add some thoughts for continuity, then we can get back to news of your exciting projects... (some good threads on this stuff over in the Art Studio topic...)
Ya, I've been watching it all pretty closely too. One of my offspring is just finishing a degree in 'traditional' computer animation... and it feels like learning horse-carriage repair just before Henry Ford showed up... Good problem solver so I'm sure it'll work out... But after seeing the first few seconds of wolf359's little video clip "THE FUTURE OF DAZ CONTENT & ANIMATION" ... I'm with you w/ respect to the upcoming industry upheaval coming at us all. Exciting, but with GROK's coding tools, new video generation and infilling (new verb?) tools like veo, heygen, ... I see the established creative heirarchy model changing dramatically - simply because the constraints that the limiting "toolkits" used to have on the creative process are being obliterated at an exponential rate. The barriers to creative production are almost gone (as are the filters to what is considered quality output... lol) - It is going to be an interesting industry and cultural reset we're facing, where the missing barriers-to-entry are already resulting in *huge* amounts of noise, but some unbelievably wonderful creative results - if we can only sift through that noise to find the gems that the clever folks in every generation will certainly produce!
Add to that, our long-sacred Intellectual Property notions and laws will also be overwhelmed by the frictionless ability to quickly duplicate, publish, and saturate any new popular and novel media styles... creating a frenzied tension opposite the ability to quickly generate more of those same novel styles. A race that will never end. That said, I've always theorized that in the food domain, everything will eventually converge to bacon (yum), but as we're easily bored and ever-curious creatures, that doesn't seem to be an accurate prediction... There are many wonderful variations on grease, sugar, salt, and ... that will likely kill us just as quickly as my wonderful bacon habit, lol. I guess there are worse fates that we might face as a completely unique and yet totally predictable primate species...
Per your tools in-the-making, I think the creative idea and 'storyboarding' engines that we all know and use will still be *foundational* for a good-while longer, acting as the seeds for the director's visual styles and base scene and character visions, but will quickly become obsolete for actual frame-to-frame production. That's probably OK and speaks to the part of this domain that I like the most, given I can't draw a straight line, and these current tools open many avenues for my own curiousities and (semi-)creative adventures.
All creative and professional media domains are facing this upheaval, in an unbound ethical context (not ethics-free, just unregulated - the ethical constraints that might occur to us today can't even start to gel before they're obsolete tomorrow, and the natural opportunistic experiments and instutions are occuring in that space, just as any pragmatic human observer would expect them to, until the costs become undeniable and are reigned in - 'til the next round...) - law, music, news, imagery, journalism, online interactions, health, etc... all are exposed, if nothing else, by the simple economic advantages (and amazing results!) of the current situation.
I have no idea what any of it will look like in 50 years (10?), other than this genie is out of the bottle and will need to be appreciated and managed, not denied... It might be a lot of fun, but it probably won't be smooth sailing for some. It's not a new pattern, it's just our own version - picture our great grandparents looking at an iPhone in 1920 with a live feed of the winter olympics (or a war...) on the other side of the world...
FWIW, I'm still really excited to see how hitchens and sagan roll, so I hope you continue to see the mentioned 'foundational' value of these tools in the same way I do. I currently feel very obsolete in my own techical niche, as I watch smarter, faster, and seemingly more capable people make my little footprint in the sand seem even less meaningful, but, by-gosh... I'm inspired by them and I *will* contribute my ideas as a footprint of some kind, and I think it will be cool, if nothing else. And I'll enjoy me some crispy bacon as I go.
best always,
--ms
I don't know which I enjoyed more: what you said or the style in which you said it :)
Well a AI pipeline doesn't certainly need a 3D software to generate contact sheets. It simply obliterates it all, the previous tools becomes unnecessary and substituted with AI generation, including DAZ, Blender and whatever.
What I personally think about it ? When I was a child I was often drawing my own stories on paper, using pencils, nothing of excellent quality but it was a lot of fun and I did like my works. As time passed tools changed, and I found myself spending more and more time learning the tools rather than drawing the stories, as tools became more and more complex. The pencil was easy, but the new tools brought so much more quality and productivity that it was impossible to ignore them.
AI is next as quality and productivity, undoubtedly. I am still at the first attempts with it and until now I didn't find anything working fine enough for production, but I am still learning and AI is still growing so eventually it will become usable.
p.s. What I have doubts about, is that AI shouldn't be allowed to train over intellectual property without paying the rights for it. That I am not sure it does actually.
Hi again, lol
Okay, so I followed the tutorial for transfering materials from diffeomorphic model to an alembic one. Rearranged the names alphabetically, as advised. All went well, except for the face. It's completely black. Went back and triple checked all materials were alphabetical. Even tried rearranging the diffeomorphic materials alphabetically first too, and link the materials that way. It's always the face that ends up with an issue.
Not sure if it's because there are a lot more materials and blends going on in comparison to the tutorial.
Also, made sure to compare nodes on the linked material to the original, and they are the same.
This is on both Evee and Cycles (AMD card). Solid is fine. Interestingly, the original diffeomorphic file renders just fine.
Thank you!
Hmm, I think I found something.
I digged deeper into the nodes and found something different. The "Base Female" UV node on the Diffeomorphic model is white, whereas the Alembic is red.
Including the screenshots below.
Thank you.
Final update. Fixed.
What I ended up doing was creating a fresh UV map node on the Alembic and connecting that to the other nodes. Not sure what the issue was with the other one. I even copied the node individually from the Diffeomorphic mesh, and even without connecting it to anything, it turned up red.
Hopefully this helps anyone in the future
Edit: Remember to select the mesh as well in the UV map node
Well said @Padone
I have moved over completely to an AI “agent” based pipeline since I retired
No Blender, Maya ,Iclone,Daz for me anymore.
Hi @wolf359
Amazing stuff, as usual.
I don't doubt a single word you say, but personally I found the unpredictability of the generations to be a del-breaker for me. LoRAs work pretty well to guarantee consistency, but unless what you presented to the LoRA was what you actually wanted, the LoRA will guarantee that it is consistently not what you hade envisioned :)
That's why I find starting with a character that you created yourself instead of an AI generated one to be the perfect balance... just too many times what I ended up with was close enough to what I wanted, but just different enough to trigger what is probably undiagnosed OCD in me. And sometimes there's a legitimate nuance that I want in the performace, something subtle, that I can't get.
That's why pretty soon I'm going to start on a tool to generate the ControlNet, depth maps, and Canny for LTX-2.3 right from Blender.
Thank you @wolf359 for sharing your workflow, as always your work is stunning and inspiring. I agree AI is a massive improvement both in quality and productivity, and certainly doesn't need 3D software to generate custom characters or environments. However, what I like in 3D is, well, you have a 3D model to interact with, like having a toy in your hands you can build and modify. While AI is another paradigm, much more powerful but different, fun wise.
Great news, guys (at least for me)
Tonight I finally got Hitchens to work. Now it is easy to export a character's armature to Blender, animate it any way you want, and send it back to DS and have it work flawlessly. No files to save and load, no options to misconfigure; the LiveLink just works. The Blender addon is done too. It looks like this.
Just a few things to clean up.
And I cannot go without saying that it took me 3 years to stumble onto the solution that made it work. Not by engineering, but by tearing my hair out trying to think of all the ways that the API could actually work.
The solution was three !@#$%^& lines. One line to get the bone's orientation, another to zero out the orientation before applying the Quaternion from Blender, and a third one to restore the vbone's orienttion after. That's it. It turns out that working with Quaternions is easy. Working with a largely undocumented DAZ Studio SDK is hard. And that has a price.
Thank you Donald for working on this. From your links the interface is clean and the result impressive, that's two things rarely coming along together. Personally I'm not one to export back to daz once I'm in blender, but sure this tool will help many.
Hi @Padone
Yes, I'm not either (at least not to "stay" in DS). I immediately export back to Blender with Sagan just to get all the JCMs and other Genesis goodness in a way that I know will always "just work" because of Alembic.
When I work in ComfyUI, I find that using Daz Studio to train my custom Character into a LoRA was absolutely essential in order to get the character I want.
I think that generative AI is fascinating, but I vastly prefer NOT giving away the work that I Love to Do to it. So I haven't been using it for generative art and am back into Studio.
Using your analogy is perfect - working out my animations and everything that goes along with them in Daz Studio is like going back to using my pencil. I have a flow:
It's incredibly fun and I love how compatible everything is - even though I'm still a glutton for collecting legacy (I mean Legacy - like, back to the beginning of Daz 3D) as even that is ultra-simple to work with.
I think, however, that it helps a lot that I make a lot of my own products for myself and add them to my own library. As I need something for my flow, I use the remarkable, under-the-hood tools of Daz Studio (thank you devs!!!) to create what I need, save it, and use Icon Creator Pro to make the icon look cool. This all makes the entire act of filmmaking a really fun experience - and that's what I really need at this stage in my life - fun!
Argh! Sorry. A friend sent me a link here - I didn't realize I was in a Blender discussion. Please accept my humble apology
Workflows for animation can be used anywhere blender is similar in that aspect, apart doing it much better
. Thank you for sharing.
Sorry, I am super late to the party. I've installed the Sagan.dll.
The plugin is listed in my Plug in list, but there is nothing in the edit menue.
do I need the "Alembic Exporter for DAZ Studio SKU:16558" in order to run it as well?
Ah, got it, but no textures in Blender.