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Alembic doesn't transfer the materials, just the material slots.
There was no point in implementing some sort of materials converter when Thomas and Padone had already done so in Diffeomorphic, and far better than I would have done. But you can do an import with Diffeomorphic, tell it to alphabetixe the material slots but not to remove duplicate materials, and then easilt copy the materials from the diffeo import to the Sagan import. Or ask your favorite LLM to write a script to do it.
Absolutely great plugin! Thank you so much!
I have a stupid problem: the surfaces of my geometry shell have the same material names as the underlying figure. Is there a way to circumvent that?
A quick answer would be very appreciated!
Is Sagen working for DAZ Studio 6.
Btw... I just found this.
Has anyone an info about that?
You are very welcome.
I've never seen that behavior. Can you tell me how I can reproduce it? What assets?
I ask myself every time I sit down to work on Sagan: "Why am I doing this to myself?". My reasons and experiences are already well documented in these forums. With so much exciting innovation happening elsewhere and DAZ 6 providing nothing that I care about, I'm going to get Hitchens reasonably close to working in v4 and then I think I'm done with this environment. Sagan v4 has over 1200 unique downloads, yet no one at DAZ has reached out to offer support and I suppose I finally understand why that would be the case.
But it is Open Source. I'll support anyone who wants to take a stab at it. All it'll take is a single enterprising nerd to want it badly enough.
$90?! If I were DAZ, I would not have helped Sagan succeed, either.
hm did I got right, Sagen is abandon from your site and you are looking for a successor?
abandoned? Language differences not-withstanding, I thank the developer for gifting us his efforts so that we can continue to use and/or extend his work in the open manner it has been shared.
Assuming the new DS version API and documentation is like the current version's docs, it's apparently far more work to maintain this tool than the benefits realized beyond this version justify.
"I've fixed my problem, and y'all can use it or extend it... best wishes - and let me know if you have any problems or questions..."
No more or less.
*Anyone* who wishes enhance these tools, or contract with someone who has the required coding abilities, is welcome to do so.
Maybe there is no need for a successor, or, perhaps someone else will have a similar needs to extend and upgrade this tool for their own purposes, and may take on the challenge...
it is all good,
--ms
Thanks, @mindsong, well put.
@Hurdy3D I don't see it that way. I see it as DAZ that has abandoned its third party developer community.
It is only for every single one of the over 1200 distinct IPs that downloaded Sagan v4 that I hadn't quit years ago. I don't want to let down the people who, like me, just wanted to make a movie.
Developing software should be fun, enjoyable, and rewarding. Having to reverse engineer even the simplest things and being robbed of the sense of closure or a-job-well-done because you have no idea if your implementation works in all cases or just works for right now, is extremely frustrating.
And the fact that no one, NO ONE from DAZ has ever reached out to help is the kicker. The SDK forums are a (bad) joke. A ghost town. Because everyone there is as bewildered as everyone else; the blind leading the blind. The number of very basic questions that are unanswered is staggering.
And I contrast this with projects like Blender. Why do I go to SIGGRAPH every year it is in LA just to shake Ton Rosendahl's hand and say "Thank you"? Because the first year he literally made a representative from Amazon (who we now know was there to give him a metric crap ton of money) wait because I had asked him what was in retrospect a pretty stupid question about Blender's Python API. He made me feel like Sagan was the most important project in the world, more important than all of Amazon's money. The project owner (Dalai Felinto, a really cool guy) is Brazilian, as is my wife, and so he hooked me up with the dev (Hans Goudey) the phenom who did the Hair Curves API, and he implemented something just so that Sagan (and Diffeomorphic, too, I believe) could export Strand Based Hair. And that, precisely that, right there in a nutshell, is why Blender is taking over the industry.
So, yeah, I'm kind of sick of being treated like I kicked someone's puppy instead of just trying to provide something that many of its users find useful.
But I still harbor hope that DAZ will better support its dev community this time around. Who knows.
I wish you'd join the Carrara community
I know it's abandoned by DAZ
but because of that, you will find a lot of sympathetic people there
and developers who have done awesome things because DAZ won't
and you might find out why I model stuff in Carrara not Blender
and discover our Stezza and what he does starting with a cube
Hi Wendy,
I can't say that I understood all the pickle references, but definitely seems like a fun place!
a fair few of us there are Aussies and have a different sense of humour
the Hairy Cucumber often emerges too
Um... what?
Hi Guys,
Sagan 5 is up.
It includes the Hitchens plugin for Blender that supports exporting animations back to DS. For this, you'll want to choose a port for Hitchens and enable it in Sagan. If you run DS and Blender on the same computer, choose localhost for the server address. Then go to Blender, where you've got the plugin installed, and Import Figures. It can take a long time, so you may have to adjust the timeout value. If you have a recent version of the excellent Diffeomorphic tool, it should import materials automatically (The Import Diffeo Materials button is for Alembic exports done via Sagan). Note that the figure won't have JCMs or any geoshells. This is for animation only.
The kinda big deal: To apply a retargeted animation, load it (probably an FBX file), and that is the Source. Your imported armature is the Actor. You can get a few bone map file presets from
https://iwasserious.com/hitchens_bonemaps
It's kind of a pain right now, so I only did a few. If what you need is not found there, you can create your own; it's just JSON.
For simulations, you might want to apply a pre-roll; I use 120 frames.
The retargeter will create collections for the cubes and spheres, that link the two armatures together. If you're using a preset bonemap, you can just hide them. If not, you'll need to rotate the spheres corresponding to bones whose orientations don't match the source animation. Do not rotate the cube objects.
Create your animation. You'll probably want Auto Rig Pro Quick Rig and Animation Layers for this.
Then bake it.
Then, with Hitchens still running and Idle, use Put Animation. It will send the animation back to DS. It should match precisely.
I'm really tired, but these instructions should work.
Other things that should also work are:
Import Diffeo Materials - Select the scene file the Alembic import came from, and apply the materials automatically
Load DS Morph - load a (vertex only) DS Morph file as a shapekey
Put Morph - transfers a vertex-only morph back to DS
Load Shape Key - load a shape key you previously saved
Save Shape Key - save a shape key
Partial Shape Keys - load a shape key and have it affect only a part of the mesh
Hair Curves - Use the external SBH hair data created by Sagan (if you chose the option not to embed SBH data in the Alembic file)
As always, please try it, test it, and let me know.
Sagan 5.
What is conversion for?
Minimum U, maximum U, etc
It's for converting mesh hair to Hair Curves in Blender.
Sagan can analyze the topology of the mesh and figure out the best way to make strands, but even if it successfully creates a strand of hair, it still won't know which end is the root attached to the head. I couldn't figure out a reliable way to determine it. A trick that another dev here (and sorry, I don't remember who, but it was clever) suggested that one way is to look at the UV coordinates. But even so, different PAs UV map their hair products differently. Being able to choose between the four possible orientation allows the user to use the one that works. I imiagine that most will use Minimum V, because that corresponds to a hair texture where the roots are at the top, and the hair hangs down vertically, along the V axis.
Did you figure out the resolution problem? I see that your previous comment is gone for some reason and don't want to speculate.
Wowzer! I gotta carve out a weekend to sort through this brilliance! bravo, congrats, and thanks!
Appreciating the inevitability of progress and the need to 'keep up' with everything in this industry... I've personally settled on DS 4.23 as my final DS version... (3DL, etc.)
that said... I have the most sinister urge to be "that guy/gal" who asks, after all of your blood sweat and tears... "does sagan 5 work in DS6?", lol.
Thanks sir, yer a gem!
--ms (just cracking myself up out here... :)
Hi MS,
Thanks for your comment.
Yeah, I don't think I'll be upgrading either. There's simply nothing in DS6 to temp me.
Ha ha, asking about DS6? Why oh why would you do that? :) I thought we were bros :) I'm sure someone enterprising nerd who wants it badly enough could vibe code it, though. But after my proposal to work on documentation to teach LLMs about the SDK got shot down, for reasons that made my head hurt trying to understand and then OKed when someone else suggested essentially the same thing, yeah, I think I'm done.
After talking it up for so long, I finally finished v5 going on 3 weeks ago, and there has been precisely one comment. It turns out I'd been taking time away from my own personal projects to fulfill what I considered a promise to the community, but I never stopped to ask if anyone cared.
I also have been watching the work by @bluejaunte and it is impressive. It alleviates some of the need for Sagan/Hitchens, I think.
you were just too ahead of the times
now everything and everyone is falling over themselves to stick AI in everything including D|S6 itself
not in a helpful way as others pointed out the lies it tells
they should have at least trained that one on the DAZ Studio manual ...
... oh wait
Ha ha...
It's made worse by the fact that when it's not hallucinating, it is generally a net productivity gain, so it is very seductive.
To be honest, if I were starting today, I'd probably use it a lot.
I could see that... but take heart - FWIW, while one has to acknowledge that in spite of its universal purpose, alembic fills a very specific niche that not a whole lot of folks in here probably need (yet?), or appreciate until they do. Add to that, you are cursed by your 'doing it right' approach, as your early versions worked so perfectly for my needs, that even I have only *downloaded* the last few versions, knowing they contained fixes/features, but haven't installed them since I hadn't experienced the fixed problems or needed the enhancements yet, etc. I move slowly when it comes to upgrades (stability first... if it ain't broke, etc.), and usually do updates after long gaps with a 'break it all at once' sort of approach, leaving my stable systems alone until I sort out the various update oddities and changes...
That said, when someone *does* find that they need something like Sagan, it is a *friggin god-send*, especially when it works as well as it does.
Lastly, I don't think 99.9% of folks even realize what Hitchens does yet. This is purely a marketting issue :), not a coding or needs-based problem, lol. Like Sagan itself, anyone who takes on the Daz-Blender-Daz-... workflow to optimize the best of both worlds and use their favored interfaces/render-engine/tools, they will likely become *dependent* upon this system you've built, let alone appreciate it. As above, I would expect that this workflow will also be embraced by a small (eventually religious!) subset of the DAZ community.
Give it time, and you might find your efforts (and integrity) are more appreciated than you imagine.
Hitchens is currently a gem-in-the-rough buried in the fray of this swirl of an environment - but, a few of us like to hunt for such gems.
Like you, I'm curious how Hitchens will 'take' over time! You've put it out there, let's see how she rolls! Hell, it took me 3 weeks to get back in here and even notice, and I've been excited about it since you announced it!
That new bluejaunte posing tool on his (?) Patreon looks wicked cool, and the Blender render plugin in DAZ concept would be a very cool new feature (esp. if it works in DS4.x, lol)
Which reminds me (per bluejaunte doing some tools under the Patreon model) - Have you seen the novel (to me) open source paradigm described by the good folks doing privacy work at futo.org (futo.tech)? Kind of a hybrid open-but-compensated sort of model - see if you can find the project sponsor's blog posts on the subject. I love their work, and am curious how their dev model will progress. (we can take this offline if you like, but it's also a good project/paradigm for folks to be aware of, etc.)
best always,
--ms