Can the house cat figure actually be ported to Blender? What are the limitations?

docbadwrench

My question regards the house cat with dforce hair. According to the product listing, I can use the Daz-to-Blender Bridge to use the figure in Blender. But I have never successfully achieved this.

When I attempt to do so, I'm treated to the Error Has Occured message. I receive this message whether I attempt to port just the cat or the cat plus the hair.

Are there some additional considerations I am not aware of? Has anyone actually used the bridge successfully for this figure?

A sort of follow-up question is that, even when I export as an FBX (with animations completely in tact), the fur is missing. I'm assuming that this is because I need to use the relevant software's particle system to recreate this, but is that correct?

Thanks; it's noob-central over here.

docbadwrench

So... I'm going to guess no? Nobody else has the housecat? What about other animals? Maybe there's something about dForce fur that applies here.

Krys Kryngle

Couple questions and maybe I can help.  Do you want to export the cat with a rig so you can pose/animate in Blender?  Or, just export the cat already posed to render in Blender? 

As far as the hair, I think you can try the hair conversion tools in Diffeomorphic and the tool Cinus provided in this forum.  One of those might be able to convert but it depends on how the hair is made in DAZ (fibermesh, ribbons, etc.). 

WendyLuvsCatz

cat yes dforce hair no and my particle hair looked horrifying but that's my lack of Blender skills, sadly dforce hair though rigged is just polylines even line tessellated and Blender sees nothing if you can import it, I tried alembic both DAZ and Sagan too. I would love to make it a groom for Unreal engine.

SDev

WendyLuvsCatz said:

cat yes dforce hair no and my particle hair looked horrifying but that's my lack of Blender skills, sadly dforce hair though rigged is just polylines even line tessellated and Blender sees nothing if you can import it, I tried alembic both DAZ and Sagan too. I would love to make it a groom for Unreal engine.

I'm grooming my pets in blender for a long term hobbyist project. If you're interested in building realistic hair, have a look here:

https://www.vfxgrace.com/product/jaguar-grooming-workflow

Aside pet fur grooming, this is also a treasure chest for generating peach fuzz and human hair in general. 

 

Padone

docbadwrench said:

So... I'm going to guess no? Nobody else has the housecat?

I am not up to date with the daz bridge and have no time to test it right now. But from what I know the daz bridge only supports G3 G8 figures, while other figures will be exported as props. Plus there's no support for SBH or dForce hair. I repeat I don't know if the last update gets improvements.

As for diffeo, you should be able to import any animal complete with rig and SBH or dForce hair, or any geometry hair will also work. Then you can convert anything to fibers with the diffeo tools. As for dForce you will need to set the simulation parameters yourself though, that is, if you need to animate the hair.

http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-15.html

WendyLuvsCatz

I really need to try Diffeo again, I just do FBX imports

nicstt

docbadwrench said:

My question regards the house cat with dforce hair. According to the product listing, I can use the Daz-to-Blender Bridge to use the figure in Blender. But I have never successfully achieved this.

When I attempt to do so, I'm treated to the Error Has Occured message. I receive this message whether I attempt to port just the cat or the cat plus the hair.

Are there some additional considerations I am not aware of? Has anyone actually used the bridge successfully for this figure?

A sort of follow-up question is that, even when I export as an FBX (with animations completely in tact), the fur is missing. I'm assuming that this is because I need to use the relevant software's particle system to recreate this, but is that correct?

Thanks; it's noob-central over here.

I've exported it as an obj, then added particle hair.

Was simple for what I required as was part of the background. I posted the image a while back in Show us Your Blender Renders.

docbadwrench

Oh wow. Thanks to everyone for chiming in here. This is some great information.

@Krampus :

I haven't decided what my render environment is yet (I'm still firmly at the front-end of my Daz-knowledge and waiting for a non-potato computer to arrive). I would prefer Blender - in which case I better get comfy with not-iray-shaders - but honestly will adapt to whichever is going to result in higher quality. I have been attempting to use Diffeomorphic, but have not explored the options with housecat. I'm not sure if I got it to work with that, but will look again.

re: rigging - I'm not sure what my preference is. I'd imagine I could get used to rigging in blender and just export an FBX when I need a figure with animations (already done in Daz).

Thank you very much for the pointer toward the hair converter addon for Blender. I had no idea it existed and will definitely explore that option.

@WendyLuvxCatz :

That tracks with my own experiences converting via any working method. Thanks for sharing; a good ymmv-warning on the addon. And, like you, I've been leaning on crude OBJ exports. But I just figured out how to make FBX work right and that's been great.

@Sdev & @Padone :

Thanks for the links. Going to def explore doing this in Blender. I must have made some kind of error with Diffeo when I originally attempted this. Going to revisit it. I can't wait until we get geometry nodes in the standard Blender build because I hate Blender's particle system interface, but am very comfortable in node-based environs. That said, I'm still going the Diffeomorphic route. Going to make that work.

@nicstt :

That makes sense. I bet my first attempt at this looks like a sasquatch.