Diffeomorphic Male FACS

jeff_someone

Hey, I couldn't find an answer on the Diffeo blog site, but I can't seem to get FACS to work with imported Male 8.1 characters.  Works fine for female 8.1.  Anyone else have this issue?  

Padone

I admit I never tried G81M but on a quick test he seems to work fine here, what doesn't work ?

 

edit. I just found that squint doesn't seem to work fine but this is the same with G81F. Reported to Thomas.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/522/facs-squint-doesnt-work

jeff_someone

Hmm, thanks for the quick reply Padone.  For some reason, if I use Diffeo to load in a base 8.1 character and then import FACS Expressions, they don't really work... it's like they barely change the expression...as if I had it dialed in at 0.1 or something, even though I tried it at 1.0.   I wonder if its because I scaled up my Daz character.  Anyhow, probably me doing something dumb...let me try again...

ThomasLarsson

Scaling a character in Blender does not work, because more than armatures and meshes depend on scale, and those things are not changed accordingly when you scale. Everything that has dimension of length has to be adjusted. This includes some material properties (e.g. displacement distance), and drivers for bone translations. The latter are the culprit here. A typical morph moves face bones a few millimeters. If the character was imported with default settings, where the unit is meters, the movement is a few 0.001 units. If you scale the character a factor 100, so the unit is now centimeters, the movement is still 0.001 units, i.e. 100 microns. It does not matter if the morphs were imported before or after the character was scaled.

If you want a character in some other scale, there is a global setting called Unit Scale that has to be changed. By default its value is 0.01, which corresponds to meters since DS internally uses centimeters. Change the unit scale and import the character again. Now morphs can be added and they should look ok.

Padone

@jeff_someone Apart what Thomas explains, scaling also affects all the simulation attributes and pbr settings, other than lights falloff and camera perspective. You should really use real world measurements when working in blender. Unless there's a damn good reason not to.

j cade

Padone said:

@jeff_someone Apart what Thomas explains, scaling also affects all the simulation attributes and pbr settings, other than lights falloff and camera perspective. You should really use real world measurements when working in blender. Unless there's a damn good reason not to.

One reason not to is that blenders cloth sim is a bit problematic at real world scale. I think because a lot of the code there dates back to when everything was in "blender units" rather than meters.

For instance the minimum distance you can put on a collision object without things starting to break is .02 (no units) so if you sim things at a larger scale you can get comparatively much closer collisions. It is a noticable collision distance too. From my measurements about 2.5 mm is the closest collision distance I can get,which doesn't sound that bad until you realize that most cloth is less than a mm thick, so it's sitting off the skin my multiple times its own thickness.

Given that I can scale things up by 10, sim, and then scale things right back down and have a collision of a quarter of a mm instead it is pretty annoying.

Padone

@jcade I agree on the cloth sim but that's not a good reason to blow up everything. As you say yourself you can simulate at 5x then scale back.

Also pay attention that the scale does affect the cloth simulation, though it's not always obvious. Scaling up is good enough if you only do draping, that is, use gravity on a static model. But try an animation with some "floating" cloth and you'll see that a 5 meters cloth is not the same as a 50 cm cloth. Personally I tend to keep real world size with the cloth simulator, then collision to minimum that's 1 mm and precision at 16. Those are also the default values when you import dforce with diffeomorphic. It's somewhat slow especially on weak cpus but it works fine enough.

Then one trick if you want to use the scale with cloth, is to scale 3x and set gravity to 3x too. This will give you a correct draping, but you can't scale up too much, eg. 10x doesn't work.

jeff_someone

Thanks all for your responses - this is helpful! 

benniewoodell

So I was googling to find if my issue was a known one and I found this thread. When I load a G8.1 male (so far I've tried Fred 8.1 and Kayden 8.1) and go to import FACS units, it doesn't show any units (photo attached) and when I click okay, it says, "Error: No morphs selected" which makes sense since there's no morphs to import. When I load in a 8.1 Female character (Clara was my test just now), all of the FACS units showed up to import and it worked just fine. Padone, I see in your image above you got it to work, though I'm not looking for the actual FACS rig, I just want to use a FaceCap file which I've done in the past with an 8.1F but never tried a male until last night since I'm starting a new project that I'm using an 8.1 male with. 

I'm using the current diffeo build from the repository link on the site. Thanks for any and all insight! 

Padone

I don't have any issue here importing facs for 8.1 males. Did you install your figures in the main content folder ? If not you have to add the extra folders in the diffeo settings.

You may also try the easy import to see if there's any success.

benniewoodell

Hmm, when I get home and in front of my computer, I'll check to see if I have to add any extra folders in diffeo. And yeah, I tried both easy import and regular just in case I was doing something wrong on the regular import. Thanks for checking, Padone, fingers crossed I can figure this out. At least I know this is a me issue and not something diffeo isn't capable of doing yet, so now it's just a matter of me figuring it out on my end. I appreciate it!