Alembic exporter and Cinema 4D

Fetito

Anyone has experience with the DAZ „Alembic Exporter“ and Cinema 4D? How do both things work together?

I export objects via Alembic from DAZ Studio 4.7 into C4D R16. However, all textures do not get imported well: All I get is a gray animated object, without textures.

Anyway, the texture-files get exported by DAZ into the same folder.

Is there an easy way to apply the textures again to the imported Alembic-object within C4D?

There seem to be alembic Selection Tags on the right tab.

Fetito

I attach a screenshot

hzr

The alembic workflow seems still a bit tricky with C4D, but if you just want correct texture assignments, here is what you do :

- Load up your alembic file, and as you mentioned there will be Face sets present on the new alembic container for each object that you exported from DS. Simply do a "Current State to Object" operation from menu that you get when right clicking the object in the object manager.

- This splits the alembic file into the geometry at the current frame. Now you got the geometry from the actual export and all you got to do is to assign textures to the polygon selection tags.

- Re-Import the alembic file, then select the newly created texture tags on the previous objects and drag them into the new imported alembic container. This can get pretty tedious however when you have alot of alembic containers for each object, since you will have to drag the textures into each object on every new import, because the texture names will not be tagged for different figures. So for example if you export a g2f and a g2m, and drag all the texture tags over, then one will overwrite the others textures because they have the same names (dzmat_Torso, dzmat_Hips etc)

Sadly, it seems that you cannot just re-name the surfaces in DS to work around that problem... So it would be amazing if the Devs would update the alembic exporter so that it names the material assignments depending on the names of the surfaces tab, and not by just using default names as it seems right now. I am not entirely sure if this is a problem on either Daz`s side or that of Maxon, but there has to be a way to get this to work less tedious :)

edit : quick update. You can rename surfaces in DS which then get exported, but only for the other objects and not G2F or G2M and probably G1 aswell, so you should be able to put all texture assignments under one null for all the non figure objects and only assign the texture tags for the figures to the actual objects on each new import, if you make sure to assign a unique name to each of your objects material zones. My guess is that this might have to do with the different way in how material assignments are handled on the figures to keep the legacy texture zone naming available, but not entirely sure.

Fetito

@heinz0r: you're my hero!

so far i was able to reproduce the textures, but it takes A LOT OF TIME!!!!

isn't there a faster way to add the textures and the bump maps? can I also export a FBX of the model and just transfer the texture domains?

jkettles16_1b93908631

I created a tutorial here: http://youtu.be/nqbT-3tjxtg about this subject. The workflow is actually not too bad and you can do this without baking down the alembic. I have another tutorial on my channel as well that shows how to retarget the alembic animation to a regular C4D object that's already textured, if you want to go that route.

Fetito

@jkettles16: Yay! Your tutorials extremely helped me! Could you please create a tutorial on how to import scenes such as "Urban Sprawl 2 The Big City" into C4D and how to add a good lighting system?

Thank you! You rule!