@TheMysteryIsThePoint all the time! You'd think after once or twice you'd stop, but nope lol.
@juvesatriani That is a fantastic idea! I'm so going to look into working with a tablet as I know I'll be using all three programs for awhile. I'm curious too now after you mention it if the Novation Launchpad would work in the same way. It'll be a fun experiment if I get my hands on one :)
@benniewoodell I did a quick google but can't find free facecap animations. If you can share a facecap animation for testing I can check and eventually confirm the bug or advice for a solution.
@gerster Most expressions in the shop are presets for the face units so you load them as poses. As for the feature requests yes it is better to ask at bitbucket, personally I agree it would be useful if the HD maps could automate a little. Actually Thomas is on vacation will come back the next week.
After I start using Diffeomorphic and the HD addon more seriously, I have some feature requests and questions:
Feature request:
It would be super handy if we could set in the settings of Diffeomorphic the n-panel name.
I use the addon Simple Tabs to reorganize my n-panel, but Simple Tabs can't do anything if an addon adds dynamicaly while using new n-panel categories like Diffeomorphic is doing, when you select n Armature with e.g. Simple IK.
Feature request:
I started creating for all hd expressions vector displacements maps with the HD addon.
Works great bu it's a lot of work and once I would have created them, I have to add them everytime manually in the nodes to use them.
I think it would be super handy if:
- There would be an option to create for all expressions at once the vector displacement maps and store them automatically in a shared folder
- Expressions check if there is a vector displacement maps availibe and if yes, they add them automtically if the expression is used.
Here, you are one hop removed from the place where Diffeo is developed, and it's not clear how often Thomas checks in. Try going to the actual project page.
Yeah I know. But I thought maybe someone can answer the question, I asked between the suggestions. ;)
Maybe I just missed something and there is a way to add third party expressions.
@Padone here's a facecap txt file, thank you so much for giving it a look! Just remember, have the gaze set to 0 for follow head and then key the gaze control on MHX around in a couple of places so you see your character's eyes move and know it's working fine. Then load the facecap file and uncheck everything, even eye rotation, so all that's going to be keyed is the facial movements and the eyes should still move how you keyed them perfectly. Then adjust anything in the morphs in the FACS or regular face morphs, like the tongue or something, and the eyes should dart to a neutral position away from where the gaze controller is set. I just opened up the file I was working on the other day and the eyes are locked in the neutral position now too, so I guess if you close the file and open it back up, it screws it up as well. I appreciate your time!
Hey @Padone, thanks for making bitbucket post about this, definitely good points brought up there. I just wanted to link this video I just did to show my exact problem that I was having as it's a little different than what I'm seeing in the bitbucket. Here's the video https://youtu.be/KvK_M5jFE9I Hope this helps and I really appreciate everything you all are doing.
Just one quick thing maybe to help you understand why some folks might use FACS and face controls/expressions. Since I'm doing animations, I use these characters for a hundred plus shots and I'm not going to go through the import process every time so I have a saved character file I append in as well as a version of the character with no hair or clothes at super low res to make animation quicker that I just retarget that skeleton onto the regular version of the character in the shot itself. But some shots I use FACS, and sometimes it's quicker for me to just hand key an expression, so I want that option and so I have both available on the character rig. I don't mix and match the two, once I use one, that's what I go with for that particular shot and then I see what's needed the next time. It's just nice to have the option available at my fingertips every time. It's like some shots FK is better for the arms rather than IK and vice versa. So I hope that gives a little insight as to why someone might have both on the rig.
@Wolf359 the MHX rig is extremely close to the rigs I'm using in my animation class, so it's helping me stay consistent between what I'm learning in class and what I'm doing for my personal projects. Plus, I couldn't find a knee/elbow controller in Rigify for IK. It might very well be there, I just don't know where it is. I might use Rigify for background characters walking through the back of the shot, your video about retargeting Mixamo is awesome and I can see it being very useful, but for my main characters, I hand key everything they do just to keep everyone feeling individualized.
I saw your video. What I mean is that facs and face units are alternative ways to do the same things, with facs having the ability to load mocaps in the facs industry standard as facecap for example. Think of facs as "face units 2.0". I'm not sure that the mhx face controls are designed to work both with face units and facs, if so then there's a bug we wait Thomas to reply on this.
Anyway there's no reason to use facs and face units together, you can do with facs everything you can do with face units. You just use the facs controls instead of the face controls. Ideally you should use face units with G3 G8 and facs with G81. Though diffeomorphic makes facs available to G8 too.
The facs controls have their own gaze controller that's not what you're using.
Oh, I see. Okay, that clears it up pretty good. Maybe to make things easier then, I'll just re-import the characters and just have the FACS option checked. And you're right, that controller is totally not what I'm using, I was using the MHX gaze control...where is the button to get the FACS controller in your photo? I've never seen anything like that before in my blender imports. I'll totally use that instead if that's an opton! Again, thank you so much :)
Oh, I see. Okay, that clears it up pretty good. Maybe to make things easier then, I'll just re-import the characters and just have the FACS option checked. And you're right, that controller is totally not what I'm using, I was using the MHX gaze control...where is the button to get the FACS controller in your photo? I've never seen anything like that before in my blender imports. I'll totally use that instead if that's an opton! Again, thank you so much :)
Hi Bennie, you have to load them in Daz before exporting your model. You'll find them in the developer section, face control for 8.1 or so (using my mobile now, not a pc) However you can use them for G8 as well. (You won't see them in Iray). Load them, export your character and under easy import in blender select facs and convert to widgets plus make bones poseable. After importing they're assigned to a separate slot in the bones/rig tab. If you convert the daz rig to rigify, the widgets got replaced, but you can reassign them by hand.
Info: In Blender, you can assign any shape to a bone, these get shown in any modes instead of the bones, except in edit mode :) where you can assign them.
Oh, I see. Okay, that clears it up pretty good. Maybe to make things easier then, I'll just re-import the characters and just have the FACS option checked. And you're right, that controller is totally not what I'm using, I was using the MHX gaze control...where is the button to get the FACS controller in your photo? I've never seen anything like that before in my blender imports. I'll totally use that instead if that's an opton! Again, thank you so much :)
Hi Bennie, you have to load them in Daz before exporting your model. You'll find them in the developer section, face control for 8.1 or so (using my mobile now, not a pc) However you can use them for G8 as well. (You won't see them in Iray). Load them, export your character and under easy import in blender select facs and convert to widgets plus make bones poseable. After importing they're assigned to a separate slot in the bones/rig tab. If you convert the daz rig to rigify, the widgets got replaced, but you can reassign them by hand.
Info: In Blender, you can assign any shape to a bone, these get shown in any modes instead of the bones, except in edit mode :) where you can assign them.
Hth!
Thank you so much SDev!! I'm going to give this a try later tonight :)
The "sparsity" for the hair tool within the daz importer doesn't seem to work, no matter what kind of hair I use and which number I put for "sparsity", the total hair count doesn't change. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but it could be a bug?
I'm currently confused at the different material import options. SSS node tree seems to be exactly the same as Cycles only (including the DAZ volume node) and when I import the model with "Extended Principled" the hair mesh gets duplicated for some reason.
@surody Thank you for testing. Actually sss is not supported for the pbr skin, I reported to Thomas. Then "sss skin" is not a material method but just an option to replace the volumetric skin with sss. As for the hair issue I can't reproduce it. Tried with "Toulouse" and "Monica Hair" and "dForce Soft Curls" that are different hair types and they all work fine here. So please describe the exact steps to reproduce the issue.
@surody Thank you for testing. Actually sss is not supported for the pbr skin, I reported to Thomas. Then "sss skin" is not a material method but just an option to replace the volumetric skin with sss. As for the hair issue I can't reproduce it. Tried with "Toulouse" and "Monica Hair" and "dForce Soft Curls" that are different hair types and they all work fine here. So please describe the exact steps to reproduce the issue.
@surody Just tell me the exact steps you're doing. Possibly with some pictures where you see the double geometry. Do the hairs I listed work fine for you ?
p.s. If the hair gets a shell and you're using the new experimental geometry nodes then you'll see a real geometry for the shell but this should happen in all material modes.
@surody Just tell me the exact steps you're doing. Possibly with some pictures where you see the double geometry. Do the hairs I listed work fine for you ?
p.s. If the hair gets a shell and you're using the new experimental geometry nodes then you'll see a real geometry for the shell but this should happen in all material modes.
I tried to recreate the issue with multiple hairs but it doesn't seem to happen for any. It must have been a very specific character with a variety of extras causing the issue but I think I overwrote the file. It was without Geoshells though. I need to report these things immediatly as they happen. :/
If I'm able to recreate the issue at some point I'll open a bug report on bitbucket.
I got another thing though: I used https://www.daz3d.com/big-expressive-81-for-genesis-81-female and imported the FACs preset to my character. They work perfectly but I can't reset all the seperate FACs, not by dialing down to 0 and not by using the reset morphs or pose button. The only option is to undo but when I save the file and reload it's stuck like that.
I figured I comment on this thread versus making a new one since it relates to the diffeomorphic plugin. One thing with this plugin I have yet to figure out is how do I get the geoshells from daz to look exactly the same in blender? i'll use some cool geoshell body accesories like jewlery for example, and in daz the jewlery looks normal on genesis 8 female, but when importing into blender the geoshell looks 2D flat, the textures and everything about it looks completely lifeless.
@vindictivepapi
Some geoshell products utilize displacement maps and you need good geometry for them. If you import the character in base resolution the mesh is minimalistic and doesn't provide enough polygons to give little details some depth. I recommend exporting in HD in this case.
@vindictivepapi Or the geoshell may also use a displacement map in daz studio. In this case you don't need to export HD since the displacement subdivision is exported fine, but it will only work in cycles since eevee can't render displacement. The advantage is that displacement subd is much faster than HD subd.
@surody As for 8.1 expressions if they're FACS presets then you first need to import the FACS morphs, then import the expressions as poses. If they also use custom morphs then you'll need to import the custom morphs as well. You can see the used morphs in daz studio with "currently used" in the parameters tab. Let me know if this works.
p.s. Then if the expression pack also provides HD morphs you will need the HD addon by Xin to convert HD to maps and a lot of manual work to link the maps in the shader editor. Long story short, while it is possible to convert to blender almost any product in the daz store, it is not always convenient and for some features you better use "the blender way" rather than "the daz way". In this case you can import the default G81 FACS and facial rig so you don't really need anything else to do facial expressions or import FACS mocaps in blender.
@surody As for 8.1 expressions if they're FACS presets then you first need to import the FACS morphs, then import the expressions as poses. If they also use custom morphs then you'll need to import the custom morphs as well. You can see the used morphs in daz studio with "currently used" in the parameters tab. Let me know if this works.
I tried to import the FACs preset expressions as poses with the "pose files" but nothing happens. The morph files with the data controlling the FACs works but I get the issue I mentioned with them. I mean, it technically works but there's no reset so I assume it's a bug?
@surody If the pose doesn't work you certainly miss some morphs. In daz studio there may be morphs driving other morphs. So if the expression set is not using the base facs directly you need to load the intermediate morphs for the pose to work. You can tell diffeomorphic to load the missing morphs together with the pose.
Let me know if this works.
edit. p.s. Then if things don't work you may also check the console for errors.
edit. I found some time to test this and seems to work fine here. The sliders go from zero to one and back. Do not import the aliases since diffeomorphic doesn't understand them and make no sense in blender anyway. Just import the morphs without the aliases.
steps:
import G81F and merge rigs
import FACS
import the Big Expressive custom morphs (without aliases)
now you can either import the Big Expressive poses or use the sliders directly
edit. I reported the aliases issue to Thomas, in case he can do something.
@surody If the pose doesn't work you certainly miss some morphs. In daz studio there may be morphs driving other morphs. So if the expression set is not using the base facs directly you need to load the intermediate morphs for the pose to work. You can tell diffeomorphic to load the missing morphs together with the pose.
edit. I reported the aliases issue to Thomas, in case he can do something.
Yep, importing the aliases was apparently the cause of the issue, thank you.^^
@Cinnatwist As for d-forms they're not supported, you may convert them to morphs as suggested in another discussion. As for "custom scaling" it depends what you mean. The dbz method will bake the viewport shape, also blender doesn't support bone scaling on the rest pose. So you may want to save your "custom scaling" as a pose then import the pose in blender. Or you may try ERC morphs if you need to animate.
Using the "load vector disp maps" function in the daz importer UI seems to create a seperate texture coordinate node. This appears to cause issues and I get seams when I don't reconnect it to the UV map node created during import. The character where I tested it has 2 UV sets and adding the vector displacement maps seemed to be mismatched with the wrong one. Would it be possible to make vector displacement nodes use existing UV map nodes?
@surody The texture coordinate refers to the active uv map. You can either change the active uv map or replace the texture coordinate with a uv map node. Not sure what the HD addon by Xin uses for baking but it's probably the active uv map.
Comments
@TheMysteryIsThePoint all the time! You'd think after once or twice you'd stop, but nope lol.
@juvesatriani That is a fantastic idea! I'm so going to look into working with a tablet as I know I'll be using all three programs for awhile. I'm curious too now after you mention it if the Novation Launchpad would work in the same way. It'll be a fun experiment if I get my hands on one :)
@benniewoodell I did a quick google but can't find free facecap animations. If you can share a facecap animation for testing I can check and eventually confirm the bug or advice for a solution.
@gerster Most expressions in the shop are presets for the face units so you load them as poses. As for the feature requests yes it is better to ask at bitbucket, personally I agree it would be useful if the HD maps could automate a little. Actually Thomas is on vacation will come back the next week.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues
Yeah I know. But I thought maybe someone can answer the question, I asked between the suggestions. ;)
Maybe I just missed something and there is a way to add third party expressions.
@Padone here's a facecap txt file, thank you so much for giving it a look! Just remember, have the gaze set to 0 for follow head and then key the gaze control on MHX around in a couple of places so you see your character's eyes move and know it's working fine. Then load the facecap file and uncheck everything, even eye rotation, so all that's going to be keyed is the facial movements and the eyes should still move how you keyed them perfectly. Then adjust anything in the morphs in the FACS or regular face morphs, like the tongue or something, and the eyes should dart to a neutral position away from where the gaze controller is set. I just opened up the file I was working on the other day and the eyes are locked in the neutral position now too, so I guess if you close the file and open it back up, it screws it up as well. I appreciate your time!
@benniewoodell
I believe I got it there's also something to fix and I reported an issue to Thomas. Please see bitbucket. Let me know if something is not clear.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1086/facecap-import-options-dont-work-fine
@benniewoodell
Out of sheer curiousity , May I ask if there is any particular technical reason you have chosen MHX over Rigify??
Hey @Padone, thanks for making bitbucket post about this, definitely good points brought up there. I just wanted to link this video I just did to show my exact problem that I was having as it's a little different than what I'm seeing in the bitbucket. Here's the video https://youtu.be/KvK_M5jFE9I Hope this helps and I really appreciate everything you all are doing.
Just one quick thing maybe to help you understand why some folks might use FACS and face controls/expressions. Since I'm doing animations, I use these characters for a hundred plus shots and I'm not going to go through the import process every time so I have a saved character file I append in as well as a version of the character with no hair or clothes at super low res to make animation quicker that I just retarget that skeleton onto the regular version of the character in the shot itself. But some shots I use FACS, and sometimes it's quicker for me to just hand key an expression, so I want that option and so I have both available on the character rig. I don't mix and match the two, once I use one, that's what I go with for that particular shot and then I see what's needed the next time. It's just nice to have the option available at my fingertips every time. It's like some shots FK is better for the arms rather than IK and vice versa. So I hope that gives a little insight as to why someone might have both on the rig.
@Wolf359 the MHX rig is extremely close to the rigs I'm using in my animation class, so it's helping me stay consistent between what I'm learning in class and what I'm doing for my personal projects. Plus, I couldn't find a knee/elbow controller in Rigify for IK. It might very well be there, I just don't know where it is. I might use Rigify for background characters walking through the back of the shot, your video about retargeting Mixamo is awesome and I can see it being very useful, but for my main characters, I hand key everything they do just to keep everyone feeling individualized.
Thanks so much everyone!
@benniwoodell
I saw your video. What I mean is that facs and face units are alternative ways to do the same things, with facs having the ability to load mocaps in the facs industry standard as facecap for example. Think of facs as "face units 2.0". I'm not sure that the mhx face controls are designed to work both with face units and facs, if so then there's a bug we wait Thomas to reply on this.
Anyway there's no reason to use facs and face units together, you can do with facs everything you can do with face units. You just use the facs controls instead of the face controls. Ideally you should use face units with G3 G8 and facs with G81. Though diffeomorphic makes facs available to G8 too.
The facs controls have their own gaze controller that's not what you're using.
Oh, I see. Okay, that clears it up pretty good. Maybe to make things easier then, I'll just re-import the characters and just have the FACS option checked. And you're right, that controller is totally not what I'm using, I was using the MHX gaze control...where is the button to get the FACS controller in your photo? I've never seen anything like that before in my blender imports. I'll totally use that instead if that's an opton! Again, thank you so much :)
Hi Bennie, you have to load them in Daz before exporting your model. You'll find them in the developer section, face control for 8.1 or so (using my mobile now, not a pc) However you can use them for G8 as well. (You won't see them in Iray). Load them, export your character and under easy import in blender select facs and convert to widgets plus make bones poseable. After importing they're assigned to a separate slot in the bones/rig tab. If you convert the daz rig to rigify, the widgets got replaced, but you can reassign them by hand.
Info: In Blender, you can assign any shape to a bone, these get shown in any modes instead of the bones, except in edit mode :) where you can assign them.
Hth!
Thank you so much SDev!! I'm going to give this a try later tonight :)
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/finishing-section-version-16.html
The "sparsity" for the hair tool within the daz importer doesn't seem to work, no matter what kind of hair I use and which number I put for "sparsity", the total hair count doesn't change. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but it could be a bug?
@surody Tried a couple hair, here works fine with toulouse but doesn't work with dforce soft curls. Reported.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1092/hair-sparsity-doesnt-work-for-line-hair
edit. Thomas did it now it's fixed.
Yep I tried it and it works, thank you.
I'm currently confused at the different material import options. SSS node tree seems to be exactly the same as Cycles only (including the DAZ volume node) and when I import the model with "Extended Principled" the hair mesh gets duplicated for some reason.
thank you to all the people who worked on this!!
@surody Thank you for testing. Actually sss is not supported for the pbr skin, I reported to Thomas. Then "sss skin" is not a material method but just an option to replace the volumetric skin with sss. As for the hair issue I can't reproduce it. Tried with "Toulouse" and "Monica Hair" and "dForce Soft Curls" that are different hair types and they all work fine here. So please describe the exact steps to reproduce the issue.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1082/better-eevee-principled-materials#comment-63913329
I'll try to figure it out, but the issue is extended principled specific. It doesn't appear to happen for iray node ones.
@surody Just tell me the exact steps you're doing. Possibly with some pictures where you see the double geometry. Do the hairs I listed work fine for you ?
p.s. If the hair gets a shell and you're using the new experimental geometry nodes then you'll see a real geometry for the shell but this should happen in all material modes.
I tried to recreate the issue with multiple hairs but it doesn't seem to happen for any. It must have been a very specific character with a variety of extras causing the issue but I think I overwrote the file. It was without Geoshells though. I need to report these things immediatly as they happen. :/
If I'm able to recreate the issue at some point I'll open a bug report on bitbucket.
I got another thing though: I used https://www.daz3d.com/big-expressive-81-for-genesis-81-female and imported the FACs preset to my character. They work perfectly but I can't reset all the seperate FACs, not by dialing down to 0 and not by using the reset morphs or pose button. The only option is to undo but when I save the file and reload it's stuck like that.
Hi all,
I figured I comment on this thread versus making a new one since it relates to the diffeomorphic plugin. One thing with this plugin I have yet to figure out is how do I get the geoshells from daz to look exactly the same in blender? i'll use some cool geoshell body accesories like jewlery for example, and in daz the jewlery looks normal on genesis 8 female, but when importing into blender the geoshell looks 2D flat, the textures and everything about it looks completely lifeless.
@vindictivepapi Or the geoshell may also use a displacement map in daz studio. In this case you don't need to export HD since the displacement subdivision is exported fine, but it will only work in cycles since eevee can't render displacement. The advantage is that displacement subd is much faster than HD subd.
@surody As for 8.1 expressions if they're FACS presets then you first need to import the FACS morphs, then import the expressions as poses. If they also use custom morphs then you'll need to import the custom morphs as well. You can see the used morphs in daz studio with "currently used" in the parameters tab. Let me know if this works.
p.s. Then if the expression pack also provides HD morphs you will need the HD addon by Xin to convert HD to maps and a lot of manual work to link the maps in the shader editor. Long story short, while it is possible to convert to blender almost any product in the daz store, it is not always convenient and for some features you better use "the blender way" rather than "the daz way". In this case you can import the default G81 FACS and facial rig so you don't really need anything else to do facial expressions or import FACS mocaps in blender.
I tried to import the FACs preset expressions as poses with the "pose files" but nothing happens. The morph files with the data controlling the FACs works but I get the issue I mentioned with them. I mean, it technically works but there's no reset so I assume it's a bug?
@surody If the pose doesn't work you certainly miss some morphs. In daz studio there may be morphs driving other morphs. So if the expression set is not using the base facs directly you need to load the intermediate morphs for the pose to work. You can tell diffeomorphic to load the missing morphs together with the pose.
Let me know if this works.
edit. p.s. Then if things don't work you may also check the console for errors.
edit. I found some time to test this and seems to work fine here. The sliders go from zero to one and back. Do not import the aliases since diffeomorphic doesn't understand them and make no sense in blender anyway. Just import the morphs without the aliases.
steps:
edit. I reported the aliases issue to Thomas, in case he can do something.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1096/custom-morph-aliases
Yep, importing the aliases was apparently the cause of the issue, thank you.^^
The importer is removing any D-forms or custom scaling I am doing on the model or clothing. Am I missing something? Or is there a fix for this issue?
@Cinnatwist As for d-forms they're not supported, you may convert them to morphs as suggested in another discussion. As for "custom scaling" it depends what you mean. The dbz method will bake the viewport shape, also blender doesn't support bone scaling on the rest pose. So you may want to save your "custom scaling" as a pose then import the pose in blender. Or you may try ERC morphs if you need to animate.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/09/morphing-armatures.html
Using the "load vector disp maps" function in the daz importer UI seems to create a seperate texture coordinate node. This appears to cause issues and I get seams when I don't reconnect it to the UV map node created during import. The character where I tested it has 2 UV sets and adding the vector displacement maps seemed to be mismatched with the wrong one. Would it be possible to make vector displacement nodes use existing UV map nodes?
@surody The texture coordinate refers to the active uv map. You can either change the active uv map or replace the texture coordinate with a uv map node. Not sure what the HD addon by Xin uses for baking but it's probably the active uv map.