Help setting up a workflow

Jack of Spades

I need some help finding the right tooling to set up a workflow to stage my scenes in Daz Studio and render them in Blender. What I'd like to have:

1. Pose figures and position some assets in Daz Studio. Figures are likely to have multiple geoshells and geografts.
2. Position camera in Daz Studio.
3. Export to Blender.
4. Add additional assets and light in Blender.
5. Render in Cycles.

Note what's not on here: Reworking materials in Blender, or any posing in Blender. I know the materials may be an unachievable ideal, but I'd like to get as close as possible. If it weren't for materials (particularly on characters), I could just use an OBJ export/import to get the results I'm after.

Any suggestions?

csaa

I'm into static scenes exported from Daz to Blender cel shaded using the product from Lightning Boy Studios. So far I'm soley focused on materials, adapting the shaders that come with the LBS base.  My figures are all G8 and have a fixed set of wearables and props. Like you, I compose a scene, pose the figures then export to Blender as OBJs without Daz materials. Once in Blender, my job then is to replace the place-holder BSDF shader with customized LBS ones from my character atlas stored as blend-files.

I'm into reusability. Over time I discovered that swapping cel shaders is a manually intensive process. Just one G8-exported object has 16 faces. For the half-orc's armor in the image below, the armor and sword has 36 or so faces. That's over fifty surfaces I have to cel shade by hand. Along with a character atlas for materials, it didn't take long to convince me of the crucial need to invest in automation. I picked up Python scripting to instruct Blender to apply the LBS materials with a few key strokes. But the benefits didn't come without a modest costs. Up front I had commit a few weeks to build my tools before I could move on and focus on the art. Right now I'm still developing my character atlas. Occasionally I have to refactor my code when a new use case comes up.

There are other issues I tackled, like compressing the Daz-exported mesh to ease memory and disk usage. Basically free add-ons like Blender decimate or Simplygon are your friends here. But if you look at your project in terms of managing growth and complexity, IMHO automating tasks with Python scripts is the best thing you can do to step over the tedium and drudgery; that plus enforcing a set of standard practices.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

Jack of Spades said:

I need some help finding the right tooling to set up a workflow to stage my scenes in Daz Studio and render them in Blender. What I'd like to have:

Padone

Well diffeomorphic exports materials quite fine, and shells and geografts are fully supported, so it's the best you can get for your purpose.

That said, the material conversion is not perfect anyway and you may need to fix something for complex materials. So, if rendering in cycles is the only reason why you're exporting to blender and you only render single pictures and not animations, then in my opinion you could as well do everything in daz studio that's much easier.

Jack of Spades

My main motive for taking things to Blender is so I can use Cycles shaders and especially procedural textures, and so I can light in a more interactive system. Also, I prefer to use a Mac, so Iray is much, much slower than Cycles. 
 

I'll try Diffeomorphic. Anything special I should configure?

Padone

If you use a mac you may need blender 2.93 because 3.0 doesn't support old ati cards.

juvesatriani

@csaa I wanna know about the phyton scripts . I know about deleting all material node but not aware scripts about assign all material into another custom shader. 

Actually In Diffeo there is a way to copy material as long they use same structures . That would be useful if you have same figure generation . ie Gen8F and Male actually use same surfaces structure.So you can creating one scene with just figures. Tweak it as you like  then  use it in another blender  files  Here the documentation link . Scroll until you find Copy Material chapter . Just be aware there is small problem if your daz scene imported via DIffeo with merge material option ticked . That will make the surface name and structure changes 

For environment - wardrobe or props, those are different topics , until @padone or thomas teach us how to edit material conversion script so we can use whatever Custom shader brick before our textures . Thats why I`m still using Multipass and tweak further in Photoshop to get styles I wanted . Maybe because easier for me to handle and tweaks rather than reassign everything in Blender . Beside what Difeo material conversion done already great in first place .

And yeah . I prefer render in Blender even for still images because although using sometimes forced into CPU , its just work and almost crash free . My latest render mostly around 5000px wide and no way my laptop can do that without crash . Even when I choose to use CPU 

csaa

juvesatriani,

Sure, I'd be happy to help. Let me review my scripts. It's been a while since I've looked at the core logic of my code.

It's not complicated though. The basic steps are easy once you understand Blender's data model; then there's the built in Python console which lets you try out the commands that eventually go into your script.

I'll reply to you via email.

Cheers!

juvesatriani said:

@csaa I wanna know about the phyton scripts . I know about deleting all material node but not aware scripts about assign all material into another custom shader. 

Padone

juvesatriani said:

.. until @padone or thomas teach us how to edit material conversion script so we can use whatever Custom shader brick before our textures.

Thomas is beginning to support some bricks. Personally I have only some basic knowledge and no experience with bricks. I don't think it is possible in general to support them apart may be some limited cases.

juvesatriani

@csaa thanks I`ll looking for it . And @Padone plus Thomas , you`re my new Hero !! Thanks