Next step for Diffeo?
marble
Posts: 7,500
Just musing over why I still have not got into using DAZ content in Blender despite having watched a bunch of video tutorials mostly on Diffeomorphic exporting. One question jumped to mind, although I have no idea of what technical difficulties might be involved, was whether the next step would be to be able to load DAZ content directly from the library as Blender assets? I mean without having the intermediate step of loading into DAZ Studio and exporting the scene first.
I realise that once the conversion has been done in Blender the object or figure can be saved as a Blender asset but it would be such a big jump in usability to be able to just have access to the DAZ Studio content library and click on the assests from within Blender.
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Comments
You can do it already.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/03/importing-morphed-character-without-dbz.html
@Padone
Good to know!
@Marble
I Don’t find it all burdensome to load and morph/dress a character in Daz studio before import ,via diffeo.
Daz studio is better suited for this task.
particularly if you plan to use Blenders animation tools to animate and render the figure in blender.
This is the same pipeline we have for Reallusion Character creator to send our customized characters to Iclone or UE5 or Blender etc. for animation rendering.
I Dont think the purpose of Diffeo
(and other Character/asset bridges) should be to completely replicate the Daz studio experience inside of Blender or UE etc.
this is NOT how a multi-application pipeline works.
Waiting for this to happen before fully embracing
and external animation and rendering environment
will ineveitably result in one never fully utilizing the options of that external animation& rendering environment.
Yeah, I know how it works now but, as you say, I'm so frustrated with the things about DAZ Studio which could be so much better, namely: cloth simulation, animation, soft body physics and a decent near-real-time render option like Eevee, that I am looking for a way to replace DAZ Studio. Having said that, you are also correct in pointing out that DAZ Studio is better at some things. Posing in Blender does not come close to the ease with which I pose characters in DAZ Studio, for example. I'm also more comfortable with the DAZ Studio Surfaces panel than the Blender node system although I know that @Padone and others will cringe when I say that.
In short - a multi-application pipeline is NOT what I'm looking for ... rather a single and comprehensive application which DAZ Studio could be if they concentrated some development resources in the right direction. I'm afraid I'm whistling in the wind though.
Good thing we have you here to point out these things. I was not aware of that. However, a quick scan-read of the procedure in your linked article suggests that the cure is worse than the disease. By that I mean that it looks like it would be quicker and more straight-forward to go the DBZ route after all.
Why must it be a ZERO sum scenario?
Technically Autodesk or Blender can “replace “ Daz studio.
and give you all of the features you want in a single and comprehensive application
However you wont get the Daz studio user experience in any app except Daz studio.
So a Multi-application pipeline ( with Daz supplying the Figures & content) is your only option.
Even Daz themselves realize this with the free Bridges to the pro 3DCC& game engines and
video tutorials on using free External apps like Cascaduere for animation.
How can an app with perfectly working, blendable IK and at least three very good control rigs to choose from be harder than an app that only has FK?
But even if for some reason we wanted to constrain ourselves to just FK, it is still virtually the same. I honestly think that this might be a case of trying to use Blender as if it were DAZ Studio, instead of learning Blender proper. Switch to local Transform Orientations, and then you've got just rx, ry, and rz. Just as in DS, the axis colors are your guides, or you can turn on axes in viewport display.
You are quite right, Donald - I don't have much experience with IK (or FK) in Blender. I'm not sure I even understand what they do. I'm just going on my tentative attempts to replicate DAZ Studio posing in Blender by exporting (via Diffeo) a character and using the posing tools as described in a couple of tutorials. I found them cumbesome and the results were occasionally horrific with shoulder joints dislocated and body parts stretched unnaturally. I know very little about JCMs and FBMs but I suspect that there was something I missed in the export procedure. I also like the way that the DAZ Studio viewport is a view through whatever camera is selected whereas I had a lot of trouble replicating that in Blender. Again, tutorials pointed to some keyboard shortcuts but I ended up with a small rectangle in the middle of the viewport which was a view through the camera - all too much hassle without a satisfying outcome.
Getting back to interoperability - I have been watching the excellent videos by our felllow forum member, Kris Kringle, on the step-by-step procedure for using Diffeo to get characters from DAZ Studio into Blender and for them to look something like they did when rendered in IRay. Yet for all their excellence, these tutorials do highlight one thing: it is not a simple nor a quick operation. There are three tutorials each lasting an hour and that is an indication of the complexity. I want to concentrate on composing and rendering my scene, not spend hours switching between two applications to achieve what should ideally be possible in one.
You are an experienced and talented animator so I'd like to ask this simple question: have you been able to animate a figure in Blender (something simple like a walk cycle) wearing DAZ clothing such as dForce garments and have the cloth simulation work? If so, do you have an example of such? When I have asked this previously I have been advised to use Marvelous Designer to animate clothes so then we have a three-way pipeline.
I tend to think that DAZ offer the free bridges precisely so that they don't have to provide such features in DAZ Studio.
Technically the way to go for fk is gimbal, that's different from local. With individual origins to work for multiple selection. The difference is that gimbal will use the original rest pose axes, while local will change all the axes to fit your pose, that may cause flipping in animation.
In daz studio they use the gimbal space for the fk sliders.
Great advice!
@Marble
I don’t use Dforce
But I have used the old Dynamic cloth control plugin with my own simple meshes in Daz studio and used Donald’s excellent alembic exporter to send them to Blender
I also use the Blender Pipeline tool for RL CC3/4, which auto creates default simulation settings for me in Blender, for any cloth already conformed to an imported CC Avatar.
Here are some quick samples with default cloth sim settings that obviously need adjusting in blender for cleaner results
The reality is that if you plan to use Daz figures/assets for your hobby, but desire more physics effects ,you will have to learn to use an external program ( supported by the bridge/export plugins), for some of those VFX.
No way around it.
Well, what you highlighted in red and bold is what prompted my question. Blender has better physics but, if I understand you correctly, the preferred workflow is still to animate/simulate the figure-with-clothing in DAZ Studio and then export via Alembic to Blender for rendering. So, for all the talk about better tools in Blender, we are still stuck with the inferior DAZ Studio animation.
@marble Most dforce outfits should work fine in blender with diffeomorphic, since the dforce structure is imported. But the simulation will not be the same you have to choose yourself the kind of cloth to simulate. Also the simulation will be slower because blender uses the cpu. That's why for dforce outfits the best way is to export alembic as @wolf359 advised. It's not that blender is bad, but importing things from daz studio has limits, it's not native blender content.
I'm surprised that the Blender cloth sim is CPU only! I mean, if dForce is GPU assisted, then there's some really poor programming in DAZ Studio because I have an RTX 3090 and dForce is painfully slow. I have an old version of Marvelous Designer which is also CPU only and that is several orders of magnitude faster (and better) than dForce. So now I see why previous advice recommended animating/simulating in Marvelous Designer rather than either DAZ Studio or Blender. I'm just not clear on how to get dForce garments to work in MD8. Also, I do find a workflow involving DAZ Studio, Marvelous Designer and Blender somewhat intimidating.
THIS!!!!^
@marble Yes Marvelous Designer is actually the best cloth simulator around, just as Houdini is the best for volumetrics, and Cascadeur is the best for assisted animation, and ZBrush is the best for sculpting, and UE5 is the best for real-time rendering etc etc. So most professional people just use those for what they are good for then import/export things with blender. Personally I have little time and no big needs so I stay within blender, waiting for it to improve, being aware that there are always better alternatives out there.
Thanks for that @Padone...
MD is sadly not the end-all either (for DAZ assets).
Often-times you have to make morphs, smooth etc to make clothing more the way you want, BEFORE importing into MD. Reason is: MD sim works on the cloth AS IS imported (via OBJ).
dF garments from DS>MD still just go via OBJ. dF is a sole feature of DS and not MD. Use MD to make your morphs, and then back in DS dForce works just fine on newly morphed clothes.
dF often only takes 10-20% completion before clothing adjustment is pretty good. Gains past df>20%completion are debateable. But hey, i kill/close DS instantly with a batch file for years without issue. So everyone has their own approach. ie Debateable.
PS. Read these Blender threads once in a while to see whats new in various 3D apps. Good read. Thx guys.
It is an interesting idea to stop the simulation after 20% completion ... I'll give it a try. Up to now I have routinely let dForce run its course and wait (...and wait). I also use "Start from Memorized Pose" all the time when I could probably let it drape from the posed position but that's because, when I started using dForce, every other attempt would end up in an explosion and then I have to wait several minutes before the cancel takes effect. I'm not sure that the 20% idea would work when I start from memorized but I'll play with the options when I get a chance.
I am also wary about using the timeline although I know that is the best way to run a simulation but, because DAZ have not come up with a way of clearing the timeline or saving out a frame from an animation, the dForce animation spoils the scene for any further character animation I might want to do later.
Yeah, that Start from Memorized Pose is a different cookie - unless seating or laying etc., tend to seriously avoid that process which takes too long. So posed and no timeline.
And dF2morph is exceptional for making morph presets to save tons of time.
Most of my dF is done in 5-8 seconds with usually more time added for Iray-preview redraw. Find critical is low dF mesh-offset and then good knowledge of morphs and making shader presetss for various dF sim-settings that you may need.
Explosions are rare these days, even with interestecting mesh remarkably. dF seems to have improved quite a bit in my years here.
I do have dForce-to-Morph, don't really know why I don't use it more. I think it is because most (if not all) of my poses are unique (I only use commercial poses as a starting point) so I would be creating morphs that I would never need or use again. I don't get many explosions now either but I put that down to knowing a little more about how to avoid them. My main complaint about dForce is the time it takes to simulate. I can understand that MD is a purpose made cloth sim (and expensive to boot) but there was also the VWD plugin which was quicker than dForce. I don't know why DAZ didn't just acquire that and develop it further.
Anyhow, my initial thoughts about sending to Blender seem to have been squashed as it seems that Blender can't offer anything better when it comes to a cloth sim.
It took me about a month to get comfortable with posing entirely in Blender. I can now make a pose from scratch significantly faster than it took me to search for the perfect base pose in Daz + tweaking it. It's now a joy to pose characters.
This. And the new pose library system starting with B3.0. And not to forget the new asset browser collection system introduced with 3.2.
I also find posing in Blender a complete nightmare, no matter how many videos I watch. This also applies to animations from Studio to Blender. I have yet to get one to work. The walking figures in my short videos all come from Mixamo.