Struggling to find an effective workflow

josiahmora20

Newbie here, I've just finished my first Daz characters (genesis 9).My project isn't for animation, just still images. The original plan was to use Daz to pose them together then import with diffeomoephic in Blender, that way I can model my own scenes there. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but I've tried all 3 shader types for 'Easy import' and either the eyes are missing or weird glossy material, or the body is white, or the skin just looks bad. Not too mention the golden palace and nipple/navel graffs are just sitting on top of the origal mesh. On top of all this my computer (which runs Daz so smooth) can't even seem to handle viewport rendering in blender. There has to be a better/more effective way of doing this. Again I don't need to animate or even pose anything in blender. I just want to import the characters, have their materials looks the same, their geograffs and geoshells work, and for it not to give my brain new $1500 computer a hard time (which I feel like it really shouldn't ..) Any advice?

Ninefold

I don't use Diffeomorphic, so I can't speak to most of this, but once you've selected Cycles in the Render tab, make sure you also switch the device dropdown that will appear to "GPU compute". Cycles will run on the CPU by default, which is excruciatingly slow. Once it's on the GPU, you will probably find it no more strenuous for your computer than Iray (and I personally find it a bit "politer", in terms of the liveability of non-GPU-intensive activities on my computer while a render is happening).

I use Blender basically the way that you want to (developing environments around static posed figures, and rendering), and I usually just export .objs and set up their materials manually. I can confirm that geografts look fine when you do this. The naming convention for DAZ character textures breaks Blender's UDIM workflow, so I like to copy all of a character's textures into a new folder and rename them to be Blender UDIM-friendly so that I can set up a single material for a character's skin and nails. I also like to separate characters' cornea/eye moisture surface into its own object so that I can turn shadows off for that object, though you can leave everything as is and accomplish the same thing with a light path node.

josiahmora20

Ninefold said:

I don't use Diffeomorphic, so I can't speak to most of this, but once you've selected Cycles in the Render tab, make sure you also switch the device dropdown that will appear to "GPU compute". Cycles will run on the CPU by default, which is excruciatingly slow. Once it's on the GPU, you will probably find it no more strenuous for your computer than Iray (and I personally find it a bit "politer", in terms of the liveability of non-GPU-intensive activities on my computer while a render is happening).

I use Blender basically the way that you want to (developing environments around static posed figures, and rendering), and I usually just export .objs and set up their materials manually. I can confirm that geografts look fine when you do this. The naming convention for DAZ character textures breaks Blender's UDIM workflow, so I like to copy all of a character's textures into a new folder and rename them to be Blender UDIM-friendly so that I can set up a single material for a character's skin and nails. I also like to separate characters' cornea/eye moisture surface into its own object so that I can turn shadows off for that object, though you can leave everything as is and accomplish the same thing with a light path node.

I really appreciate the info. I restarted my computer and now it seems to be working fine to load the rendered view.. very strange. Obj seems like a good option, however, I'm concerned about the textures- for example,when I was trying to edit a 3rd party horse 3 texture or makeup textures in photoshop, they seemed to be a combination of different textures stacke don top of eachother. How do you go about making sure they look the same in daz? seems like a headache to set up no? 

Also how does dforce hair look? i can't seem to get it looking right at all (very clumpy) in diffeo)

One more concern, doing it the way you suggest wouldn't I have to re-import my character and re-do the materials every time I want to bring he back from daz with a new pose?

benniewoodell

For hair, go to the render properties tab and up the transparent from 8 to at least 32, that usually fixes the problem. 

josiahmora20

benniewoodell said:

For hair, go to the render properties tab and up the transparent from 8 to at least 32, that usually fixes the problem. 

hey thanks for that! that fixed the blockiness, but I have this weird thing, any ideas? 

josiahmora20

Eveything Is just off. This is BDSF. Seems to be the best one but everything from skin, hair, pupils, eye whites, lips just have the wrong colors

Ninefold

josiahmora20 said:

I really appreciate the info. I restarted my computer and now it seems to be working fine to load the rendered view.. very strange. Obj seems like a good option, however, I'm concerned about the textures- for example,when I was trying to edit a 3rd party horse 3 texture or makeup textures in photoshop, they seemed to be a combination of different textures stacke don top of eachother. How do you go about making sure they look the same in daz? seems like a headache to set up no? 

I'm not sure I understand the situation you're describing. Were you trying to edit LIE textures, like from Design Anvil's Horse 3 materials sets? LIE components, which I think are usually just transparent .pngs that DAZ Studio can stack up in the layered image editor, and things like the transparency maps for geoshells, are ultimately just a bunch of alpha maps and color maps that you can plug into mix nodes. How you use this is situational. For something like the DA horse materials, combine your texture maps as desired and plug them into the base color of a principled BSDF node. For makeup, you might find yourself mixing things into a character's roughness or metallicity channels, or using the mix shader node. I find some makeup (like lip gloss) looks best on a slightly offset solidify modifier "geoshell" with its shadows turned off and transmission cranked way up.

Also how does dforce hair look? i can't seem to get it looking right at all (very clumpy) in diffeo)

I haven't really explored this, though I tried using Diffeomorphic to convert a polygonal hair to hair curves once and that seemed to work fine. (I ended up not pursuing that render for reasons unrelated to the hair.) I recommend looking at tutorials for whichever Blender native hair system you're converting the dForce hair to. If it's hair curves, use the scalp opacity map as a density mask. This might go for particle hair as well, but I'm less familiar with it.

josiahmora20 said:

hey thanks for that! that fixed the blockiness, but I have this weird thing, any ideas? 

This is the head mesh clipping through the hair's scalp mesh. You can fix it by grabbing a few vertices and adjusting them in edit mode.

josiahmora20

Ninefold said:

josiahmora20 said:

I really appreciate the info. I restarted my computer and now it seems to be working fine to load the rendered view.. very strange. Obj seems like a good option, however, I'm concerned about the textures- for example,when I was trying to edit a 3rd party horse 3 texture or makeup textures in photoshop, they seemed to be a combination of different textures stacke don top of eachother. How do you go about making sure they look the same in daz? seems like a headache to set up no? 

I'm not sure I understand the situation you're describing. Were you trying to edit LIE textures, like from Design Anvil's Horse 3 materials sets? LIE components, which I think are usually just transparent .pngs that DAZ Studio can stack up in the layered image editor, and things like the transparency maps for geoshells, are ultimately just a bunch of alpha maps and color maps that you can plug into mix nodes. How you use this is situational. For something like the DA horse materials, combine your texture maps as desired and plug them into the base color of a principled BSDF node. For makeup, you might find yourself mixing things into a character's roughness or metallicity channels, or using the mix shader node. I find some makeup (like lip gloss) looks best on a slightly offset solidify modifier "geoshell" with its shadows turned off and transmission cranked way up.

Also how does dforce hair look? i can't seem to get it looking right at all (very clumpy) in diffeo)

I haven't really explored this, though I tried using Diffeomorphic to convert a polygonal hair to hair curves once and that seemed to work fine. (I ended up not pursuing that render for reasons unrelated to the hair.) I recommend looking at tutorials for whichever Blender native hair system you're converting the dForce hair to. If it's hair curves, use the scalp opacity map as a density mask. This might go for particle hair as well, but I'm less familiar with it.

josiahmora20 said:

hey thanks for that! that fixed the blockiness, but I have this weird thing, any ideas? 

This is the head mesh clipping through the hair's scalp mesh. You can fix it by grabbing a few vertices and adjusting them in edit mode.

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

Ninefold

josiahmora20 said:

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

You could apply new exported versions of your character to herself as shapekeys, but that seems like it would be its own hassle, with her hair, clothing, etc. You don't have to set every material up from scratch every time. Just apply the previous frame's materials to the character in the new frame.

josiahmora20

Ninefold said:

josiahmora20 said:

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

You could apply new exported versions of your character to herself as shapekeys, but that seems like it would be its own hassle, with her hair, clothing, etc. You don't have to set every material up from scratch every time. Just apply the previous frame's materials to the character in the new frame.

oh, duhh, that makes sense. (sorry, really am a newb here). 

 

josiahmora20

Skin looks a million times better just importing as an obj but the hair and eye lashes are pretty funky. Could you direct me to a tutorial for converting it like you mentioned?

josiahmora20

Noticed the texture wasn't loaded in the shader editor, but adding it does this:

 

also looks like it isnt dforce hair (OOT 4-in-1 Sporty Ponyail)

Padone

As for performances, be aware that iray takes almost all the available vram for itself, even when it's not used for rendering, so iray is not "friendly" to other applications using the gpu, and you better close daz studio while using blender. Be sure to use simplify in blender, especially to avoid 8K textures which may blow up your vram.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/simplify.html

As for materials, as you discovered yourself your better option is bsdf, without sss, but you have to render it with cycles, as eevee can't reproduce correctly the iray materials, especially skins. If you want to use eevee then your best option is extended principled, but you will have to adjust something by hand, this is expected.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Material Methods

As for viewport artifacts. that is expected you may have something odd in the viewport until you render. For example the viewport subdivision is usually off or lower than the render subdivision, so some geometry overlapping may happen in the viewport but it doesn't in rendering.

josiahmora20

Padone said:

As for performances, be aware that iray takes almost all the available vram for itself, even when it's not used for rendering, so iray is not "friendly" to other applications using the gpu, and you better close daz studio while using blender. Be sure to use simplify in blender, especially to avoid 8K textures which may blow up your vram.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/simplify.html

As for materials, as you discovered yourself your better option is bsdf, without sss, but you have to render it with cycles, as eevee can't reproduce correctly the iray materials, especially skins. If you want to use eevee then your best option is extended principled, but you will have to adjust something by hand, this is expected.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Material Methods

As for viewport artifacts. that is expected you may have something odd in the viewport until you render. For example the viewport subdivision is usually off or lower than the render subdivision, so some geometry overlapping may happen in the viewport but it doesn't in rendering.

Thanks for the help! Going to create a new thread more specific to the skin issue which seems to be my last problem now. Thanks again!

 

Padone

It looks like your figure gets two overlapping normal maps. Makeup is supported in diffeomorphic so this shouldn't be an issue. Not sure how you can fix it in daz studio, apart reloading the original materials. Then of course in blender you can edit as you like in the shader editor.

You can also give exact steps to reproduce the issue if you feel this is a bug. In this case better use bitbucket.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues

p.s. Can't understand why you want to use blender though. I mean if you only do comics with still pictures, without animation, then this is what daz studio is good for.

josiahmora20

Padone said:

It looks like your figure gets two overlapping normal maps. Makeup is supported in diffeomorphic so this shouldn't be an issue. Not sure how you can fix it in daz studio, apart reloading the original materials. Then of course in blender you can edit as you like in the shader editor.

You can also give exact steps to reproduce the issue if you feel this is a bug. In this case better use bitbucket.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues

p.s. Can't understand why you want to use blender though. I mean if you only do comics with still pictures, without animation, then this is what daz studio is good for.

If you could check out the details of my new thread that would be great! And ah I didn't realize they use 2 normal maps like that. Thank you! That makes sense now I want to use blender so I can add soft body physics to breasts, cloth simulation to clothes that don't offer dforce, volumetric atmosphere, build complex environments and not have to depend on purchased assets.

Singular3D

Padone said:

p.s. Can't understand why you want to use blender though. I mean if you only do comics with still pictures, without animation, then this is what daz studio is good for.

I plan to create a comic as well and Blender offers so many more options than Daz. I also will create own environments and characters in mid-term. Daz items can be the base for that. Diffeo is a fantastic piece of software and I'm refining my workflow from Daz Studio to Blender 4. Another goal is to refine the materials by using procedural overlays.

This can't be done with Daz Studio, as I want this to be quite realistic. I just fell in love with Blender and Diffeo is the tool to reuse my huge Daz library as I have done it before in Cinema 4D.

josiahmora20

Singular3D said:

Padone said:

p.s. Can't understand why you want to use blender though. I mean if you only do comics with still pictures, without animation, then this is what daz studio is good for.

I plan to create a comic as well and Blender offers so many more options than Daz. I also will create own environments and characters in mid-term. Daz items can be the base for that. Diffeo is a fantastic piece of software and I'm refining my workflow from Daz Studio to Blender 4. Another goal is to refine the materials by using procedural overlays.

This can't be done with Daz Studio, as I want this to be quite realistic. I just fell in love with Blender and Diffeo is the tool to reuse my huge Daz library as I have done it before in Cinema 4D.

Yeah, blender can just do so much more. If they made Daz a modeling software too though I could see myself using Daz exclusively.