The new "blender to Daz plugin"

Artini

Ok, found it, but it still creates shadows in Daz Studio.

It is probably, how lights are handled by iray in Daz Studio.

Check below.

Artini

SnowSultan said:

I'm probably going to buy it today, but if you have a minute Artini, could you test something? Could you export a light from Blender with shadows turned off and see if it still casts shadows in Studio? That's something that's always bothered me about Iray, it forces realism when you occasionally don't want it. Thanks.

By the way while using  FilaToon in Daz Studio, you can easily get light without shadows.

 

WendyLuvsCatz

iray is strictly PBR unlike Octane render for example and of course Cycles and Evee which have extra non PBR features such as shadow options

a bridge between sofwares cannot change this core functionality

Artini

The official support thread was created:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/738451/released-blender-to-daz-studio-plugin-released-official-support-thread-commercial#latest

 

mummystoat

Ainm said:

mummystoat said:

I have it installed with 4.3, not super impressed.
It exports the OBJ wonderfully well. I haven't had one success with materials yet and with almost no documentation to help, it's basically a dead end.

It relies on a PrincipledBSDF shader setup in Blender. PrincipledBSDF, from what I understand, is an open physically based rendering format (PBR). Iray is a PBR engine with equivalent material slots in its shaders. If a Blender mesh doesn't have PrincipledBSDF shaders nodes applied, this product can't bake/convert them to Iray shaders. Instead, you'll only get the mesh.

I don't buy a lot of Blender products, but most of those I own don't have that shader setup and don't transfer materials. Some of them I can sort of convert to PrincipledBSDF manually and they sort of work. The Blender products I own that do have PrincipledBSDF shaders are transferred to Daz/Iray perfectly.

I don't use Blender much and struggled to figure out the product. I thought it wasn't working, but it was a combination of not the best documentation and my severe lack of Blender shading systems. Having learned a little about those, the documentation seems more adequate (at least on the marketplace I bought it from). 

Yes, the product does specify it needs a principledBSDF shader to work. I'm not relying on purchased products in Blender and my materials are set up with a Principled BSDF shader.  Only the very simplest of setups has come through with any material export at all; anything with colour ramps, mix nodes, alpha channels (this one is really a mystery as it looks like it should be working correctly) etc. is a mess.

 

SnowSultan

Thank you for the tests. I figured the shadows would remain, I was just curious if maybe the bridge did something to screw up how Studio handled that particular light and disabled shadows for it.

lilweep

SnowSultan said:

I'd like to read the manual for this, I have a few questions that I doubt would be answered in a video. Can it export things generated by geometry nodes, or plant and environmental items that are instanced? Can you export a light from Blender to Studio that has it's shadows turned off and they *stay off* in Studio?

One thing I will comment on is with exporting blender environments in general, it usually gets complicated by more than just instances.  Take the free Polyhaven Blender environments for example.  There are so many procedural shaders being used in those collections; they arent simple Principled BSDF shaders.  So you would have to do a lot of work baking them down to a simple Principled BSDF network before you could export.  I had this problem when doing Blender to Unreal.

I think many environment creators in Blender are going to be using some degree of procedural shaders and they arent going to bake down to a texture map easily.  Off-the-shelf Blender environment scenes will probably all have this issue to some extent.

lilweep

mummystoat said:

Ainm said:

mummystoat said:

I have it installed with 4.3, not super impressed.
It exports the OBJ wonderfully well. I haven't had one success with materials yet and with almost no documentation to help, it's basically a dead end.

It relies on a PrincipledBSDF shader setup in Blender. PrincipledBSDF, from what I understand, is an open physically based rendering format (PBR). Iray is a PBR engine with equivalent material slots in its shaders. If a Blender mesh doesn't have PrincipledBSDF shaders nodes applied, this product can't bake/convert them to Iray shaders. Instead, you'll only get the mesh.

I don't buy a lot of Blender products, but most of those I own don't have that shader setup and don't transfer materials. Some of them I can sort of convert to PrincipledBSDF manually and they sort of work. The Blender products I own that do have PrincipledBSDF shaders are transferred to Daz/Iray perfectly.

I don't use Blender much and struggled to figure out the product. I thought it wasn't working, but it was a combination of not the best documentation and my severe lack of Blender shading systems. Having learned a little about those, the documentation seems more adequate (at least on the marketplace I bought it from). 

Yes, the product does specify it needs a principledBSDF shader to work. I'm not relying on purchased products in Blender and my materials are set up with a Principled BSDF shader.  Only the very simplest of setups has come through with any material export at all; anything with colour ramps, mix nodes, alpha channels (this one is really a mystery as it looks like it should be working correctly) etc. is a mess.

 

On product description it says

5) Bakes materials to create simplified texture maps that can be used in Daz Studio.

so guess that was potentially being over-sold?

SimpleBake for Blender can probably make baking down shaders to simply PBR easier before export.  It's still tedious to do this even though SimpleBake makes it slightly easier.

nonesuch00

I want to buy this but:

a) Will support to be available in DAZ Studio 6 be added in a future upgrade?

b) DAZ 3D isn't going to buy this, integrate it into Premier, and then EOL this addon is it?

Ainm

nonesuch00 said:

I want to buy this but:

a) Will support to be available in DAZ Studio 6 be added in a future upgrade?

b) DAZ 3D isn't going to buy this, integrate it into Premier, and then EOL this addon is it?

a) When 6 comes out, it'll be a different binary/patching path. It won't break 4.24+. You can export to 4, save and open in 6.

b) Who knows what they'll do, but the Daz plugin is only part of the puzzle. This is primarily a Blender plugin.

Artini

Tested hair from Blender demo on https://www.daz3d.com/em3d-kash-hd-for-genesis-9

Rendered in Daz Studio. Need to figure out, how to make my own hairs in Blender.

felis

Can it import blender hair curves?

crosswind

felis said:

Can it import blender hair curves?

Yes, as polylines. 

nonesuch00

Ainm said:

nonesuch00 said:

I want to buy this but:

a) Will support to be available in DAZ Studio 6 be added in a future upgrade?

b) DAZ 3D isn't going to buy this, integrate it into Premier, and then EOL this addon is it?

a) When 6 comes out, it'll be a different binary/patching path. It won't break 4.24+. You can export to 4, save and open in 6.

b) Who knows what they'll do, but the Daz plugin is only part of the puzzle. This is primarily a Blender plugin.

OK, thanks!

SnowSultan

Slightly OT, but can DAZ strand-based hairs be exported to Blender? The DAZ bridge didn't do it when I tried, and I'm not sure if exporting as an OBJ would work. Just curious, I haven't had time to test any further.

crosswind

SnowSultan said:

Slightly OT, but can DAZ strand-based hairs be exported to Blender? The DAZ bridge didn't do it when I tried, and I'm not sure if exporting as an OBJ would work. Just curious, I haven't had time to test any further.

You can make it with Diffeomorphic: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/674431/how-could-i-have-daz-hair-strands-converting-to-blender ;

SnowSultan

Any other way? Diffeomorphic might as well be in Latin as far as I'm concerned; it is the absolute proof that every programmer or coder needs a partner who isn't one to translate what they've done into the common tongue.  ;)

Richard Haseltine

As I understand it this gives a UI to Diffeomorphic (possibly plus other stuff) https://www.daz3d.com/fast-animation-studio-tools--a-daz-to-blender-pipeline

lilweep

SnowSultan said:

Any other way? Diffeomorphic might as well be in Latin as far as I'm concerned; it is the absolute proof that every programmer or coder needs a partner who isn't one to translate what they've done into the common tongue.  ;)

export it as obj at desired density and then in Blender convert to whatever you want to convert it to (Curve, particle Hair, Hair Curves). More in-depth workflows for conversion, adding children hairs to desired density, and attachment are probably described online somewhere.

I've used Diffeomorphic for a while and I agree they should put some effort into making it more accessible. I wrote a few paragraphs about why i think their blog is annoying and their wiki needs updating, but it seemed unfairly critical since the addon is free anyway, so I deleted what i wrote.  

SnowSultan

Thanks, I'll look into doing it that way when I learn a bit more about Blender's hair options.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

SnowSultan said:

Any other way? Diffeomorphic might as well be in Latin as far as I'm concerned; it is the absolute proof that every programmer or coder needs a partner who isn't one to translate what they've done into the common tongue.  ;)

The Hitchens part is going to take longer, but I'll be releasing a version of Sagan in about two weeks that already converts SBH to Hair Curves and can animate them reliably. That much is a done deal. I'm finishing up the same functionality that should work for most card-based and tube-based assets.

 

Artini

Experiment with exporting a posable character - just one click. Amazing.

Artini

Some more clicks later...

Artini

Testing transfer of some bigger structures.

kenmo

Singular3D said:

Looks interesting, though I would love to see the possibilities in Daz to Blender direction compared to Diffeomorphic, which is already quite good.

I always hoped that future generations of the Daz figures (e.g. G9) would be more Blender friendly, but good bridges will at least help to use Daz figures in Blender.

Sorry but I don not understand why there are two addons that appear to do the same thing? What are the pros and cons of both?

For me Diffeomorphic seemed a little too convoluted to install. Perhaps I am giving up too easily but after doing computer database programming and systems admin work (34 years), when I use a computer, I use it as a hobbyist and want to avoid  head scratching when i can.

UncannyValet

kenmo said:

Singular3D said:

Looks interesting, though I would love to see the possibilities in Daz to Blender direction compared to Diffeomorphic, which is already quite good.

I always hoped that future generations of the Daz figures (e.g. G9) would be more Blender friendly, but good bridges will at least help to use Daz figures in Blender.

Sorry but I don not understand why there are two addons that appear to do the same thing? What are the pros and cons of both?

For me Diffeomorphic seemed a little too convoluted to install. Perhaps I am giving up too easily but after doing computer database programming and systems admin work (34 years), when I use a computer, I use it as a hobbyist and want to avoid  head scratching when i can.

For Daz->Blender direction, most people have swarmed on Diffeomorphic as the preferred option, so I would trust the hivemind and learn it instead.

Discussions around DaztoBlender vs. Diffeomorphic may be slightly derailing this thread.

crosswind

kenmo said:

Singular3D said:

Looks interesting, though I would love to see the possibilities in Daz to Blender direction compared to Diffeomorphic, which is already quite good.

I always hoped that future generations of the Daz figures (e.g. G9) would be more Blender friendly, but good bridges will at least help to use Daz figures in Blender.

Sorry but I don not understand why there are two addons that appear to do the same thing? What are the pros and cons of both?

For me Diffeomorphic seemed a little too convoluted to install. Perhaps I am giving up too easily but after doing computer database programming and systems admin work (34 years), when I use a computer, I use it as a hobbyist and want to avoid  head scratching when i can.

Again, to clarify,  new "Daz to Blender " (FAST Animation Studio Tools) just embeds Diffeo as the importer for DS workflow, I.e. importing DS scenes... You may ask and discuss with the author in their commercial thread:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/738856/released-fast-animation-studio-tools-massive-daz-blender-bridge-official-thread-commercial#latest

 

MrRogerSmith

I'm requesting the Dev to please update his instructions for installing the add-on.  Took me a frustratingly long time to figure out why the add-on wasn't showing up.  Step 3 in the readme file should be corrected to:

"Click the drop-down arrow in the top right corner and select 'Install from Disk.'  Then navigate to the zip file called 'Blender add on' and select it."

As currently written, you are directing the user to install the wrong file/folder.

Thanks.

bambooji

Thanks for this tip Roger.  You have probably saved people lots of save and frustration! 

xyer0

evacyn said:

It works really well with KitBash stuff. You can download the native Blender files from Kitbash, and it keeps the textures without any additional work to import them individually. Definitely the coolest thing I've bought here in a long time.

@evacyn, I'm wondering: Do you have to save the buildings separately to separate the buildings, or are they already separate on import? I've been using Poser 11 Pro's FBX to get KB3D into Studio, and the real tedium is separating the buildings, as Wendy said. Thanks for testing this!