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I really like that Daz abandoned the triax feature with G3. This is so outdated and no professional software supports this out of the box. As far as I remember, triax was a system implemented in Poser first and thus a rigged character (e.g. V4/M4) can hardly be transferred and used in todays software. HD would be fine though.
http://blenderfbx.render.jp/
You do need to read the installation instructions - as I said, it requires separate installation of an Autodesk SDK package in order to get around the licence issues, using an internal format to communicate between the GPL script and the non-GPL SDK.
TriAx was the weight-mapped rigging system devised by Daz for Ds4/Genesis, Poser didn't add weight-mapping with a similar system until later. The older figures, including Victoria 4 and Michael 4, use parametric rigging which does have separate settings for each axis but isn't what is meant by TriAx.
Sorry for the slow reply, RL has been very demanding, and I've been tied up doing some other work with Blender (no time to test DAZ imports). One figure that I know I did try was Danae for G8F (available here), and my own figure that I have been working on. They both use the dual lobed specular shader, and come into Blender/Cycles with the specular (translucent in Cycles IIRC) component way too high. Since I'm really just starting with Blender, I can't say for sure what the problem is, but I do know adjusting the translucency did help.
When I get a chance (probably in a week or so), I'll try with a G3F character to see if it is the dual lobed specular. It's nice to know you are having great luck with it though, as I'm sure I will use it in the future!
Agreed.
Since duf is an "open" file format, except for the HD morph issue (which I really wasn't asking for, since Carrara doesn't support them either), DAZ wouldn't need to expose any protected IP, but they would be able to open an additional market for their content. It would be nice to have the same level of integration that Carrara has/had. But until then, or if it never happens, Diffeomorphic is a huge plus!!!
So what it sounds like is Diffeomorphic is better to export DAZ Content as FBXs to Unity or UE4 that using DAZ's FBX exporter? Or does the kludge only work with special code within Blender?
Thanks so much!
I Would imagine that once you get your genesis Character
,with all of the JCM 's working with Diffeomorphic, in Blender,
any export to another application (Unity or Unreal etc),
would set you right back to square one unless those external application have ther
own systems to approximate the same JCM functionality.
Every third party plugin I have ever used for blender, was based on python
Python is essentially Blender's programming language.
I am not a software engineer, however I would love to see how Daz could
Make a "plugin" that could miraculously execute inside of blender without python
and perform all of the complex functions of emulating full genesis functionality
without any actual integration into Blenders python based code.
Python is a commercially used language; in that sense, it isn't part of Blender, only used to create scripts. Properly written code should only pass parameters between the required sections.
Poser has had Python support for over a decade.
if python was sufficient for getting a fully functional genesis into another
program with JCM's &HD morphs it seems that Daz likely would have done so with python instead of the
highly crippled implementation of DSON that was shoe horned into
poser for G1-2 "support"
IMHO this notion of "expanding ones commercial content market"
by creating special genesis bridges to high end programs is
wishful thinking at best.
It is one thing to offer the usual industry standard export fomats
( FBX.obj.MDD or alembic etc)
and let the people( Like myself) figure out how to implement them in their
specific pipelines.
When you however,start offering a complete Figure framework with its figure specific content
for commercial sale to be used in other programs via your commercial plugin,
You will have to provide continuous content tech support for every user of that external program
who purchases something from your store to deploy in the other program.
This is quite a challenge even if one is an Autodesk Certified Plugin developer
trying to stay current with a constantly updating Maya program.
With Blender, Daz would have to commit time and personel to trouble shooting
the inevitable problems that users of a free open source progam will report
as they will rightfully demand tech support from the seller of this commercial
content.
I would personally much rather Daz spend time& resources improving Daz studios
longstanding shortcomings.
I don't think Poser Python is a full implementation of Python, though I could be wrong. Whether Poser Python is a full implementation of Python or not, is rather irrelevant though. Poser does not have the internal technology, infrastructure, and hooks available to implement a full translation of Genesis figures to be native Poser figures (or at least it didn't have prior to P11, it may be closer now to having full internal support, but the user base has probably dropped to a point where it's not economically attractive now). It's not so much that DAZ couldn't develop something to bring Genesis characters into Poser "because Python is lacking", it's because Poser lacks the proper technology to make a full transfer. This is why the support for Genesis 1 & 2 was rather slow and a less pleasant experience than in DS. Poser simply didn't have the proper internal support, IIRC some things had to be done outside of Poser, with the results then given back to Poser. Poser Python just provides methods to interact with the programming in Poser, If something isn't available in Poser via Poser Python (or other features/methods for scripting or from an SDK), then the program creator must develop that functionality "outside" of Poser, and find a way to integrate it back into Poser (like VWD has done).
The Maya plugin mentioned above doesn't have these issues, since Maya has native internal support for many (all???) of the features found in Genesis. The plugin just needs to be able to interpret the .duf files to the appropriate Maya functions while importing the object geometry/rigging/shaders. IMHO, the whole issue of supporting an "external" program is much easier when the program has a proper feature set available, and has the proper hooks to the functions needed available in it's scripting environment or SDK.
With respect to Blender, I'm far from knowledgeable on what can, and can not be done without the addon needing to be open sourced. But, it can obviously be done, since there are commercial plugins available for Blender. In some instances, I think it's actually the addon content that can used with the addon that is being sold (in conjunction with the addon), and the addon may actually be open source. In other instances, it looks like the addon is fully proprietary. As noted above, it's probably due to the fact that the addon does not alter Blender code in any way. Just one last note, It seems that unlike Poser, Blender does appear to have all of the internal capabilities required to import Genesis 3/8 figures (thus why the Diffeomorphic plugin does such a great job of importing everything), except for maybe HD morphs.
I'll just end with saying it would be great to have the same level of functionality for using Genesis 3/8 figures in Blender, that we have with Genesis 1/2 figures in Carrara. It may never happen, but I must say that the more I learn about Blender, the more I use it (plus for some odd reason Carrara will no longer run on my main machine - 2 or 3 other Carrara users have had similar problems, with no resolution other than a complete re-install of the OS). True, DS is getting more features all the time, but the ability to do everything (including modeling/sculpting/painting/landscapes/compositing) in one single program is really nice!!
Python is a very capable language.
Like any language, how it is implemented is important.
With macOS support for NVIDIA not looking to be available in the future, I'm having to make a difficult choice between using DAZ and staying on the macOS platform. The ability to import DAZ content to Blender would address that. Maya might also, but I've been a long-time Blender user, and would frankly prefer Cycles to Iray if I could get my DAZ content seamlessly imported.
Thanks for pointing that out. I always thought that TriAx is referring to the separate maps for XYZ, which is not supported by most modern CG programs as far as I know. I like that quaternion weighting is identical with Cinema 4D's spherical weighting.
Python evolved over the last years and is a very capable language now. The .DUF format is not a secret as mentioned before. All data are available except the HD morphs.
We may not even need a Daz exporter. It should be no problem to read Daz Assets directly, but we woud need to mimic Daz functionality in Blender as well. I made some experiments for Cinema 4D with a Python script and this should be possible for most features. It is just a huge amount of work and I do not have the source code of Cinema 4D. You do not have these limitations in Blender.
Amen! Decent, simple animations tools like Poser has (Keymate and Graphmate are sorely lacking) and resurrecting Mimimc Pro would go a long way.
AFAIK the plugin doesn't support dual lobe specularity, I guess it should just ignore it. Regular specularity though matches quite fine when you choose the standard BSDF conversion. While the Principled conversion has issues with non-pbr materials. Since the Uber shader can generate both pbr and non-pbr (aka specular) materials, while the Principled shader can't.
I have been reading about and considering exporting scenes to Blender for animation (as you are aware, @Padone ). The question about exporting morphs - espcially HD morphs - suddenly occurred to me and led me to this thread. When I do G3/G8 animations in DAZ Studio, I regularly animate body morphs (I have the Xenic101 Musculature HD Morphs for G8). Could you explain what you mean by "bake to obj" please? I guess that I'm asking whether I could adjust those HD morphs as Shape Keys in Blender?
Apologies for my recent barrage of questions - it is frustrating being so far away from home and my PC and therefore unable to try these things for myself.
I mean you can save a high-res obj and bake it as a displacement map in blender. This will work fine enough if the HD morph is defining fine details as it usually is. If the HD morph defines some jcms other than the general shape details then you can't import them in blender. To save the high-res obj just increase the viewport subdivision in daz studio before exporting. To bake to a displacement map in blender there are many tutorials around, below there's one quick and to the point.
As a side note for @DustRider the latest version of the plugin imports dual lobe specularity and it is also somewhat better with the V8 skin though the sss chromatic mode stills not supported.
Thanks for the YouTube link @Padone. I think the Xenic morphs are sculpted in HD for better definition but are more than just surface details - they are muscle bulk definition using SubDivision above level 2. I found a discussion on Blender Artists where Thomas was asked about importing High Poly Meshes and the answer was "not in the foreseeable future" ...
https://blenderartists.org/t/daz-importer/684697/252
Another thread has just appeared here which raises the question of whether geoshells are handled by the diffeomorphic importer. I use third party geoshell add-ons all the time. I'm starting to think that I might lose some vital features if I export to Blender but I'm really keen to have the extra possibilities that Blender offers, such as a decent faster renders, better animation and soft body physics. Ah well, perhaps the tantalising comment about the upcoming improvements to DAZ Studio animation and interoperability with other software will offer some solutions.
AFAIK geoshells should work fine, though I don't use them personally. Bug reports can be reported on the diffeomorphic bitbucket repository, usually Thomas is quite fast fixing things. Actually the main features not supported by the plugin are triax weighting, hd morphs and dforce. Also materials may require some fixing though usually they're fine enough.
As for daz studio they're doing a nice job actually improving things, so yes it may be that the next versions will be fine depending on your needs.
Yeah, the discussion regarding geoshells is ongoing in the other thread so I'll have to wait and see how that is resolved. As for DAZ Studio, the upcoming 4.12 beta might be out by the time I get home mid-August so I'll be highly motivated to try out the new features. One thing that I've been thinking about is animation and if DAZ can improve the tools sufficiently, then all I will need to do is get the scene into Blender for rendering. I'm not absolutely sure of the best method to do that yet: Diffeomorphic, TeleBlender or just Wavefront OBJ combined with MDD (I have Animate 2). I need to figure out how the MDD process works such as whether I can export an animated figure including draped clothing in one go or whether I have to have an MDD file for every separate object in the scene.
[EDIT] I've just added the Alembic Exporter to my wishlist (waiting for a heavy discount) but I don't yet understand the difference between MDD and Alembic. It looks as though Blender treats them in a similar way via th Mesh Cache Modifer.
In my opinion mdd is far superior for exporting animations from daz studio, simply because a vertex cache also exports dforce animations and triax deformations and hd morphs so it's a catch 'em all solution. While the diffeomorphic plugin is more to export characters and do animations with blender. As for the alembic exporter I don't own it but I heard it's extremely slow and clunky may be someone who actually uses it can confirm.
Not sure about blender, but MDD and obj for exporting animations to marvelous designer works great. Alembic exporter would be a waste of money imo, if it carried over all the info usable by alembic, like textures etc, it might be worth that price tag.
Great news then :) as I already have MDD export with Animate 2.
May I just ask about the export process now? In other words, what is the process? I think I understand the Marvelous Designer animation export which is covered in a few tutorials (I have MD8, by the way) but I'm also interested in using Eevee to render animations in Blender 2.8. Let's say I have a character in a scene with furniture and clothing. Do I export an OBJ of each object in the scene plus an MDD file for the whole scene? I haven't been able to find a video tutorial for this yet. Any advice on the export settings for DAZ Studio and the import settings on the Blender side would be a great help too.
I banged my head against the keyboard all day yesterday trying to pin down a workflow to get from daz to blender, was no luck. I was using diffeomorphic, sometimes it would work, sometimes it didn't, and I couldn't figure out why. Some things would import, other things wouldn't show up at all. Some geographs worked fine, others looked bad. I will probably revisit it when the new release of blender comes, and the plugin is updated for it. As it is now, the limited time I have for my art hobby, I can't afford to spend it all fiddling aroun instead of actually getting some renders done lol. Maybe in wintertime work will slow down and I will have more free time to use to muck about and figure it out.
Well, I guess I'm realising that I have to decide what I want to do in DAZ Studio and what in Blender. As @Padone said, unless I need the rigging and want to acutally animate in Blender, then I don't really need the Diffeomorphic Plugin. So I'm hoping that DAZ will improve the animation tools so that I can get away with using DAZ Studio for my admittedly simple animations and just export to Blender for faster rendering. In that case, it looks like the OBJ/MDD export is the best option.
Yeah, I only really do stills myself, after going through and compositing my last render, I remember why I wanted to get it into blender to render to begin with again lol. I am sick of being handcuffed by VRAM, and having to spend hours trying to cut larger epic scenes up into various render passes and render each pass, then spending many minutes to hours in photoshop trying to put them together into one final image that looks good. A bit of fiddling with shaders in the beginning doesn't seem so bad again lol. Going to work on this further. Got a surprise day off today, might as well make some use of it.
Amen to all that!
If you work it out, please share the techniques and the results. Are you intending to set up your scenes in Blender, including posing, or do all that in DAZ Studio and export for render in Cycles?
Hi
As other have stated, MDD is the best point cache method of moving animated characters& cloth sims out of Daz studio.
I use .obj/MDD to send pre-animated genesis characters to Maxon C4D.
I have an entire 90 minute ,feature length, animated film coming out in the fall ( hopefully),using .obj/MDD Characters exported from Daz studio
I dont have any detailed information on a MDD to Blender workflow,but in general you only need to send a matching MDD file for animated elements like figures and cloth sims.
For scene sets&props a static .obj file is best
For example: Every Genesis 1,2,3 figure in thes two clips was animated in Iclone/Endorphin/Daz studio and exported to Maxon C4D with textures to be rendered for the final shots.