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DAZ Studio to Blender

ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
in The Commons

Interesting....

Usually my only interest in exporting from Studio to Blender is if I'm making clothes for a Studio character, which I make in Blender then import back to Studio to use VWD.

But I started to poke around on existing applications that can do full scenes, not just individual OBJ's. Long ago I had heard about mcjTeleblender, but my recollection was that it was in a very early stage and not real functional. So today I downloaded the latest version, and after a bunch of head banging just to figure out where to install it (the docs are wrong) I was successful in importing a Studio scene into Blender. Well, kinda. some of the objects were rotated or missing (?), and some of the textures were purple (missing). So after some searching I saw that the author mentioned that Blender 2.79 (the latest) is really pretty good about importing an entire scene, much like Teleblender does, but not quite as well in some areas. 

So I tried exporting a Studio scene as an OBJ, and surprisingly when it came into Blender 2.79 it was almost perfect. Well, after you get the XYZ orientation figured out. In textured shaded mode in Blender it looked almost perfect. 

However, in Rendered mode (Iray), since an OBJ doesn't include light information, even after I add a sunlight or spotlight to the Blender scene it's almost totally black, and it looks almost like flipped normals and only some edges of objects are lit. 

Anyway, it's nice to know that you can export a scene as OBJ, though I'm clueless why the render isn't working. Anyone know what's going on? It would be nice if we dont' need an extra addon to so something like this. 

Comments

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926

    You can ask mcCasual in his Freebie thread or Diffeomorphic freebie has a similar use intent as mcTeleblender if you want to try:

    http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.se/

     

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited November 2017

    Thanks, nonesuch, but I'm hoping to get the native OBJ export/import figured out so I don't need an external add-on. If not, I guess I'll have to figure out Teleblender.

    BTW, from the looks of it the nodes that are made in Blender when the OBJ import happens are lacking. Though maybe I did a stupid. 

    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926
    edited November 2017
    ebergerly said:

    Thanks, nonesuch, but I'm hoping to get the native OBJ export/import figured out so I don't need an external add-on. If not, I guess I'll have to figure out Teleblender.

    BTW, from the looks of it the nodes that are made in Blender when the OBJ import happens are lacking. Though maybe I did a stupid. 

    Well if you have to manually do them at least you'll learn PBR principals more thoroughly.

    Post edited by nonesuch00 on
  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    nonesuch00 said:
    ebergerly said:

    Thanks, nonesuch, but I'm hoping to get the native OBJ export/import figured out so I don't need an external add-on. If not, I guess I'll have to figure out Teleblender.

    BTW, from the looks of it the nodes that are made in Blender when the OBJ import happens are lacking. Though maybe I did a stupid. 

    Well if you have to manually do them at least you'll learn PBR principals more thoroughly.

    Nah, that's the easy part. Just add a Principled shader, hook up 3 inputs (Color, Roughness, and Normal) and you're all set. Then just set Metallic at 0 or 1 and you're done. Unless it's glass, then tweak Transmission. 

    BTW, for some reason it looks like Teleblender isn't bringing some texture images across. It sets up the nodes okay (though with the old style Diffuse and Glossy only), but something strange going on with the textures. 

    Though the nice thing about Teleblender is that it doesn't require you save the entire scene as one OBJ. And it also brings lights over. 

    Okay, I think I'm sold on Teleblender. Now just to figure out why some textures are getting lost. 

  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310

    The stumbling block is the object import/export. This isn't a blender or studio problem but a limitation of the .obj specification itself, which is not good at storing information about textures. (Incidentally since the teleblender also utilizes the object export this is why it also has problems with textures).

    Currently I generally use a hybrid method. Teleblender for characters, cameras, and lights. And either the dsf importer or fbx for props background etc. (Fbx probably does the best job of retaining textures, I've been meaning to experiment with converting all the figures to props and then using fbx, I might give that a swing and get back to you)

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    Okay I'm a big fan of mcjTeleblender. Wow. Apparently there's a magic setting to "collect maps" that seems to make most of the missing textures show up. Cool. 

    Much much better than saving an OBJ. Though the textures and lights still need a lot of tweaking. But at least it gives you node setups for each texture. But there's a LOT of tweaking needs to be done. Life will be nice when Studio uses the same Principled Shader as Cycles. 

    Though it sure seems that Studio is a lot nicer and faster to work in. So for me at least, there would really need to be a big reason for me to move an entire scene to Blender. 

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    j cade said:

    The stumbling block is the object import/export. This isn't a blender or studio problem but a limitation of the .obj specification itself, which is not good at storing information about textures. (Incidentally since the teleblender also utilizes the object export this is why it also has problems with textures).

    Currently I generally use a hybrid method. Teleblender for characters, cameras, and lights. And either the dsf importer or fbx for props background etc. (Fbx probably does the best job of retaining textures, I've been meaning to experiment with converting all the figures to props and then using fbx, I might give that a swing and get back to you)

    Thanks. I'm starting to think about writing some Python for Blender that automatically goes thru and tweaks at least the lights the Teleblender brings in. And maybe the textures too. 

  • emclean2014emclean2014 Posts: 27
    edited August 2018

    can someone tell me where to locate this teleblender mentioned?

    Post edited by emclean2014 on
  • rk66rk66 Posts: 432

    https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjteleblender3

  • emclean2014emclean2014 Posts: 27

    thank you :)

  • videoninja719videoninja719 Posts: 343

    thank you for the link. is teleblender3 still working and being developed?

  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,476
    edited January 2019

    just for the sake of completeness

    diffeomorphic's is much better than teleblender for the following reasons:

    - imports G3 G8 characters with automatic perfect deformations, they work the very same as in DS

    - much better material matching, for most materials you have to fix nothing

    - imports cameras and lights and even emissive metrials with a very good matching

    - for scenes it also imports the hdr skydome and instances, that are imported as correct blender instances so to save on memory for large scenes

    http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/

    EDIT. here some tests I did a while ago

    https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/123/material-tests

     

    Post edited by Padone on
  • maura01maura01 Posts: 18
    In my case the diffeomorphic doen't give sùch impressive results: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/153487/why-are-some-of-my-daz-studio-models-not-showing-their-materials-correctly-in-th
  • raphaelmartinesraphaelmartines Posts: 59
    ebergerly said:

    Though it sure seems that Studio is a lot nicer and faster to work in. So for me at least, there would really need to be a big reason for me to move an entire scene to Blender. 

    Yes, I agree for sure. However, there are some objects that I can't find in Daz Studio, e.g: Military content (weapons, clothes, objects) is rare (but is common to find 3d objects and fbx). Daz assets' makers are focused on erotic, casual and fantasy content. If I could import my character and its clothes to Blender (or other) without issues, I could improve the military accessories, the entire scenario and lots of effects.
    The reason here is a "postwork step", I already came to the Daz limitation for that I wanna do.

    It is also a question of repetition, how many times did you see the same clothes with the same characters?

    Did you get it? I can do nice renders using the same objects and clothes, but sounds like "that's all folks"... I did not find a way to import obj and its textures into Daz, as well export Daz into Blender.

    I already to think Daz Studio was made to work as a stand-alone software aiming to sell its assets and nothing more.

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