mcjTeleBlender:Daz Studio scenes/animations w/Blender's Cycles Engine

3dOutlaw · July 2014

Casual said:
i bet mcjTeleBlender 3 will be posted Sunday
but i bet uhhh just one chocolate chips cookie

Cool, thanks! Sent you a PM...

mCasual · July 2014

electronicdanielx said:
Hey MCJ,.........

i will chronicle my DS 4.6 test of Genesis 2 vs mcjTeleblender2 here

here ---> https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjteleblender2casestudy1

for now, a single frame render works great!

next i'll try a 30 frames animation

then i'll make a mat-lib and (re)use it

then mat-lib + scene file, using a Blender scene which never hosted Genesis

then mat-lib + scene file, using a Blender scene which did host Genesis ... in case remnants on genesis materials cause problems

3dOutlaw · July 2014

I believe what I am seeing in the previous posted image is a bug in the material "transparent shadows" they added. For the object, I have the shirt with an opacity map mixed to its texture. I also have the buttons set to transparent. It appears that where these two overlay, I am getting a shadow, even though I have Transparent Shadows checked...

So for now, A3 will have to change shirts... ;-)

mCasual · July 2014

electronicdanielx said:
Hey MCJ,fi.........

i think i found the problem !

while writing mcjTeleBlender 3 i encountered this problem
when i tried to render an animation

i believe this problem appeared with version 2.71 of Blender

here's the issue

in the the scene___.mtl file(s),

if you look at the way the path to the images are specified,

you see something like this

map_Kd Maps/V4LanaRRLimbsM.jpg

which means,

"the map named V4LanaRRLimbsM.jpg is right here, in a folder named Maps

in the same folder as Scene.obj and Scene.mtl

In previous versions of Blender, this was perfectly understood

but in the new version, blender will look in C:\Maps !

which is a folder that may or may not exist

and anyway it's not where our image files are

---

Now if you have Administrator privileges on your PC

you could simply copy the Maps folder from your tvScenes folder

abd paste it in your C:\ folder

and Blender will find the maps during your renders

---

or you could get the revised mcjTeleBlender 2 which i will post in a few minutes

the new version will fix the mtl files at creation time, and give them more explicit

paths to the correct folder

--

note that this could also be because D|S 4.6 specifies file locations in the .mtl files differently than in previous versions

---

animated gif below, rendered after using the trick of copying the Maps folder into C:\ )

mCasual · July 2014

########################################################################
_____ Important Update for Animators and Blender 2.7 / Daz Studio 4.6 _______
########################################################################
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts3/mcjteleblender2
########################################################################

Only the mcjTeleblender script needs to be updated, not the mcjBlendBot part of it
( though it cant hurt )

the FixMtl option no longer removes the leading / slash / character
from the texture image file paths in the .mtl files

The issue appeared with the release of Blender 2.71 and/or Daz Studio 4.6

this was found to be imperatively needed when rendering animations
and using "collected" image maps

Without this fix, Blender will look for your texture image files in C:\Maps
instead of the Maps folder where your images were collected.

Eventually another version of mcjTeleBlender will be issued to make this optional -
I will do this to cover for cases where you are rendering using old versions of Blender and/or Daz Studio

########################################################################
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts3/mcjteleblender2
########################################################################

mCasual · July 2014

electronicdanielx said:
Ok,that did help,I was able to render two different combos of scene and mat lib,than third gave me white skin no map files.So have no idea what is happening but it is better so I can at least do a layer rendering with proper lighting to help complete the scene!Merci beaucoup, vous êtes vraiment un maître en la matière! Quand j'ai fini ma musique vidéo en environ 3 ou 4 mois, je vais vous envoyer un lien afin que vous puissiez voir comment vous avez contribué à mon travail! Vive le grand et bel esprit de Casual !

maybe the .blend file which serves as the mat-file is refering to images which are no longer there or were not there ?

the other thing is, sometimes when a .png or even .tif file is part of the texture images
for example the image file "cloth.png"
the Daz Studio obj-mtl exporter (which does the actual work of exporting the geometry )
will write in the .mtl file "cloth.jpg"
so Blender will try to load cloth.jpg and fail

and recently i had a problem because i was using a material named "ligné" and the accent aigu was getting lost in translation

avec téléBlender 3 ca va être la révolution ! ... tranquille

( mostly ambient and opacity nodes will be improved and spotlights, sun lights and area lights )

mCasual · July 2014

well teleBlender 3 wont come out this weekend ( in part because of my main monitor being kaput )

remember that there's 2 parts here

mcjTeleBlender which is a Daz Studio script that exports the Daz Studio Scene
and
mcjBlendBot which is the kit of blender python scripts that imports in blender this scene

i will set things up so that you can keep using mcjTeleblender 2 and mcjTeleBlender 3

mcjBlendBot will become more universal, and serve all masters

this will help maintenance ( updates and fixes )

normally, people using mcjBlendBot for Carrara and Poser renders wont see a change
-----

Fig 1 - Oppa city style

fig 3 - this opacity map

fig 2,4 - a direct light with raytraced shadows = light through an opacity map

fig 5 - this seems to be the equivalent in Blender ( but i have to figure how to mix the diffude ambient specular correctly

mCasual · July 2014

now adding diffuse

hmm tomorrow

-----

fig 3 - getting there !

the opacity color is used for the opacity strength, and the opacity ( color blocking ) and it tints the diffuse

then the opacity shader and the glossy+specular shader are Added just before the output

next we must fing out how the ambient/emissive shader enters the game

fig 4 - daz render, bringing ambient to the party - diffuse can be fully black, it doesnt matter - so conclusion, the ambient shader is added to the diffuse shader - not multiplied .... neons ! we may get great neon signs

fig 5 .... well ...

mCasual · July 2014

it takes time but we'll get Blender Cycles materials that behave as they do in Daz Studio

****

i'm experiencing probably-pci-e / new monitor / possibly video card issues so everything is on hold

cross fingers !

****

( ok you can uncross fingers now, thanks )

mCasual · July 2014

almost out of PC hell ( power supply monitor video card ) , and having foolish dreams of posting mcjTeleBlender V 3 soon

this picture is probably a DS render it's there only to unboringify up the forum post :)

3dOutlaw · July 2014

How is PC recovery coming? Not that I am anxious or anything... ;-)

mCasual · July 2014

3doutlaw said:
How is PC recovery coming? Not that I am anxious or anything... ;-)

i have the new video card, new power supply and am waiting for the new 24" monitor

dont know which component killed the 2 others

i did re-start work on teleblender 3, i want to make it all easy to maintain compatibility

i finish work on the mcjTornare script and get back to teleblender

( if i don't get stuck in speech synthesis animation experiments )

mCasual · July 2014

having high hopes for the release of mcjTeleBlender 3 (tomorrow
with backward compatibility,
meaning the mcjBlendBot files which are in Blender's side of things

can create legacy material trees if mcjTeleBlender 2 activates them

and they can create new extensively mappable cycles materials if mcjTeleBlender 3 does

mCasual · July 2014

a default DS material with no maps

mCasual · July 2014

first substantial render using mcjTeleBlender3

they are still tests to do, but we're close to a release

things to do -

1 - make the ambient color and strength behave like in TB2 : only activated if an image-map is applied

2 - connect the normal map to the bsdf diffuse and bsdf glossy normal inputs only if there indeed is a normal map
because i apparently cant plug anything there without having an effect

mCasual · July 2014

TeleBlender 3 which will include a TeleBlender 2 Legacy mode

will use Node Groups, which will make Material tweaking much easier

3dOutlaw · July 2014

Looking good!!!

...on an unrelated but related note, a Blender user posted a method to get shadows from an environment using render layers and the compositor. I am still trying to figure it out, but he posted an example blend file, and I changed the light to the environment, and I do get shadows on the render layers. Here is a link:

https://developer.blender.org/T34272

DaremoK3 · July 2014

Looking forward to the new release, and thank you for keeping a version 2 mode available, just in case we need it.

As a B.I. user who hasn't migrated to Cycles yet, I love mcjTeleBlender2 for interactive DS/Blender work-flow that allows me to FreeStyle render my DS scenes/camera setups, along with Blender's toon shading network. Keep up the excellent work.

3doutlaw:

Thank you for posting the link. When I get into Cycles rendering, this looks like it will be useful.

mCasual · July 2014

yay ! substantial progress

here you see the upcoming teleblender 3 created two "NodeGroups" one for the shader one for the bump map

only meaningful properties are exposed, which will really improve tweaking activities

---

fig 2 - wet cy !

a fix here and there, then the re-integration of the teleblender-2 style Cycles node-trees, then we're at the Nirvana i mean at the release date

( actually the PSY's "Gentleman" song says "west side" not "west PSY" , it's sad i know, i thought it was "wet PSY" too )

Fig 3 - Textbook example of a situation that mcjTornare can solve !

Fig 4 - The normal-color group-input will be removed, now using a strength value, the normal map input remains

the bump color value is also superseded by a strength value - the Bump map input remains

Fig 5 - bump strength is not exported through the .obj file but rather through the scene-specific python script produced by mcjTeleblender

same goes for the glossiness map and normal map

mCasual · August 2014

fig 1 - the "diff spec remix" input lets you select if the specular is added or mixed with the diffuse
in Daz Studio mcjTeleBlender3 you'll have a checkbox to select which one is used for all exported materials
but once you're in Blender you'll be able to change this per-material

the teleblender 3 functionality is pretty much completed

the python source code is more tidy than before

next i want to re-introduce the teleblender 2 node-trees,
so you can take a Daz Studio scene from 2 years ago
and render exactly the same way as it did 2 years ago

------

fig 2 - the pretty much finalized shader node group for teleblender3

nakamuram002 · August 2014

Are node groups optional? I understand Cycles Nodes pretty well. Now I will have to understand how Teleblender's Node groups work. Is it possible to modify the Node Groups?

mCasual · August 2014

nakamuram002 said:
Are node groups optional? I understand Cycles Nodes pretty well. Now I will have to understand how Teleblender's Node groups work. Is it possible to modify the Node Groups?

i may make the node-groups optional later

----

when you're in the node editor you see 3 nodes:

the "shader group" node-group-node
the "bump group" node-group-node
the output node

and up to 8 image-map nodes with their UV coordinate nodes
if you click on the upper-right-corner of the "shader group" node-group-node, it expands and you can see the node-tree it contains
you can then reconfigure this node-tree, add nodes, remove nodes change links, just like you did before for each mat.tree
but, changes to this group-node will affect all the materials in the scene since they all re-use that same node-group
If you want to modify only one specific material tree, you can link the node-group's internal
tree sockets to the node-group's input and output sockets,
then click on the Tab key to un-expand the shader group
then modify your material's 3-nodes ( plus image maps ) tree

----

in python, instead of adding nodes and links to the each material.node_tree
i add them to one node-group's groups and links

 
 group = bpy.data.node_groups.new( groupName, trad( 'SHADER' ) )
 group_inputs = group.nodes.new( 'NodeGroupInput' )
 group_outputs = group.nodes.new( 'NodeGroupOutput' )
 group_inputs.location = ( -300, 0 )
 group_outputs.location = ( 300, 0 )
 buildBranch( group.nodes, group.links, mynodes, mylinks )

my new buildBranch function is universal
it can build networks in the node-groups, as shown above or it can
build them in a mat.tree

 tree = mat.node_tree
 buildBranch( tree.nodes, tree.links, mynodes, mylinks )

mynodes and mylinks are tables containing all the information needed to build a network

myShaderNodesV3 = [
["Mix.001",    "MIX_RGB",   "opacity mix",  -900,   400, [["VALUE", 1.0],["RGBA",WHITE],["RGBA",WHITE]], [["blend_type", 'MULTIPLY']]],
[
.
.
.
["Normal Map",   "NORMAL_MAP",  "normal map",  -600, -1800, [["VALUE", 1.0],["RGBA",NONRM]],[]],
["Diffuse BSDF.001", "BSDF_DIFFUSE",  "non transparent", -300,   200, [["RGBA",BLACK],["[VALUE", 1.0],["VECTOR", 0]],[]]
]

myShaderLinksV3 = [
["Mix.005",    "Color", "Emission",   0],
["Mix",     "Color", "Diffuse BSDF",  0],
...
["Normal Map",   "Normal", "Diffuse BSDF",  2],
["Normal Map",   "Normal", "Glossy BSDF",  2]
]

mCasual · August 2014

on second thought i'll make the "don't use node groups" option part of the initial release of teleBlender 3

Fig 1

Not there yet but, that's a No-Node-Group mat tree created by the upcoming TeleBlender 3

i learned new python things ! ( about custom attributes )

nakamuram002 · August 2014

Interesting... Is that a JSON representation of shader nodes and shader groups, Casual?

sioc · August 2014

nakamuram002 said:
Interesting... Is that a JSON representation of shader nodes and shader groups, Casual?

That's part of Blender interface.

mCasual · August 2014

nakamuram002 said:
Interesting... Is that a JSON representation of shader nodes and shader groups, Casual?

i didn't try to follow a format,
i quickly wrote a python script that saves a selected mat.tree as a nodes table and a links table
so the "shaders" are less hard-coded in python
doesn't handle all types of nodes but it could

the complete TeleBlender 3 Shader Tree tables is shown here
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/bric-a-brac

------

and this is the new No-NodeGloup mode in action !

there will be a checkbox in mcjTeleblender 3 to select if the node trees use NodeGroups or not

fig 2

exact same scene as in the above post
but with the Use-Node-Groups option turned on

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mcjTeleBlender:Daz Studio scenes/animations w/Blender's Cycles Engine

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