the original shape belongs to

If the shape is made within Character Creator (CC3) because for some reason someone prefers to build patiently from head to toes his body shape using this app, and then the Genesis 8 wireframe is wrapped around that CC3 shape and brought as a morph into DAZ, there's 0 shape that belongs to nobody else than the one who made it. An umpteenth Genesis 8 body morph, done with ZBrush, Character Creator, or DAZ is just and umpteenth morph made by a user who owns and therefore has the right to use all those apps to reach his artistic aim. 

Whether someone makes a DAZ custom morph with ZBrush (which also provides already made human bodies that G8 could be wrapped around), CC3, Poser, etc. doesn't matter. At the end it will just be a Genesis 8 with a shape done thanks to a third party tool. If all those marvelous 3D apps available export as fbx, obj, etc. it's pretty much because developpers want to be a part of every artist's workflow. An application that would be too exclusive and would refuse to offer export formats compatible with the rest of the 3D world would be doomed to disappear.

The shape of the base mesh once customized does not "belong" to reallusion, it belongs to the artist who makes it. Reallusion did not develop a tool, 3D real-time oriented, to prevent people from using their morphs anywhere else than inside CC3. The very purpose of such human shape apps, is for people to export their custom humans and do whatever they want with them : a game, an anatomy course, a short film, a DAZ morph, anything.

There's not always a copyright on every step of our workflows ;)

jbowler said:

What these tests show is that some products, animations, the various converter/script products and props (weapons etc) have next to no effect on character load time.  Products that morph the characters - poses, expressions and raw morph packages as well as, curiously, wardrobe items have a significant effect on load times, but the really big issue is characters.  My "figures-in-use" set has been dervied over the last month or so by starting with no figures visible ("G8 no figures" - no figures but everything else is visible) and adding figures as I opened scenes and encountered the "you need to install this product" dialog.

In fact I have a total of 636 G8 figure products (i.e. separate DIM packages) of which 78 are in my "Genesis 8/Figures in use" content directory.  So I have only one eighth of my purchased G8 figures visible in my standard content set ("G8 figures-in-use" above).

So my current approach is to accept a 7.5x slow down and I could reduce this to a 4.2x slow down (the "G8 no figures" row) by using a scene specific set of G8 figures - only the ones I actually use in that scene.

Been following (and advocating for others to follow as well) the practice of limiting currently installed content to just core Daz Studio components, universally useful things like plugins, and stuff used in scenes/projects actively being worked upon for at least 5 years for the exact reasons your tests indicate. 

Fun fact - Daz Install Manager has functionality built into it to  enable just this sort of operation (and has had it for at least all the years I've been paying attention to such things) If you go to the DIM Install tab, hit the checkboxes next to some of the items listed and then right click anywhere, you will see that the last option available is called "Export Selected as CSV..." This allows you to preserve a list (in CSV format) of all the content packages needed to eg. load your most recently completed scene/project. Thereby freeing you to uninstall those items in DIM (to enable speedy development of the next scene/project on your docket) without having to resort to time-consuming detective work to determine which no-longer-installed  packages are needed to get that scene open once again at some later date. Just make sure to keep all your not-currently-installed DIM install zip files in your DIM downloads folder. Then right click in the "ready to Install" DIM tab, select "Select Package(s)  >  From CSV File..."  and point it towards your saved CSV ffile. You will get a recreation of those item selections (minus anything already currentlyinstalled)  ready for one-click reinstallation.

Padone said:

jeff_someone said:

I can import a character with a simple dress on, merge rigs, but when I pose it, the simple dress does not deform the same way it does in Daz.

The deformations will not be the same if you don't import jcms too. Then some outfits may have custom morphs too.

steps

1. import the figure
2. merge armatures
3. import jcms
4. transfer jcms to the outfit

Thanks much, I'll give that a shot! 

lol In my previous post, I was transferring Kayla to G8M, but I was also transferring Fane too and got carried away with my result. Daz Galleries link [x].

To me, he looks like a mix of Cillian Murphy and Tom Welling. I was gonna use a different hair, but this was where I realized that the only male AprilYSH hair I have currently installed on this laptop is Orson Hair. Not that it mattered, since it actually fit whatever I was going for.

I know y'all are probably curious about how I transferred him. But what I did was using the Cross-Figure kit, I shaped G8M like G8F and exported that as an .obj file. Then, I loaded G8F and the G8F-shaped G8M .obj on G8F as if it were a bodysuit. I then dialed in Fane's head, and used the Cross-Figure kit to shape G8F like G8M. This helped masculinize the head a bit. But I used other shaping morphs I had to tweak it further. I made G8F invisible, and exported the G8M bodysuit as an .obj file. Finally, I used Morph Loader Pro and imported the male!Fane file as if it were just another head shape. With this setup, I personally don't need any converter system because I can, more or less, do it myself.

For most other "genderbends", I have enough morphs where I could just line up the models and then shape whichever one to the opposite gender version. But Fane Guy and Kayla Boy, have unique shapes, so I decided to go about it this way.

marble said:

Paintbox said:

Hey DAZ/Diffeo users, I spent quite a lot of time on this, so hopefully this will be the start of something beautiful ;-) , I am in progress of making a tutorial site. In the first installment I cover all the basics. It is written from the standpoint of the noob (which I am when it comes to Diffeomorphic, haha) , so it forgoes all the technicalities of Thomas (excellent) explanations in favour of a more guided and focused approach.

You can find it here :

https://roadvsmap.neocities.org/diffeo/diffeo_mainindex.html

I am looking into what the next step will be, so input is surely welcome, my own thoughts are probably something on lighting, textures or posing. Hope there is some use for it!  I also don't mind constructive criticism, especially if my english is not clear enough.

Wow, so glad that you are taking on this task. I would echo everything that Krampus said and also Donald's comment about a nice HTML template. I might add that these are the things I find difficult to grasp and I assume that others who are not at the level of expertise of say, Padone, might find difficult.

• How to drape clothing (or is it even possible)?
• How and where to find the material surface adjustments - perhaps links to more information on how to tweak them.
• The differences between Eevee and Cycles.
• Maybe a little about viewport navigation because Blender is not like DAZ Studio. In Blender, we don't view through the camera like we do in DAZ Studio so this can be confusing to noobs (and still is for me even though I've watched the tutorials).
• How to pose. Whether to pose in DAZ Studio and import the pose (how to do that) or whether to pose in Blender. Of course, we are then back to the clothing drape issue.
• Rigging (maybe this should be at the top of the list). Differences between rig options and which is suited to which purpose.
• Morphs - I am utterly in the dark when it comes to all the different types of morph (custom, JCM, etc.) and how to import and apply them and how to manipulate the imported custom morphs (Shape Keys in Blender).
• Geografts and Geoshells - do they work? Should we merge the geometry? If so, how and what does that mean? Will the geograft morphs still work in Blender?
• Hair. A subject in itself due to all the different hair types and the fact that there are other import/conversion tools. I know nothing about hair technology.

Many of the things on that list have resulted in me abandoning all hope of ever understanding how to work with my DAZ content in Blender. I hope you have some success in simplifying the process for us.

I would also concur that many of the things on that list have tutorials online already but very few address working with imported DAZ content in mind. Thomas has done an incredible job of doing a lot of the work for us but many will not grasp how to take advantage of the tools provided.

Hi Marble, that's exactly my goal, to make DAZ content practical within Blender. On the templates, I probably move over to blogspot as well. When it comes to the tutorial I'll probably try different approaches that are goal oriented and above all be practical, or have FAQs were applicable. You make some good points to tackle! Thanks!

Paintbox said:

Hey DAZ/Diffeo users, I spent quite a lot of time on this, so hopefully this will be the start of something beautiful ;-) , I am in progress of making a tutorial site. In the first installment I cover all the basics. It is written from the standpoint of the noob (which I am when it comes to Diffeomorphic, haha) , so it forgoes all the technicalities of Thomas (excellent) explanations in favour of a more guided and focused approach.

You can find it here :

https://roadvsmap.neocities.org/diffeo/diffeo_mainindex.html

I am looking into what the next step will be, so input is surely welcome, my own thoughts are probably something on lighting, textures or posing. Hope there is some use for it!  I also don't mind constructive criticism, especially if my english is not clear enough.

Wow, so glad that you are taking on this task. I would echo everything that Krampus said and also Donald's comment about a nice HTML template. I might add that these are the things I find difficult to grasp and I assume that others who are not at the level of expertise of say, Padone, might find difficult.

• How to drape clothing (or is it even possible)?
• How and where to find the material surface adjustments - perhaps links to more information on how to tweak them.
• The differences between Eevee and Cycles.
• Maybe a little about viewport navigation because Blender is not like DAZ Studio. In Blender, we don't view through the camera like we do in DAZ Studio so this can be confusing to noobs (and still is for me even though I've watched the tutorials).
• How to pose. Whether to pose in DAZ Studio and import the pose (how to do that) or whether to pose in Blender. Of course, we are then back to the clothing drape issue.
• Rigging (maybe this should be at the top of the list). Differences between rig options and which is suited to which purpose.
• Morphs - I am utterly in the dark when it comes to all the different types of morph (custom, JCM, etc.) and how to import and apply them and how to manipulate the imported custom morphs (Shape Keys in Blender).
• Geografts and Geoshells - do they work? Should we merge the geometry? If so, how and what does that mean? Will the geograft morphs still work in Blender?
• Hair. A subject in itself due to all the different hair types and the fact that there are other import/conversion tools. I know nothing about hair technology.

Many of the things on that list have resulted in me abandoning all hope of ever understanding how to work with my DAZ content in Blender. I hope you have some success in simplifying the process for us.

I would also concur that many of the things on that list have tutorials online already but very few address working with imported DAZ content in mind. Thomas has done an incredible job of doing a lot of the work for us but many will not grasp how to take advantage of the tools provided.

Interesting results here.

I tried a scene with a G8F character, another character (G3M) and a set of props etc. and the scene took 45 seconds to load. Then I tried the base G8F alone and she loaded in less than 10 seconds.

I have a 6 core Ryzen 5 5600X with 64GB RAM and my content is stored on an SSD. 

Compared to several others in this thread, I have very few G8F characters (I count 22) but I do buy morph packs like the Zev0 sets and Muscularity morphs, Not so big on expression packs though - I like to pose the face myself.

Gordig said:

You don't need to convert morphs or textures. I'm less certain about grafts, but since the geometry hasn't changed, I suspect those will work without issue, too. G8.1 does have a new UV, so if you wanted to convert them, you could load a G8 texture onto G8.1 and then Map Transfer to the new UV, but you wouldn't get the benefit of textures which were made for the new UV. 

how do i map transfer uvs?

The issue of character load times - the time to add a new character to a scene or, indeed, the time to load a scene file with one or more characters in it - has been around for some time.  It's not specific to the the 4.15 release but it is present in this release.  It has been discussed multiple times in multiple places; it seems as though a new thread in "The Commons" or elsewhere gets started every couple of weeks and the issue is frequently raised on general threads.  Recently the discussion started anew on the Genesis 8.1 thread with this comment.

The issue is really simple; it takes me over 92 seconds to merge the "Genesis 8 Basic Female" into an empty scene if DAZ Studio can see all the content I've purchased, but if I hide most of that content the merge takes under 2.65 seconds.  As we buy more content the product actually slows down, and it slows down a lot; by a factor over over 34 in my case.

Explantions have been posted in multiple places, but they are rarely clear; users with a detailed knowledge of DAZStudio will explain it in terms that depend on knowledge of how a character actually works.  The work rounds are not obvious and the benefits not clear.  For me it became so annoying that I ended up figuring I had to work out what was going on in terms I could understand and then come up with something that would at least get back to the speed I had a year or so ago.  The work round I came up with gives me a time of about 20 seconds to insert a new character.

To get to this time I have divided my DAZ content installation into separate directories according to the type of the product.  New characters go in one installation directory, conversion scripts, character specific props, animations, wardrobe items, poses, expressions and general morphs each have their own root.  DAZStudio can see all of these as separate directories in the DAZStudio "Content Directory Manager", and DIM sees them as possibilities for the "Advanced Settings/Installation" pane "Content Path Shortcut".  Because I can de-select ("remove") individual directories from the DAZStudio Content Directory Manager I have been able to perform simple tests of the load time of a character and establish where the time goes; hard numbers rather than speculation about exactly what is going wrong.

These load time tests produced the following results; obviously they are specific to me but they show how different products affect the character load time:

Times are in seconds to load the "Genesis 8 Basic Female".  The basic time is in the "+CACHE" column, the "NO CACHE" column lists the time after the DSON cache directory is completely deleted and the "SIZE" column is the size, in bytes, of the Female8.cache.dsf file in the cache.  The left columns indicate what combination of products I made visible to DAZStudio before performing the timing test, I restarted DAZStudio before each test.  The column headers above the check marks should explain exactly what was in the CMS; the left column is a little cryptic.

What these tests show is that some products, animations, the various converter/script products and props (weapons etc) have next to no effect on character load time.  Products that morph the characters - poses, expressions and raw morph packages as well as, curiously, wardrobe items have a significant effect on load times, but the really big issue is characters.  My "figures-in-use" set has been dervied over the last month or so by starting with no figures visible ("G8 no figures" - no figures but everything else is visible) and adding figures as I opened scenes and encountered the "you need to install this product" dialog.

In fact I have a total of 636 G8 figure products (i.e. separate DIM packages) of which 78 are in my "Genesis 8/Figures in use" content directory.  So I have only one eighth of my purchased G8 figures visible in my standard content set ("G8 figures-in-use" above).

So my current approach is to accept a 7.5x slow down and I could reduce this to a 4.2x slow down (the "G8 no figures" row) by using a scene specific set of G8 figures - only the ones I actually use in that scene.

Most of the CMS changes I made have a relatively small effect on load time. The take-away here is that hiding individual character products and only making visible those that are actually used in the scene is a sure way o substantially improving scene load time.  Of course that really doesn't work in practice - it takes longer to set that up within DAZStudio that it takes to load the character or the scene, but it may make sense to have "character groups" or characters typically used together and it certainly makes sense for me to hide most - seven eighths - of the character products I own!

You don't need to convert morphs or textures. I'm less certain about grafts, but since the geometry hasn't changed, I suspect those will work without issue, too. G8.1 does have a new UV, so if you wanted to convert them, you could load a G8 texture onto G8.1 and then Map Transfer to the new UV, but you wouldn't get the benefit of textures which were made for the new UV. 

Wonderland said:

algovincian said:

Wonderland said:

7 minutes and 38 seconds. I usually go make coffee or something to eat...

Wow . . . that would be enough to drive me to drink - hope you put a little Bailey's in there ;)

There was a time a while back (when I had less content) that G8F was taking 8+ minutes to load for me. Drove me crazy and I stopped using DS altogether because of it. Turned out to be one morph package that was the culprit. Never did find out exactly what the issue was, but un-installing it did the trick and got my load times back down to around 30 seconds.

- Greg

Which morph package? I own all of them. The problem is, I use all of them. I rarely use a character as is and do my own morphs. I also own a ton of characters so I can mix morphs. I still get that duplicate formula warning and Zilpha loads with every G8 character and tech support is aware of it and still won't fix it. I'm wondering if that's slowing things down. 

Barbult asked the same thing and unfortunately I just can't remember. I've gone back to try to find any posts I may have made about it, but so far haven't had any luck.

- Greg 

PerttiA said:

Making comparisons is quite useless if the total number of morphfiles is not included. Someone with less that 100 "characters", small amount of other morphfiles and expressions can have the figure load in seconds, when someone having 1000+ "characters", a lot of morph files and a ton of expressions may expect loading times to be several minutes if not several tens of minutes. 

The warnings and errors recorded in the logfile can make loading take considerably longer in both cases.

Thanks for taking the time to read the original post where I ackowledged all the variables. As stated in that post, that info is useful (I welcome discussion about it), but I wanted to keep responding as quick and easy as possible for people.

What I'm primarily interested in is the kind of loading times people are experiencing (for whatever reason). After giving people a few days to respond, I hoped to have a discussion about if/how load times effect people's use of DS and what they buy in the store. If you think the thread is useless, then by all means feel free to ignore it.

- Greg

hansolocambo said:

One way to do that would be to :

- Be sure that all your apps units are set to 1cm = 1unit

- Export a human mesh as FBX from Character Creator

- From DAZ, Load a G8 male or female and File > Send to ZBrush (Base resolution)

- Now in ZBrush you have the Base DAZ G8. Load the CC3 exported FBX 

- Use ZWrap to set points on both meshes so that the DAZ mesh takes the shape of the CC3 Mesh. 

- Once the wrapping is done, use GoZ in ZBrush to send back the G8 now morphed.

And there you go. You have a G8 morphed into a CC3 character, already rigged and useable. 

Do bear in mind that the original shape belongs to the creator/reallusion - whether doing this may or may not produce something usable in the desired manner depends on the license terms.

Also bear in mind that, as with any morph, soem rigging adjustment may be needed.

Maybe someone should create a pot morph?

EDIT: and material

My load times are around 75 secs for G8F and just over 60 for G8M.

This same subject was discussed in another thread, I believe in the DAZ Studio forum. In that thread there were a few people pointing the finger at expression packs, rather than characters as one of the main culprits for load time. Remember that apart from the main DAZ characters, quite a lot of PA characters don't have a lot of JCMs, sometimes none at all, so the number of dsf files they add maybe as low as just 3-4. Expression packs with dial controls tend to have at least 30 main dsf files, and also the same number of additional dsf files to set up the dials in the head as well. However it is likely the biggest issue is the expression dials are normally not just activating a single morph, but instead change a large number of base expressions, and it is setting up these numerous interdependencies that could be slowly things down. I uninstalled just 4 of my packs, and it seemed to improve loading times by around 20% or so. Note that expression packs that are simple duf files have no effect at all on load times, but most in the store these days do include dials, which I believe was not true back in the Genesis 1/2 era, which may explain why those older bases will load quicker, even if you have a similar number of characters installed.

One thing that helps supports this theory is the load times of Wonderland, which seem to be a good deal higher than most other people here. I recall her telling us in a different thread that she has a huge number of expression installed, I recall her posting a list of them, and I was pretty impressed, I think she might own every Zeddicus expression pack ever released. I seem to remember her saying she had also created her own expression dials.

Did a bit more towards getting the model into DS. It seems I'm going to have to re-model the central grass in my modeller because in the third render, you can see sharp triangle artefacts marking the grass going from the end of the Javelin Runway to the corner by the 200m start in the bottom left of the image. Irritating as it's a fairly complex shape with those clipped corners due to the running track and the 800cm radius at the end of the Javelin thowing runway. Going to take a fair bit to correctly model that again.

I've got the water in the steeplechase water jump, and need to create a tartan cover for it. The pole vault, shot and discus/hammer features are there along with most lines needed. There are 8000+ facets in each of the sand pits for long & triple jumps (5cm square) ready to apply impact morphs. Getting there, but still a bit of work to do. I have an idea for the sand morphs - pose a figure and animate an impact with the sand with dForce dynamic surface for the sand and no gravity. Then save as an obj & re-import as a morph. Do it with several poses & that should give a reasonable range of dialable morphs.

Plan view:

From the 100m start at competitor eye level:

From a 300m altitude:

Regards,

Richard

jeff_someone said:

I can import a character with a simple dress on, merge rigs, but when I pose it, the simple dress does not deform the same way it does in Daz.

The deformations will not be the same if you don't import jcms too. Then some outfits may have custom morphs too.

steps

1. import the figure
2. merge armatures
3. import jcms
4. transfer jcms to the outfit

Christoph7891 said:

Taoz said:

5 minutes exactly, with 712 G8F characters and a lot of morph packages installed, DS 4.15.  Hardware 10+ years old - first gen Core 2 Quad 6600, DDR2 RAM and only HDDs.  An i5-4690 CPU is over 4 times faster, so you have to take CPU speed into account too.

Dont forget, it's about single-threaded performance, not overall CPU performance. So you can have a CPU that's 100 cores and it's 100 times faster, but it won't make a difference as loading a character is single-threaded. For faster load times on the hardware front, the key seems to be a CPU with strong single-thread performance. Fortunatly there are lots of good benchmarks for this.

True, but those CPUs I talk about are both 4 cores / 4 threads so in that case an overall performance comparison will also give a good hint about about single thread performance.  I did get the numbers wrong though I can see as I was looking at the wrong test, the 4690 is actually about 2.3 times faster single threaded and 3 times faster multithreaded than the Q6600, in CBMarks :

https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-compared/page2.html

In any case, my point was just that there are different variables at play here so a simple load time test among users doesn't say much about what is causing the huge differences.

Oh wait, I found under the Shaping tab a morph slider for "FW_Lashes", whatever that is. And it does exactly that, makes the lashes longer or shorter. And if you de-select the "Use Limits" them lashes can be made REAL long. So maybe it's both. You can morph and you can apply alpha masks. 

algovincian said:

Wonderland said:

7 minutes and 38 seconds. I usually go make coffee or something to eat...

Wow . . . that would be enough to drive me to drink - hope you put a little Bailey's in there ;)

There was a time a while back (when I had less content) that G8F was taking 8+ minutes to load for me. Drove me crazy and I stopped using DS altogether because of it. Turned out to be one morph package that was the culprit. Never did find out exactly what the issue was, but un-installing it did the trick and got my load times back down to around 30 seconds.

- Greg

Which morph package? I own all of them. The problem is, I use all of them. I rarely use a character as is and do my own morphs. I also own a ton of characters so I can mix morphs. I still get that duplicate formula warning and Zilpha loads with every G8 character and tech support is aware of it and still won't fix it. I'm wondering if that's slowing things down.