Fire Angel said:

• There are five small city blocks that can tile, so by snapping them together at their edges you can make a lot of layouts with it.  This alone makes it very flexible.
• Each block can be rotated through ninety degree increments and will still tile, so you can use the same block in a row of four linked together and it will not be obvious from street level that it is the same block, as each side has been carefully designed to look quite different.
• The memory use is optimised to a silly degree for such a large set.  It gives you a huge amount of city to use in your renders and still does not use anywhere near as much memory as some single street sets I have bought.  I laughed out loud when I realised that.
• The design of the blocks and their contents means that if you rotate and chain them together in the right way you can easily portray a very very long city avenue, stretching off into the distance.  However if arranged differently you can make short, more confined looking backstreets from exactly the same set of blocks!  This will be missed by some people, but I think it is one of the best features and yet another way in which US3 is flexible.
• There is a lot of scope for customisation of various kinds, from changing the street signs to retexturing the shop signs to make even more variation.  Go out and photograph some of your local shops if you want ideas, or maybe import and use the signs from those photos.  I am sure you can think of more ideas if you've been using it, and probably even if you haven't.

Thanks for that. One thing Stonemason always does well is optimising his models and offering more versatility in their use. It's fun just to explore his sets sometimes and find new angles.

Fire Angel said:

I forgot to mention in my first post that I use all my DAZ content and the 3D content I buy elsewhere in Blender, not in DAZ Studio.  The Diffeomorphic script for DAZ Studio is used to prepare and export the figures and then they are imported into Blender using the Diffeomorphic add-on for Blender.  This does make customising stuff extra easy, as Blender has a highly comprehensive set of modelling tools in it.  However a lot of the customisation I am going to show does not require anything other than an image editor to make custom textures with.

OK, here is my first addition to the set; the sixth block in my Urban Sprawl 3 collection; the park!  Off to the right of the cinema you can see it.  I took one of the five existing blocks, loaded it in, deleted all the buildings and retextured the paving in the middle using the grass texture used for some of the grass patches in US3.  I added some of the benches from a courtyard elsewhere in US3, then loaded in some high quality but low polygon count trees and arranged them to make the park.  I will certainly get some use out of this one, and because an open flat space is not exactly polygon-heavy and there are also fewer textures this block uses less memory than the five original blocks.  I cannot recall which product I used for the trees but I will work it out and post a link to the product page here on the DAZ site.

Looking good 

I love Blender but I always seem to go the other way for rendering. I guess I'm just more familiar with DS and Iray now.

 

I have a problem when using Golden Palace and STX nipples & navel on my genesis 9 character (victoria 9 skin) and trying to import into Blender via Diffeomorphic. I can't figure out why the grafts don't merge correctly. They seem to both leave a seam as well as have slightly off colors on the grafts.

This is how I set them up in Daz:

- Added Golden Palace "Smart Vanilla"

- Clicked Golden Palace "copy material script" now it has skin and looks correct

- Added STX navel and nipples (independently)

- Clicked STX Copy materials script (which doesn't work because Golden Palace messes it up).

- Took me a while but I fixed all materials by selecting the majora and minor SHELLS as well as the navel and nipples OBJECTS in scene then clicked the fix shell Omni script in Golden Palace

- Everything looks correct in Daz now

 

Things I've tried to get it into Blender via diffeo:

- Selecting "Merge Geografts" through the Easy Importer dialog and additionally selecting "Merge UV Layers."

- Selecting "Merge Geografts" through the Easy Importer dialog and additionally de-selecting "Merge UV Layers."

- De-selecting "Merge Geografts" through the Easy Importer dialog and then going to the finalize tab and trying to merge after import

 

What's going wrong? and is there a way to just bake the grafts into the mesh in daz before hand?

 

Update:

I tried creating a new project and only loaded Golden Palace this time. I used material script from golden palace and it is correct in Daz. Diffeomorphic did that exact same thing to the graft.

 

Diffeomorphic version 1.7.3

Blender Version 4.0.2

Tags are a separate thing, you can add them to items via the Smart Content pane in the (collapsed, usually) section at the bottom of the pane - which also has  tabs for file info and other things.

The Content Library search is much more limited in features than that in Smart Content (after all, not every file in the Content Library will have any metadata), so yes that is the expected behaviour.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Having bought Urban Sprawl 3 I am a happy customer and as usual with Stonemason's products I am highly impressed.  There are a lot of subtleties in Urban Sprawl 3 that aren't obvious in the product images, so it's actually better in some ways than you might think from looking at the description and renders on the product page.  Some of the benefits are obvious, some really aren't so I'll cover both for anyone who hasn't bought it yet.

• There are five small city blocks that can tile, so by snapping them together at their edges you can make a lot of layouts with it.  This alone makes it very flexible.
• Each block can be rotated through ninety degree increments and will still tile, so you can use the same block in a row of four linked together and it will not be obvious from street level that it is the same block, as each side has been carefully designed to look quite different.
• The memory use is optimised to a silly degree for such a large set.  It gives you a huge amount of city to use in your renders and still does not use anywhere near as much memory as some single street sets I have bought.  I laughed out loud when I realised that.
• The design of the blocks and their contents means that if you rotate and chain them together in the right way you can easily portray a very very long city avenue, stretching off into the distance.  However if arranged differently you can make short, more confined looking backstreets from exactly the same set of blocks!  This will be missed by some people, but I think it is one of the best features and yet another way in which US3 is flexible.
• There is a lot of scope for customisation of various kinds, from changing the street signs to retexturing the shop signs to make even more variation.  Go out and photograph some of your local shops if you want ideas, or maybe import and use the signs from those photos.  I am sure you can think of more ideas if you've been using it, and probably even if you haven't.

Yep, another happy customer.  Anyway, on to the main subject, I am posting this to see the level of interest and to suggest similar projects to others.  I hope other people will join in and post their own customisation efforts.  This first post contains no renders but those will appear quite quickly.

Richard Haseltine said:

NorthOf45 said:

I have had the CMS turn off by itself a few times, causing me to question why the metadata is not available when installing new stuff. As it is, the gray and grayer button does not exactly grab your attention when it has changed, unless you are watching it. How about something with a little colour? Green for ON, maybe? Keep the gray for OFF...

"Installing new stuff" suggests you may have closed DS and started DIM in quick succession, or vice versa. That can lead to PostgreSQL still being busy closing down when the start signal is sent by the other application, or even the signal not being sent if the timing if perfectly unhelpful. It isn't necessary to close the one to use the other. (Not that that has any bearing on the requeat for clearer differentiation.)

Timing the start/stop of the two might have been the cause. That is totally up to me, but easy to overlook as I rarely do it, but, as you say, does not detract from a need for better status indication.

NorthOf45 said:

I have had the CMS turn off by itself a few times, causing me to question why the metadata is not available when installing new stuff. As it is, the gray and grayer button does not exactly grab your attention when it has changed, unless you are watching it. How about something with a little colour? Green for ON, maybe? Keep the gray for OFF...

"Installing new stuff" suggests you may have closed DS and started DIM in quick succession, or vice versa. That can lead to PostgreSQL still being busy closing down when the start signal is sent by the other application, or even the signal not being sent if the timing if perfectly unhelpful. It isn't necessary to close the one to use the other. (Not that that has any bearing on the requeat for clearer differentiation.)

I've been building my first character in Daz and tried moving it over to diffeomorphic for the first time to find that the skin looked really strange and plasticy (see first picture). I've been at this now for 6 hours. I originally though it was an issue with Diffeo but I created a new basic gen 9 female with the same skin and upon import to blender it looks correct and the same as Daz (see second picture). I snooped around the sufface editors and the node trees look the same. I can't figure out what I did to my character that could have caused this or how to undo it. the whites of my characters eyes are also not right, they seem to be grey-ish, and her hair is suppost to be brown not black (see third picture for how she is supposed to look).

I've ensured the enviroment settings are the same between my test character and real character (so my eyes arent just playing tricks on me). I've tried re-applying the Victoria 9 skin (which should undo any makeup). I had played around with Skin Effects Adventure acouple days ago and had applied Daz Uber Base to get it to work over my other geoshell/graffs (stx navel/nipples and Golden Palace) as per the recomendation of a tutorial i watched on the matter. I thought maybe THAT could have been what messed it up, but after applying dzDefault shader it didn't fix it. Not sure what else to do. Please help! thank you

 

 

I have had the CMS turn off by itself a few times, causing me to question why the metadata is not available when installing new stuff. As it is, the gray and grayer button does not exactly grab your attention when it has changed, unless you are watching it. How about something with a little colour? Green for ON, maybe? Keep the gray for OFF...

Ninefold said:

josiahmora20 said:

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

You could apply new exported versions of your character to herself as shapekeys, but that seems like it would be its own hassle, with her hair, clothing, etc. You don't have to set every material up from scratch every time. Just apply the previous frame's materials to the character in the new frame.

oh, duhh, that makes sense. (sorry, really am a newb here). 

 

josiahmora20 said:

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

You could apply new exported versions of your character to herself as shapekeys, but that seems like it would be its own hassle, with her hair, clothing, etc. You don't have to set every material up from scratch every time. Just apply the previous frame's materials to the character in the new frame.

Ninefold said:

josiahmora20 said:

I really appreciate the info. I restarted my computer and now it seems to be working fine to load the rendered view.. very strange. Obj seems like a good option, however, I'm concerned about the textures- for example,when I was trying to edit a 3rd party horse 3 texture or makeup textures in photoshop, they seemed to be a combination of different textures stacke don top of eachother. How do you go about making sure they look the same in daz? seems like a headache to set up no? 

I'm not sure I understand the situation you're describing. Were you trying to edit LIE textures, like from Design Anvil's Horse 3 materials sets? LIE components, which I think are usually just transparent .pngs that DAZ Studio can stack up in the layered image editor, and things like the transparency maps for geoshells, are ultimately just a bunch of alpha maps and color maps that you can plug into mix nodes. How you use this is situational. For something like the DA horse materials, combine your texture maps as desired and plug them into the base color of a principled BSDF node. For makeup, you might find yourself mixing things into a character's roughness or metallicity channels, or using the mix shader node. I find some makeup (like lip gloss) looks best on a slightly offset solidify modifier "geoshell" with its shadows turned off and transmission cranked way up.

Also how does dforce hair look? i can't seem to get it looking right at all (very clumpy) in diffeo)

I haven't really explored this, though I tried using Diffeomorphic to convert a polygonal hair to hair curves once and that seemed to work fine. (I ended up not pursuing that render for reasons unrelated to the hair.) I recommend looking at tutorials for whichever Blender native hair system you're converting the dForce hair to. If it's hair curves, use the scalp opacity map as a density mask. This might go for particle hair as well, but I'm less familiar with it.

josiahmora20 said:

hey thanks for that! that fixed the blockiness, but I have this weird thing, any ideas? 

This is the head mesh clipping through the hair's scalp mesh. You can fix it by grabbing a few vertices and adjusting them in edit mode.

Thanks for all this. Yeah I'm just trying to find the fastest and mnost effective work flow, I'm trying to make a comic and so having to re-do materials for every new frame seems like a headache. Do you know of a way I could just replace the pose if i import her as an obj? 

Ninefold said:

I don't use Diffeomorphic, so I can't speak to most of this, but once you've selected Cycles in the Render tab, make sure you also switch the device dropdown that will appear to "GPU compute". Cycles will run on the CPU by default, which is excruciatingly slow. Once it's on the GPU, you will probably find it no more strenuous for your computer than Iray (and I personally find it a bit "politer", in terms of the liveability of non-GPU-intensive activities on my computer while a render is happening).

I use Blender basically the way that you want to (developing environments around static posed figures, and rendering), and I usually just export .objs and set up their materials manually. I can confirm that geografts look fine when you do this. The naming convention for DAZ character textures breaks Blender's UDIM workflow, so I like to copy all of a character's textures into a new folder and rename them to be Blender UDIM-friendly so that I can set up a single material for a character's skin and nails. I also like to separate characters' cornea/eye moisture surface into its own object so that I can turn shadows off for that object, though you can leave everything as is and accomplish the same thing with a light path node.

I really appreciate the info. I restarted my computer and now it seems to be working fine to load the rendered view.. very strange. Obj seems like a good option, however, I'm concerned about the textures- for example,when I was trying to edit a 3rd party horse 3 texture or makeup textures in photoshop, they seemed to be a combination of different textures stacke don top of eachother. How do you go about making sure they look the same in daz? seems like a headache to set up no? 

Also how does dforce hair look? i can't seem to get it looking right at all (very clumpy) in diffeo)

One more concern, doing it the way you suggest wouldn't I have to re-import my character and re-do the materials every time I want to bring he back from daz with a new pose?

try the latest beta as the FBX import has been improved

otherwise Carrara imports FBX  and so does Poser 11+

.dae there is possibly more chance of getting it in rigged correctly but varies a lot

DAZ Studio can import .fbx and .dae files, so those should be fine. You can see a list of importable formats by opening the import dialogue (File >> Import), then clicking on the formats dropdown to the left of the file name input box. You might need to move the dialogue box to the left to keep the formats dropdown from running off the edge of the screen. It's mostly a bunch of Poser formats, and industry standard formats like .fbx, .dae, .bvh, .obj and so on.

Newbie here, I've just finished my first Daz characters (genesis 9).My project isn't for animation, just still images. The original plan was to use Daz to pose them together then import with diffeomoephic in Blender, that way I can model my own scenes there. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but I've tried all 3 shader types for 'Easy import' and either the eyes are missing or weird glossy material, or the body is white, or the skin just looks bad. Not too mention the golden palace and nipple/navel graffs are just sitting on top of the origal mesh. On top of all this my computer (which runs Daz so smooth) can't even seem to handle viewport rendering in blender. There has to be a better/more effective way of doing this. Again I don't need to animate or even pose anything in blender. I just want to import the characters, have their materials looks the same, their geograffs and geoshells work, and for it not to give my brain new $1500 computer a hard time (which I feel like it really shouldn't ..) Any advice?

Then you export and import settinmgs don't match up (it's best to use one of the presets) or you are scaling in Blender or its import/export settings.

Ok, since getting into DAZ, I've been making some real progress but am now hitting walls in using my Poser content. When I import my custom morphed V4 figures the go bat****. Bodies are malformed and explode when I use poses on them. When I use character faces for V4, the eyes pop out of the skull and are not able to be moved back into place, moving an eye moves the head and destroys stuff more. I really need to use my V4 characters (and even 1 in v3 format) but it seems Daz is picky about some of my Poser stuff. I am looking at a convertor that takes poses from Poser and converts them to .DUF. https://www.daz3d.com/batch-convert-gen4-poses-to-duf-format

Will this work for the V4 morphs++ as well? I dont mind remaking my characters with the V3 and V4 that come in DAZ but my Poser morphs++ dont work and premade character faces do the eye thing, so I am hoping using .duf files may be more compatible. I''m between Poser and DAZ and I just cant make much headway anymore. This would be the cheapest option if it works for the morphs++ as to buy them again for DAZ is $32 and the characters I use that I can find are $20-30 each. I dont make money on commisions anymore so theres not a lot of disposable income to spend thousand and thousands for DAZ assets. 

$14 for pose convertor or $32 for DAZ V4 shapes++ or $275 to buy the latest version of Poser (but I friggin LOVE IRAY)

Faeryl Womyn said:

Oh ya I keep forgetting I use clothes from all generations on all generations...thank you Morph Loader Pro lol ... I actually got an old AlphaSeed, formerly known as Aery Soul, outfit for V3 to fit G3. I don't bother with the plugins and extra bits, just take whatever version model with the outfit in question into Blender (use to use Hexagon) make the outfit adjustments, save out obj and import to daz as morph, then I can keep the original rigging and morphs. Just save as morph asset to use again.

I do plan on trying to make clones to help with the progress for better fits.

I should learn to do that. Sounds great! From what I've tried, the clones work like magic! Mostly, I've been dressing some of my G8 people in V4 clothes. 

Torquinox said:

Faeryl Womyn said:

I've dabbled with G9 but rarely, I'm more of a G8 and G2 person, I still have all models all the way back to Generation 3 installed. The older models are great for background characters since they're lower poly. 

Cool! I also still use the older figures. I'm getting more range out of their outfits with clones. It would not be trivial to start really using G9. To me, it would mean (at minimum) having https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-9-essential-shapes-bundle and https://www.daz3d.com/natural-movements-pack-for-genesis-9 - maybe also https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-natural-bend-morphs-for-genesis-9-female-base. That does not include visiting the Naughty Store for enhancements that I already have for earlier generations. Then I have to actually use all that, and I've already got thousands of items. 

I like the look of some G9 outfits, but using those on older figures would require https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-genesis-9-clones-for-all or rolling my own g9 clones. I suppose I'll have to at least buy/find/put together few clones to take advantage of the few G9 things I've already acquired. I got the entertaining (if impractical) https://www.daz3d.com/skinny-jeans-ourfit-for-genesis-9 to for my Pot of Gold. I'm just wondering how someone like https://www.daz3d.com/dragonsbane-barbarian-character-hd-for-genesis-3-male would look in that. It would be different! 

Apologies for thread-jacking. Happy St Patty's Day!

Oh ya I keep forgetting I use clothes from all generations on all generations...thank you Morph Loader Pro lol ... I actually got an old AlphaSeed, formerly known as Aery Soul, outfit for V3 to fit G3. I don't bother with the plugins and extra bits, just take whatever version model with the outfit in question into Blender (use to use Hexagon) make the outfit adjustments, save out obj and import to daz as morph, then I can keep the original rigging and morphs. Just save as morph asset to use again.

I do plan on trying to make clones to help with the progress for better fits.

Most likely you closed daz Studio, started install manager, and isntaled the content - as a result the database engine wasn't runing (it was still closing down from DS when DIM would have asked it to start) and so the product wasn't added to the database. The files can still be found by their location, and will still appear under Daz Studio Formats in the Content Library. Go to the Content Library and open its option menu (the lined/hamburger button in the top corner, or right-click the tab) and select Content DB Maintenance; check Reimport Metadata and click Accept; check the products thata re installed but not appearing in database-driven views (greyed out in Products) and click Accept.

If you install through DIM there is really no reason to have DS work online (the only benefit is getting personalised notifications in the New scene dialogue).