Sorry, that's all I got :)

My workflow is to export an animated figure via Alembic with Sagan at base res, and import that into Marvelous designer. I simulate that and export the results to Blender via Alembic. I then import a higher res animation into Blender, again via Sagan, and lay it over the MD Alembic, and the results are always perfect.

I should point out that I haven't yet figured out how to retopo garments that are not native MD garments. There's got to be a way, but I haven't figured it out. Native MD garments are not a problem.

Pickle Renderer said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

And even though the bone orientation of the feet is all messed up anyway (because that actorcore armature's bone orientations were different from the G8, and I haven't accounted for this yet is the back-to-daz script. The feet look fine in Blender.), the feet do slide because the bone proportions from the Hip down are different between the two armatures. But that is because the retarget script I use is not a real retargeter and just applies bone rotation constraints, with no math to correct for differences. I didn't bother to apply the Quick Rig IK and do the general work to fix it... that IK works was not what I was trying to demonstrate. The important point, though, is that the feet slide in DAZ in the exact same way the slide in Blender. Fix it in Blender and it is fixed in DAZ.

So what you're suggesting is if you make the animation natively in Blender, with a Simple Rig Daz character imported via. Diffeo, it probably will import back correctly without any loss of fidelity, after baking.

Not quite. The steps I did are those listed in the Youtube video. Diffeo is not involved at all. The precise steps I followed are listed in the Youtube video, nothing more nothing less.

If you wanted to keyframe the animation natively in Blender, the only difference is that instead of running the "pseudo retarget" script, you would use ARP's Quick Rig with the G8 preset I made, that seems to work suitably. The reason why it works is that Quick Rig's magic is that it can apply an IK rig to an existing armature without modifying it, so you have the best of both worlds: a world class IK rig and an armature that still matches the G8 armature exactly and so all the rotations are still correct and the result is no foot sliding, contact points match perfectly, etc...

And please note that I am not "suggesting" anything. You've seen it work now. The Quaternions that get sent back to DS are baked, so how they actually get calculated doesn't matter... it can be via constraints to a source armature or it can be from an IK rig, or a blend of the two. Once it's baked, it has no memory of its state before it was baked, and the Quaternions work back in DS.

After 4 years, I think I finally figured it out. The only real issues are:

1) When retargeting from mocap data, I haven't thought through what transformation is necessary when the source armature's orientation does not match the target armature's orientation. Hence the janky feet. This is not an issue if you keyframe with or without an IK rig.

2) I thought I had it licked, but the twist bones don't quite work like I thought. Notice that, say, the forearms look correct but there is extreme twisting around the elbows joints at extreme angles, even while the pose itself looks correct.

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

And even though the bone orientation of the feet is all messed up anyway (because that actorcore armature's bone orientations were different from the G8, and I haven't accounted for this yet is the back-to-daz script. The feet look fine in Blender.), the feet do slide because the bone proportions from the Hip down are different between the two armatures. But that is because the retarget script I use is not a real retargeter and just applies bone rotation constraints, with no math to correct for differences. I didn't bother to apply the Quick Rig IK and do the general work to fix it... that IK works was not what I was trying to demonstrate. The important point, though, is that the feet slide in DAZ in the exact same way the slide in Blender. Fix it in Blender and it is fixed in DAZ.

So what you're suggesting is if you make the animation natively in Blender, with a Simple Rig Daz character imported via. Diffeo, it probably will import back correctly without any loss of fidelity, after baking.

Pickle Renderer said:

That was back in Daz from Blender?  I was paying close attention to the feet (no, I'm not one of those fetishist people).  Looks amazing.  She's not ice skating.

It was the animation exported back to DAZ so the JCMs would work, but then in order to render it, I exported it back to Blender via Sagan (which is Alembic) so that it is a pixel-perfect rendition of what was in DAZ Studio. So the comparison is fair.

And even though the bone orientation of the feet is all messed up anyway (because that actorcore armature's bone orientations were different from the G8, and I haven't accounted for this yet is the back-to-daz script. The feet look fine in Blender.), the feet do slide because the bone proportions from the Hip down are different between the two armatures. But that is because the retarget script I use is not a real retargeter and just applies bone rotation constraints, with no math to correct for differences. I didn't bother to apply the Quick Rig IK and do the general work to fix it... that IK works was not what I was trying to demonstrate. The important point, though, is that the feet slide in DAZ in the exact same way the slide in Blender. Fix it in Blender and it is fixed in DAZ.

I chose this particular animation because it was a case where even the Houdini retargeter that Alex wrote, that I'm sure calculated all the Eulers correctly, confused DAZ on import. I wanted to see if using Quaternions instead of Euler Angles would fix the problem. It did. Again, even that problem was a case of a generic tool that just doesn't speak "DAZ Studio" and a specific solution that understands DS's peculiarities is needed.

wolf359 said:

These are not “Claims”

I made a 90 minute animated film using  iclone motion exported as BVH to Daz Studio

 

A Genesis 2 pose preset will NOT work on G8
that has long been established.
If you insist on using external Motion data on Genesis1- 8 to render in Daz studio, then you should consider buying an Autodesk MOBU sub or spending the $900 USD for Iclone 8 & CC4.

So you've been using iClone motion exported as BVH in Daz Studio, but you can't have been using Genesis 3, 8, 8.1 or 9, because BVH doesn't import correctly for those, unless you're also doing something you haven't specified in your post.  So let's be clear.  Which Daz rigs are you applying your BVH to (1 or 2 I assume).  And what are MOBU and iClone doing that none of the other options do?  Mangling their FBX and BVH output to work with the Daz rig?  What precisely are you doing to get animation onto later Daz rigs from these external packages?

mehdi.biz96 said:

hi everyone im actually fairly new to daz studio and i wanted to transfer a morph from a g8f figure to a g9f  since i didnt find any script or plugin that automates this process i tried asking chatGPT since it can write code however i have no experience with daz scripts ( or python in general ) so im gonna share what i got from chatGPT if someone can tell if its usable or can be modified to work well 

import os
import sys
import dson.dzdsonimporter as dzimp
import dson.dzdsonexporter as dzexp
import dson.dzdsonio as dzio
import dson.dzdsoncommon as dzcom
import dson.dzdsonutils as dzut
import dson.dzdsondata as dzdata
import dson.dzdsonconstants as dzconst
import dson.dzdsonmaterial as dzmat

# Get references to the selected Genesis 8 and Genesis 9 figures
g8 = None
g9 = None
selection = dzcom.get_selection()
for node in selection:
    if node.is_figure() and node.label() == "Genesis 8 Female":
        g8 = node
    elif node.is_figure() and node.label() == "Genesis 9 Female":
        g9 = node

# Check if both figures were selected
if g8 is None or g9 is None:
    print("Please select both a Genesis 8 Female and a Genesis 9 Female figure before running the script.")
else:
    # Get the file path for the morph to load
    morph_path = dzio.get_file("Please select a morph to load onto " + g8.label() + ".", dzio.FileType.DSON, dzio.FileLoadType.OPEN)

    # Load the morph onto the Genesis 8 figure
    if morph_path is not None:
        g8.load_morph(morph_path)

        # Get the name of the loaded morph
        morph_name = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(morph_path))[0]

        # Transfer the morph to the Genesis 9 figure
        g9.paste_morph(g8.morphs[morph_name], morph_name)

        print("Morph " + morph_name + " transferred from " + g8.label() + " to " + g9.label() + " successfully.")
    else:
        print("No morph selected. Script aborted.")

 

This version of the script uses the get_file() method to prompt the user to select a morph file to load onto the Genesis 8 figure. It then loads the selected morph onto the figure, gets the name of the loaded morph, and transfers it to the selected Genesis 9 figure using the paste_morph() method.

Again, please note that this is just an example script, and it may need to be modified or customized to work properly with your specific Daz Studio setup and workflow. Additionally, as with any script or plugin, it's always a good idea to test it on a backup copy of your scene data first.

ChatGPT continues to show the worth of AI - it's given you a Python script, apparently wildly guessing at function availability, but Daz Studio doesn't use Python.

hi everyone im actually fairly new to daz studio and i wanted to transfer a morph from a g8f figure to a g9f  since i didnt find any script or plugin that automates this process i tried asking chatGPT since it can write code however i have no experience with daz scripts ( or python in general ) so im gonna share what i got from chatGPT if someone can tell if its usable or can be modified to work well 

import os
import sys
import dson.dzdsonimporter as dzimp
import dson.dzdsonexporter as dzexp
import dson.dzdsonio as dzio
import dson.dzdsoncommon as dzcom
import dson.dzdsonutils as dzut
import dson.dzdsondata as dzdata
import dson.dzdsonconstants as dzconst
import dson.dzdsonmaterial as dzmat

# Get references to the selected Genesis 8 and Genesis 9 figures
g8 = None
g9 = None
selection = dzcom.get_selection()
for node in selection:
    if node.is_figure() and node.label() == "Genesis 8 Female":
        g8 = node
    elif node.is_figure() and node.label() == "Genesis 9 Female":
        g9 = node

# Check if both figures were selected
if g8 is None or g9 is None:
    print("Please select both a Genesis 8 Female and a Genesis 9 Female figure before running the script.")
else:
    # Get the file path for the morph to load
    morph_path = dzio.get_file("Please select a morph to load onto " + g8.label() + ".", dzio.FileType.DSON, dzio.FileLoadType.OPEN)

    # Load the morph onto the Genesis 8 figure
    if morph_path is not None:
        g8.load_morph(morph_path)

        # Get the name of the loaded morph
        morph_name = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(morph_path))[0]

        # Transfer the morph to the Genesis 9 figure
        g9.paste_morph(g8.morphs[morph_name], morph_name)

        print("Morph " + morph_name + " transferred from " + g8.label() + " to " + g9.label() + " successfully.")
    else:
        print("No morph selected. Script aborted.")

This version of the script uses the get_file() method to prompt the user to select a morph file to load onto the Genesis 8 figure. It then loads the selected morph onto the figure, gets the name of the loaded morph, and transfers it to the selected Genesis 9 figure using the paste_morph() method.

Again, please note that this is just an example script, and it may need to be modified or customized to work properly with your specific Daz Studio setup and workflow. Additionally, as with any script or plugin, it's always a good idea to test it on a backup copy of your scene data first.

When you say "works with", do you mean can import animations back into Daz?

@Pickle Renderer
Yes as custom BVH files
That Daz store product (in the video I linked) for G9 was made with Autodesk MOBU
I know this because that Daz PA is a fellow member of the same private Daz studio animation Facebook group as I.

I seem to have lost track of the various claims here.  Daz can import iClone animation (via. 3DX - which last time I looked at it was 32 bit and crashed a lot) and Daz can import Motion Builder animation?  What I don't understand is how given they'll export in some standard formats like FBX that Daz doesn't "correctly" apply to its rig, or rather its rig is non-standard and there's no information about that outside of it.

These are not “Claims”
I have been retargeting
 Iclone motion to genesis figures since Genesis 1
I made a 90 minute animated film using  iclone motion exported as BVH to Daz Studio
and then exported the actors from Daz studio to( my former) C4D for rendering

RL 3DX is gone and its retarget & BVH export functionality has been folded into the 64 bit Iclone 8 apparently

I still have my Old RL3DX6  which I rarely use as I have largely migrated away from the Reallusion eco system
and will not be buying anymore of their software.
 I only use ARP rigged Characters (genesis & others) in Blender 
ARPS retargeter is world class and allows me to leverage my huge archive of thousands of MIXAMO
and Iclone motion files inside blender as wel as Cascadure and even ragdoll FBX from my 20 year old Endorphin software.
 

OK I tried it.  Genesis 2 export to Blender, imported back a quick animation, able to play it back no problem on the genesis 2 figure in Daz.  Save Pose Preset, apply it to a Genesis 8 figure and it's completely wrong.  

A Genesis 2 pose preset will NOT work on G8
that has long been established.
If you insist on using external Motion data on Genesis1- 8 to render in Daz studio, then you should consider buying an Autodesk MOBU sub or spending the $900 USD for Iclone 8 & CC4.

Gator said:

OK, I am confused now, mentioned that you have the Genesis 8 Dev load.  You could just delete the eyelashes on Genesis 3 and then and you're in the same boat as with Genesis 8.  I mentioned bending the arms because I assumed you were making morphs for Genesis 9.

What are you trying to accomplish?  Perhaps with that info can be of more help.

 So, let's start from the beginning: I need to edit the body shape of a female figure in Blender. The one who made this model used DAZ Studio to have a base to work on and in this case, the base is Genesis 3 Female.
Since this is a heroine of a famous video game, I assume he used a software to extract the skin texture, eyes, hair etc. from the video game itself (unfortunately I'm not well informed about this sort of thing because for me are too complex).
He later ported it to Blender but didn't use Diffeomorphic for the import otherwise, if that were the case I wouldn't be here asking for help as I would have used Diffeomorphic to import a body morph from DAZ directly on the figure in Blender.
So I started looking elsewhere and someone told me that I could create an OBJ file with the body shape, import it into Blender and use it as a body morph.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do any of this because..
1) On Genesis 3 I have never been able to eliminate all the protrusions (eyelashes, eyebrows etc..) therefore, even if I could create an OBJ file I would never be able to use it for my purpose.
2) What would be imported into the OBJ would basically be a Genesis 3 Female and therefore, together with the body there would also be the head. In my case, however, the head of the figure on Blender must remain unchanged since what I have to change is only the shape of the body ..and that's it.
Since I couldn't do any of this, I decided to let it go and learn how to model and sculpt the figure directly on Blender, but the process requires time and above all.. knowledge! That's why I would have come in handy to use a ready-made morph..!
I could also show you a couple of reference images for you to understand what I intend to achieve but unfortunately I can not post them here because they are adult content.
And this is all :)

I seem to have lost track of the various claims here.  Daz can import iClone animation (via. 3DX - which last time I looked at it was 32 bit and crashed a lot) and Daz can import Motion Builder animation?  What I don't understand is how given they'll export in some standard formats like FBX that Daz doesn't "correctly" apply to its rig, or rather its rig is non-standard and there's no information about that outside of it.

mikael-aronsson said:

FBX always export at base resolution, no HD or even high resolution meshes will be exported, you just get the crappy base resolution, you can subdivide after you import it into C4D though even if you will not get the same result as in DS

.

if you lock high resolution and export fbx it will export high rez with the morph .... it works with genesis 3  and it 's perfect when imported in c4d ...........;i didn't try genesis 8 or 9 but i will 

wolf359 said:
Nothing FREE perhaps.
one obvious paid solution( RL 3DX or Iclone 8) works with every Daz figure from M4/V4 to G8.1
and the other (MOBU) works for everything  including genesis 9.

https://www.daz3d.com/runway-animation-for-genesis-9
 

When you say "works with", do you mean can import animations back into Daz?

Hey Daz crew just thought I'd voice a fustration im still having with FBX character imports from Daz3d to C4D having quite nasty deformations on elbow and leg joints when posing them.

I know this is an old issue which probably some have had. Though a bit surprised to find the new advanced Genesis 9 character rigs having the same issue and kind of has me scratching my head a bit.

I've attached image comparisons of Daz viewport vs C4D import of the same character to diagnose.
Is there any export settings or workarounds which are ideal to fix this?
Without resorting to Alembic exports
I really like DAZ3D characters and to find them unsuitable for realistic joint articulation in other 3D software is a bit disappointing 
Any tips would be much appreciated

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

But that's the thing: The mathematics of an armature is not difficult at all. It's just a DAG where each edge is a matrix multiplication. I started this task naively thinking it would take a few days, tops. DAZ made it difficult by not documenting adequately critical information needed to make it work. One day I just noticed that a bone's rotation seemed to always be off by what appeared to be about the same as its orientation, thought "Could it be?", and when I created the proxy armature like I described,

BAM! every pose started coming out perfectly. I mean perfectly. The way I thought it should and would, about 4 years ago.

And that is why I keep saying that we don't need more features. We need more documentation, and the features will come. I don't know why DAZ can't seem to appreciate how many people are trying to help make DS better and that they should make the barrier to entry as low as possible.

My issue with the math was the order of matrix multiplications and the generally terrible FBX file format even with (or especially with) the Autodesk SDK.  I used a library called Assimp in the end, which presents kind-of a single interface to a bunch of different 3d file formats.  At the time my own engine was OpenGL 4 (this was before Vulkan, DX12, etc.).  There's a lot of boiler plate needed to get to animation "hello world" unfortunately and I have a day job, so gave up.

But anyway, I've tried Diffeo (different versions) and I can categorically say animations don't come in correctly at all.  It's possible I'm doing something wrong when baking in Blender of course.  Unless I have to switch something somewhere before I bake to get the IK converted to FK properly.  When I click on each FK shape, I can see a key on every frame after baking however, so I think I baked it OK.  It plays back in Blender fine too.  It's just the feet slide in Daz and the hip is consistently wrong, so the entire animation is wrong.

I don't understand what content producers are doing to create quality animations and sell them in the store.  That's why I assumed there was some secret incantation.  Then I saw Daz's own Cascadeur tutorial video on YouTube.  I followed the instructions exactly except I just did a 3 key animation moving the hip up and down.  Same problem on import.  Feet sliding and hip in wrong place. 

At least it's consistent!

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Pickle Renderer said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Ha ha, don't worry. Help is on the way.

But I understand that Diffeomorphic can already do this. Have you tried it?

Wait, did I misunderstand what you're actually doing?  Is it two-way transfer, or just putting Daz data into Blender?   I'm hoping it goes both ways, and that you've learned the required black magic to retarget to a Daz rig (I won't ask what the magic spell was - I once read a blog on all the transforms involved in a standard FBX rig and I lost the will to live by the third paragraph).

Here's a list of what I've tried:

• FBX
• BVH
• BVH (Sagan's conversion)
• Diffeomorphic (Save As Preset)
• RigDNS
• Cascadeur

Literally nothing works.  It's all broken.  Well, either that or I'm so dumb I made the same mistake on all of the dozens of attempts and combinations I've tried.  Going the other way, out to Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, etc.  no problem.

 

if you are prepared to use conversion methods in DAZ studio (and put up with foot sliding) Genesis 1 was the last figure to work with BVH import 

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/250726/so-if-an-animation-is-saved-using-genesis-it-works-on-genesis-3/p1

rather than derail TMITP's thread (unless it's about adding BVH to THE LORD of the Plugins) how to do it as is best discussed in that thread 

Hi Wendy,

Derail anytime :) Your input is always appreciated.

If I'm thinking about not using Alembic, I'm waaaay past not using BVH :) Knowing now what I do about how DAZ rigs work, I can assure you nothing that I develop is going to ever use BVH again.

No, you did not misunderstand. It is two-way. But I was under the impression that one could import via Diffeomorphic, and save it as a preset. People say that it works.

The difference with LotP is that it's literally you press a button to export a character mesh and armature from DS to Blender, and you run a single script to export the entire animation back to DS. I'm not going to say that no black magic was involved... it was a case of trying a million different things until everything worked. What worked was a combination of

1) Using Quaternions everywhere, no Euler Angles anywhere

2) Correctly accounting for DAZ bone orientation, which is aligned with the first axis of the bone's rotation order vs Blender's orientation, which is always aligned with +Y

3) And this one is the one that makes me angry everytime I think about it: If you set a bone's local rotation with Euler Angles, it is from the bone's oriented rest position, i.e. the bone's orientation is offset from that axis. But if you set the bone's local rotation with Quaternions, it is from the axis without applying the orientation. So the fix was to create a "proxy" armature that is constrained to follow the figure's armature, but its rest position is unoriented. It looks wierd, but the quaternions that get baked and sent back to DS are the unoriented ones, because only Quaternions are guaranteed to work correctly, even at extreme rotations. Well, as <> pointed out, that's not even true, as I never did figure out why I hade to negate the w component of all the quaternions.

So no, you're not crazy... you probably just never dreamed that DAZ would do something like have the same setLocalRot() function behave fundamentally differently based on the way the same !@#$ rotation is expressed, and not document it. I don't remember, but the "documentation" for both probably says "setLocalRot() - Set the bone's local rotation" Gee, thanks. For nothing.

Pickle Renderer said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Ha ha, don't worry. Help is on the way.

But I understand that Diffeomorphic can already do this. Have you tried it?

Wait, did I misunderstand what you're actually doing?  Is it two-way transfer, or just putting Daz data into Blender?   I'm hoping it goes both ways, and that you've learned the required black magic to retarget to a Daz rig (I won't ask what the magic spell was - I once read a blog on all the transforms involved in a standard FBX rig and I lost the will to live by the third paragraph).

Here's a list of what I've tried:

• FBX
• BVH
• BVH (Sagan's conversion)
• Diffeomorphic (Save As Preset)
• RigDNS
• Cascadeur

Literally nothing works.  It's all broken.  Well, either that or I'm so dumb I made the same mistake on all of the dozens of attempts and combinations I've tried.  Going the other way, out to Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, etc.  no problem.

 

if you are prepared to use conversion methods in DAZ studio (and put up with foot sliding) Genesis 1 was the last figure to work with BVH import 

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/250726/so-if-an-animation-is-saved-using-genesis-it-works-on-genesis-3/p1

rather than derail TMITP's thread (unless it's about adding BVH to THE LORD of the Plugins) how to do it as is best discussed in that thread 

I added metadata to all my Generation 4 and 3 era items. When I went to convert it went better because they were identified. But it is a challenge to 'find' the products if you were not used to the Poser file system. 

This is the link to the Commercial thread where most of the initial problems were reported and answered. And where suggestions were incorporated.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/304091/released-rssy-clothing-converter-from-victoria-4-to-genesis-8-female-commercial/p1

Heve you read the included manual?

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/58887/start
"Items without metadata can be converted but will not show up in Smart Content. They may also need to be converted using a Force Convert Item(s) button."

Product https://www.daz3d.com/tactical-pants-for-genesis-3-male-s

I don't have them.

You can't increase mesh density used for dForce. Increasing subD will make the mesh smoother, but it is still the base mesh that is used for dForce (you can do collision detection on subD mesh).

You could take it into a modeller and increase mesh resolution there, and import back. In Daz Studio it would be considered a new item, so you would have to transfer rigging and materials.

I am a bit surprised though, that it should be necessary. My prime concern would be that the pants fell apart, due to missing seams.

Can you describe what happens (or a picture) when you simulate?