reserv888 said:

PerttiA said:

The nested directories are still there: "Nested directory encountered while adding..."

This lead me to think DS is trying to connect to DAZ servers, ie. you are logging in to DS; "dzcloudtasknotifier.cpp(178): Server did not accept username/password"

Another thing I noticed, you are rendering on both, the GPU and CPU, disable CPU in rendering devices.

Have you tried deleting parts of the scene (as a test) to see, if it then renders, there's at least some objects with 5M triangles, which is very high.

You've got the eyes of a hawk!
The nested directories is something DS itself does. I removed them and I am 100% sure they weren't there. The "new" nested directories doesn't contain any files (unlike the "old"nested directories), just empty folders.
The thing with DS trying to login to something; what is that? Why does DS do that, and why doesn't it succeed? Are there any settings i should adjust/delete?
I ususally don't use CPU rendering. I just added it to show it doesn't matter if I have CPU fallback or not.
 

Where in the log do you see I have objects with 5M triangles?

Geometry import (2 triangle objects with 5 M triangles, 3 fiber objects with 1084 fibers (1084 segments), 
4 triangle instances yielding 5 M triangles, 3 fiber instances yielding 1084 segments) took 0.079 s 

In DS preferences->Startup, uncheck "Show Login Page" and "Automatically Login With Remembered Credentials" and DS will not try to connect to DAZ servers.

I would need to see how your content directories are setup to help getting rid of the nested directories, see the attached sample.

Leviathan Suit for Genesis 8 Male(s) | Daz 3D

I have this added to a genesis 8.1 male character and upon import into unreal it errors out with:  "Failed to find any bone hierarchy. Try disabling the "Import As Skeletal" option to import as a rigid mesh."

I noticed in Daz Studio the Leviathan suit ends up as a child of the main figure but then the suit has its own joint hierarchy childed under itself. Not sure if this is a problem or if there is a way to merge the two joint hierarchies together or if the issue is something else altogether.  Any idears? 

Fair use would be fun in the international context... fair use, but not for EU-customers of your network, for instance. Or get blocked, or 10% fine :). Stuff like that.

If you wanted to avoid such, the minimum measure simply is strict "opt-in" only, signalled via metadata. Should be in HTML, e.g.  due to older formats. And re-training only after re-checking, so removed images can't be used anymore. Anything else would be nuts. I don't care how a certain court case ends here or there.

Also consider, that all sorts of formats including video will be scraped same way. The AAA(A) industry will always be ahead and make idk/ 2 billion in a day or what not, but the whole of Hollywood? Think they're having a glimpse around the corner already :p. There is no way to stay unique in any way, except if people let you. Perhaps this hits the storytellers hard, who try to stay within some cosmos. A not copyrightable thing still means, that you can't have copyright for it either. No copryight might still not prevent some platforms from providing monetization, and in return, demonitization for the original artists? It may get more complicated with series of images, like comics, though. 

Edit: The artwork side really seems to remain a carousel of worms. It seems to be hard to escape from it. While law may be spoken, it's not certain that it will actually resolve enough issues for this to make sense.

Looks like everybody makes different kinds of reasonings and estimations, but still all seem to be off somewhere, and partly considerably off, concerning all the problems that follow. Maybe this is due to the fact, that the whole issue can't easily be seperated into different problems to tackle individually or sequentially. That's also where some of the failure potential with courts might lie, in case of a somewhat confined focus.

Concerning off or on,  a current article from the law side, also containing a quick description of the algorithms, hints at possible consequences of a precedent. https://www.fieldfisher.com/en/insights/ai-related-lawsuits-how-the-stable-diffusion-case

It reads a little bit like "they could enforce software quality with future ai developments", or rather you could sue them for bias, which in my opinion is something different than using a training data set that threatens to poison the source of the data itself. Something that doesn't work or break at random, already is well known, e.g. modern operating systems. But violation of copyright (if) or the circular reference with training data of a system that relies on but at the same time reduces the training data by it's nature, in my opinion is a different category, because you don't have a new world with different or new jobs, or just a better but otherwise independently usable tool, and everybody moves on happily ever after. You might as well find yourself holding a can of worms in your hands, which likely won't go away just so. Do we tell the "neuron artist entity" [subtly differently pronounced ~ "moron"], that we take their stuff anyway, and the ai will be great, for the benefit of all mankind, who now all become clickwork-illustrators in a day. Undead artists, after all. In the end, using literally everything is just faster and cheaper, not necessarily better. But everyone being able to create images isn't the main problem, you can simply flood any site with quasi-copies of images and styles, once an artist publishes anything at all. Copiers won't be specialists anymore, but could literally be anyone. Resolving this by effectively removing any protection would be cheap, though you'd always have to consider what further protecting (which/what) means in terms of damage, otherwise. An interesting problem with the "everyone scenario", of course is where to get training data from after a while (can't repeat that often enough... will we just say "up to 2022... enough"? Also this means telling that the artist face-to-face now.). Resolving that needs more/different measures than enforcing either of fair-use or classic copyright for this case, the consequences are too far reaching. (In my not so humble extrapolations.)

(One more can: So deciding for fair use, will make it necessary to find a way to tell, what works actually are useful for society in particular, if you needed to filter or find a way to reward originality, being confronted with an "upscaled amount" of similar images. Will "best rated" be what we call "art" then? We might create what fair use was to prevent, in the end :p...)

Does anyone follow the standards bodies / orgs that standardize the metadata tags used in digital photos and other digital image formats?  Any movement there towards incorporating tags to grant or deny permission for use in Machine Language learning or AI image generation?

Yes I find most daz hairs plain stupid brute force stone age assets as of how they are made. Now daz studio has fiber support but most PAs just ignore it and go on with transmapped resource boggers. There's also a marvelous hair tool for blender that's easy to use and may cover most common hair needs without the need to import from daz.

https://blendermarket.com/products/hair-library

https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/hairtool

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Hi again,

No, not exactly. The new plugin does not use the bridge at all. It is all new. You press a button and your character is in Blender, ready to animate with an IK rig. You do your animation, bake it, press another button, and your animation is back in DAZ Studio. It doesn't even attempt to do the more sophisticated things that either Diffeomorphic or DTB do because the assumption is that you'll import the animation back to DS and then export the complete character through some other means. I use Sagan, of course.

And maybe one of our resident experts,  @Wolf359 could chime in and offer his opinion as to whether ARP and Animation Layers are worth the money :)

But if your intention is to animate a non-DAZ character, then ARP, Animation Layers,  is all you need for high quality. Although, there are better riggers than ARP, like the Heat Diffusion addon.

And of course I don't know Sagan, either...
But I wouldn't be exporting a character. I'd be creating short animated clips, maybe a few animated gifs, and posting them for people to laugh at. That's about it.

I've written ideas for short clips and comic strips for decades, but never had the time nor tech to create them. Some of them are so old I don't even remember what the heck I was referring to.

This is very much just a personal thing! I intend to animate mostly DAZ characters, plus the amazing creatures created by Ken Gilliland, and also Hivewire3D. Plus, since I'm still a kid at heart, dinosaurs, monsters, etc!

So I'll keep a watch on your posts, hoping to learn more. Lots for me to study meanwhile. Still trying to get my new system properly set up.
I look forward to seeing how your plans work out, because I haven't heard about that technique until now. Cheers!

Saxa -- SD said:

 

Some poses like Zevo's breast control morphs, go expand or look under Your Character > Properties >Pose Controls > chest > etc

...

Totally understand bad associations.  Key here is selected keyframes from timeline tab command only.  Any chance you clicked clear from menu>figure>etc?

 I think you are right in mentioning morphs from certain vendors. I have a LOT of Zev0 morphs and also I have 3rd. party Geografts which also come with many morphs. I find it difficult to find a way to save a character pose/shape/morph settings from a frame in a scene so that I can replicate it in a single scene or scene subset - I mean that certain morphs just don't save and are reset to zero. Sometimes saving animated poses has the same problem. I tried saving a Puppeteer dot but I don't know how to save that external to the scene (so that I can re-import it in another scene). I think Puppeteer only works during an open session.

As for the Clear/Zero thing - I believe that DAZ has changed the way it works in the latest Beta versions so maybe it will work ok now. I had trouble understanding the way it is explained in the Change Log though.

Anyone knows how to import the same version of a clothing with the zipper opened as morph in Daz?
I used MD many times to better simulate clothes then I always imported the OBJ using loader pro and then saved it as morph, never had problems, but now when I try to load the OBJ with the zipper open it says the geometry didn't match :(

Thanx for the replies. 
It isnt the Metadata import window, and all of the plugins are from DAZ.  I fired up Studio on my old box, which is running Windows 10 and it doesn't have that initial window.  I discovered a difference in the log files; the new machine lists after the plugins load:

2023-01-22 09:15:56.175 [WARNING] :: Error writing author data.

I have an author name in preferences, so why would it give this error?

Assuming your content is in the same location (D:/My DAZ 3D Library), you should be able to simply Re-Import Metadata from the Content DB Maintenance utility. This will add whatever metadata was available when the products were installed, plus any modifications you made, assuming you exported the UserData at some point. Select everything, including User Data and Accept. If you have a lot of products, it could take a while...

NotAnArtist said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Hi

First things first: Yes, definitely start your Blender Learning Journey now... it won't be a trivial task, but I am confident that any person who likes to animate more than they like to complain about the world and software that is in it not being exactly as they would wish it, will be able to master it. I compare it to learning Mandarin: It's hard, no doubt, but 1.4 billion people have, and I've never heard of a mute chinese guy who just could not do it. See you on the other side :)

It means you'll run the new plugin in DS, and with one click in Blender, just enough of the character will be imported into Blender in order to do animation, i.e. the armature and the base res mesh. There's a script to "retarget" animations from supported rigs, and another to export it back to DS. That's it. No FBX, BVH, or any other file format that doesn't know what a G8 is, no obscure settings to remember to set (read: forget to set). It just works.

I think there are two keys for why this works well: 1) Blender is using precisely the same armature as DS, so no foot sliding, etc., and 2) Quaternions are used exclusively, so no weird flips at extreme angles.

While the character is in Blender, there's a G8 preset for Auto Rig Pro Quick Rig which puts a fully capable, professional IK rig onto the existing DS armature. That, together with the equally superb Animation Layers addon, is all you need for an animation environment almost as good as the one in Maya. I just can't seem to get this to bake automatically via script for importing back, so it currently must be done manually. I'll figure it out.

I was inspired to work on this because DAZ Studio is, still, the best character creation environment there is, IMHO. If I gripe about it a lot, it's because I'm passionate about this awesome program. Likewise, Blender is nearly the best at everything else, and at the rate it is going, it will overtake the industry leaders by 2025, when they complete the character animation initiative they've started.

 

OK, looking good. Long ago I created a spider web via a Blender tute. It was easy to do, just hard to remember since I seldom needed to go back to create more, so Hexagon remained my quicker go-to. I seldom need to model anything.

So apparently you won't be creating animation movements with a Blender character, which is what I was asking about. You'll use the Blender bridge and import a partial G8 character. Back to what I was hoping to avoid in a way, but maybe not necessary after all.

I took a quick look at Auto-Rig Pro. I could afford the $40 package if it actually helps towards my goals. And I see the Animation Layers addon costs $28, so it's time to do some research.

I recently spent an embarrassing amount of my retirement savings on a new machine, even though I built it myself, cutting corners along the way... so I'm apprehensive about even small things like this.

Good luck with your project and please keep the Daz community updated! Thanks for the information!

Hi again,

No, not exactly. The new plugin does not use the bridge at all. It is all new. You press a button and your character is in Blender, ready to animate with an IK rig. You do your animation, bake it, press another button, and your animation is back in DAZ Studio. It doesn't even attempt to do the more sophisticated things that either Diffeomorphic or DTB do because the assumption is that you'll import the animation back to DS and then export the complete character through some other means. I use Sagan, of course.

And maybe one of our resident experts,  @Wolf359 could chime in and offer his opinion as to whether ARP and Animation Layers are worth the money :)

But if your intention is to animate a non-DAZ character, then ARP, Animation Layers,  is all you need for high quality. Although, there are better riggers than ARP, like the Heat Diffusion addon.

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Hi

First things first: Yes, definitely start your Blender Learning Journey now... it won't be a trivial task, but I am confident that any person who likes to animate more than they like to complain about the world and software that is in it not being exactly as they would wish it, will be able to master it. I compare it to learning Mandarin: It's hard, no doubt, but 1.4 billion people have, and I've never heard of a mute chinese guy who just could not do it. See you on the other side :)

It means you'll run the new plugin in DS, and with one click in Blender, just enough of the character will be imported into Blender in order to do animation, i.e. the armature and the base res mesh. There's a script to "retarget" animations from supported rigs, and another to export it back to DS. That's it. No FBX, BVH, or any other file format that doesn't know what a G8 is, no obscure settings to remember to set (read: forget to set). It just works.

I think there are two keys for why this works well: 1) Blender is using precisely the same armature as DS, so no foot sliding, etc., and 2) Quaternions are used exclusively, so no weird flips at extreme angles.

While the character is in Blender, there's a G8 preset for Auto Rig Pro Quick Rig which puts a fully capable, professional IK rig onto the existing DS armature. That, together with the equally superb Animation Layers addon, is all you need for an animation environment almost as good as the one in Maya. I just can't seem to get this to bake automatically via script for importing back, so it currently must be done manually. I'll figure it out.

I was inspired to work on this because DAZ Studio is, still, the best character creation environment there is, IMHO. If I gripe about it a lot, it's because I'm passionate about this awesome program. Likewise, Blender is nearly the best at everything else, and at the rate it is going, it will overtake the industry leaders by 2025, when they complete the character animation initiative they've started.

OK, looking good. Long ago I created a spider web via a Blender tute. It was easy to do, just hard to remember since I seldom needed to go back to create more, so Hexagon remained my quicker go-to. I seldom need to model anything.

So apparently you won't be creating animation movements with a Blender character, which is what I was asking about. You'll use the Blender bridge and import a partial G8 character. Back to what I was hoping to avoid in a way, but maybe not necessary after all.

I took a quick look at Auto-Rig Pro. I could afford the $40 package if it actually helps towards my goals. And I see the Animation Layers addon costs $28, so it's time to do some research.

I recently spent an embarrassing amount of my retirement savings on a new machine, even though I built it myself, cutting corners along the way... so I'm apprehensive about even small things like this.

Good luck with your project and please keep the Daz community updated! Thanks for the information!

Could be the elusive "Show Metadata Import Page" from Preferences->Startup...?

Well, the simplest way would be to connect DIM on your new computer to your Daz account and tick the checkbox to reinstall everything.  However, that may not be suitable if you have a download cap or any kind of metering. And also would not take into account anything you have acquired from outside the Daz store.

Next simplest way is to export your metadata (only if you have made manual change), copy your base libraries across to the new machine and hook them up in Daz Studio and then re-import the metadata. There will be a few niggly issues with that maybe.

May be an issue with the metadata if you are using DIM and not going online in Daz Studio, I use Connect so get the current metadata from the servers every time I log in to install something.

Sorry, yes; just simplifying. Bloody annoying though to have a more advanced shader system that fails to allow (for me) critical image map import

It depends what you have on the scene since the viewport renders everything. For small scenes with a few figures I just use simplify and everything is smooth. For HD figures use multires with viweport subd to zero, that's the default in the latest versions. For large scenes use collections to hide what you don't need for animation. For example if you're animating two friends at the table you can hide the room until rendering.

note. important. Of course be sure that the textures fit the vram, since daz assets often use huge textures not optimized for animation. Always check the task manager for vram usage. You may need to resize textures in the blender viewport preferences. Be aware that this will crash blender 3.4.1 so get a daily build or wait for 3.4.2 or use 3.3.2.

Or use solid mode for the viewport shading so that you don't display textures.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1338/blender-341-crashes-when-rendering-g9-with

note. important. These are not issues with blender or diffeomorphic itself though but rather limits with the daz assets. I mean whatever method you use to import daz assets in blender they are not optimized for animation. This is why it is important to avoid HD figures and 8K textures when getting items from the shop, especially G9 and HD figures and environments are most cumbersome and do not fit animation.

SnowSultan said:

Not about composing an entire piece from parts from multiple different pieces.

IT

DOES

NOT

DO 

THAT.

 

Seriously, I'm done now. This is like arguing with conspiracy theorists.

It has been explained numerous times at this point.

Simple question: If you remove the training data from the AI, will it work as well?

And why do you believe a machine has any right whatsoever to use any of your data? The argument of whether a work is transformative from the original is not valid here. The AI does not possess this right. You and I possess this right, but the AI is not a person.

It is true some websites have terms where such rights are waved, but that doesn't change the situation here. The training data is confirmed to come from specific websites that give the users these rights. Aside from this, courts have ruled against restrictive EULAs many times. So a EULA is not a binding contract. Keep in mind that both Diffusion and Midjourney state that local laws take priority over their EULA.

wolf359 said:

We can only hope that litigation will shut the heavy hitters like Midjourney down...or heavily gimp them by making them need to completely rebuild from scratch

 

 

Keep hoping
AI generated art cannot be copyrighted because an AI does NOT  have legal “personhood”

there are literally millions of new images  being produced per day that belong to no one.

Those can be used for new training data .

So any notion of even one of the big AI companies being “shut Down” by “starving” the AI is pure fantasy.

Midjourney reportedly viewed 300 TB of online images to create their 5GB training CPTK

how many terabytes of non copyrightable AI images already exists as of  20 jan 2023?.. one wonders

Best case scenario is that a court orders a “clean” training data set in, some future ruling, and after

months or years of  appeals etc, how many terabytes of non copyrightable AI images will exists by then.

And before anyone declares them “fruit of the poison tree” well there  is that existing court ruling that declared AI art as essentially belonging to no one .

Game over.

 

 

and if the process is found to violate copyright then those images will also violate copyright. Even if theya re not themselves protected it is still possible for them to infringe, and so for anything else derived from them to inherit that infringement. It would depend, no doubt, on the fine detail of any judgements.

 

 

Well since there is no metadata in the AI generated images on the internet you cannot legally determine where the new  training data images online came from, particularly images altered in photoshop to fix flaws etc.
Also there is a  legal percentage of derivation that makes something an original work soeach new AI image will have to be examine to determine which one does not meet the threshhold…not practical

so ..no.. a "friuit of the poisen tree" argument will likey fail

Game over

You sound like you only want to cause chaos to the system. The system already has plenty of chaos, and you seem to ignore just how vicious copyright law can be. The lawsuits have started flowing, and the flood gates are opening fast. I am not sure where your confidence comes from. This will get itself all sorted out in time, as country by country consistantly limits what the AI can do. The AI companies are getting sued before they can really make a profit. They may not have the money to defend themselves for every case that pops up. They may even get bankrupted before finishing their projects. Boy that sure would throw a wrench into some people's AI dreams. They don't even have to lose the cases, if they lose money by constantly going to court, they may have to just cut their losses. Has anybody considered this possibility? These companies might get litigated into obvlion before they can get started. These companies are not huge mega corps just yet. They are only starting to get money from what they have put in.

Midjourney, according to their CEO, has made money only since August. Do you think they have enough of a war chest built up just a few months? Stable Diffusion has $100 million invested into it, but as far as I can tell, it has not become profitable yet. And if things go south, it could lose those investors if they decide it isn't worth it. Diffussion has spent over $50 million just getting up and running. So things could get ugly for these companies if lawsuits start to eat away at their earnings. 

Training AI with its own output doesn't even make sense. Besides that, like Richard said, an image lacking copyright doesn't make it fair game to use. If the image infringes on copyright, it cannot be used, period. The loophole you are looking for doesn't exist.

Talk about game over, LOL.

As mentioned above the percentages of what makes a work legally transformative is designed for HUMANS. Remember, as has been said multiple times, AI is not a human. Just in case anybody forgot this detail, it is kind of important to point it out. I hate that I have to point this out so much, but some people do seem to forget (including some 'youtube experts'). The AI does not have this same right when it comes to judging how much an image must be changed to avoid copyright. If a machine is using a copyrighted work in ANY capacity, whether it is 100% or 0.1%, that work needs to be given explicit permission to be used by a machine. It is pretty simple, really.

Any argument about AI needs to first understand that AI has no human rights. If you train a monkey to paint, it doesn't matter how good it gets, the pictures are not copyrightable. This has already been established, and in turn established what rights a non human has for copyright matters...um...none.

What kind of models? The answer will differ depending on whether you're looking to import morphs of a Genesis figure, standalone figures, props, etc. The most important thing to know going in is that rigging doesn't carry over when importing to DS, so if you're trying to sell rigged props or standalone figures, know that you'll need to redo the rigging inside DS.

Unfortunately no change after reinstalling. If I search for another product with texture addon (dforce medieval barmaid), I do see a separate entry for it. I do not see the same for breezy outfit, even if I load the poncho in the scene first and select it. I am debating on doing a full reset database and just downloading all the metadata again. Not sure what else to do.