Complaint, but about myself. xD

So the past few days I've been scratching my head over importing figures from D|S to see them come in with no materials.  Only just now,  did I think to check in Cinema 4D's Preferences and take a gander at the Import/Export preferences.  Under FBX Import what do I see?  <Materials:  None>    Switching that to anything else and wham, just as things should be! 

It's embarassing it took me this long to think of checking that

Padone said:

As for geografts, for HD figures the geograft has to be exported as a separate mesh. That is, you have to enter the geometry editor in daz studio before exporting.

I'll try exporting geograft as separate mesh and test HD Morphs plugin again. If it works would capture a new video of the process later.

Update: The HD Morphs plugin still can't work with Diffeomorphic using this approach, the test results were the same as before, I'm quite convinced this is the limitation of HD Morphs plugin that it can't generate morphs for genitals. (Blender 3.2.1 / Diffeomorphic1.6.2.1108 / HD Morphs0.82.3)

Understand that it has to enter the geometry editor in daz studio before exporting, because when entering geometry editor mode, the Daz viewport virtual vertices change and it separates the geograft geometry. I've tested merging geograft to the virtual HD mesh using "Export HD To Blender" and it works, this is the simpler and prefered method to merge geograft for virtual HD meshes / Multires modified meshes in Blender. Here's the several minutes video capture using this method and showing the complete workflow from Daz to Blender to Unreal, how to merge geograft to HD meshes, transfer morphs to clothes, render images in Blender, import mocap file for quick animation making, and using Send To Unreal bridge or FBX to export to Unreal: https://streamable.com/hf528h

Oops the tutorial was removed by streamable.com because of porn staff lol, but Diffeomorphic has complete documentation that users can refer to, amazing plugin that is a must have to get the best of Daz characters. HD Morphs plugin works very well to generate true HD characters with HD morphs though geograft morphs are not supported. That does not matter too much the geograft morphs can be transferred by other plugins.

namffuak said:

barbult said:

Mine finally opened, but it took much longer than usual. I have purchased some 3D printing licenses, but probably only a hundred or two hundred, not thousands. I suppose you'll have to wait and try at less busy times or submit a help request, for what that's worth. This whole 3D license thing seems to have been very poorly thought out prior to implementation.

Off topic rant:
Everything that gets "upgraded" at Daz seems to be worse that what came before. The Gallery is much less functional. The store barely functioned at all for the first month after the last store upgrade. Store search is still poor. The New and Sale labels pasted across product thumbnails makes it hard to even see what the product is. The forum has almost continuous gateway timeouts. NFTs - let's not even go there! Sales and coupons still don't consistently work as advertised. Advertising text is confusing, misleading and often just wrong. Order confirmation emails no longer even have the order number in the subject line and the order number is not even a hyperlink in the message text. All 3D printing licenses have the same SKU, so the email order confirmation doesn't even tell what product you bought a license for. Products are still delivered with metadata errors, inconsistent metadata categories and inconsistent paths.

What a sad place this has become.

How many pages are you showing for the product library? I'm at 414 and the library popped up in about 4 seconds. I have not added any 3D print licenses yet. I'm just curious if it's something about the way they're tracking the 3D print licenses.

I have no idea how pages I have now because I can't open the library. I had over 600 pages before I added the licenses. Since I added about 14,800 licenses I suspect the number of pages has incresed significantly. As a guess at 60 items per page adding that many licenses would increase the number of pages by an additional 247 pages. I do think it may have something to do specifically with the licnses because even when I had added only a few licenses my loading times increased dramatically.

barbult said:

Mine finally opened, but it took much longer than usual. I have purchased some 3D printing licenses, but probably only a hundred or two hundred, not thousands. I suppose you'll have to wait and try at less busy times or submit a help request, for what that's worth. This whole 3D license thing seems to have been very poorly thought out prior to implementation.

Off topic rant:
Everything that gets "upgraded" at Daz seems to be worse that what came before. The Gallery is much less functional. The store barely functioned at all for the first month after the last store upgrade. Store search is still poor. The New and Sale labels pasted across product thumbnails makes it hard to even see what the product is. The forum has almost continuous gateway timeouts. NFTs - let's not even go there! Sales and coupons still don't consistently work as advertised. Advertising text is confusing, misleading and often just wrong. Order confirmation emails no longer even have the order number in the subject line and the order number is not even a hyperlink in the message text. All 3D printing licenses have the same SKU, so the email order confirmation doesn't even tell what product you bought a license for. Products are still delivered with metadata errors, inconsistent metadata categories and inconsistent paths.

What a sad place this has become.

How many pages are you showing for the product library? I'm at 414 and the library popped up in about 4 seconds. I have not added any 3D print licenses yet. I'm just curious if it's something about the way they're tracking the 3D print licenses.

Very new to 3d applications. I learned Daz3d first and feel pretty good with my renders. But now I'm wondering how (or if) you import a unreal engine 5 scene into daz so I can place my model and render with daz. Or am I thinking of things all wrong lol

barbult said:

Mine finally opened, but it took much longer than usual. I have purchased some 3D printing licenses, but probably only a hundred or two hundred, not thousands. I suppose you'll have to wait and try at less busy times or submit a help request, for what that's worth. This whole 3D license thing seems to have been very poorly thought out prior to implementation.

Off topic rant:
Everything that gets "upgraded" at Daz seems to be worse that what came before. The Gallery is much less functional. The store barely functioned at all for the first month after the last store upgrade. Store search is still poor. The New and Sale labels pasted across product thumbnails makes it hard to even see what the product is. The forum has almost continuous gateway timeouts. NFTs - let's not even go there! Sales and coupons still don't consistently work as advertised. Advertising text is confusing, misleading and often just wrong. Order confirmation emails no longer even have the order number in the subject line and the order number is not even a hyperlink in the message text. All 3D printing licenses have the same SKU, so the email order confirmation doesn't even tell what product you bought a license for. Products are still delivered with metadata errors, inconsistent metadata categories and inconsistent paths.

What a sad place this has become.

I did open a ticket but that is the sort of thing that it could take ages for DAZ to resolve. Meanwhile I'm not sure there is much sense in purchasing items (unless they are free) if I can't access them in my product library. 

Mine finally opened, but it took much longer than usual. I have purchased some 3D printing licenses, but probably only a hundred or two hundred, not thousands. I suppose you'll have to wait and try at less busy times or submit a help request, for what that's worth. This whole 3D license thing seems to have been very poorly thought out prior to implementation.

Off topic rant:
Everything that gets "upgraded" at Daz seems to be worse that what came before. The Gallery is much less functional. The store barely functioned at all for the first month after the last store upgrade. Store search is still poor. The New and Sale labels pasted across product thumbnails makes it hard to even see what the product is. The forum has almost continuous gateway timeouts. NFTs - let's not even go there! Sales and coupons still don't consistently work as advertised. Advertising text is confusing, misleading and often just wrong. Order confirmation emails no longer even have the order number in the subject line and the order number is not even a hyperlink in the message text. All 3D printing licenses have the same SKU, so the email order confirmation doesn't even tell what product you bought a license for. Products are still delivered with metadata errors, inconsistent metadata categories and inconsistent paths.

What a sad place this has become.

barbult said:

dgatwood said:

If anybody runs into this problem, Blender has a really annoying open bug:

https://developer.blender.org/T68058

where by default, it destroys the vertex order both during import AND export.  So you have to explicitly open a "Geometry" disclosure triangle and tell it to keep the vertex order during import, then check a checkbox to preserve it on export.  Otherwise, your morphs will be garbage.

Now that I've figured that out, I have a working approach.  Basically, I morph the undesirable bits into a tiny ball about a millimeter across and hide it inside one of the parts that I want to keep.

 

That's not an open bug. It is over a year old, is on an old version of Blender, is closed and archived, and isn't even a bug at all. It is just how Blender works. It uses the options YOU select for import and export. If you select Keep Vertex Order, it does. If you don't, it doesn't.

My bad.  It is closed.  That's even more depressing.  It violates pretty much every set of human interfaces guidelines ever written, because it is a destructive behavior (the ordering of vertexes is permanently lost) that is entirely silent.  It is not obvious when you import it that the vertex order changed, there is no warning message, and the default option is not the non-destructive option.  As a result, it is very easy to import something into Blender, spend an hour or more working on it, and only discover at the very end of the process that your effort was wasted because you forgot to check that checkbox on import an hour earlier.

That checkbox should have been turned on by default.  Or better, it should be called "Optimize vertex order", and should be off by default.  Make the same of the setting give some hint about why you would check it, and make the default behavior be nondestructive.

The new experimental importer apparently does the right thing by default, so I guess this will eventually be fixed when that becomes non-experimental.  *sigh*

EDIT  -  Okay so the textures failing to import was actually because the preferences for FBX Import at some point was set to "Materials - None".    I'm embarrassed to admit it took me this long to notice
 

In order to bake displacement (or normals) you need a base resolution mesh and a divided version, the baking will reflect the difference between the two. If you have only a single, undivided mesh then there are no differences to bake. Aside from that, GoZ does not preserve any grouping and for the Genesis figuers you need to have the surface groups so that you can bake each group to its own map. What you need to do is export the base resolution mesh, because you want the displacement to capture the differences between that and your sculpt, then in Zbrush import that with the option to import mats as groups, so you have a way to split the geometry by the maps it uses. You then need to divide and sculpt that mesh, and when done you set it back to zero divisions and bake your displacement (I think the new versions of ZBrush may support UDIMs, which would simplify the process - otherwise you have to hide all but one group and create your displacement map for that for each group in turn).

felis said:

Ok, I tried on a product with a U icon.

1) Update metadata so it got a download icon

2) Installed with Connect, checked that it was now in installed

3) Uninstalled with Connect, checked that it was now in Available

4) Reinstalled in DIM. Tvice in fact. First reinstall, then uninstall-delete-download-install

No matter what I do it will be regitered as installed, only if installed with Connect.

And other new DIM installs work normally?

Ok, I tried on a product with a U icon.

1) Update metadata so it got a download icon

2) Installed with Connect, checked that it was now in installed

3) Uninstalled with Connect, checked that it was now in Available

4) Reinstalled in DIM. Tvice in fact. First reinstall, then uninstall-delete-download-install

No matter what I do it will be regitered as installed, only if installed with Connect.

thank you very much for your answer and sorry to answer so late but I was absent... I will try to do what you told me ;) 

"Could you just turn off the sections of the interior environment that you want to match the environment HDRI? I often do something like this for interior scenes where I use a soft HDRI as the source of ambient lighting. "

usually this is what I do, I even export to blender to modify the structures and I import them back to daz to make them easier to handle but in this case there are way too many elements to modify

again thank you very much ;) 

Richard Haseltine said:

The U icon is User metadata, which may actually be old product metadata.

Products will appear in Available and All even if no files are isntalled (with a grey thumbnail image) if Daz Studio has been allowed to go online since purchase. Double-clicking will start the installation/prompt for log-in - if that was installed through DIM then appearing not to be installed suggests DS doesn't know the content directory used, that the database wasn't running at installation, or some other database/metadata issue.

Ok, in Available means uninstalled according to the database. But how does that correspond to, that the product is available in both Smart Content and Content Library under Products?

And why should the icon be updated, because I reinstalled with DIM?

Edit: tried to reimport metadata. That resulted in that the products in Available with the download icon, actually was not installed (primarily some older products), but a number of additional products got the U icon. And these products are installed.

So now I am wondering how to get these products properly into the system.

The U icon is User metadata, which may actually be old product metadata.

Products will appear in Available and All even if no files are isntalled (with a grey thumbnail image) if Daz Studio has been allowed to go online since purchase. Double-clicking will start the installation/prompt for log-in - if that was installed through DIM then appearing not to be installed suggests DS doesn't know the content directory used, that the database wasn't running at installation, or some other database/metadata issue.

I'm trying to work through a process and running into a roadblock.  Perhaps someone who understands zbrush better can explain it.  Here goes:  I load a base Genesis figure.  I set it to high resolution and the most subdivisions.  I export it as an .obj file.  I re-import it.  I send the .obj to zbrush.  I perform a modification in zbrush.  Then I try to create a displacement map.  Zbrush says my subtool is at a higher subdivision and i need to switch to the lowest subdivision.  But this .obj file isn't subdivided at all, right?

SolitarySandpiper said:

I've used content wizard on hundreds of products from rendo on my desktop pc and have encountered very few problems in both installation and creating smart content.

I'm now trying to replicate the process on my laptop but CW fails when trying to create the smart content.

(Not sure if this is relevant but my desktop is windows 10 and my laptop is windows 11).

 

After a successful install and analyze i get a error message when installing smart content (see log below).

 

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Installing Product to Daz Studio...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Version Number 1.2.1

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Verifying existence of Renderosity store: true

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Verifying "Nightbird for G8 and G8.1 Females" product does not exist already

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Creating "Nightbird for G8 and G8.1 Females" product (Store="Renderosity", ID="151634") in Daz Studio...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Building product metadata...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Unable to open file for writing: C:/Content Wizard_Renderosity/Runtime/Support/Renderosity_151634_Nightbird_for_G8_and_G8_1_Females.dsx

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Error creating metadata for Daz Studio import: C:/Content Wizard_Renderosity/Runtime/Support/Renderosity_151634_Nightbird_for_G8_and_G8_1_Females.dsx

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): There were errors during installation.

It sounds as if the Runtime\Support folder doesn't exist when creating.

You have to import the FACS on the HD mesh, not on the base mesh. If you use multires you can delete the base mesh so to avoid confusion.

Anyway, to be precise those are not the full HD morphs. That is, HD morphs get both a base morph for the base geometry (div2.dsf) and a full morph for the HD geometry (div2.dhdm). With multires you use the base HD morphs. To get the full HD morphs you have to use the HD addon by Xin.

I've used content wizard on hundreds of products from rendo on my desktop pc and have encountered very few problems in both installation and creating smart content.

I'm now trying to replicate the process on my laptop but CW fails when trying to create the smart content.

(Not sure if this is relevant but my desktop is windows 10 and my laptop is windows 11).

After a successful install and analyze i get a error message when installing smart content (see log below).

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Installing Product to Daz Studio...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Version Number 1.2.1

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Verifying existence of Renderosity store: true

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Verifying "Nightbird for G8 and G8.1 Females" product does not exist already

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Creating "Nightbird for G8 and G8.1 Females" product (Store="Renderosity", ID="151634") in Daz Studio...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Building product metadata...

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Unable to open file for writing: C:/Content Wizard_Renderosity/Runtime/Support/Renderosity_151634_Nightbird_for_G8_and_G8_1_Females.dsx

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): Error creating metadata for Daz Studio import: C:/Content Wizard_Renderosity/Runtime/Support/Renderosity_151634_Nightbird_for_G8_and_G8_1_Females.dsx

07:49:36 GMT+0100 (GMT Summer Time): There were errors during installation.

My trick for Smart Content is... to not use it.  The design is awkward and I own far too many products that come from outside the DAZ store for it to ever to be more than partially functional even if it worked the way it's supposed to. (And yes, I know that metadata can be created now but no, I am NOT going to go back and try to create metadata for literally hundreds of thousands of items.) Creating custom categories has worked fine for me.