I don't think you need to rig the character from scratch. What you can do is transfer an existing skeleton in Maya. This should be covered in your rigging exercises, as this was the first thing I learned when I started learning rigging. If you use Daz to Maya to start out you should already have a working skeleton. You can always adjust the joints as you need with an existing skeleton definition and it's way easier than starting from scratch.

Yes, I totally agree with you, animation is easier in Mata, also with more options, but that's not surprising given this is Maya's main purpose. The moment I decided to learn Maya I never looked back and never do anything else in Studio except assets over or setup stuff. So therefore unfortunately I have no knowledge about how to bring back animations back to Daz but Wendy's guess looks spot on to me.

The setup of clothes or props should be relatively easy, most of these assets use bump map and/or normal maps. In animation sometimes you ca get away without these maps of the prop is far away because you won't see them anyway. I think the major challenge are characters, especially Gen 8 characters, because some Iray maps are incompatible with Arnold and still relevant for non close-ups, like the specular map. Also, Arnold is seemingly built better for displacement maps because normal maps can cause some weird bugs but displacement maps are heavy for animation rendering.

What you can also try if the shader is the problem or just you tiresome to tweak - you can import the clothes character and export the animation sequence in alembic. If you keep the standard materials during conversion these should be properly translated into material zones in Studio, and you can assign the shaders like you do normally to characters in Daz Studio.

felis said:

Essentially you can't import anything to Daz Studio and keep rigging and textures.

What you can do is creating morphs to the item inside Daz Studio.

Aw bummer, is there a way to fuze pixels together on a model? (in daz)*

Essentially you can't import anything to Daz Studio and keep rigging and textures.

What you can do is creating morphs to the item inside Daz Studio.

st3ph3nstrang3 said:

Splatterbaby said:

Hey st3ph3nstrang3. Was wondering if there is a tutorial on this method from start to end. I can import my character but the clothes and hair dont come through. Only one way works . Import morphed characters one. All the other buttons or import ways dont work. So I can get the character in. Its low res. I can get the modifier working but I dont see details. I guess I need to import all the morphs etc. Still alot to discover with this way but I can see the potential:) Thanks again.

Unfortunately I have yet to see a tutorial using the Daz > Diffeomorphic > Unreal workflow. It's something I had to work out myself, but I had a natural transition from using Daz to using Blender and then deciding to experiment in real-time, so I was familiar with all the software used. There are tutorials on just Diffeomorphic though, this one is good. Diffeomorphic should send over any clothing that is attached to your character just fine. What you should have is:

-A Daz studio scene file with the character and clothing

-A .dbz file exported along with the scene file (this is used by Diffeomorphic)

It sounds like you may not have remembered to create the .dbz file, which must be done any time you want to import something into Diffeomorphic. This is just a script you run inside Daz that will create it for you. I went ahead and put the script on my toolbar, so it's right next to the rotate/translate tools on the toolbar in Daz for easy access.

If you aren't getting good results with your HD morphs with a single subdivision, consider subdividing again or even a third time. This will of course make your character ridiculously high-poly and not really suitable for real-time, but if you were doing cinematics or something like that it would be fine.

Hair works a little bit differently. You can import it the standard way, as you would clothing, but Unreal has a groom feature for hair that is quite nice and looks far superior to importing traditional mesh hair. You can find more info about that (and tutorials) here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/489721/tutorial-daz-hair-to-unreal-grooming-system-via-blender-pit-stop

 

 Ill test this out. Really appreciate your help and input. Hair im pretty waxed at. I use the blender hair plugin. Yes definately groom all the way. The power of putting it through blender is that I can repose and resculpt anything. Its like a non distructive workflow which is a MASSIVE win. Ill get this right as its definately the way forward with using unreal or rendering in Blender. Thanks again. Massive thanks and love for your help and response buddy.

I want to import a figure from daz, bring it to blender, fix up a few things with the mesh then import it back and hopefully everything still functions as it did before (rigging, texture, ect).

I want to fuze two different meshes together, basically.

I know it sounds silly, essentially posting a google search in the forum here but I wasnt confident in the searches I found for what i am looking for.

Im not familiar with blender at all. I used 3ds max back in college but lost my copy since.

Or if anyone has a suggestion for anything else to use I am all ears and happy to hear them.

Thanks!

 

Thank you all for the comments

adbc - Wow..That is a very nice futuristic landscape. Love the terrain and the city.

---

Proudly presenting the very first- (I think) fully integrated Unreal Engine 5/Bryce hybrid render.

Unreal Engine (UE for short) has an option (it has 1000nds of options but that is neither here nor there) to import hightmaps.

What if I could import hightmaps from Bryce? Well, as it happens, that is very simple. The "ultra fine" terrains translate 1 on 1 to UE.

Ah well, I now had a Bryce-made terrain in UE but tthat doesn't give me a Bryce render and so this doesn't qualify as post-able in this forum, right?

Right! Hmmm..

First, I changed the terrain material in UE, found myself a nice spot on the terrain with a good view, added some houses and liberally sprinkled trees, flowers and grass all over the place.

This gave me something like this:

Nice indeed, but still not qualified for posting in here. Hmm...

I made a screenshot from within UE of this scene and started up Bryce.

Then, I Spuddyfied this scene onto a terrain and added some birds and a different sky.

As they say in Greece "Et voila!" a full Bryce render as a hybrid of Unreal engine 5 and Bryce:

It even picks up the typical Bryce lighting from the sky, which is nice ofcourse and it gives me the opportunity to make more lifelike landscape renders in Bryce with help from Unreal engine.

Now all I need is to import the Erasmus into UE and away we go.

I hope you all like this.

 

Splatterbaby said:

Hey st3ph3nstrang3. Was wondering if there is a tutorial on this method from start to end. I can import my character but the clothes and hair dont come through. Only one way works . Import morphed characters one. All the other buttons or import ways dont work. So I can get the character in. Its low res. I can get the modifier working but I dont see details. I guess I need to import all the morphs etc. Still alot to discover with this way but I can see the potential:) Thanks again.

Unfortunately I have yet to see a tutorial using the Daz > Diffeomorphic > Unreal workflow. It's something I had to work out myself, but I had a natural transition from using Daz to using Blender and then deciding to experiment in real-time, so I was familiar with all the software used. There are tutorials on just Diffeomorphic though, this one is good. Diffeomorphic should send over any clothing that is attached to your character just fine. What you should have is:

-A Daz studio scene file with the character and clothing

-A .dbz file exported along with the scene file (this is used by Diffeomorphic)

It sounds like you may not have remembered to create the .dbz file, which must be done any time you want to import something into Diffeomorphic. This is just a script you run inside Daz that will create it for you. I went ahead and put the script on my toolbar, so it's right next to the rotate/translate tools on the toolbar in Daz for easy access.

If you aren't getting good results with your HD morphs with a single subdivision, consider subdividing again or even a third time. This will of course make your character ridiculously high-poly and not really suitable for real-time, but if you were doing cinematics or something like that it would be fine.

Hair works a little bit differently. You can import it the standard way, as you would clothing, but Unreal has a groom feature for hair that is quite nice and looks far superior to importing traditional mesh hair. You can find more info about that (and tutorials) here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/489721/tutorial-daz-hair-to-unreal-grooming-system-via-blender-pit-stop

there are plenty of programs that convert stl to obj.

otherwise if you do a dressed A pose scan

with Genesis 8 base male scale and rotate the bones to fit your obj then select the bowtie shaped joint editor tool and rightclick edit bake rotations then use the transfer utilty.

unparent it and delete the G8M

Then load another G8m and pose and scale etc the rigged one to fit that one and under edit rigging convert the rigged scan to a prop

then use the transfer tool on that one.

again unparent it and delete the base male again

then under edit figure morphloader pro import the original back to it as a morph

under edit rigging adjust rigging to shape 

in parameters edit mode with morphloader morph selected run erc freeze

save it as a support asset figure 

it won't be a G8M but it will take its poses

Also, is still the script by @jag11 the only way to activate the "iray visible to primary rays" property ? I tried the official "create advanced iray node properties" in the beta but it doesn't work, only creates the "enable iray matte" property. Plus the script by jag11 only works for emissive surfaces so I would prefer a way to do it myself.

I remember there were instructions to do this without the script, probably by jag11 as well, but can't find them.

 

p.s. I'm working to support both the ghost light "bug" and the new 4.20 iray properties into diffeomorphic for import in blender.

Hey st3ph3nstrang3. Was wondering if there is a tutorial on this method from start to end. I can import my character but the clothes and hair dont come through. Only one way works . Import morphed characters one. All the other buttons or import ways dont work. So I can get the character in. Its low res. I can get the modifier working but I dont see details. I guess I need to import all the morphs etc. Still alot to discover with this way but I can see the potential:) Thanks again.

That's because iray doesn't support material layers, so in daz studio the geometry shells are used instead. That's also why diffeo doesn't import the shell geometry in blender and uses a material layer instead. As for merging the uv maps you can do it in diffeo but will not be compatible with the fbx by daz. Again you can export the fbx from blender though so I don't see what's your problem here.

pipeline: daz > blender+diffeo > fbx > C4D

Then as a personal advice you may leave C4D and go for blender since exporting to fbx you lose a lot over the native diffeo figures. That is, thanks to diffeo blender is the best platform now to import daz assets.

Here in Montreal, we have a scanning service to make figurines of ourselves called Doob ( a variation of the word double in french )

https://www.3ddoob.com/en-ca/

So im thinking of getting one ( about 149 bucks i think ) 

so can i ask for the scan file after and convert it to a DUF to import it into Daz ? 

I would have to go down to my briefs right ? if i do that, i'll feel like Jeff Goldblum in the fly stepping in his machine. LOL

Thanks.

 

So the issue I am having currently is i am trying to get Mixamo Animations to work on a G8F and then Export into Blender. I can get the animations to work in Daz Studio but cannot seem to set the export up right on daz's side, or the import Fbx on blender's side. Are there any stepps i can take or a starting point to reference for this? 

I have tried all sorts of combinations and have gotten nowhere has anyone else tried this and succeeded?

marth_e said:

Krys Kryngle said:

I have a tutorial on youtube that goes over using Xin's add-on (Export DAZ to Blender using Diffeomorphic - Part 3 of 3). 

One thing I've discovered and hopefully I can save you some time and frustration is that adding a lot of HD Shapekeys in Blender will slow Blender to a crawl and make it almost unusable.  I imported all the normal shape keys along with some extra div-2 shape keys while my character had 2 subdivisions (264,000 verts I think).  It might work if you only import a limited number of shape keys, but I stopped using it and stay at base resolution because of the performance issue.  Of course I could have been doing something wrong that made it perform so poorly but I did try it multiple times with the same result. 

Thanks for the videotutorials, Krys. I've found them very informative and useful. Are you planning to do more tutorials?
Thanks a lot,

Martha

So glad you could find some useful information in them.  I thought about doing some shorter 2 minute vids, maybe after I learn rigging and animation...

Krys Kryngle said:

I have a tutorial on youtube that goes over using Xin's add-on (Export DAZ to Blender using Diffeomorphic - Part 3 of 3). 

One thing I've discovered and hopefully I can save you some time and frustration is that adding a lot of HD Shapekeys in Blender will slow Blender to a crawl and make it almost unusable.  I imported all the normal shape keys along with some extra div-2 shape keys while my character had 2 subdivisions (264,000 verts I think).  It might work if you only import a limited number of shape keys, but I stopped using it and stay at base resolution because of the performance issue.  Of course I could have been doing something wrong that made it perform so poorly but I did try it multiple times with the same result. 

Thanks for the videotutorials, Krys. I've found them very informative and useful. Are you planning to do more tutorials?
Thanks a lot,

Martha

Krys Kryngle said:

I've spent many hours experimenting with different approaches.  Here is what I've discovered so hopefully it can save others some time.

To preserve DAZ HD details (sub 4/5 details found in the HD Add-Ons), we have 2 approaches.  

    1) Import DAZ character into Blender using Diffeomorphic and MultiRes
    2) Bake out the HD details to displacement/normal maps.

 

Bake Displacement Maps for HD details-

Bake using Blender - I've tried (using bake from multires), but always get seams between the uv layers on the final render.  I've searched for a solution but have not found one yet.  Blender is planning on improving their baking process so maybe this will be fixed in future versions.

o go for wrinkles in the face and other places on the character, although I have not gotten that far yet.  I'm thinking we can generate wrinkle maps in Zbrush and use drivers in Blender to activate those maps.

 

Well, in fact, I found a solution for the seams issue.  The Bake Wrangler addon works well for this, because it allows you to set a margin for the displacement maps.  I tried it, and set a 16 pixel margin, and there are no seams on my figure.  I even viewed the displacement maps by connecting a material output node to the displacement setup - there are no seams.  The addon is worth it, and is quite flexible.   It's also node based, which is interesting.

https://blendermarket.com/products/bake-wrangler

 

Krys Kryngle said:

I've spent many hours experimenting with different approaches.  Here is what I've discovered so hopefully it can save others some time.

To preserve DAZ HD details (sub 4/5 details found in the HD Add-Ons), we have 2 approaches.  

    1) Import DAZ character into Blender using Diffeomorphic and MultiRes
    2) Bake out the HD details to displacement/normal maps.

MultiRes-
Pros - Easy and quick, preserves all the details up to Sub 4.  DAZ has some HD details in sub 5 which should be baked out to normal or bump maps so sub 4 is sufficient.  We can keep the character at 0 subdivision levels in the viewport so we can pose/animate without Blender lagging too badly.  We can also sculpt in various levels of MultiRes to modify our characters (but we lose detail, see below).
Cons - Difficult to change HD details.  If we need to smooth out some issues when posing, the fine HD details get lost.  For example, if our character had a bend at the elbow or knee which requires some sculpting, using the smooth brush destroys the fine HD details.  We could bake out the fine details to normal/bump maps, but at that point why bother with multires?  Another example is using geografts.  They often need some smoothing and adjustment, which destroys the HD details.  Also, we can only import the HD details that already exist.  If we add additional HD details or change something, we have to repeat that change on every import. Our edits are not saved.  There is a 'Sculpt Layers' add-on that may fix some/all of these issues but I have not tried it yet.

Bake Displacement Maps for HD details-

Bake using Blender - I've tried (using bake from multires), but always get seams between the uv layers on the final render.  I've searched for a solution but have not found one yet.  Blender is planning on improving their baking process so maybe this will be fixed in future versions.

Bake using Xin's addon - Works, but the HD details did not seem to be very strong.  I could not get the level of detail I was hoping for.  Also, there is no way to adjust any details such as smoothing a wrinkle or bump, adding a crease, etc.  What you get from DAZ is what you get.

Bake using external program - Best so far, and what I currently use, except I had to buy Zbrush.  There may be other programs that are equally good at baking displacement maps, but Zbrush just works.  Export OBJ from DAZ (or maybe even use the GoZ link) and bake.  Flipped Normals has a tutorial on youtube which goes over the settings and process.  After getting the model in ZBrush, we can adjust any HD details we want with some additional sculpting.  Then we have displacement and normal maps that we can use on multiple characters.  Back in Blender we can sculpt and fine tune our characters all day without worring about losing any HD detail.  I also think this is the way to go for wrinkles in the face and other places on the character, although I have not gotten that far yet.  I'm thinking we can generate wrinkle maps in Zbrush and use drivers in Blender to activate those maps.

Krys, 

I'm sure you've already seen the works of Chris Jones at BA. He's working with wrinkle maps and drivers.

It seems he will release some updates 'very very' soon.

https://youtu.be/gh6WbaYzwFc

 

Using a Geoshell to make custom clothes, even a tight body suit, is not the best idea.

A solution could be to :

- 3D model your suit on Genesis 8 base default shape (even using the geoshell, why not).

- Import a Genesis 8 with bigger breast in your modeling software and adjust a copy of your finished cloth onto that version of Genesis 8.

- Unwrap the copy of the cloth once adjusted to Genesis with bigger breast. This way UVs will be perfect for huge breast without stretching.

- Copy UVs from that unwrapped version onto the original modeled onto Genesis 8 defaut.

- Bring that into DAZ.

 

You won't get stretching for the specific body shape you're interested in. But you will get some "pinching" issues if you ever use that cloth on a girl with smaller boobs.

Good thing about Genesis 8 base is that it's an average human body shape. When you wanna hit extreme difformations of the mesh, well you get pinching or spreading of the corresponding polygons unwrapped. There's just no easy way around that, except by doing 2 or more versions of the same cloth, with different unwrappings. Or one unique cloth with eventual morph options and multiple UVs for average and big boobs.

I've spent many hours experimenting with different approaches.  Here is what I've discovered so hopefully it can save others some time.

To preserve DAZ HD details (sub 4/5 details found in the HD Add-Ons), we have 2 approaches.  

    1) Import DAZ character into Blender using Diffeomorphic and MultiRes
    2) Bake out the HD details to displacement/normal maps.

MultiRes-
Pros - Easy and quick, preserves all the details up to Sub 4.  DAZ has some HD details in sub 5 which should be baked out to normal or bump maps so sub 4 is sufficient.  We can keep the character at 0 subdivision levels in the viewport so we can pose/animate without Blender lagging too badly.  We can also sculpt in various levels of MultiRes to modify our characters (but we lose detail, see below).
Cons - Difficult to change HD details.  If we need to smooth out some issues when posing, the fine HD details get lost.  For example, if our character had a bend at the elbow or knee which requires some sculpting, using the smooth brush destroys the fine HD details.  We could bake out the fine details to normal/bump maps, but at that point why bother with multires?  Another example is using geografts.  They often need some smoothing and adjustment, which destroys the HD details.  Also, we can only import the HD details that already exist.  If we add additional HD details or change something, we have to repeat that change on every import. Our edits are not saved.  There is a 'Sculpt Layers' add-on that may fix some/all of these issues but I have not tried it yet.

Bake Displacement Maps for HD details-

Bake using Blender - I've tried (using bake from multires), but always get seams between the uv layers on the final render.  I've searched for a solution but have not found one yet.  Blender is planning on improving their baking process so maybe this will be fixed in future versions.

Bake using Xin's addon - Works, but the HD details did not seem to be very strong.  I could not get the level of detail I was hoping for.  Also, there is no way to adjust any details such as smoothing a wrinkle or bump, adding a crease, etc.  What you get from DAZ is what you get.

Bake using external program - Best so far, and what I currently use, except I had to buy Zbrush.  There may be other programs that are equally good at baking displacement maps, but Zbrush just works.  Export OBJ from DAZ (or maybe even use the GoZ link) and bake.  Flipped Normals has a tutorial on youtube which goes over the settings and process.  After getting the model in ZBrush, we can adjust any HD details we want with some additional sculpting.  Then we have displacement and normal maps that we can use on multiple characters.  Back in Blender we can sculpt and fine tune our characters all day without worring about losing any HD detail.  I also think this is the way to go for wrinkles in the face and other places on the character, although I have not gotten that far yet.  I'm thinking we can generate wrinkle maps in Zbrush and use drivers in Blender to activate those maps.

To fix that you need (let's say I'd use) a 3D modeling app. Easiest option being to Relax and/or smooth the breast area and import that back as a morph in DAZ. You can see the enlargment of quads in the breast area (Viewport set to Wire Texture Shaded) when you make them bigger. There might be a bundle as TheCediz explains that takes care of that for those who don't want to use another app (such as ZBrush of Blender). But, often, the best option is to consider DAZ as part of a workflow. Not as a tool that will do-it-all.

EDIT : I just read a bit of  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/539521/breast-utilities-2-for-genesis-8-and-8-1-females-commercial, and indeed the stretching happening to your pixels when projected on the default UVs from Genesis, should be fixable using this Breast Utilities Bundle. But this bundles relies on the use of a Geoshell rather than on a morph that relaxes the wireframe, or a slightly modified version of the default Genesis UVs, so... if ? this bundle can fix your problem, it might very well create lots of other complications.