Problems with Daz Decimate
gdebojyoti.mail_9a41a001e9
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I am having a problem with Daz 3D's Decimate plugin which is frequently troubling me. When I select a figure and click the 'Prepare to Decimate' button, the textures get damaged. This image will show what I mean.
Please tell me what I am doing wrong. I need to use the Decimate plugin before I export the models to Unity.
By the way, I am using Daz Studio Pro (version 4.0).
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Comments
I bet the textures are on Genesis and were made for Generation 4 figures....Yes??
No. I am using the default Michael 5 character.
That is surprising ok did your Turn off Sub-D for Genesis first before using Decimate?
Actually, I am not sure what you mean. Could you please tell me how to do that?
Googling how to turn off subdivisions in daz didn't help.
I didn't change any setting. I am using Daz after quite some time. Just installed it a couple of days ago.
Sorry from how long you have been a member here I wrongly assumed you new Daz Studio, my bad.
Ok Select Genesis and in the Parameters pane look for Mesh Resolution and set the Resoloution Level to Base. If you look hard enough you will find it.
The Texture Atlas is the complement DS tool to Decimation. It allows for you to optimize the UV mapping to a given level of detail and fix teh seams. Also try exporting after decimating but before creating Level of Detail, It will apply the original density UV to lower poly mesh. Sometimes this works out well. Finally, the exported texture maps - use the photoshop fill with BLEND on the black background. It will help mask seams to an acceptable degree, depending on application. http://www.daz3d.com/texture-atlas-for-daz-studio
PS You need to add the Texture Atlas icon to a toolbar in preferences, its not in the default UI setup.
I found the Resoloution Level, no probs. I set it to 'Base'. But still the same result when I press the 'prepare to decimate' button.
I tried with dragging the SubDivision level all the way left to 0. But still the same result. :-(
Seems like this is a known bug.
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=167725
Too bad that it hasn't been resolved yet.
There is a workaround for this problem (http://www.digitech-innovations.com/forum/?p=319), but I would rather like to see this bug get squashed.
Any chance of that?
It works fine for me with Genesis base and various morphs. From what I see in your image, its not a "bug" but rather that the UV's are not optimized for the decimated mesh. That's normal and there are tools to optimize the UV's like I pointed out. Consider what decimation is doing, condensing many polys into larger ones. If you do not adjust the UV map to the lower resolution map, the boundaries of the UV's will not align properly with the poly groups and you will have ghastly seams as depected in your image. All decimation tools require UV adjustment, while some can be automated most developers realize some manual manipulation or masking is required for high quality texture wrapping.
More on UV's coordinates: UV's provide the topographical map for textures and materials, and are initially generated by the polygon modeling system used to create the mesh. UV's can be swapped and edited, however its usually done in 2D. Some UV's are so complex that the resulting texture layout is not human readable. There are some advantage to complex, algorithmic gtenerated UV's in that in high resolution mappings, you can really hide the seams. However most people prefer working with readable UV's so that the resulting texture maps can be edited in Photoshop and common image editors. Many people use UVMapper for adapting UVs, however I prefer the capabilities in Ultimate Unwrap 3D. Because I work with many 3d rendering engines, max export flexibility is important. So for my figure conversions, UUWrap3D enables me to flatten overlapped UV's into one and swap out animation motion sequences easily and pump it out in the "flavour of the day" format. I maintain low, medium and high detail versions of my creations.
Thing is that I don't know anything about UVs. :-(
That's why I was trying to avoid this method.
What should I do now?
Will ZBrush's Decimation tool also have the same problem?
By the way, what should I learn in order to be able to perform the steps you mentioned?
Sorry for not adding to this and trying to help but I have to admit Decimating genesis has alwasy been a pain so I haven't continued to keep up with that side of things. I have reverted back to using Gen 4 figures when it comes to Decimating and exporting for Vue.
Dream Cutter thank you for helping out here with this it is much appreciated and I am impressed with your understanding of this. ;)
Dont get discouraged - UV's are not that complex. I tried to avoid getting into that too - but as I will explain you will understand why its unavoidable.
The Chocolate Easter bunny is a perfect example of how UV coordinates define texture placement. The chocolate bunny factory manager needs to instruct his staff how to package the chocolate bunny for Easter. The bunny's are to be wrapped in foil sheets that are imprinted with a flattened pelt of a bunny. The objective is to align the printed bunny features with the features on the chocolate as its being wrapped. Realizing that the bunny nose is printed dead center of the foil, and while taking precise notes to pass to the workers, aligns the foil nose with the chocolate nose and then proceeds to wrap the foil over the head of the bunny. Logging detail about how the foil is crinkled in the crevasses, and stretched over the bumps in the notes, ensures that the process is repeatable. The notes will define the process how to wrap ANY chocolate bunny whit ANY TEXTURE that uses the same TEXTURE LAYOUT of the SAME ORIENTATION and the image maintains alignment with the surface detail.
Now in the in our world of 3d figure modelling, replace the chocolate bunny with the figure base MESH object (.obj), the printed foil, the wrapping notes with the UV COORIDNATES, the foil itself with the MATERIAL. Also other coridinate "layers" may be defined, such as animation smoothing WEIGHT MAPS. Materials can be shiny, flat - paper,cloth or metallic. Also they can be the whole surface or part as in a patchwork. Materials are algorithmic adjustments to the look of a texture, like making is WET, DRY, REFLECTIVE, LUMINOUS and such in appearance. The materials may be applied to groups of polygons defined by the figure mesh or they may have their own coordinates. Because animatable 3D figures are complex and have many moving joints the mesh is divided into body-part groupings. As with traditional Poser figures, materials are applied to mesh groupings.
A bit farther down the rabbit hole...
These groupings are GROUPs of polygons defined by a boundry or SEAM, and all the groups assembled make the full figure. This would be hard to do in Chocolate, but its how a Barbie doll is made. There are many advantages to dividing a model into parts, one being that you can develop more detailed features in parts because it uses less computing resources to manipulate, and 3D paint (TEXTURIZE, COLORIZE). These parts (or whole) then can be can be reduced in resolution (DECIMATED or Resurfaced Topographically) and exported MERGED and WELDED (adheres group seams) .obj. Not welding on either export or subsequent import the groups may cause export to treat each group as an individual object, or in other words, rather than joints motion stretching the surface, it will tear. However DS 4.5 is advanced enough to ignore groupings all together and rely on UV and Joint Smoothing WEIGHT MAP data at the individual polygon level to coordinate VERTEX ANIMATION. Vertex Animation is commonly called morphing. Its different than relying on body part groups managed by a rigid BONE skeletal system - like Poser and DS 3 use. The TRI-AXIS weight mapping system adds 3 layers to the onion skin of the mesh coordinates, one each for defining the give and take (skin stretchability) parameters the X, Y and Z dimensions. Thankfully in DS 4.5, they made a system that facilitates defining the weight map layers, by painting more stretch GREEN-less RED on the object in 3d using a neat interface widget.
Well - that covers the fundamentals, takes some mysticism out of the subject to make it comfortable enough to try to give a go.
OK... if brought up a topic that gets your mouth all fired up break this glass: http://www.godiva.com/easter-chocolate-foil-bunnies-setof3/190404,default,pd.html
@DreamCutter: Nice lesson. Thank you. That cleared some of my doubts. I am currently going through some tutorials; hopefully I'll be able to crack this soon. :-)
P.S. The Foil-Wrapped Chocolate Bunnies are out of stock. Too bad! ;-)
I just bought Decimator and had problems with Genesis seams also. I want to use Texture Atlas but can't find it. It is listed in the Plugins but not in tabs. I looked in Preferences didn't see anything about adding an icon for it from there.
The method you describe for as exporting before creating LOD works great. Thanks!
Where to download Texture Atlas: http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Texture+Atlas+for+DAZ+Studio
Or maybe you already have it, depending on your version of DS?
Thanks. I have it. It installed itself with DS 4.5 It just doesn't provide a way to access it within DS. LOL. I ended up going into preferences and assigning a speed key combination to it in order to open it. Now I have to figure out how to use it. Can't seem to find any documentation, as usual. It doesn't very complicated though...
You should not need to install Texture Atlas, just need to add its icon to the Menu Tab. In DS 4.5, go to EDIT > Customize. Select Texture atlas on Left Pane, and andrag Texture Atlas (Globe Icon) to Right pane toolbar or menu selection. Texture Atlas operates like Decimate - so be sure to set the various weighting to get good results.
I don't know what weighting means in this case. I watched a YouTube Video where the narrator said to make the head, limbs and torso .5 and the rest 1. Does this mean these 3 will be higher resolution than the smaller parts? That's what I would want.
I don't know what weighting means in this case. I watched a YouTube Video where the narrator said to make the head, limbs and torso .5 and the rest 1. Does this mean these 3 will be higher resolution than the smaller parts? That's what I would want.
By using term "weighting" I am referring to the process of Decimate and Texture Atlas where you define values (Weight) that concentrate the decimation or image detail in the relative to the other poly groups being worked. There is a menu tab called weighting in both applets.