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and in unrelated mews here's the animation i was rendering
Yea, your right. I always have understood, that the default cube is 2x2x2 Blender Units, and "A BU is an arbitrary unit of measurement."...so as long as you are consistent (proportional), it's really not an issue. I always had it in my head that the cube was 1m^2...but that was probably cause it was easiest for me to think of it that way. :)
Since DS has a default of 1BU = 50cm, I made the Poser exporter a default of "Scale Up" x4.8768 after import. That way they are consistent. It probably needs a interface now, so I will work on that...which will let folks change it, if desired.
Many thanks, Casual, for this superb piece of work.! I would never have discovered Cycles without it. When I export animation, I find that glossiness is missing although it is present in the same export to current frame. Am I missing something?
I found out that the smoothing/collision modifiers in DS do not export through the framework. For example, I needed to use them for a problem such as this: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/10751/
Once exported to blender, the bodysuit had the same issue.
sorry i didnt respond earlier i missed this post
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the color ( usually a shade of gray )" on the specular channel of the surface in Daz Studio's Surfaces tab
determines the amount of glossiness applied on a surface. white means full glossiness, black means no gloss
in teleblender itself, there's 2 "master controls" for glossiness, "Gloss factor" and "Roughness" The first one controls the overall glossiness strength, in the image below, i set it to 0.5 to exaggerate the effect. A roughness on 0 almost gives a mirror surface.
The default values Gloss = 0.05 and Roughness = 0.15 were optimized for Aiko3's default skin settings.
if you want a true mirror surface, in Daz Studio's you can set the Reflection map for the Reflection channel to an image (any image). The material in blender will then use the glossiness type called "Sharp" which is a mirror effect. Note that unfortunately, the latest version of Blender 2.64 broke this feature ( meanies!) so you'll have to manually set the chosen surface to use the "Sharp" gloss.
in an earlier post i was saying you could use Daz Studio's exporter to overwrite the .obj exported by mcjTeleblender
since it seems to apply the smooth modifier before the export
but the solution i use myself is to go in Scene/Edit/Geometry/Bake Smooth morphs
i will probably have to modify mcjTeleblender to make it wait a second or 2 before exporting the .obj.
Last time i exported an animation, i could see Daz Studio finish applying the smoothing modifier after the scene had started being exported ( lucky my English teachers never saw this sentence construct )
in the image shown below, the first time i exported this scene, there was a lot of poke-trough once it got to Blender,
so i baked the morphs (took a few seconds only) and this time Blender received the scene without poke-trough
Note about Blender Cycles and Windows 7's display driver issues ( crashes )
this is not a problem with teleblender, but if Blender Cycles crashes your display driver, and/or Windows 7 itself, it seems to be related to Windows 7 time-out, if Blender Cycles hogs the display card for too long, Windows 7 panics and falls on its face.
one solution is to chop the rendering process in smaller pieces
for example if i render a 1920x1200 image with Full Global illumination and big textures, big geometry, Blender/Windows7 most likely crash
so i set Cycle's Render tiling to 8 x 4
and the render completes without harm
another solution probably involves changing the Time-out Windows 7 uses before panicking
though i read somewhere it doesnt always solves the problem
the optimal solution according to another post i saw floating on the web is to use one display card for windows 7 and another display card for the Blender Cycles renders
I'm glad I found this thread. I've been looking for something to port characters I've created in DAZ Studio over to Blender. I have a few questions before I play around with this. Is this just for rendering in Blender something that has been pre-posed in DazStudio or is the character fully rigged and able to be posed and animated in Blender? Also, is there any adjustment needed to the materials once in Blender? Some of the renders you've posted have the character's skin looking of one tone and have a kind of plastic appearance.
on daz studio's side the mcjTeleblender script exports a scene, as obj/mtl/bat/py file(s), on Blender's side, the blendbot scripts help import that scene and build node-based materials according to what was in the obj/mat/py files. All node-materials are a mix of matte and glossy. I did not spend much time (15 minutes?) trying to find the settings that make materials look like skin. there must be studies of this at blenderartists.org.
somewhere on the net there's at least one person that has a system to import poser (and daz?) figures in Blender. Rigged animatable characters that is.
lets see if i can remember . . .( googling import poser blender ) . . . here! :) http://blender3dclub.com/posertools/index.php
Thanks for the link. I haven't used DAZ Studio that much over the last year and a half so I haven't kept up with what's been happening on the DAZ side of things. I've been spending most of my time at Blender Cookie and Blender Guru doing tutorials and working on some stuff of my own. I know how to do some basic rigging and texturing. But, I came back to DAZ Studio because of the sale that's going on. It's saving me a lot of time when creating characters. I think your tool will do the trick for the texturing side of things. That's the tedious part. I don't mind the rigging side of things.
Poser Tools 2 for Blender shows that the Poser Character Exporter goals are all in the red. So, I don't think that's going to work for the time being.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
~~~ solved issue ~~~ solved issue ~~~ solved issue ~~~ solved issue ~~~ solved issue ~~~
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( from a post by Wiseavatar )
when you have clothing items using Smoothing Modifiers,
they are not applied during the transfer (obj export) to Blender
the solution is to go in the clothing figure's parameters tab and
set the Smoothing Modifier's "interactive updates" property ON
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I'm not sure exactly were to put the mcjTeleBlender.zip contents. In the installation instructions it says it goes in the contents folder which is usually in the "C:\program Files\Daz\Studio\Content".
But with DAZ Studio 4 the program directory is
C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\ with a scripts folder but now content folder.
The content folder is located under
C:\Users\(username)\Mydocuments\DAZ 3D\Studio4\Content.
Should I put the scripts in the scripts folder found in the DAZStudio4 directory or the Content directory which doesn't have a script folder?
yes you can unzip it in Daz Studio folders named Content, or "My Library"
if the installation went well, you'll then find it in Daz Studio's content tab under
"Daz Studio Formats / Studio4 / scripts / mcasual
or
"Daz Studio Formats / My Library / scripts / mcasual
in Daz studio, if you go in Edit / Preferences / Content Library / Content Directory Manager
you can add or remove which folders are "seen" by Daz studio as content folders
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( random image to decorate the forum )
Thanks for the help. For some reason I was thinking it was something that integrated into DAZ Studio as a kind of render option. I guess I should have read the instructions further.
With so many different content folders I'm glad the Content Library Tab has a search bar so I don't have to memorize where everything is. Typing "mcj" pulls it up quickly.
Works nice, with the exception of GPU rendering. It keeps crashing blender. I have an evga gtx 260 superclocked with 896MB of memory. So, I think I'm running out of memory. I've got my eye on a gtx 660 superclocked with 4GB of memory. Hopefully I can pick up one, maybe two, within a couple of months. I can put up to 3 video cards at 16x each on my mobo. Although, I'll have to up grade my power supply as well.
Also, I found this blog post by Blender Guru on some tweaks to speed up Cycles. In the comments, Thomas Dinges, gives tips on how to get a better looking render with lower samples. Lower samples = faster render times.
http://www.blenderguru.com/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/
i only recently went for windows 7 64-bit and had the NVIDIA driver crashing
due to (i conclude) Windows7 panicking because it sees the video driver become unresponsive
for more than x seconds during Blender-Cycles-GPU renders
so when my renders are large ( HD1080p ) or contains heavy geometry
i change blender cycles ' render tiles to 4 tiles by 4 tiles, by default, it's 1 tile
and this prevents crashes
i read somewhere that in windows' registry there's a timeout value you could change
so windows would not panic so early and crash the driver
the forum post was saying the ideal is to have 1 video card for
windows and 1 video card for rendering
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the old-school way of crashing blender/cycles/gpu is when the scene contains a figure like victoria 4
which uses texture images like 4000x4000 pixels. Since Cycles ( i think ) transfers
all the images to the video card memory before rendering. The solution is to switch the texture images
to smaller ones (ex: 1024 x 1024). this can be done in daz studio or by using mcjTeleblender's "collect maps"
option, closing Blender, resizing the collected maps in the /Maps folder then re-launching the render using the .bat file
produced by mcjTeleblender.
I've already edited my registry to take care of this. But, the lowest I've set my tile size is 64x64. Strange thing is it renders fine when looking at the preview, but crashes when render it out for the final image. Maybe, I'll bring this up on blenderartist. I know I've not had this problem in the past. Might even be an nVidia driver up date that's causing problems. nVidia has written some bad drivers before.
you could remove all body/face texture images from your figures before exporting/rendering using mcjTeleblender
them and this way you'd know it that's the issue.
on a related matter, i think windows' "magnifier" can cause DS4.5 crashes
also i disabled Aero's transparencies, because it seemed to cause severe problems to Magnifier
and i suspected it uses video card memory
i also downgraded my nvidia driver to 197 instead of 304, but i'm not sure it did any good
i didn't have recent problems with blender/cycles/gpu renderings, i set tiling to 2x2
note that your version of blender seems to be more recent than mine since you specify tile sizes
I was able to GPU render a character using a basic setup and using "David's Batch Processor" plug-in for Gimp to re-size the textures by 50%. Time to render - 1H:50M:13.64S. Settings used are in the image below.
Irfanview also makes quick work of batch resize, conversions and many other batch options
if Blender Cycles with the non-negligible help of Windows 7 crashes with a message talking about the video driver having crashed
it's due to the fact that windows7 and vista have a timeout of only 2 seconds, after this delay , it panic and do all sorts of disgraceful things
for Windows 7 i used this method, on the web
if you never used Regedit, dont try this solution, it's too dangerous
personally i pumped up the TdrDelay to 16 seconds
My GPU usage always hovers between 40 and 60 percent. Once and a while it jumps to 83 percent. So, I don't think my problem was the windows time out issue. I've had games push my card harder than Cycles.
If my render goes slightly higher in memory usage than my card, I get the out of memory error in the render window. The only time Blender crashes for me is if the memory usage spikes above what I have. My TdrDelay value is "10" in decimal "a" in Hexadecimal. And the crash for me is immediate as cycles calculates the render solution and the memory usage jumps up. But, shrinking the textures to fit within the video memory seems to be the fix for me until I get a better card.
I'm looking forward to seeing the memory issue in cycles resolved. Cycles seems to be the Blender Foundation's main focus for now. Hopefully, they will come up with a fix to this and the lack of particle hair in cycles. As GPU computing grows I think we will see video cards begin to have expandable memory. There just isn't enough demand currently for them to add this feature. Here are some things to look forward to in Cycles. http://www.blenderguru.com/is-it-in-blender-yet/
Also, Carrozza, gave these tips which I tried and it helped.
1a) Go into nvidia control panel > manage 3D settings > global settings >
> Multi Display/Mixed-GPU acceleration > set to either Single display performance
mode or Multiple display performance mode, depending on your setup
1b) Right under that is power management mode > set it to Prefer maximum performance
(that stops the downclocking)
1c) Now go down to Threaded Optimization > set to Off
http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-235303.html?s=463be4b84df621486718d326694be2ff
recently i had a 20000 pixels wide image( Flatiron Building Equilateral Env. map ) that was hard to handle with PaintshopPro, and before that i had large HDR environment maps ( StudioHDR ) to resize. I also had a not-so-large image that was freezing PaintshopPro.
I used the free command-line driven imagemagick and batch files.
The content of the .bat files i used
or
or this one which works by dragging and dropping the image onto the .bat file ---and overwrites the original
imagemagick can handle HDR and 16-bit Tiff ( sometimes used as bump maps
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about tdrdelay and blender cycles -- since my Windows7 was using the default 2 seconds delay, if i tried rendering a full HD image in full global illumination, it never failed to crash :) not with 16 seconds life should be good
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for some images you can afford long render times, and i think (not sure) that if you set Cycles to CPU rendering, it wont mind the huge texture images.
my card has 2G DDR5 but i guess baseline for new rendering cards must be 4G
and ideally you'd have one card for Windows and one card for rendering
I did a little turn table animation and posted on Youtube. Only 1500 passes, so it is a bit grainy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ez7t8hLsz4&feature=youtu.be
Thanks for this tool! I've been experimenting lately with Blender Cycles and learning more about using shaders and textures to achieve reasonably realistic surfaces.
However, I have some issues with the kind of nodes that this script produces for Blender. First of all, it uses an 'Add' shader node to mix diffuse and glossy, which is a bad idea in my opinion. Why not control the mix of diffuse, glossy, and transparency (when used) with 'Mix' shader nodes instead? The B&W textures get plugged into the 'factor' input to vary the mix instead of controlling the color directly.
With some experimentation I've come up with some custom node groups that I append to any file created by this script. I have node groups for skin, hair, eyes, mouth, cloth, tear, cornea, and eyelashes. I export the scene with Blender Render option checked instead of Cycles. Then I can append my custom node groups and go about assigning materials and textures for Cycles as I see fit.
The script does the important job of getting the objects, UVs, and materials all linked in the scene in Blender. I just wish it gave more options for how the nodes get set up. My method wouldn't be any good for animation, and unfortunately, I'm no coder. If anyone's interested, I can post pics of the nodes and results.
Well, I decided that I would go ahead and post some more about my shader group nodes for Blender Cycles before I forget and move on to something entirely different.
I made a separate .blend file just for these materials. I append this file into a scene that mcjTeleBlender exports to Blender. Then it is just a matter of selecting objects and materials, setting up nodes, and matching up textures. It's not an automated process by any means, so it wouldn't work for animators. But I think it gives me more flexibility and control for still shots. Perhaps some day I'll get around to learning 3Delight in DAZ Studio, but I'm really used to the Blender interface now.
The group nodes have texture inputs on the left with names like DifTex (diffuse texture), TransTex (transparency texture), etc. Below that are color (RGB/HSV) inputs that can pretty much stay as they are unless one wants to tweak a particular material for effects. Then there are value (float) inputs that can vary the roughness and amount of specularity in a material. For instance, if a piece of clothing has shiny buttons, I can decrease the roughness setting and/or increase the specularity. I might even change the specular color to something more 'metallic'.
A skin node group can be assigned to one material of the torso, limbs, or face. The textures for each area can then be added. Then the material can be copied and pasted to other materials that use the same texture set. For example, set up the material for the nostril, and then copy and paste that same material to the skin-face and lips. Put a skin node group on a part of the torso, apply the textures, and copy/paste to all corresponding torso materials. The only thing that actually needs to be done inside the node editor window is to manually connect the node group 'bump' output to the material displacement socket. The rest can be handled in the properties window.
Here is Justin/Aaron as an example of the node groups I described above.
Skin shader node group. There isn't a standard SSS shader for Cycles yet, and I haven't found a 'cheat' that I really like.
this started as scripts for my needs thrown together, and i didn't put much research into how to handle glossiness, i chose "Add" but indeed in some cases 'Mix' and the other nodes like that give different results
there's 2 ways to use your custom materials / nodes with mcjTeleblender,
open blender, create a blank .blend file, set the renderer to 'cycles', that includes your materials ( since i dont have much experience with blender, i'd do this by applying materials to invisible objects ) , save this as "mylibrary.blend"
in daz Studio / mcjTeleblender, select "Scene File" as the render engine, and specify "mylibrary.blend" as your scene file
this would work for static scenes, where you then would apply your materials to the scene's objects "manually"
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the second option is explained in the section of the manual titled "another way to re-use custom materials (.blend files )"
this method should work for animations
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjteleblender-for-ds1-2-3-4
( i just hope it's not broken in newer versions of blender or windows )
Thanks, I will try out those suggestions. I did read at least part of the manual :)
I've also noticed that some textures don't get included in the 'Maps' folder. I still don't fully understand all the material options included with characters in DS. Some are designed to work with special kinds of lighting and others trigger 3Delight specific options like SSS. I wonder if this is a character specific issue, or does it have to do with material options? It's not a problem for me since I just copy the files from my DAZ textures to the working directory for the .blend file and then see what I like best.
So much to learn and do and so little time!!
My current 'cloth' shader node group: