Trying to build a genesis 1and/or 2 rig for Maya. Need some help first though

hzr

Hey there.

I have been contemplating this idea for a long time and now I am finally making an effort. The first experiments have turned out well. I have a few correctional blendshapes down for thighs and shoulder area and they look quite nice so far. But of course this will probably not look as good as the original.

That is where I am now wondering if it is possible to get the deltas for the correctional morphs used in DAZ Studio exported somehow. Either in mesh form, or any format that I could use that maya or a plugin for it can read, so I can rebuild these correctional blendshapes there, and use them. Even if they may not be 100% suited for Maya itself, but at least that way I have a base from where I could build, and speed things up a little instead of doing everything from scratch.

Maybe even someone here at DAZ could be so nice as to explain if that would be possible from their side, perhaps making the blendshapes available that they used?

Richard Haseltine

Moved to DAZ Studio Discussion as Developer Discussions is for scripting.

I'm not entirely sure I follow the question, but if you enable Show Hidden Parameters you will be able to see the hidden correction (JCM and MCM) morphs. Zero the figure, then set each morph to 1 and mesh resolution to base then export as OBJ - I don't know Maya, but I imagine there's a way to turn an OBJ with identical vertex count and order into a blendshape.

hzr

Exporting as OBJ with all morphs to 1 would create something truly horrible looking :) Would be fun but its certainly not what I need.

You understood my question, but I dont think this will work at all. I already tried exporting with these hidden delta attributes into FBX. But those seem to be basically empty values, at least what gets exported. All the other regular morph shapes are nicely placed into a blendshape container when youre importing the file into maya, but the delta morphs will just come out as default mesh shapes.

Is there no way to actually visualize them? Or is Genesis rigged so differently inside of DAZ Studio and the system doesnt actually use blendshapes for bend adjustments?

Richard Haseltine

The correction morphs, if that's what you mean, are generally pretty subtle. Which doesn't mean they aren't failing to export, I've not got much that will attempt to read FBX let alone produce anything in a fairly usable state. But I wasn't suggesting exporting all morphs in a single OBJ - one OBJ for each morph that you want in Maya (and that isn't making it via FBX).

hzr

Yeah I think I will most likely just go about it by exporting poses for each bodypart in 30° steps for each joint rotation and then see how I can get some curves going to smooth the transitions.

However, I would still love to know how you guys actually handle those deformations. Is this all also blendshape driven or is there something under the hood in Daz Studio that helps you handle deformations and volume conservation on bends? Especially the crotch area, shoulders and thighs are really a mess and I am already quite frightened when thinking about fixing those :D

DAZ_cjones

While morphs (equivalent to Maya's blendshapes) are used to correct bending here and there, they are usually minor fixes. Most of the bending you see in Studio is the result of TriAx weighting. Its a different rigging system with different math. Its got several differences from the weight mapping you'll see in Maya but the biggest difference is that there is a weight map for each axis, as well as scale, on each bone, while the standard weight mapping you'll see in Maya is just one map per bone. With such different rigging the corrective morphs for the joints won't be of much use. You would need to make new ones for Maya's rigging.

Richard Haseltine

DS also has bulges associated with each rotation, with their own weight-maps, and those help with the volume conservation effects. I'm not rigging expert but I think those are largely confined to the Poser and DAZ Studio systems.

hzr

Ah thats good info. I have actually managed to get G2 working in Maya with some good mass conservation on bends by using dual quaternion as the skin bind method. This of course introduces these very bulgy effects on knees etc, but by using blendshapes with driven keys I am relatively close to how genesis2 is looking in DAZ Studio.

I would post a quick shot but well, the mesh is nude so I could see whats going on, so I cannot post it here.

You say that TriAx uses weightmaps per axis on each bone. Would this be possible to simulate with some python scripting, perhaps there is some theory documents that I could study? :)
I really would love to get as close as possible to the original. I am aware that other kinks will happen, but since I am normally not rendering with DAZ Studio, I have been doing obj exports for years now, and while it gives some good results, it also takes alot of effort to always reapply materials, not really being able to quickly preview things while in pose mode etc... There are just tons of issues that always bugged me so far.

If there is the slightest chance for a TriAx plugin for any of the major 3d apps, this would be a godsend and I am sure there are alot of users out there who are not ashamed to make use of DAZ models in those applications.