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actually what I want is an alembic or mdd importer for DAZ studio
so one can get all those awesome Blender Artists made stuffs into DAZ studio for iray renders since getting Blender rigging in is just about impossible
certainly not via FBX
I admit that I'm influenced by my personal requirements. I run DS on Windows and Blender on Linux, two separate computers. I have to store the files on a NAS, which is slow.
I'm sure all of that will be figured out, and made as convenient as possible. I cannot be the only one who has ever wanted to make a small change once the Alembic has been imported.
I'm sure I'll need a little help understanding all of that, when we get to it; I've never even touched the multires modifier and don't know what it actually does.
@WendyLuvsCatz While I've though about that, and it would be much easier to just write an Alembic/MDD-to-DSON converter and leave plugins out of it, neither one of those formats would solve the rigging problem...
And I cannot understand why DS doesn't have an FBX importer. DS isn't under some incompatible license and presumably they use the official FBX library, right from Autodesk, for exporting already.
they have a useless one
They added a very robust one to Carrara 7 years ago so I suspect it is intentional
maybe don't want people bringing in not DAZ stuff
what I do at the moment is export obj series I add to morphloader
then use puppeteer to go between them
there is a script for Marvelous Designer that effectively does that too but it looks for MD specific obj exports
Casual made a script too
Of course you are probably right about that. DS would be just free IRay.
I am not knocking MDD (it made "Galactus Rising"possible..period) Now if you plan to create your own companion Blender Add-on or add it to your existing Sagan importer Dialogue by all means You should if possible
The reason I mention it not being used today is that Many applications (Blender included) have such dismal support for it.
With C4D I had to use a (now defunct) third party plugin called "Riptide pro"
this plugin had a comprehensive import dialog that let me choose import scale (extremely important!!),as well as frame range and offset from my project frame length
This enabled me to select at what frame ,of my C4D timeline, an off camera Genesis actor would walk into camera shot regardless of when he started walking back over in Daz studio.
And Yes you can make NON destructive,NON vertex#changing edits to a .obj driven by MDD data and I did this frequently by applying SubD to my decimated low poy( 6000 faces) "backgrounders" in my movie.
However I just added some nondestructive mesh detail to a FBX imported CC3 figure yesterday in edit Blender mode and did not lose the detail when returning to object mode to render the animation
Another thing to consider With MDD is streaming verses importing.
A naked Daz Genesis 3/8 figure moving for about 10 seconds,exported at Base res, will produce About 350mb of MDD data which is not bad IMHO.
But export at higher resolutions & start adding clothing and hair and you quickly start to get to over one gig per animated actor.
Not a problem with Lightwave3D as it streams the Data just as Blender streams Alembic Cache data
Sadly, at this time Blender only imports MDD into the .blend file which will eventually lead to the kinds of viewport choking scene bloat people have reported with some of the new Daz "bridges" so make sure your MDD exporter/importer streams data as with Alembic.
And unlike lightwave's (unsurprisingly awesome MDD importer) Blender has No import dialog other than the file browser to select the MDD file and ZERO user defined import options ( Scale, Offset ) But again I assume you will add these option on the blender side of the transaction because they dont exist currently for MDD data.
Lastly in the matter retargeting ,it is quite obvious that the blender devs assume that all users are working within one Character/Rig Eco-system...BLENDERS!
In principle I actually agree that for animated filmaking you should choose ONE CHaracter eco system and stay within it for the highest compatibility
The few DAZ Studio users who are animators(and not using Carrara), are using Daz studio&Genesis 8, Not Iclone/CC3/3DX or Autodesk MOBU. And Rokoko has a free general retargeting plugin that requires internet connection to their server
just like ALL of the Reallusion CC3 characters,the Daz G8 figures share the same Rigging within the Daz Eco system. I undertand the Challenge of getting a decent animation on a G8 figure within daz studio but at the very least the armature data transfer, I showed in the video, will give a DS animator (using puppeter,baking aniblocks etc)the option to send over a naked G8 with new animation or still pose data Data and apply it without having reimport the fully dressed figure and redo textures each time the animation changes. .
All important insights, Wolf, thank you, particularly abot MDD. It sounds like the support for it is even worse then Alembic. I was unware that MDD didn't take an offset, nor stream like Alembic. That's a deal-breaker and I would have to do a lot more work than I anticipated on the Blender side.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
Given the features by diffeo that uses multires and merged shells to save geometry, and the points by @wolf359 that I trust as correct as I don't play with mdd myself, I feel that a first implementation of mdd would fit a short animation of a small scene with a few dressed characters. I mean without streaming and complex stuff. Then since in an animation project the shots are usually separated into multiple scene files, this may work fine enough anyway.
Then more advanced features may be useful to export a full long animation of a large scene with many characters. But this may not be required for small projects.
@ThemysteryIsThePoint
Hello everyone,
I have the same problem with textures pixellated with the normal alembic.
I would like to instal Sagan Alembic Exporter but I have only a dll and I don't know how to install... please help (sorry I am a noob).
Drag and drop it into the plugin folder of daz studio, C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\plugins is default location. Then start up ds and make sure to enable it in plugins, help>about installed plugins.
@francescogenovesi78 also once the .dll is in plugins folder and enabled you will find it under the edit menu at the bottom labeled 'sagan'
for export to blender the workflow would be to save scene, then save with diffeomorphic (textures will be loaded from it) and lastly export the sagan alembic file under the abovementioned edit menu.
@francescogenovesi78 Hi Francesco, did you get everything working? Let us know if you have any questions, but TheKD and SoulMyst have steered you in the right direction.
OK, venting about the lack of documentation and how much time I waste going down ultimately fruitless avenues has not really generated any positive change, so I'm not going to bother this time. I'll just say that my love/hate relationship with Daz and its lack of documentation continues.
The exporter now generates a script that fixes any normal uv map shenanigans. Look for a new version, probably tomorrow.
OK, sorry I can't let this one go: The code was working perfectly all along; it's just that the existence of two functions called DzFacetMesh::getNumUVSets() and DzFacetMesh::getUVSet( int index ) strongly implies that objects have multiple uv sets, when they really only have one that is already merged and the value that getNumUVSets() returns is irrelevant. Why Daz, why?
Edit:Spelling.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
The uber shader can't apply multiple uv maps per surface that's why shells are needed. That said a surface can have multiple uv maps to choose from. For example this happens when you use the Texture Atlas addon, it generates a new uv map for the atlas textures. I guess this may be what the daz api is referring to.
Plus other assets may add their own uv maps as the Mutomorph HD for example.
https://www.daz3d.com/mutation-morphs-hd-for-genesis-8-female
I agree that that would have been the obvious conclusion, and was what I did originally think. But the DzFacetMesh::getNumUVSets() call often returns 0, even when there is a set is in the UV Set drop down. If it returns 0, I think every programmer in the world would think not to bother calling DzFacetMesh::getUVSet( int index ) because there is no valid index that could be passed in to it. And even when it does return 0, one would also think that DzFacetMesh::getUVs() cannot be called either, but it seems to always return a valid, merged UV.
With no real documentation, one has to assume certain things from the structure of the API itself, but many times totally reasonable assumptions are 100% incorrect because the API just doesn't make sense... it's probably showing that it grew organically over time as features were added, not that it was architected all at the same time. I suppose I can relate to that, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
Or may be it's intended for the shader mixer that I know very little about. May be with the shader mixer you can have multiple uv maps per surface. Then there are mdl shaders. Then there are also 3delight shaders but afaik they use a single uv map per surface too.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/242936/an-iray-shader-mixer-cookbook/p1
As for diffeo it doesn't import mdl and shader mixer. It tries to import 3delight though, but the recommended workflow is to convert everything to uber before exporting. That's quite easy it's enough to select all the surfaces and apply the uber base.
Version 1.14 is up. It is the first version that should have no tedium to get to a perfectly textured scene. Please test.
There are two generated scripts now. One is the uv fixer that fixes the black materials. The other is the material renamer, which renames the materials to more user friendly names.
With the "Temple of Sand" asset, I discovered that 1) both Diffeo and Sagan generate geometry for the back wall object that causes Blender to crash. Exporting it as obj and importing it back in fixes whatever it is, and there is an n-gon in the geometry. 2) The two generated scripts hiccup on the instances, even though I ran the scene through Instance-to-Object. I'm working on that.
The workflow I use is:
Next up are some scripts to:
And also some other small minutiae that others have asked for.
Perhaps this is a dumb question, but...
If you're importing Diffeo anyway, why bother with also importing Alembic? Especially now that Diffeo has HD?
Genuinely confused.
@emoryahlberg Well as for sagan vs diffeo they are just two different things. With alembic you import the daz animation, including dforce, and that is useful if you want to animate in daz and render in blender. With diffeo you import a full rigged character and that is most useful if you want to animate and render in blender.
Then it is true that you can also import daz poses and animations with diffeo, but that doesn't include dforce for example.
cant really be bothered learning more than the bare minimum with Blender. Dont really want to have to learn animation + posing
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
I tested a dressed G8F animation and sagan seems to work great. Test scene included.
For anyone else. Be sure to follow exactly the steps reported by TheMystery, especially delete the diffeo collection before running the uv script, otherwise it will fail due to mismatching names.
@emoryahlberg
The two main reasons are that 1) Alembic is vertex exact, and will not suffer the same minor differences due to subdivision, and 2) that Alembic is a general interchange format, meaning that it's appropriate if your model will be moving through a pipeline. I know that people have exported to at least Marvelous Designer, Houdini, Maya, C4D, and 3DS Max. Everything "just works" because Alembic is fairly simple and does exactly one thing.
It may very well be the case that you're not confused at all, and Alembic brings nothing that you need.
But still stick around and help test :)
@Padone I am always holding my breath when I read your first response after releasing a new version... It determines how my weekend is going to go :)
Thanks! I appreciate the response!
Geographs aren't currently working in Diffeo, how can we import the materials for use with Sagan?
You say geografts don't work, but have you tried it anyway? Maybe Diffeo still imports the materials?
Failing that, you could always select "Write Textures" and then set the nodes up yourself in Blender.
Sorry - I must be missing something obvious. I went to download the latest Sagan version but the Zip only contains sagan.dll no other script. Where do I find the scripts mentioned in your post?
The scripts are specific to the scene, so Sagan generates them when you export. There will be a scripts directory in the base directory.
Sorry - still confused. Which base directory? The DAZ Studio folders? The Scripts folder within the DAZ Studio content or are we talking about Blender scripts?
@marble