VR Scene Arrangement? (Easier than you might think!)

ZaeZodTheToonCrafter

Alright, I should preface this by saying that I am not some kind of VR evangelist. In my opinion, it's still gonna be quite a loooong wait before some of the cooler/more useful VR stuff is actually affordable enough that anybody that isn't a multi-millionaire can buy it without flinching and/or being disowned by their wallet. But I do think we can and should make use of what VR tech does currently exist.

Having said that, here's my suggestion. Use the Daz to Unity/Unreal/Whatever is Easiest Bridge to export an entire Daz scene into a blank VR Sandbox. (A VR Sandbox being something like Garry's Mod, except it's in VR). Then, arrange (meaning adjust the rotation, translation, and scale of) the contents of the imported scene (like tables, chairs, books, cameras, lights, characters, etc) to whatever positiions you want. Maybe posing stuff too, but that might get pretty complicated so that probably wouldn't/shouldn't be a supported feature right away, if at all. Then, when you've arranged the scene how you want it, export the changes (translation, rotation, scale) of the scene back to Daz. A pretty easy-ish way to make a whole lot of things a lot easier and quicker.

Now, I'm sure people will be apt to ask "why not just use the normal Daz interface? It works fine for me." And I'm sure it does work fine for those who've gotten used to it. But for people who aren't used to it, what could be more intuitive than "grab item and place where desired?". I'm not saying to try to turn Daz into the latest VR Killer App. I'm not even saying a lot of Daz's functions should be converted over to VR. And I recognize that the number of people who use Daz AND have a VR system are very much in the minority. But I still think it would be worth even the most simplest and rudimentary of efforts to make use of a little bit of VR to help with Daz things.

We're already pretty close-ish to having this sort of thing. A Daz to Unity/Unreal Bridge exists. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to use it to export an entire scene to Unity/Unreal/whatever. (Haven't tried yet though, all the guides I've found are for exporting characters, not scenes.) A blank VR sandbox in Unity/Unreal/whatever is probably really easy to make (I'm watching tutorials to see if I can make one myself), especially if you don't bother with things like gravity/weight/collision detection/physics and just focus on "grab object and place where desired". The only real difficulty is likely going to be found in trying to send the new arrangement data back to Daz. It's not an insurmountable task though. Especially if adding objects to the scene while the scene is in Unity is disallowed. (Another restriction for the sake of actually getting a start. Like I said, not trying to ask for the moon here.) Really, that last part, sending the arrangment data back, is the only real hurdle that a non-coding Daz user couldn't do themselves. And even then, if they were really determined, they could probably just copy and paste the values by hand. (But who would want to do that when you could hopefully have a script do it instead?).

Finally, to briefly bring up and put down the subject of Interface Licenses in one fell swoop: since the VR sandboxes the arrangements would be done in would never be distributed (because why would they?), no Interface Licenses for the models would be required.

In conclusion, I'm sorry for writing so much but I really had to give this a respectable effort. Hopefully I did this suggestion justice. And for those that didn't want to read it all, I guess the short version is "Make it so we can send an entire scene from Daz to Unity and/or Unreal and back to Daz again so people can save time by rearranging their Daz scene in Unity/Unreal-based VR-sandboxes please!"

FSMCDesigns

Nice read. I am a VR enthusiast and have been using any game/app I can find that uses DAZ content in VR, some work well, most don't. I have tried several times to export a scene into Unity, but for some reason it hasn't worked. I plan to dig deeper into it to see why, but haven't yet. I can open a new Unity project and explore the empty space in VR no problem though. I do highly doubt it will be an easy task to import anything back into daz Studio though and probably not worth the time and effort since you can render in Unity as well.

I wouldn't mention Garrys Mod or any other game sandbox since DAZ assets can not be legally used in them, even with the interactive licenses since that would be considered a mod and the license only allows for original game development. You can use it for personal reasons, but based on my experience, if a user can get DAZ assets into a game like Garrys Mod or SFM, it's being uploaded to the workshop since that is how most gamers are.

I do agree that it would be nice to at least be able to view and walk around a scene in DS in VR mode, you can do it at Sketchfab for any model they host, so why not.

ZaeZodTheToonCrafter

Wow, I genuinely hadn't thought about the difference between modding a game and making a new game. I guess that makes sense though. Legalities and such. But I only mentioned Garry's Mod since that was literally the only 3D sandbox thing I knew. I wasn't really thinking of using it. Or any prebuilt game for that matter. Just an empty VR sandbox game template would be enough, I would think.

I thought Unity was just for game creation? Hmm...I should look into rendering options for Unity, it might be easier to do certain things for my current project if I rendered in Unity.

I'm kind of surprised that the Daz to Unity Bridge isn't doing whole scenes yet, but I guess I can believe it since it's new. Be sure to post if you manage to export a whole scene into Unity. Being able to do just that much would be a great start.

I must admit though, my naive mind still ponders "how hard can it be?" when I consider what it might take to send just the arrangement data back from Unity to Daz. If the scenes are identical in content (objects, cameras, lights, etc), and both programs must surely track the rotation, translation, and scale data of each individual item, then isn't it as simple as sending a bunch of arrangement values from one program to another somehow?

ea

The good choice for VR could be Omniverse, which use mdl materials (so conversion from Iray materials should be easy) it will depend what Nvidia will  include in the free version for individuals and if a connector with Daz studio will be developped.

 

Wonderland

I definitely AM a VR evangelist lol. The newest Oculus Quest 2 headset is $299 equivalent to two of Daz’s season Passes, you don’t have to be a millionaire! You can get a link to your computer for about $20 on Amazon. I would LOVE to be able to use Daz in VR to set up scenes! There are a lot more VR users than Daz Studio users so maybe if they added that capability, it would be a lot more lucrative than their Season Pass experiment...

ZaeZodTheToonCrafter

Sorry if this thread has gotten a bit stale since the last post but I had some stuff to add.

1. Regarding Daz -> Unity -> Daz import/exports, I realized it's possibly a chicken and egg problem. There would be a good reason to create the Unity to Daz reimporter if there were a Daz/Unity Scene Arrange, but getting a Daz/Unity Scene Arranger might require being able to send stuff from Unity back to Daz. Fortunately, there's a way out which I happen to maybe have. I've recently figured out that I simply can't do all of what I need to do to make some of my projects happen using Daz's available renderers. (Bit of a long story, don't really want to try to explain it just now.) So, since I don't care if I can't send stuff back to Daz atm, it would benefit me a lot to make a Unity thing for using VR to arrange a sene that was initially made in Daz. (Also, Daz stuff has better prices, features, poses, and what not than any other market/application else I've found so far, so I will still be using Daz even though I'm not rendering in it.)

2. Ease of actually making a VR Scene arranger. Near as I can tell, the fastest way would be to set up a simple VR game/app/whatever template for Unity, make sure it's set up so it's really easy to import Daz scenes into it and obvious how, and then just use a fresh copy of that template whenever I want to arrange a scene. I've looked closer at how to make such a thing, and it still seems about as easy as I expected. Maybe even easier. When life gives me a chance (which is actually a bit rare these days, but should be within the month of May), I will definitely make such a template. It's sad I can't offer a way to send the scene back, but I'm not a programmer so I can't really help that. (Meanwhile, for a bit of money (which I had enough of because Unity was having a sale), I can evade having to get too involved in coding the Unity template by buying some Unity plug-ins that claim they make it possible to make stuff without being a programmer. Hopefully it works.) If I get something that does in fact allow VR Daz scene arrangement, I'll let this forum know. Hopefully it will inspire a Unity to Daz reverse bridge thing.