DAZ Survey

JoeMamma2000

Jonstark said:

Roy, I knew that daz/poser content could be imported into Blender (imported into anything, for that matter, do it all the time to get stuff into Thea to render, for example). Are you saying that there's now a plugin that will allow to load, pose, conform clothing and hair, all in Blender quick and easy? If so that's a game changer.

I could be wrong, but I think the export/import into Blender is only the mesh itself as an OBJ (or similar) without the bones/rigging. So you won't be able to pose in Blender unless, as Roy says, you add an armature in Blender.

I haven't tried it myself, but based on a lot of experience with bones in many applications over the years, I'd be very surprised if it was quite so easy to add a good armature to a DAZ figure, with all the required weight maps and falloffs, etc., that you need for a human character. And I also assume that morphs are not directly transferrable, so I doubt you'll be able to just slide a slider to morph your character in Blender.

But I could be way off on that, since I haven't tried the Teleblender plugin due to my biased assumption that the results were too limited and not worth the trouble at this point.

Roygee

No, not that simple, unfortunately. With MCJ's plugin, you set up the scene in DS - posed, clothed,whatever; it exports and opens Blender automatically, with the materials optimized for Cycles (which is unbiased), ready to render.

I see his plugin does include the option to export animation, but I can't get that to work, although I must say, I haven't really gone into it much, this not being my main focus of interest. Possibly I'm just not using it correctly.

Unlike what I've read about the other unbiased render plugins, you need none, or minimal, shader tuning.

If you want to pose in Blender, you would have to export as Collada, add an armature and for Cycles rendering, tune the shaders.

What I am saying is that Genesis 2 behaves itself better in Blender than it does in Carrara - no poke-through and all the other hassles I've read about in the forum.

All Daz needs to do to get Genesis to work fully in Blender - and I presume other applications - is to improve the Collada export - as it is, it does export the armature, but gets it all wrong. That would add a huge market.

Roygee

Joe, you are correct as far as Teleblender is concerned - whatever morphs, etc. you need, you will have to adjust in DS - it simply transfers the DS scene. Of course, if you want really good deformation, you'll have to build a really good armature.

The guys on the Blenderartists forum put me onto exporting as Collada - get rid of the bad armature and build in a Blender one. Then they talk about .fbx export for morphs, but I don't know enough about Blender to figure out what they are on about - they are very technical over there and not as chatty as here :)

I asked Casual about exporting animation using Teleblender. What happens is it exports sequential .obj's, one for each frame, with a batch file to launch and invisible Blender, which gets on with rendering automatically - load one .obj. render, load the next.

Just for the heck of it, I did this with a 30-frame render and got this - about 20 minutes. Fun, but not all that practical, because you don't get an opportunity to do any adjustments. He did this not so much to do an animation, but to allow you to select an individual frame of the animation for stills render.

http://youtu.be/7TeeYm3q0RY

EDIT: Correction - Casual has now given me details on how to go into Blender and do whatever corrections to lighting, shaders as is needed, then launch the batch for rendering.

DUDU

If I understand well, you export a sequence of objects, you can then import it in Carrara with the DCG Obj.Seq. importer.
I use it to import meshes sequences from Realflow.

Jonstark

Roy, sounds like it will function quite well as a Studio plugin for Cycles rendering at least, and that's no small feat actually, means more Studio users may start using Blender, even if just a little (dipping the toe in the water, so to speak) via this plugin to get to an unbiased render with Cycles. Frankly I wish there was a similar plugin for Carrara, I'd enjoy having a fairly direct workflow to render in Cycles. But I dislike using Studio quite a bit, so probably not something I'll take advantage of. Nevertheless, sounds like a good solution for Studio users and makes Blender one step closer to more accessible. And it makes sense it could be used for animations as well, glad to hear that as it will expand it's usefulness beyond still renders.

evilproducer

Right, but un-editable animations if it's using sequenced .obj files, which means you would absolutely have to have the animation perfectly the way you want. I don't know about anybody else, but I constantly notice things I need to tweak after I start a render, be it a collision artifact or bad timing. To me, it would be a non-starter even if I used Studio- especially since Studio already has access to a un-biased renderers.

Roygee

Yes, the .obj sequencer import should work, except for G2 has these weird opaque white eyes, because for some reason Carrara doesn't pick up on the eye shader, although it does on all the others (all the maps are gathered together in the export file). Blender allows you to import the first frame, do whatever changes you need to and save that to apply to all subsequent frames. Don't know whether DCG's importer has that facility.

jon, Casual had a script for exporting from Carrara to blender. He didn't take it all the way - you had to run a script in Blender. This has become outdated by newer versions of Blender and I doubt he has plans to revive it - maybe if you asked nicely :)

EP is correct - I personally don't see this as a viable animation method, because, as he says, you have to constantly tweak animations to get them just right. Which is why you would go the Collada method.

DUDU

I didn't test the change of textures with the DCG Importer but with Fenric' s MDD I/O, that works !
It's the same principle for both plugins, I think…
It often happens to me to build my scene around an animated character, therefore this technique of the importation is interesting.