Who said Blender was hard?

nicstt

Silent Winter said:

I tend to export to Blender at 0.0002% and re-import at 5000% since that works well with Blender's default scale. But I think you can also change Blender's scale itself if you want to fit it to DS (I've no idea how though - I started by using the 'blender' export option from DS and just stuck with that scaling after that). So long as you export and import at reciprocal scales (e.g. 100 to 100 or 0.0002 and 5000) it doesn't really make a difference.

Edit: I was thinking from the point of view of getting something back into DS at the right scale (so using G8 as a reference scale for example) - if you're only importing to Blender for use there, then see the post below.

Ha!

I export at 1% and import at 10000

I also adjst the axis from default too, otherwise one gets orientations wrong.

Harry Dresden

Yeah, you might want to actually install Blender 2.82 and give it a try before comparing. It has changed drastically with a much better UI, real time rendering, a new fluid and gas simulation engine and much more. This is not your grand daddy's Blender. ;) 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

nicstt

Harry Dresden said:

Yeah, you might want to actually install Blender 2.82 and give it a try before comparing. It has changed drastically with a much better UI, real time rendering, a new fluid and gas simulation engine and much more. This is not your grand daddy's Blender. ;) 

Better UI?

It's certainly different, and some things I like, others not so much.

I've been using Blender since 2.49 (which was horrible), and there have been many changes to Blender over the years, the UI is only one.

benniewoodell

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

benniewoodell said:

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

Way to go! You're welcome!

Silent Winter

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

alex86fire

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

zombietaggerung

Why not just model in Blender at .01 scale and then import it into daz at 100%? Then everything is scaled right for daz figures. No muss, no fuss.

benniewoodell

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

Harry Dresden

Something to keep in mind as far as clothes and hair go is that box modeling such items is really the worst possible way you could do it. Yes, you can do it and make it look good but in the time it takes you to make a single dress someone who uses a sculpting tool such as Zbrush or even Blender sculpting tools will make many dresses. Clothing is organic so you are better off using a tool that lets you create items in an organic fashion, By far the easiest workflow is to simpy copy the section of the body your clothing item will go on, smooth it out a bit and remesh it and then use that as a sculpting base to mold into a perfectly fitting clothing item. You just cannot do that with traditional box modeling. 

alex86fire

Harry Dresden said:

Something to keep in mind as far as clothes and hair go is that box modeling such items is really the worst possible way you could do it. Yes, you can do it and make it look good but in the time it takes you to make a single dress someone who uses a sculpting tool such as Zbrush or even Blender sculpting tools will make many dresses. Clothing is organic so you are better off using a tool that lets you create items in an organic fashion, By far the easiest workflow is to simpy copy the section of the body your clothing item will go on, smooth it out a bit and remesh it and then use that as a sculpting base to mold into a perfectly fitting clothing item. You just cannot do that with traditional box modeling. 

I think that actually sewing is the fastest way to make a dress and most pieces of clothing. I heard Marvelous designer is very good and popular with people making clothing for Daz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvxQWUw24Ro . Sewing is available in Blender as well, btw.

Anyways, I find that getting the rough good shape is not that time consuming any method you use. I think you can do it in a few hours even with box modeling.

The time consuming is getting it back into daz, starting to rig it and creating the correction morphs so that it fits properly however you pose your character.

 

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

The best part about it will be that at the end you will have enough of an understanding that you could easily create morphs for the pieces of clothing you already own to make them look good and fit every pose/body type.

nicstt

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

You need to be at the right scale for lots of things, simulations and rendering are the ones that spring to mind first.

wolf359

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

I find Many advantages to modeling my own content.

Particularly if one needs more than just another tight mini-dress (As in Alex86's example),for the G8 females

I work in the MALE oriented sci fi genre.where I need future tech ,armors weapons etc as well as Sci-Fi environments.

I am also an animated film maker who not only needs purpose built content for my narratives
But will also need that content OPTIMIZED to be both animated and rendered in realtime environments( like EEVEE,Iclone) where 4K textures are not the best approach for animation.

Also the ability to support the older Genesis models with custom content is a huge advantage as the The G3/8 models present certain well documented challenges with external Character animation system such as Mixamo.

The older G1/G2 models have far less problems in this regard IMHO and based on my experience making a 93 minute feature length, animated film with Daz content&figures.

The attached image is a conforming Sci fi armor for the G2 male created in Blender 2.82

very low poly with blender procedural materials ,and converted to an Iclone realtime avatar for animation and Alembic export to Blender for EEVEE rendering

This is my advantage.

Luciel

Since I can remember I've been told every year or so "Blender has a new UI, it's not totally awful now".

So I'd go download it. Though I liked some things, I was also not able to describe the UI without using lots of unpleasant words that are best not used in polite conversation.

So I got to the point of ignoring it when anyone said that for the 10th billionth time.

However, turns out the recent edition has a proper UI now that wasn't designed by a spiteful person to cause maximum pain and suffering (the only explanation).

No more axis that don't work, or press a billion keys to do something simple and much less reach menu level 903.

It's basically almost like all those expensive (and much more intuitive and less annoying) programs now.

Luciel

wolf359 said:

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

 

I find Many advantages to modeling my own content.

Particularly if one needs more than just another tight mini-dress (As in Alex86's example),for the G8 females

I work in the MALE oriented sci fi genre.where I need future tech ,armors weapons etc as well as Sci-Fi environments.

Plus, modeling skills also give you the ability to fix numerous less than perfect things in store products. That tight minidress, more than likely isn't going to fit more than a few shapes perfectly, or have all the morphs you need. Fit control and stuff is great for small things, but it's never going to be remotely close to custom morphs. 

Even female orientated stuff (which I do a similar genre in) is usually aimed at rather specific things repeated a few times. Also, if you're stuck with store products, it's not going to be particularily unique. I couldn't really imagine not being able to make stuff myself, or how limiting it would be. 

benniewoodell

wolf359 said:

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

 

I find Many advantages to modeling my own content.

Particularly if one needs more than just another tight mini-dress (As in Alex86's example),for the G8 females

I work in the MALE oriented sci fi genre.where I need future tech ,armors weapons etc as well as Sci-Fi environments.

I am also an animated film maker who not only needs purpose built content for my narratives
But will also need that content OPTIMIZED to be both animated and rendered in realtime environments( like EEVEE,Iclone) where 4K textures are not the best approach for animation.

Also the ability to support the older Genesis models with custom content is a huge advantage as the The G3/8 models present certain well documented challenges with external Character animation system such as Mixamo.

The older G1/G2 models have far less problems in this regard IMHO and based on my experience making a 93 minute feature length, animated film with Daz content&figures.

The attached image is a conforming Sci fi armor for the G2 male created in Blender 2.82

very low poly with blender procedural materials ,and converted to an Iclone realtime avatar for animation and Alembic export to Blender for EEVEE rendering

This is my advantage.

Oh! I figured out a Mixamo workaround for G8 last week! So you have to download the DAE and open that in Blender. Scale it up to however you want. Then export that as a BVH. Then bring in your Daz character and use the Diffeomorphic BVH tool and it works perfectly. I've been using Mixamo stuff all week, and you can change any part of the animation you want through the keyframes in the animation tab. This also works for G3 as one of the characters I used in a shot was Mei Lin 7, so it works for both G3/G8! 

wolf359

benniewoodell said:

wolf359 said:

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

 

I find Many advantages to modeling my own content.

Particularly if one needs more than just another tight mini-dress (As in Alex86's example),for the G8 females

I work in the MALE oriented sci fi genre.where I need future tech ,armors weapons etc as well as Sci-Fi environments.

I am also an animated film maker who not only needs purpose built content for my narratives
But will also need that content OPTIMIZED to be both animated and rendered in realtime environments( like EEVEE,Iclone) where 4K textures are not the best approach for animation.

Also the ability to support the older Genesis models with custom content is a huge advantage as the The G3/8 models present certain well documented challenges with external Character animation system such as Mixamo.

The older G1/G2 models have far less problems in this regard IMHO and based on my experience making a 93 minute feature length, animated film with Daz content&figures.

The attached image is a conforming Sci fi armor for the G2 male created in Blender 2.82

very low poly with blender procedural materials ,and converted to an Iclone realtime avatar for animation and Alembic export to Blender for EEVEE rendering

This is my advantage.

Oh! I figured out a Mixamo workaround for G8 last week! So you have to download the DAE and open that in Blender. Scale it up to however you want. Then export that as a BVH. Then bring in your Daz character and use the Diffeomorphic BVH tool and it works perfectly. I've been using Mixamo stuff all week, and you can change any part of the animation you want through the keyframes in the animation tab. This also works for G3 as one of the characters I used in a shot was Mei Lin 7, so it works for both G3/G8! 

How does you workaround Provide for lipsync and facial performance???

I need my characters Speaking like so

benniewoodell

wolf359 said:

benniewoodell said:

wolf359 said:

benniewoodell said:

alex86fire said:

benniewoodell said:

benniewoodell said:

SadRobot said:

So I’ve been playing around with Blender and I bought Auto Rig Pro. It actually does a really good job of rigging a high-resolution (subdivision 1 or 2 if your feeling gutsy) obj export from Daz.

Rigging the eyes (at least on G8) is a little tricky. I ended up seperating each eye into its own object, setting the origin to center of mass (surface) and then tracking it to the appropriate eye IK bone thing. Expressions are much harder to do here, but one thing that you can do is export the ones you know you’ll want to use from Daz as separate OBJ's and then use blend-shapes to animate facial expressions.

I like this becaue Blender gives me a lot more control over animation and a lot more ability to have things like references in the viewer. I may even purchase the X Muscle System add-on and start playing around with muscle deformation and fat jiggling.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's a neat alternative to Dforce, too. Since your character exists in the A-pose (or T-pose for earlier generations) you can basically just export clothes from Daz and then use the cloth simulation to drape them on your character. If you do your posing on frame 12 or so, you’ll get pretty nice results.

Might I ask how you're getting the cloth simulation to work a little more? This has been the only thing I can't get to work in Blender. I have a kimono on a character and I have her arm raised, but every time I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

Is that kimono a bought product or something you have made yourself?

I have seen objects falling off, or disappear into the body, but I don't recall any explossions.

 

The Kimono is actually this one: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-kimono-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I'm going to delve into learning how to make my own clothes here during this quarantine just to learn something new. Yeah, most times they don't fall off for me, but when I use the kimono, it's on the floor in 20 frames lol. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

I try the cloth sim, it either explodes or falls off. I've figured out the pinning thing to keep it from falling off, but now it just inflates or fully explodes and I don't know what's going on. I know without seeing my settings it's hard to guesstimate what's going on with me, but what's your process for getting it to work if you don't mind me asking? 

1. Make sure your character is scaled correctly, or the settings will not work reliably.
2. In all your objects, got to the Viewport Overlays in the upper right of the 3d viewport, and turn on Face Orientation. The outside of objects should be blue, not red. If you see red, your normals are flipped. But from your description, you seem to be OK.
3. In the physics tab for the kimono object, select a cloth preset to get reasonable physical values.
4. The default collision distances are way to high. Under object collisions, set the Distance to 0 and let Blender bump it up to the minimum value. Disable Self Collisions for now (but when you get the sim sorta kinda working and want to enable it, set its Distance to 0 as well).
5. Got to your character object's Physics tab, and set it as Collision. Under Softbody and Cloth, set both the Thickness Outer and Inner to zero, and let Blender set them to the minimum value. The effective distance is the sume of the cloth's distance and either the inner or outer distance of the collision object.
6. Hit the space bar to see the sim. Adjust the Collision's Quality parameter upwards if there's still penetration due to fast movements, etc. If the Kimono gets stuck in any object, try selecting Single Sided on that object's collider.
7. If it explodes, try changing the Damping parameter on the cloth object as well as the collision objects.

Good luck!

@TheMysteryIsThePoint, many, many thank you's! This looks to be exactly what I was looking for :) Also, I signed up for Quixel and have been loving the textures there, you pointed me in their direction a month ago or so, just wanted to say thank you for that tip as well! 

For modeling your own clothes, in my opinion there are only a few reasons to do it:

1. You want something really unique and can't find it anywhere so you decide to do it yourself.

2. You want to eventually become a PA so you want to learn how to do it

3. You enjoy modeling and/or making everything yourself

I don't think it is worth modeling your own clothes just to not buy them. Even for people that are very proficient and making them (the PAs that sell them), for the clothes to be worth their time, they have to sell them to a lot of people. I don't think the time creating a good item of clothing is worth it if it's just for one person.

For example and to show I speak from experience I attached a screenshot of a dress I made when I had just started out with Daz and decided I'll make almost everything myself (At that point I even wanted to make the hair). I have not really finished the dress. This is just modeled and moved to Daz. There I autofitted it with the transfer utility to G8 and that's it. It has no corrective morphs (other from the autofit ones) nor weight maps, rigging or anything. I just applied smoothing modifier on it and dForce and than used the Fit control to correct a minor pokethrough on the left hip and one on the breast area. I have also just made this dress when I modeled it purely from imagination with no design in mind.

 

Silent Winter said:

I'm actually going to have to change the scale I work at in Blender - it's fine for modelling but running any cloth-sims / rigid-body sims is much easier if you're working at the right scale within Blender.

I actually never scale anything when importing into Blender. I use the huge scale that Daz has and almost always have to adjust my view to be able to see more than the original 1000m. It's a little annoying at first that you have to scale everything else in Blender to that size but I got used to it. The huge scale also helps with simulations.

Oh no, I'm not going to delve into it so I don't have to buy anything anymore, it's so worth it to just pay the 10, 15 bucks or whatever for an item here in the store. But I figure with all the extra free time right now, I should learn something I don't understand at all and maybe I'll learn something I didn't know before that could help in something else as I'm seeing so many things are tied together. 

 

I find Many advantages to modeling my own content.

Particularly if one needs more than just another tight mini-dress (As in Alex86's example),for the G8 females

I work in the MALE oriented sci fi genre.where I need future tech ,armors weapons etc as well as Sci-Fi environments.

I am also an animated film maker who not only needs purpose built content for my narratives
But will also need that content OPTIMIZED to be both animated and rendered in realtime environments( like EEVEE,Iclone) where 4K textures are not the best approach for animation.

Also the ability to support the older Genesis models with custom content is a huge advantage as the The G3/8 models present certain well documented challenges with external Character animation system such as Mixamo.

The older G1/G2 models have far less problems in this regard IMHO and based on my experience making a 93 minute feature length, animated film with Daz content&figures.

The attached image is a conforming Sci fi armor for the G2 male created in Blender 2.82

very low poly with blender procedural materials ,and converted to an Iclone realtime avatar for animation and Alembic export to Blender for EEVEE rendering

This is my advantage.

Oh! I figured out a Mixamo workaround for G8 last week! So you have to download the DAE and open that in Blender. Scale it up to however you want. Then export that as a BVH. Then bring in your Daz character and use the Diffeomorphic BVH tool and it works perfectly. I've been using Mixamo stuff all week, and you can change any part of the animation you want through the keyframes in the animation tab. This also works for G3 as one of the characters I used in a shot was Mei Lin 7, so it works for both G3/G8! 

 

How does you workaround Provide for lipsync and facial performance???

I need my characters Speaking like so
 

@wolf359 I'm totally sorry, I didn't see this until now. I have not yet tried lip syncing, the short I'm currently doing utilizes voiceover and imagery, but I did read up on it for the next project I'm going to do to start figuring it out ahead of time instead of trying to get it to work when I'm in the thick of it and papagyo apparently works with the diffeomorphic tool. I want to see if I can get anilip to work with it though first since I've got that and love it's results. I'll comment here once I get to the point of lip syncing and let you know! As for facial expressions, just go into the update morph section of the diffeomorphic tool and you can load expressions and facial movements and have full control over everything. 

I have a question though for anyone who might be able to answer, who might know what the problem is. I followed the cloth sim instructions that TheMysteryIsThePoint laid out above and the cloth and hair itself move wonderfully. I gave up on the kimono though as it just wouldn't stay on, and then I tried the exact movement in Daz with Dforce and it fell off her there too, so I said forget it, I'll live with what I've got. But I tried it again on this dress and if it just stayed as it should look, I'd be happy as a clam. Anyone know why  it all looks jagged and how I could fix it? Thank you for any help! 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

The fact that it affected the hair and the dress, I assume different objects, you may have produced an intersection. Try increasing the collision quality and the damping. Also try simulating in layers, baking the dress right there in the physics tab, and then the hair, instead of just hitting the space bar and doing everything at the same time.

If you've got it on, try turning off self collisions.

BTW, did you try pinning the Kimono in a few strategic places?

If none of this works, consider Marvelous Designer. There's a thread here with people doing very impressive work. And Blender 2.83, due out soon, has some improvements to the cloth engine; this might not even be your fault.

Good luck!

benniewoodell

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

The fact that it affected the hair and the dress, I assume different objects, you may have produced an intersection. Try increasing the collision quality and the damping. Also try simulating in layers, baking the dress right there in the physics tab, and then the hair, instead of just hitting the space bar and doing everything at the same time.

If you've got it on, try turning off self collisions.

BTW, did you try pinning the Kimono in a few strategic places?

If none of this works, consider Marvelous Designer. There's a thread here with people doing very impressive work. And Blender 2.83, due out soon, has some improvements to the cloth engine; this might not even be your fault.

Good luck!

I figured it out! There was a sub modifier and a smoothing modifier on them that were causing the issue. I took them off and everything was how it should be! But these were baked seperately though, I think that just kind of carried over from doing Dforce here in Daz that made me naturally seperate it all lol. Thanks for trying to help out again! 

With that kimono, I had it pinned in every conceivable place and I weight mapped the heck out of it too but it just wanted to do it's own thing. I was surprised trying dForce here in Daz, it just fell off the same way as in Blender. All I really wanted was the sleeves to drape otherwise they were shaped unnatural if she lifted her arm up, but if I just had the sleeves mobil, they didn't drape, they curled up. I don't know, I might go back and try to fix it but I got the shots to a point where I'm happy with them. I just got a tutorial on Udemy the other day for Mantaflow, so now I'm trying to learn that for something else in my short film. 

I was looking into marvelous designer but saw it was fifty bucks a month which I sadly can't do right now. It's definitely something I'm interested in though! 

And I'll be on the lookout for 2.83 and see if that helps out with an issue or two that I have. Thanks again for all your help! 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

benniewoodell said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

The fact that it affected the hair and the dress, I assume different objects, you may have produced an intersection. Try increasing the collision quality and the damping. Also try simulating in layers, baking the dress right there in the physics tab, and then the hair, instead of just hitting the space bar and doing everything at the same time.

If you've got it on, try turning off self collisions.

BTW, did you try pinning the Kimono in a few strategic places?

If none of this works, consider Marvelous Designer. There's a thread here with people doing very impressive work. And Blender 2.83, due out soon, has some improvements to the cloth engine; this might not even be your fault.

Good luck!

I figured it out! There was a sub modifier and a smoothing modifier on them that were causing the issue. I took them off and everything was how it should be! But these were baked seperately though, I think that just kind of carried over from doing Dforce here in Daz that made me naturally seperate it all lol. Thanks for trying to help out again! 

With that kimono, I had it pinned in every conceivable place and I weight mapped the heck out of it too but it just wanted to do it's own thing. I was surprised trying dForce here in Daz, it just fell off the same way as in Blender. All I really wanted was the sleeves to drape otherwise they were shaped unnatural if she lifted her arm up, but if I just had the sleeves mobil, they didn't drape, they curled up. I don't know, I might go back and try to fix it but I got the shots to a point where I'm happy with them. I just got a tutorial on Udemy the other day for Mantaflow, so now I'm trying to learn that for something else in my short film. 

I was looking into marvelous designer but saw it was fifty bucks a month which I sadly can't do right now. It's definitely something I'm interested in though! 

And I'll be on the lookout for 2.83 and see if that helps out with an issue or two that I have. Thanks again for all your help! 

Glad you figured it out. Please show us what you do with Mantaflow... it's one of those things that I'd really like to know more about, but just haven't had the need yet. What course did you get on Udemy?

benniewoodell

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

benniewoodell said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

The fact that it affected the hair and the dress, I assume different objects, you may have produced an intersection. Try increasing the collision quality and the damping. Also try simulating in layers, baking the dress right there in the physics tab, and then the hair, instead of just hitting the space bar and doing everything at the same time.

If you've got it on, try turning off self collisions.

BTW, did you try pinning the Kimono in a few strategic places?

If none of this works, consider Marvelous Designer. There's a thread here with people doing very impressive work. And Blender 2.83, due out soon, has some improvements to the cloth engine; this might not even be your fault.

Good luck!

I figured it out! There was a sub modifier and a smoothing modifier on them that were causing the issue. I took them off and everything was how it should be! But these were baked seperately though, I think that just kind of carried over from doing Dforce here in Daz that made me naturally seperate it all lol. Thanks for trying to help out again! 

With that kimono, I had it pinned in every conceivable place and I weight mapped the heck out of it too but it just wanted to do it's own thing. I was surprised trying dForce here in Daz, it just fell off the same way as in Blender. All I really wanted was the sleeves to drape otherwise they were shaped unnatural if she lifted her arm up, but if I just had the sleeves mobil, they didn't drape, they curled up. I don't know, I might go back and try to fix it but I got the shots to a point where I'm happy with them. I just got a tutorial on Udemy the other day for Mantaflow, so now I'm trying to learn that for something else in my short film. 

I was looking into marvelous designer but saw it was fifty bucks a month which I sadly can't do right now. It's definitely something I'm interested in though! 

And I'll be on the lookout for 2.83 and see if that helps out with an issue or two that I have. Thanks again for all your help! 

Glad you figured it out. Please show us what you do with Mantaflow... it's one of those things that I'd really like to know more about, but just haven't had the need yet. What course did you get on Udemy?

I got the kimono to work! Well, sort of lol, it exploded in the back, BUT I'm only seeing her from the front so it doesn't matter! And it stayed on her! I tried one other thing which was adding a collision to the obi, maybe that helped keep it from opening up. I added just a bit of wind so the kimono is whooshing back and forth while she's on the bridge. I'm so stoked right now it looks really cool. 

The udemy course I got was Mantaflow Fluid Simulation Guide in Blender. I think they have a sale going again right now. It's so cool. And what I noticed is you can make an ocean and use the choppiness setting to move it around and get the waves how you want, but I'm going to try and texture that frame to be like a mountain range. I think there's a lot more to Mantaflow than just water and smoke. I've got like three scenes left to animate for my short film and then get the audio done, when it's completed I'll post it here in case you want to check it out! I'm amazed at the amount of time I'm saving with Blender. I've already animated about 8 minutes of my short in roughly two and a half to three weeks time thanks to Eevee. I'll keep you posted! 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

benniewoodell said:

I got the kimono to work! Well, sort of lol, it exploded in the back, BUT I'm only seeing her from the front so it doesn't matter! And it stayed on her! I tried one other thing which was adding a collision to the obi, maybe that helped keep it from opening up. I added just a bit of wind so the kimono is whooshing back and forth while she's on the bridge. I'm so stoked right now it looks really cool. 

The udemy course I got was Mantaflow Fluid Simulation Guide in Blender. I think they have a sale going again right now. It's so cool. And what I noticed is you can make an ocean and use the choppiness setting to move it around and get the waves how you want, but I'm going to try and texture that frame to be like a mountain range. I think there's a lot more to Mantaflow than just water and smoke. I've got like three scenes left to animate for my short film and then get the audio done, when it's completed I'll post it here in case you want to check it out! I'm amazed at the amount of time I'm saving with Blender. I've already animated about 8 minutes of my short in roughly two and a half to three weeks time thanks to Eevee. I'll keep you posted! 

I love hearing stories about people kicking butt with Blender! I can tell you're having a ball with the wind physics and all :)

If you're done with the Kimono, I understand, fair enough... but sometimes things blow up because the mesh is over-complicated. You could use the decimate modifier to reduce it a bit and it might not blow up at all.

I think I'll snag that Mantaflow tutorial... besides getting better at keyframing, that's my number one priority.

I'd love to see your project when it's done, as would others too, I'm sure.

SadRobot

What's the current preferred method for bringing in a model from daz with its textures as properly configured as possible? I'm not so much concerned about advanced textures, like skin or hair. I'm super picky about those and do them myself. I'm just hoping to bring in props and environments, maybe clothes, and not have to wire in roughness, bump, and normal myself. That's insanely time consuming to do manually. I'm happy to tweak the settings for close ups, but is there a good-enough solution for stuff like environments?

TheKD

Diffeomorphic seems to be the most developed and works the best IMO these days. https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-14.html

davidtriune

Silver Dolphin said:

Maybe what we need is a skin kit for Daz figures in Blender? A Cycles skin shader that can be applied would be ideal but in place of that a skin kit that works for Cycles and Evee? I redo textures and shaders on all my surfaces inside Blender all the time it just looks better but I'm not a skin creator so a Blender skin that could be appled to Daz male and female charcters would be very usefull.

I find that DAZ characters convert well if you apply a gamma node. It mimics the effect of transluency darkening in DAZ.

For example, here's mila rendered in daz (with translucency around 95) and blender (with gamma set to around 2)

TheMysteryIsThePoint

davidtriune said:

Silver Dolphin said:

Maybe what we need is a skin kit for Daz figures in Blender? A Cycles skin shader that can be applied would be ideal but in place of that a skin kit that works for Cycles and Evee? I redo textures and shaders on all my surfaces inside Blender all the time it just looks better but I'm not a skin creator so a Blender skin that could be appled to Daz male and female charcters would be very usefull.

I find that DAZ characters convert well if you apply a gamma node. It mimics the effect of transluency darkening in DAZ.

For example, here's mila rendered in daz (with translucency around 95) and blender (with gamma set to around 2)

You're right, that works very well; thanks.

One day ( not today :) ), I will have the courage to try a procedural skin, or make something from scratch in Blender, using one of those G8 UV map masks I've seen floating around the net. I just can't help but think that it's the wrong and limiting approach to try to adapt Daz Studio materials instead of making native ones, skin included.

nicstt

TheKD said:

Diffeomorphic seems to be the most developed and works the best IMO these days. https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-14.html

Yes, but sadly doesn't support enough libraries for me.

JClave

nicstt said:

Yes, but sadly doesn't support enough libraries for me.

Would you mind explaining what you mean by this?
Do you mean many Daz assets fail to load using the plugin? or if they do load, it's too messed up in some way?