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Meet Mikey, the owner of the garage, and Clara, his ace mechanic. Looking at them next to the garage, it looks like I may have to scale the entire scene down, because Mikey, my first troll, is 226cm tall, well over 7', and even he looks small.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time over the last several days combining a bridged figure and a couple different FBX exports to get all of Mikey's JCMs and morphs working correctly. It was probably unwise to spend all that time on a character I don't see myself figuring very largely into the story, but I guess it's good experience.
If you don't mind my asking, what do you do with the sets once you've made them? Liked the gunstore for example. Signage looked like you had fun.
They're for an animation project I've been developing based on Shadowrun. This set is one of the major recurring locations, and while I'm working on it, I'm also creating new characters and fleshing out the world.
I moved Mikey and Clara into the gun shop to see if the scale worked out. To my relief, it does. I finally "finished" up with Jimmy Chang, the owner of the gun shop and dropped him in there.
I say "finished" because there's more work to be done. For one, the War Dog shirt doesn't cleanly fit him, but that would be a relatively easy fix. After all the work I put into making his various prosthetics work with his base skeleton, I'd need to start over with a different approach if I wanted to have any hope of using his morphs and expressions. Perhaps most frustratingly, I made him a dwarf, but didn't give him pointy ears.
Missed that one & would’ve been right up my alley. Oh well. Some amazing stuff out of Houdini & Arnold. He looks pretty good. Tempting to hare off & try it but better learn more in DS.
Anyway, leave you to your work without any more interuptions. Thanks for reply & best wishes.
"Missed" what? The project is still very much in development, if that's what you're talking about. Everything there is to see about it at this point has been showcased in this thread.
I'm a substantial part of the way through getting Jimmy fully rigged and ready to go. I really should have started this process with the main characters, but I'm certainly learning some important procedural lessons. Really wish the bridge correctly transferred morphs. I only get a couple pairs of JCMs, a lot of expressions are missing, some morphs horribly overfire or trigger things that they shouldn't....it's a mess, but I am learning that it's important to start with a bridged character because at least then I get properly aligned joints.
Game you mentioned. Looked it up & would’ve been around the time a group of us playing pencil & paper RPGs. My bad. Sloppy writing with implied the pronoun. How the heck were you supposed to know what was referring to!
Anyway, won’t interrupt further. Enjoy your week!
Started focusing more on characters, which has largely involved finding the best workflow for bringing characters from DS into C4D and Houdini. To my great delight, FBX export has been fixed in recent versions of DS such that I can now export a character with geografts and not only get the entire character with geografts, but also morphs. The most recent version of the Daz to C4D bridge still has some bugs, but it's not too terribly hard to get it fully working. I also figured I should get back into experimenting with facial mocap using Moves by Maxon. I won't share my previous tests with it (although it might be worthwhile for me to go back and apply lessons I've learned to those), so here are the two most recent, both made after trimming my beard and moustache such that the camera can actually see my lips.
Wow, you've been busy! Some very cool work.
very cool
I use PoseRecorder in DAZ sometimes and it hates my crooked face, works fine on videos of other people's faces so feel your pain with the beard and mustache
I think any markerless facial mocap will have that issue
Because I'm incapable of focusing on one thing at a time, I downloaded a free horse animation and did a quick and dirty retarget to a G8M centaur.
I could probably make it look better if I put a bit more work into it, but there's a pretty affordable pack of good-looking horse animations on CGTrader that I just bought in the middle of typing this post out, so I'll give those a more thorough working over. If I understand the license correctly, I could even sell the animations retargeted to centaurs and DH2/3 if I wanted to.
Apart from that, I've mostly just been working with naked people, so not a lot to share about my recents goings on.
That's more like it. It's a little frustrating that all the animation is in a single sequence rather than different takes, but it'll be easy enough to extract different parts,
I spent a while setting up a centaur for ragdoll simulations, and there were some...unexpected results.
Thought I'd finally experiment with Redshift, so I took a Kitbash3D set that I'd set up for Arnold and reconfigured the materials for Redshift. It's not exactly 1:1 because I didn't focus enough on the lighting, and this was one of the first KB3D sets I prepared for Arnold, so I was less fluent in Arnold at the time and made some mistakes with things like displacement (see, for example, the lantern at the bottom to the left). I also applied the roughness map to ALL the glass instead of just one of the glass materials in the scene. Even accounting for all of that, there are some weird discrepancies in the color of certain materials. I'm making peace with Redshift after some initial difficulties, and there are still some things I don't like about it compared to Arnold, but it does have at least one massive advantage over Arnold: since Redshift is made by Maxon, the company that makes C4D, it can include C4D's powerful suite of noise generators, whereas Houdini's noise generators are highly inadequate unless you're willing and able to do some complex math, and Arnold's are not that much better. Redshift is also quite a bit cheaper than Arnold, which is another point in its favor, but I'd happily pay for Arnold (once I can afford to pay for either of them) if I thought the results were worth the extra money. I've got two weeks total to try out Redshift, so it's going to require more testing.
Arnold:
Redshift:
Continuing to experiment with Redshift by going back to an old scene. It's missing the camera motion because I forgot that a Protection tag would protect it even from keyframed movement, and motion blur on the water effect got real screwy because of inconsistent topology. Other than that, I didn't put a ton of effort into optimizing this, choosing instead to try to match the settings of the Arnold version of this scene.
I started playing around in Unreal, and because I am a lunatic, I started with the entire city block scene I posted earlier. I built the scene in C4D with Arnold materials, which didn't transfer over, and there were various other frustrations from not exercising enough hygiene on the scene; anyway I started the arduous process of rebuilding the shaders, which involved the arduous process of figuring out how Goddamn ANYTHING works in Unreal editor. It literally took me over half an hour to figure out how to add an image texture to a material. Since Houdini also uses MaterialX shaders, I thought I'd set it up in Houdini first and export USD from there, because as tedious as I find it to texture things in Houdini, it's a cakewalk compared to my brief dalliance with Unreal's material system. That said, I've still been dealing with many of the same frustrations as in Unreal.
I first started with USD, and I'm not sure why I moved on from that, because looking at it again it seems fine.
After that, I tried GLTF, which for no reason I can figure out imported all the buildings rotated 180° on the X axis, but in such a way that the tops of the buildings were lined up with the ground and the bottoms were staggered, so I couldn't even rotate the whole block upside down at once. Zooming in, all the objects in each individual room were also upside-down.
After that, the obvious choice was OBJ, and again, I've lost sight of why I didn't pursue that further. It's possible that I wanted to focus on FBX so that I could hopefully retain the rigging on individual components. Throughout the process I've had to re-export multiple times to correct some surfaces being incorrect because a material on an object was assigned to a polygon selection that no longer existed, so it overwrote all surfaces after it, and it's possible that doing so would have fixed the issues that steered me away from USD.
Anyway, here's as far as I've got with the scene so far. I haven't textured the sidewalk and street yet because, as previously mentioned, procedural materials are not Houdini's forte. I also need to remember how atmospheric rendering works in Karma. I've got a Karma Fog Box in the scene, but it might be in the wrong position in the hierarchy.
Good God, setting this character up was a hundred times more complicated than I expected it to be, and I'm not even done. First, I had to rig the Crocs to the figure, since I had to dial the character morph out of them before exporting because it was causing some pretty extreme deformation. I had to reposition them in Houdini, but couldn't figure out how to actually rig them. Joint Capture Biharmonic wasn't working at all, because apparently the mesh needs to be closed, which Crocs famously are not, and Joint Capture Proximity was failing to capture all of the points, no matter where I put any of the settings. After a bit, I gave up and moved back into C4D for the rigging, which was pretty uneventful (although the video reveals that more work needs to be done), and also gave me an opportunity to delete the extra bones that for some reason Houdini wasn't letting me delete from the capture pose.
Anyway, after all of that, I thought the cloth setup was going to be pretty routine, but it thwarted me at every step. Part of that was carelessness, like not realizing that the groups I set up didn't necessarily include all the polygons I needed, but other things I needed to logic out and find little workarounds for. For one example, the bottom of the shirt would just clip through the pants, even with the cloth set up in layers. Solution? Just delete the polygons on the shirt that are lower than the waist of the pants. There's still the matter of the apron to work out: no matter how low I set the mass, the main apron would just keep falling, stretching the neck strap to infinity. There are also minor things to fix, like stiffening the sleeve cuffs and collar. There's also the problem that I never remember to solve before doing this extensive work, which is making sure that the animation loops smoothly and doesn't cause massive velocity shock.
Due to the chaotic and haphazard way I approach problem solving, I can't be entirely sure why this started working, but I have some pretty good guesses.
Still need to fix the rigging on the shoes, though.
There must be an easy way to add "hairspray" so that hair retains its original shape better, but I have yet to find it, and the current method isn't really working. As is, it's a lot more frizzy than it should be. Some irregularities with the cloth as well, like some roiling in the pants, and the friction settings between the shirt and her body could use some work, but I'm not quite sure how to do that. Also, because I'm a maniac, her nipples are pierced, and it took quite a while figuring out how to make sure the piercings stay in place during the animation and collide properly with the shirt.
Making peace with Unreal. I still don't like it for a lot of reasons, but I'm learning how to do the things I want with it. So far, anyway; all I'm really doing now is importing assets and texturing them. Animation and other things are sure to be a whole new world of frustration.
Brave new world but worth the effort.
I'm just looking forward to the day when I can move past transferring the same scene and characters into different programs.
Funny thing about that: I've decided that I hate Unreal too much to spend a single second more inside the program. I took a brief spin with Unity and found it much more comprehensible, much easier to figure out how to do simple things, but I was long past the point where I could remember why I started playing in game engines, since I'm not trying to make a game. So I refocused my energies on building out more of the set I'd been working on. I had already converted the entire scene to C4D's standard renderer because Arnold materials don't transfer into any other program, but since I've only ever used third-party renderers since I started seriously using C4D, there are a lot of things I don't fully understand about how to make standard materials and lights look particularly good. This is an alright shot for now, I guess.
We stan trolls named Mikey!
Is that a reference to something?
No, I just love that the troll is called Mikey!
Metahumans aren't a different species/race/however you want to put it, so all of my elves, orks, etc. are just people. Mikey's not a runner, so he doesn't need a flashy codename. He's just a dude. A GIGANTIC dude with horns and tusks, but a dude nonetheless.
That's actually how things work in my fantasy story as well. Trolls, elves and humans are subspecies of the same species, and they can get married and have families together. But they have distinct, individual cultures, and my trolls traditionally have nature-based names. (Also, I invented a clan of trolls who look nothing like anything. I don't even know how I'd make them in Daz Studio.) Those who live in cities and suburbs often get absorbed into the human culture and get names like Douglas and Mary Elizabeth, however.
We stan that.