Daz3d to Blender Workflow
shavonnew
Posts: 34
Hello!
I would like to ask all who uses DAZ3D models in Blender what their workflow is. I've installed the Diffeomorphic add on and everything but am still having some troubles. (If I'm not animating, is FBX easier?)
Do you guys import a generic genesis 8 model over to blender and sculpt/customize her there or do you do it first in DAZ3D? Do you use any of DAZ3D's textures in Blender?
Is it easier to just pose her in DAZ3D first then move her over or get her rig properly fitted in blender and pose her from there?
I also have outfits made in Marvelous Designer that I bring in as obj into my DAZ3D file, can I do the same in Blender?
Sorry for the load of questions. I just started Daz3d a month ago, Marvelous Designer 2 weeks ago and Blender 2 days ago... cos I apparently like to be in a constant state of frustration or something. lol.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Hi there, and welcome!
If you are not animating or even posing, I would just export via OBJ, use Diffeomorphic for material conversion, and learn the Blender material node system to tweak materials or better yet, use native ones.
I can't see ever customizing anywhere else but Daz. Trying that in Blender is the quickest way I can think of to come to appreciate how much the Genesis framework is REALLY doing for you. But of course, being a competent modeler in Blender is still and important and worthwhile goal, if only in order to fix things. But once you see how many things that are hard in Daz Studio but trivial in Blender, you'll want to try to master it, I'm sure.
To export an OBJ, you'll need to select "write object statements" so that separate Daz object will stay separate, and "use original maps" so your material zones stay like you would expect. Once in Blendr, Daz Studio is y-up and centimeters while Blender is z-up and meters, so you'll have to rotate around global y by -90, mirror along global x, and scale by .01
You can export from MD via obj or Alembic; that works fine. Daz Studio, MD, and Blender is a powerful combo indeed. Autofit and all that stuff in Daz Studio is like magic. Cloth sim in MD is like magic. The modeling tools, sim, and VFX tools in Blender are like magic, especially version 2.83 with strand based hair, the cloth brush, and Mantaflow.
To get materials from the Diffeomorphic plugin, import you model, and go to File/External data, and pack all the files into the .blend file. Now you can go to the .blend file with your imorted OBJ and link your materials from the first .blend file. This way, you can build up a reusable library of converted materials and perfect them over time.
Getting a posable character into Blender is more of a challenge, but getting stills in is pretty much a solved problem except for material conversion.
But understand that Daz Studio is Daz Studio, and Blender is Blender; don't expect Blender to behave always like Daz Studio. That power comes at a cost; you'll have to learn it and it'll be slow at first. But with Blender you will pretty much never have to say "Whelp, guess you can't do that..."
Good luck, and ask questions!
Heya! Thank you so much for that, it's so so helpful, hugely appreciated!
Every time I import my model obj into Blender, there's always issues with my model's eyes though. I know to change the blend mode for the eyelashes to alpha blend but the eyes are just .. white even though the image material node is connected. :I tried turning the cornea and eye moisture transmission to 0 but it didn't really help either!
Also do you use the maps from Daz and play with their nodes in Blender or texture paint on top of them orrrr.. do you create your own maps while in Blender?
Ooh okay I kinda figured out the daz3d eyes for anybody else who might be searching. I had to turn the cornea and eye moisture's transmission and alpha to zero while also having their blend mode at alpha blend.
Don't know if it's actually the right way of doing things but at least the iris and sclera appeared again for me!
Now to figure out the skin.. lol.
In the shader section, it seems like the face, torso, arms and legs are all separated. Is there any way to apply and overall skin surface for them without messing with their individual maps? I assume if the skin shader nodes gets complicated, copy pasting for every part of the body would take quite some time!
Hi!
The eyes are the most complex part of the G8. What you are seeing is the Eye Moisture material group, which covers the eye, so it's got to have transparency or else you won't see the iris, pupil, cornea, and sclera. In Blender, you can temporarily set the Eye Moisture to a material use the Transparency BSDF, with a color of #FFFFFF just to see what I'm talking about.
The OBJ format is never going to work like Iray materials. You can certainly just use the maps from Daz in a node setup that you create in Blender. The minimal setup for a basic PBR material is basically a diffuse, specular, and bump map. You just plug them right into the Principled BSDF:
Diffuse into Base Color input
Specular into Specular
Bump into a Bump Node and then into Normal
A normal map and SSS are bonuses. The SSS map goes into the Subsirface color input, and the normal needs a Normal Node and then goes into the Normal input of the Bump Node.
This is the basic structure, but you will doubtless have to play around with it. For example, I have a BrightContrast node in between the Diffuse map and the Principled BSDF in order to make the character's skin slightly darker.
You could also use the Diffeomorphic Daz Importer to take a stab at creating all the materials for you, in another blend file, and link/append them from there. It does eyes pretty well. But don't forget to change the render engine to Iray BEFORE you import.
Let me know if any of that helps :)
Great! Thank you! I did my first render. It's not amazing but it's also 4am lol. Clearly the SSS got a little out of hand and her lips are mad pale. Eyes are finally existent though really fake.
Not sure why there's the harsh line on the nose and her neck though, do I have to subd surface her more?
You made the Eye Moisture transparent, right? That was just to illustrate that it occludes the other surfaces of the eye, not for you to actually keep :) You'll need to fix that. The easiest way is to let the Daz Importer plugin do it for you.
I don't know what the harsh line is either. You could try selecting the character. and then the Vertex Groups tab (green triangle) in the properties window on the lower right. Go to Normals, and select Auto Smooth. Also right click the character in objec mode and choose smooth shading. Maybe add a subdivision modifier as well?
It's coming along...
the diffeo plug-in is great for harvesting correct node set-ups for your daz content.
are you trying to get the same result as DAZ? I highly recommend using Diffeomorphic plugin
I prefer blender myself. You can use the magical Prinicipled Shader node to make everyhting look realistic. Here's a good intro to it
just to show everyone how easily you should be able to set up a face in blender, here is an example.
I thought the whole point of the Diffeomorphic plugin was to have a rigged, poseable DAZ figure in Blender so that we could animate it and render it with Eevee. I keep reading that Blender has much better animation than DAZ Studio.
I tend to export as an obj, and then create the shaders for that character.
I enjoy the process of creating a render in Blender; I much prefer their render engines, they just require more work than a couple of clicks in Studio. And I'm getting better at the shaders.
The default DS FBX exporter will do that for you ( with less accurate material conversion than Diffeo )
After dumping my old obj/MDD to maxon pipeline,I was hopeful that Diffeo would allow me to Load various .duf files with facial and body morph animation into blender after the fact as I did with MDD files to maxon...
It does not.
Sure I could convert to a native Blender Metarig and manually animate in blender and have no native Audio based lipsynch functions but , again this is already possible without Diffeo via FBX from DS or Iclone.
All moot for me, as I am doing my facial and body in Iclone and using both Alembic and FBX from Iclone Direct to blender.
, As replacing the textures on an imported, Alembic or FBX from Iclone, is literally click&pick without even having to revisit the node setups that diffeo conveniently parsed for me simply by importing the still posed character from a saved Daz scene first.
So, to condense the point: is there any reason not to use the Diffeomorphic plugin if the intention is to animate AND render in Blender? I'm trying to determine whether the exported figure will be somehow compromised when imported into Blender thus preventing attempts to pose/animate. BTW, I'm not interested in lipsynch but I am interested in soft-body physics and cloth simulation.
Wolf, I've heard you say that before, I hadn't tried it since cerca the 2.79/2.80 transition, but I tried it just now and it failed as badly as it always has. Can you share both your export and import settings? There's got to be a certain trick to it, right, that you figured out?
I am away from my Daz/ Blender 2.8 machine posting on a mobile device, so I cant pull up the DS export setting ATM export settings But this speaking Character animation is a straight FBX export from Daz studio 4.12 to Blender 2.82
@Marble even if you plan to manually animate your figures in Blender with no lipsynch,( arrgghh!!)
The diffeo plugin will likely give you a better starting material result particulary on HAIR transmaps and those pesky eye/tear layers etc.
Just know that you will not be able to avoid the node editor entirely and anyone who promises effortless quality Blender Cycles or EEVEE renders, without ever visiting the shader node editor, is a Liar.
I can never get the bones to align, and they never seem to deform correctly... I'm tremendously curious how you resolved this. I'm nearing completion of my Alembic plugin, and then I'm going to try my hand and a Blender addon. I'd like to be able to do mocap cleanup on a basic Genesis figure, for which I don't really need JCMs, materials, anything beyond the basic deforming mesh. FBX would be easy and perfect for that, would it not?
Well, my requirements for animation are not the same as yours. I'm not making movies, I just want to animate short clips such as a dance or maybe a few BVH/Mixamo actions. The main storytelling for me is still in a comic book format, albeit (attempted) photoreal, with a few animations thrown in. Mixing still images and short animations is becoming my preferred format these days but the animations make the projects many times more time consuming than my old picture-book styles.
As for the node editor - yes, I still find it daunting but Blender is moving towards "Everything Nodes" so I guess I'll have to bite the bullet.
Thanks for all your replies!
I've been trying out the principled shader and it's been going pretty okay. My desktop is a little slow so it hard to make changes while waiting to see the results.
Does blender have a version of the dual lobe specularity that Daz has? It's probably possible to create using the nodes, I'm just not sure how.
Also, I can't seem to subdivide my model without the program crashing.
My desktop is kinda old but it was built pretty well 7 years ago, I attached its stats too. Is it a hardware problem?
Also, when I import my model in Blender using Diffeomorphic, they mention something about merging and joining
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/finishing-section.html
Which parts do I merge and which parts do I join?
It mentions merging genitalia and joining eyelashes. What about peach fuzz? What about her clothes, hair and eyebrows?
Hey! I wanted to have this done last week for a different thread on here, but got caught up with work during the middle of the week and then when I was making the actual video my mouse broke for my PC! I still don't have it fixed so I used my iMac to do it this evening. I hope this makes sense, I've never done a tutorial before and I don't know if I helped me worse lol. But if this did help and anyone wants to see like a lip syncing tutorial with papagayo, what I do for cloth sim, or anything you want to know that I might not have covered, please let me know because you absolutely can lip sync characters with diffeomorphic. At the end of this, I have like 2 minutes of my animated short I've been working on, and one clip you'll see her speak with lip sync, it's in Japanese, but you can see it matches. Otherwise, I may or may not be able to help because I just started learning Blender like two months ago and had to figure out all this diffeomorphic stuff on the fly, but I have a good handle on it now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HnvxP05vjM&feature=youtu.be
@shavonnew I show it in the video above, but just shift click on everything in the hierarchy of the character to highlight it all and click merge rigs, eyebrows and all. Some props might not merge, like the ninja outfit, the sword and sheathe don't stay with the character so you have to manually parent that, but for the most part everything will become merged with the character perfectly.
Oh, and as you'll see in my video the clothes breaks a lot, if you do cloth sim, that fixes that problem completely as the cloth moves with the body, but if you don't do cloth sim, then you just have to scale the X or Y axis a tad, don't scroll just click once or twice on the arrow. I don't think I explained that well enough.
Hope this helps!
I forgot to mention that I still use the Genesis1-2 figures exclusively.
Now that I have thought about it ,the extra twist bones in G3/8 made standard FBX export with animation a Non starter as they sent the limbs flailng all over the place in Blender in my tests.
The G8 default female imports with her bones pointing in strange directions but is technically"posable" with the Blenders translate tools.
YMMV.
Can you create a lipsync with mimic or Anilip2.
Save the.DUF animated pose file.
Apply that to your Daz figure, in Blender via the "Load Pose" button??
Thanks for the tutorial Bennie! My main issue with Diffeomorphic is that if I import my model using it, whenever I try to render, Blender totally freezes. (edit: okay finally i got a render, 500x 500, took 10 mins) If I just import my model as an obj though, then the render works (less than a min) but I won't be able to pose her. Does Diffeomorphic make her take up more memory or something? I can't seem to figure it out.
I was messing with diffeo and blender 2.79 but i had to put those projects on hold due to irl stuff. Getting the skins in Blender to look like they do in a Daz Iray is the hard part and you'll need to learn the node system. Also i was using mostly G8 figures and one thing that i learned is that the diffeo plugin for 2.79 didnt work very well with G8. I would import the figure into blender using diffeo and add the control rig to the skeleton but the knees would bend weird. I found out that i had to import the G8 figure, convert its skeleton to a G3 style skeleton (there's an option in diffeo to do it) then from there i would do rigify and add the control rig. After that i found that the knees finally bent properly. The link below is a thread i started trying to figure out that issue.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/343456/daz-blender-2-79-diffeomorphic-problem-with-thigh-pole-targets#latest
Is that her iris peeking through her sclera?? 0.o
What render engine are you using?
Set it to Eevee, if using cycles, before importing.
Thank you @benniwoodel for the nice video it gives a good overview. I see you're using an old version of the plugin in the video. In the new version the pose scale has been fixed please download the development version.
As for facial animations they should work. Again please download the development version. I just tried a viseme animation on G2F and it works fine. If you use aniblocks you have to bake them to the timeline. The plugin doesn't import aniblocks. This may also apply to mimic for @wolf359.
As for the corrective morphs that you don't know about, they import the daz jcms, that for example shape elbows and knees when you pose the character. Try a pose with and without to see the difference yourself.
As for the outfit "breakings" this is what the plugin "transfer correctives" is for that you don't use in your video. The reason is that the genesys platform in daz studio uses an automatic fitting that transfers the jcms of the figure to the outfit. Unless the outfit has custom jcms for that character that is. Also often a smoothing modifier is used in daz studio to fix the same breakings when jcms are not enough. In blender you can use a shrinkwrap modifier on the outfit to get the same effect.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/morphs.html
As an additional note for materials conversion. The plugin works much better with the uber shader so when exporting G1-G3 assets with 3delight materials it's good to convert the materials to the uber shader inside daz studio before exporting. This is good even for iray itself though because this way you have better control on the materials when rendering with iray so it's a win win.
These are just some notes hope they help sorry I don't have time for full tutorials.
edit. @shavonnew Your system is a little weak in the video card but it's not bad. In blender you can use the simplify panel to limit the textures size in the viewport and in rendering, plus there are other settings that also help. This will get you better performances. In daz studio there's the same problem though and people needs to use the scene optimizer addon to get anywere from a basic scene.
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
@shavonnew If you have scene optimizer, run that before sending over, otherwise it will eat up memory fast. I found that out the hard way as I brought in two characters and boom, my memory usage went up to about 12GB lol. Then when you bring it into Blender, and I forgot this part because I normally don't use it and I don't know because it does help, but under the next tab down from finishing you should see a make faithful low poly button. Click that and it will also help you out in making the character less of a strain to your system and I can't tell the difference between regular and a low poly. And definitely try working with Eevee, it is so much quicker than Cycles.
@Padaone Oh, wow okay, thank you for this info! I just downloaded the stable version becuase I figured that would be better lol. I've gotten aniblocks to work when I baked them to the timeline, but once I discovered rigify, I can't go back lol. I really love that as I've been able to move the characters so smoothly. But I'm excited to hear the visemes work in this other version! I don't use G2, I only use G8, but I'm going to give this a try today after work and see how it works. Papagayo has been working working really well though. But yeah, @wolf359, that was honestly one of the first the things I tried to do when I started delving into it as I'm about to do a feature and didn't want to lip sync by hand and I couldn't get it work, but now I see why! I'm so excited to try this development version.
And thank you so much for the information regarding the correctives and why the clothes were breaking. Now I know what they do and will begin to start adding them to my workflow. I do really love how Blender works wtih the clothes in cloth sim though, once I figured out how to get that to work. I've still got so much to learn :) I get it with not having time for full tutorials, I've been trying to get this one together for a week now.
By chance, do you know how I can add other expressions into the facial expressions tab? Like I have all these that I've bought but I can't get them into being a slider. If there's no way to do it, no worries at all, it's just for the girls there's a ton that are avaialble to me, but for the guys I have like six that show up, so it would be nice to use some of the other expressions I've got. But maybe this is something that's fixed in the development version?
Either way, I love this plugin and it has opened up so much to me in terms of animation. I love Daz Studio, and still use it if I want to do a still, but I'm firing off full frames with characters and environments at 2-12 seconds each, which I never could have gotten in Daz. It's rendering faster than I can go grab a bite to eat for lunch and sit down again instead of starting a render and coming back five to seven hours later for one layer of a character shot to render fully. It's incredible. And volumetrics are a breeze in Blender! Again, thank you for the info!
It depends if they are presets or morphs. Most expression sets are just presets so you have to import them as poses after first importing the base morphs they drive. You can also import a full pose library in the posing tab. For extra morphs there's the "import custom morphs" button in the morphs tab.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/posing-panel.html
Hope you can do more nice videos this will help a lot.
Hmmm, I just downloaded the development version and tried to bring in an anilip sequence and it didn't do anything when I loaded it to the armature, it just said animation loaded but some morphs were missing. When I tried to load it to the character itself, it just sat there. I saved it as a pose preset in Daz and made sure the animation range was selected and everything was checked, and then in Blender I went to import action and brought it in. Is there a different way like being able to export a .dat in Daz to use in the load moho section? Does it matter that I'm using G8?
Also, with the development version, her eyes are just gray and in cycles, they just reflect the world around her. I just tried three other characters and that's happening with all of them that all had their eyes show up in the stable version. If I need to reattach material files, I can, I just wondering if you've run across this.
But thank you, yeah, I really want to do a video on bringing in Mixamo files with BVH importer as I it took me awhile to find a workaround to bring in BVH files as I just kept getting an error. But I figured it out and want to do one for that to help, and then also one for cloth sim as I can't tell you how many days and hours I've spent trying to get that to work lol.
Thank you so much for your help!
@benniewoodell As for the G8F eyes I just checked commit 459c103 that's the latest download and it works fine here with default settings. You may check your render settings in cycles and be sure you have enough for refraction. Using the "full global illumination" preset will reveal you any flaw. Below the G8F eyes first iray then cycles. They seem quite good to me.
As for anilip please report to diffeomorphic you may be able to get better help there. Please also include a duf file for testing.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues