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Oh, right... that's the distinguishing characteristic... thanks, I knew it was too good to be true :)
Okay, I got it to look fantastic in Cycles, it was totally refraction being the cause, but in Eevee, it looks like there's a weird film over her eyes. Do you have any idea what that might be? This is also with refractions on...The big white circle is the light, so that's not my worry, but as you can see her eyes aren't black like they should be. I attached a shot of her eyes in Cycles so you can see that they should be black. I'm trying to use Eevee for my films. And the eyes were never an issue with the stable version, so I'm curious what the difference is on why the eyes are acting different between the two versions. I'm sure this is an easy fix, a checkbox to mark or something, I've just tried all the tricks up my sleeve and have come short of fixing this so any help would be greatly appreciated. Since I only have like five shots left for my short to do, I'm going to reinstall the stable version so I can finish it up with the same setup, but before I embark on the next project I'd like to see if I can get the development version up and running on my computer.
And I'll for sure send the anilip problem to the link you posted along with the duf file, hopefully that can be worked out too! Thank you!!
@Padone, @benniewoodell,
Can either of you clarify what you mean by "allowing enough for refraction" in the render settings? I'm having a strange problem with parts of the eye appearing black, when viewed at high angles of incedence. Sounds like an IOR too high, but that wasn't it.
Thanks
Hey! For me, all I did, was I went into the render properties in Eevee, clicked on screen space reflections and marked the checkbox for refraction and I got the character from having white/gray eyes all around to having what you see above in my photo on the left. I really wish I had a better answer for you, hopefully Padone can chimie in and help us both out!
Hey BW, oh, it's an EEVEE setting? That would explain why I didn't understand :)
But I fooled around a little more, and it is actually the bulge in the cornea. That's why it only appeared at extreme angles. There's something up with the cornea material...
So grateful for your tutorial - this gives me a much better idea of what is possible. When it comes to posing, is it possible to use Rigify and still import poses from our DAZ Studio content? In other words, is there a way to convert pose presets to Rigify and apply them to a figure which already has Rigify applied?
@themysteryisthepoint Lol yeah, I tried Cycles when I first started in Blender and saw the render times were the same as in Daz, so I figured why spend all the time converting things if it takes the same amount of time. And then I found out what Eevee could do and was like that's it, I'm making the switch lol. I went from spending on average 5-7 minutes a frame in Daz to 2-12 seconds in Eevee. But I'm glad you found out what the problem was! Hopefully there's an easy fix to the problem with the cornea. Keep us posted!
@marble I'm so happy to hear that this helped!! I plan on doing a couple more, one with importing Mixamo stuff in and one for cloth sim. There's tons of stuff out there on cloth sim, but nothing really concise on how to implement it on clothes that you didn't create from scratch so I can't tell you how many hours and days I spent on that lol. But as for bringing a pose in with Rigify, on the stable version of the importer, if you bring in a pose after Rigify is applied, the person gets distorted around like the head area, I haven't been able to make it work. Now you can add Mixamo to Rigify, that's doable, but not poses from Daz. Now, that might be fixed with the updated version of the tool, I'm going to delve into that version after I finish the short I'm working on as I don't want to screw up the settings I have right now and I only have like five shots left to finish animating. So hopefully in a couple of days I can start looking into that as I really would love to use my poses I bought in Daz as a starting point with Rigify.
Thanks again. Can't wait for the next installments. I was going to make time for another attempt at making some clothing with Marvelous Designer (since I paid the money and haven't used it yet). But now I'm tempted to finish my present project and then have another go at animating/rendering in Blender. It seems like the plugin has come on strongly since I last tried it.
Yes, thank you, it's greatly appreciated. Looking forward to seeing more.
Thank you all for all your help! Wanted to ask, is it me or does the diffeomorphic faithful low poly turn the model's teeth rounded looking or does a daz3d model just generally have lousy looking teeth?
How are folks managing hair in 2.8x ?
I don't use none strand/dforce hair as it rarely looks as good.
I've been trying to learn the particle hair system from this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpVyTc_72z0
But his blender is the older version which is annoying since the UI has changed quite a bit.
(oh hey! you're the asymmetric face morph guy! thanks for that!)
I've been playing with the skin shader in blended and got my model to something I'm for now satisfied with. However there are really jagged shadows on her forehead and chin, am not sure how to resolve these. She has already been shaded smooth. Does she need subd surfacing?
@benniewoodell @TheMisteryIsThePoint
Well as you'd expect to convert iray materials to eevee is not always good since eevee is a real time engine so of course it has limitations over cycles. Plus daz characters use multiple layers of refraction for the eyes that doesn't help with eevee.
That said, if you have to use eevee then I'd avoid the default import options and I'd go with principled and sss that's more eevee friendly and easier to eventually fix by hand. Below there's how the G8F eyes turn out with those settings. Plus some basic settings for eevee refraction. Also a link if you want to learn more.
edit. @shavonnew to fix the rounded teeth please download the development version.
@Padone Hmm, I wonder then what makes the eyes work without any problem in Eevee in the stable version versus the development? All the shots in at the end of the video I posted are all done in Eevee with just the default settings from the diffeomorphic tool, I didn't touch the materials on anything. But I'll look into using the video you posted here because I would like to start using the development version for my next project. I did see the brighten eyes thing on the diffeomorphic page but couldn't for the life of me find it in Blender when I did some research after finding it out, and I found the operator presets and unit scale, but I didn't see any of the options listed below it in your photo.
@nicstt I've been able to make hair move with a cloth sim, but it takes FOREVER to bake. Like my computer was baking overnight for like 125 frames, which I laughed at that as I would set shots to render in Daz overnight for animation which is what I was trying to avoid with Eevee. But I just found a tutorial from a guy I follow for Blender tips that shows how to rig hair to move naturally in under 2 minutes,
I don't need to rig anymore hair for the few shots I have left in my film, but I am going to give this a try afterwards. If it works, I'll let you know!
As part of the Alembic Exporter I'm finishing up, it converts certain hair assets (only dForce Long Curly Hair right now) to particle systems. I think the results are very good, but there are a LOT of unexplained or poorly explained options. And, as I discovered, someone who is good at it can duplicate the results quickly from scratch, by just grooming. With all the particle edit tools availble in Hair mode, I think I'll be moving forward with it. But I've been having problems with simulating it, and with collisions in 2.83.
You absolutely MUST apply some sort of subd to imported Daz models. From the size of your jaggies, it looks like you exported at base resolution. But its an area of confusion because of the poorly names "base resolution"... this leads people to think that it's a lower resolution version of the model. It isn't. All character models in Daz Studio, as far as I know, are meant to be subdivided, if just at level 0. So what Daz provides you is not a base resolution model, but a subd cage intended to be subdivided. The thing is, the subd cage does not necessarily represent the artist's vision of the model and it's not supposed to. It's there so that the subdivided model does.
After adding a subsurface modifier, you might try toggling Normal Smoothing for the character object, on the vertices tab in the properties window on the lower right, under Normals. OBJs that come in from Daz Studio come in with the normals flipped. You should go into Edit Mode on your object by hitting tab, and select all your verts by hitting a. Select Mesh from the menu in the upper left, then Normals, and then Set From Faces. Then clear the selection with alt-a, and exit Edit Mode by hitting tab again. This operation may have changed you normal smoothing option, so you might need to toggle it again. I'm not sure why, but sometimes I had to even do a Reset Vectors as well.
Tray all that :)
In the Alembic Exporter plugin I'm finishing up, I did a LOT of work to convert dForce Long Curly Hair to a Blender particle system. I think it worked very well, but I'll admit that I'm lost in the Hair Particle System options... it is extremely powerful but I'm not understanding everything yet. I'm not yet satisfied (it doesn't sim perfectly yet, and I haven't figured out good collision settings yet), but I'm convinced that I'll get there from here, based on what it used to look like, and what it looks like now with a little messing around. The model is already 3.5 gigs lighter, though... who knew that there was so much metadata in a vertex?
It's still too soon for me to laugh about it yet, but after spending 3 days writing the code to convert simulated dForce Long Curly Hair to a particle system, I showed it to a colleague, and he was like "Cool, you mean you got it to do this...?" and he groomed up something that looked almost identical in about 20 minutes, with the kinky curls and everything. So I have no doubt that Blender can do hair well, you just have to know how, and I don't yet.
Thank you! Mega helpful information again!
How much subd do you think a daz model needs to be sufficiently acceptable? Not too much I hope!
I tried playing with the hair particle system. Definitely not easy! I kinda gave up and just cheated by zooming in lol. I could not get the hair parting looking right, they all just kept protruding really weirdly.
Anyhoo, any idea how to make her irises a little smaller? They look kinda anime at the moment.
Subd is completely up to you. I don't think I've ever gone above 2.
As for hair, yeah, a few of us are struggling with getting a handle on it. I've seen what competent people can do with it, and very quickly, though. If you're using 2.83, though, you can put the character in a collection and then set that collection as the collision collection. That should vastly improve penetrations and just look more natural.
As for the irises, you could fix it in Blender, there's probably an edge loop you could slide, but I think you should really find a morph in Daz for that sort of thing... stand on the shoulders of giants, ya know?
Thanks, but I've seen that before.
I've just been experimenting and practicing.
Not too bad, and when I've got something im happy with, I'll post here.
Will be interested to see that.
Thank you again! Is it possible to move a model from Blender back into Daz to edit or do I have to re import a new model and restart the shading process all over again?
Also should I make sure to import her as high res?
The stable version is from february so it just uses different default values, that may be better for eevee but not for cycles. For a quick summary of the new features you can check the discussion below in the first post.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/389931/
I actually wouldn't know... there might be a way, but I'm sure it is not easy.
But if I were you, I'd copy the blend file before the export so you can just File/Append all your materials that you worked so hard to perfect.
And there are two ways to go about choosing what resolution to export at. If you want it EXACTLY how it is in Daz, export at High Resolution, and the file will be large. If you can deal with very slight differences, convert to base resolution and apply a subdivision surface modifier once in Blender. The file will be lighter. But for one character, and one frame, I'd just export at High.
Again, thank you so so much for your mega helpful comments! I redid everything again with my first model using the second model's skin shader and spent the whole day working on hair. I'm glad to say... I'm really proud of her hair! Hah!
Woah. I like the hair, too! Congrats!
Hehe thank you! Now moving onto the next stage, do you recommend I use rigify on her for posing?
Should I save this file as base such that if I ever want to use this character, I'll duplicate from this file since it already has her shaders and hair in it and then change the scene around her accordingly?
For Marvelous Designer, between it and Daz3d, I would first get the A pose of my model, bring her to Marvelous Designer, get the outfit on her, go back to Daz and change the pose to what I want and then bring that model into Marvelous Designer as morph target. Once the outfit is fitted into her pose, I then save the outfit as obj and bring that obj back into Daz.
Are the steps basically the same between Blender and Marvelous Designer?
I would really pose her in Daz Studio before exporting. I gripe a lot about Daz Studio, but you will never hear me say anything bad about the rig, posing tools, or even ready-made pose assets that you can just buy for cheap. Not to mention that if you use a Blender rig, you'll be throwing away the JCMs and JCJs, which are two of the things that set Genesis models apart from everything else. With Rigify, I think you will quickly learn just how good the Genesis framework is, and how much it really does for you :)
That being said, people swear by Rigify... I've never used it though.
You don't have to duplicate her. You can keep her in her own blend file, and "link" to her in another. You'll probably want to keep the character in one file, the environment in another, VFX stuff in a third, etc... that way you can change things independently of one another, and it makes loading and saving a lot faster. "Appending" is another operation, but that's not what you want in this case... it's like File/Merge in Daz Studio.
As for getting MD stuff back into Daz, I'm afraid I can't help you with that either... once out of Daz Studio there's no way I would go back in :) and I often really want to know why people would actually do that. Getting things back into Blender is trivial. There's a Marvelous Designer thread here where people are doing some seriously impressive stuff, though. I'm sure there are a half a dozen people there who could tell you anything you wanted to know, and even some things you didn't know you wanted to know.
My workflow has been to export an Alembic file without subdivisions, that starts in an A-pose, and import that into MD. I fit the clothes, run a sim, and export the resulting garment to Blender as Alembic. I just import it on top of the subdivided Alembic I exported from Daz. It works perfectly, but I'm sure you could use obj as well. You might have to fiddle with the scaling, as it didn't seem to work as logic would suggest. On second thought, you know, there's really probably someone on that MD topic that could inform you better.
But seriously, why are you trying to get things back into Daz Studio? :)
Ohh damn I did her hair and shaders to her in her A pose. I now know that I can move shaders between files but can I do that with her hair too? I assume its possible since redoing her hair for every pose sounds horrifyingly tedious lol.
As for going back to Daz, well before Blender it was the only choice I had for rendering haha. Now if possible I have no interest of going back to Daz3d after exporting out my initial model.
I've never used Alembic before though and I just did a quick google.. and have no idea what they're saying hahaha. Why would an alembic file be better than an obj?
Btw just to make sure I understood you clearly, your workflow is basically..
- Get model adjusted to your liking in Daz
- Pose her in Daz but with A pose somewhere in the animation (?)
- Bring her to Blender and add shader and hair (?)
- Change the timeline till where model is in A pose
- Import A pose model from Blender to MD
- Fit the clothes on her in MD
- Move the timeline till she is in her desired pose and clothes move along
- Export clothes to Blender as an alembic where model is also in desired pose (?)
Haha did I understand the above correctly or am I way off base here?
You can edit the mesh.
You can add geometry; it may cause issues, but I have done, to the rigged figures, without issue so far.
I'm considering sculpting some changes to see how it goes.
Adding items and parenting them to the appropriate bone or mesh part is very useful.