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So have all y'all animation folks tried this out? Its a pretty basic retargeting plugin
The target figure in the example is even a Daz figure.
I tried it out and got it to work pretty well despite knowing next to nothing about animation. I now have Gen 8 dancing to a animation from Mixamo. Blender 2.9 has also improved strand dynamics apparently so I'm having all sorts of fun experimenting
Behold the majesty!
I'm calling it a skirt posessed
perfect, we are all waiting for your cloth simulation tutorial.
@aelghazi When you import the daz morphs some bones may get drivers so you can't move them anymore. That's the way daz do things, the genesis rig is quite complex as for morphs and driven bones dependencies. To fix this you can use the "make all bones posable" tool, that will give you an extra layer of bones you can always pose.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/corrections-section.html
p.s. Your video is nice I like it, then the comments by @wolf359 may push you to do even better.
@benniewoodell As for the development version, the diffeomorphic plugin warns you if your cycles settings are outside some minimum requirements including refraction and transparency. This only happens when you import the scene though, so if you import with eevee you get to bypass the warning.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2020/04/render-settings.html
Nevertheless the plugin only checks for minimum requirements and some scenes may need more. As a general rule if you get strange artifacts in your renderings then you may use the "full global illumination" preset in cycles to check if the issue is in your render settings.
@jcade Love that fluffy skirt
. Also the addon seems very interesting I like the ik retargeting feature for hands and feet, thank you for pointing that out.
Fyi, Diffeomorphic also makes a BVH retargeting plugin that, in my brief tests, works really well with the DAZ Importer: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/bvh-retargeter.html
The guy is some kind of benevolent genius!
One of the reasons (and likely the main one) is that getting stuff over to Blender will allow me options other than using the 'almost enforced' requirement for a Nvidia card; sure you can manage without, but it is painful.
Yeh, 2.9 looks amazing; I like the improvements to the Multiresolution Modifier.
@Padone I see, that makes sense as Blender just defaults to Eevee for me when I open it up and so I've never seen that warning, good to know. Plus everything I'm trying to render right now I've already animated and rendered in Eevee, I'm not actually bringing anything new in. But later today I'll try just to see what happens when I load a character in with Cycles selected. It looks really good rendered out.
@aelghazi I'm so sorry for the delay in the cloth sim tutorial, the past week has been jam packed. I'll make some time later today to do it!
thank you Bennie, take your time, I am trying to render a new type of HD character, it took me 15 minutes to render one single frame , thats just no possible for an animation, it will take days, I tried to reduce some cycles settings to lower the render time but just it doesnt look good, with eevee looks even worst , I tried to play with the nodes but it doesnt work, did you guys realised every character is bein imported with diffeo with different shading nodes and it makes it very hard to know what you have to touch. I tried e-cycles version of blender, doesnt make a big difference in render time. Maybe I am very limited now with the GTX 1060 for the type of realism I wanna achieve. Damn those expensive graphic cards.
I will try to find that plugin and try, just texture nodes connected to principle BSDF ? it looks so easy setup, no mapping node , mix shader, nothing ? ok I give it a try? but was it rendered in eevee or cycles ? becaude for me this new HD character I am trying looks amazing with cycles, but eevee, is a joke.
Sometimes they have it on sale for like 25 bucks or something like that, I think that's how much I spent on it.
But yeah, I just connected the jpg map to the color node in the Principle BDSF, I didn't add anything else. But that was a couple of months ago when I did this, so now I would try to work with the other nodes to make it better now that I know more of what's going on. I did it on Eevee because the whole reason I wanted to go into Blender was for Eevee and the real-time rendering. I'm about to do an animated feature and don't want to spend two years rendering. The animated short I just I did, the shots were rendering faster than I could go and get a drink and sit back down. Does it look as good as cycles? No, but I'm also doing more anime style so it works great for what I need.
I am rendering a 250 frames in cycles of an HD pirate female, I had to lower a lot the settings in cycles to be able to get 6 minutes per frame, otherwise in setting by default was like 15 minutes per frame, 6 minutes is still a lot but I am expecting a good result. I will share once is ready, maybe after 12 more hours.
Not much of an improvement over Iray.
maybe but I can use blender at least and composite the model there. the goal here is not to render the character only, is to use the character in a composition in blender as daz is very limited .
@aelghazi @benniwoodell
As for HD characters they don't fit animation you need to bake the HD geometry to a normal map. The diffeomorphic plugin imports HD characters to get a base for baking. Though they can also be used for rendering since the iray materials are preserved.
As for materials conversion if you want the principled shader you can just switch off the auto material option and select the principled option for both the opaque and refractive materials. The default values work best for cycles.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/settings-panel_17.html
And there is little reason to expect one, since they are both non-biased render engines, if you have an Nvidia card to use. You do have more levers to pull with Cycles to get better performance, but you must expect to spend time working out which ones work best. With Iray you seem to have only one really effective lever - buy a 'better' Nvidia graphics card.
People moving to Blender mainly for improved render times should surely be using EEVEE, and shouldn't expect the results to look exactly like Iray (or Cycles), though they can look very good.
Cycles by default is a brute force path tracer much like Iray except that it has "branched mode" that allows the user to individually set parameters on a per material type basis and other optimizations such as the number of bounces for reflective surfaces etc.
The Mistake, I am seeing, is that people seem to think that they can escape the unidirectional"buy a bigger$$NVIDIA$$ card" solution of Iray.
So they flee over to Blender and faithfully replicate the IRay experience right down to ridiculously hardware intensive volume based Subsurface scattering and 4K textures , Ultra hi-res figure geometry and NONE of the Branched path tracing optimizations, yet expect the mighty Blender to magically out perform IRay....for ANIMATION. RENDERING no less .
This is not how the technology works.
Hello guys, again, the only reason why we want to move to blender is because we are doing the final composition in blender and we want to use more things like particule simulations or other assets, things that are better done in blender than daz, we are not importing our character just because we want a better render time, we all know that eevee wont look as good as ray trace engine however I guess we still have to render in blender once the composition is done right ? ;)
PS : I understand if your only goal is to renter one image and one pose and you are looking for realism, dont use diffeo and dont bother to rennder using other 3D app just stay in daz, but for the ones looking for realism and more complex scenes to make, then there is no point to stay in daz, only use daz to make a character or a scene and then work it out in Blender.
If you are using Hi resolution characters in Blender, imported Via Diffeo, with 4K textures and Volume based SSS to emulate Iray materials, your peformance/render times per frame will not be signifigantly better than Daz studio Iray even with a single naked character in an empty universe to say nothing of a complex Blender environments with hair and cloth simulation etc.
Having completed a 92 minute animated film with Iclone /DAZ studio Raytraced in Maxon C4D, I can assure that animated filmaking is about optimization particularly if you are working alone and not using a render farm service.
For the record, I think Diffeo is a great asset in fact I use it to import my figures into my Blender scenes to harvest the excellent Shader node setups it generates and apply those to the same figures brought in from Iclone via FBX or Alembic.
However I use EEVEE because I am only willing to accept a render time of a few seconds per frame as I plan on doing a WEEKLY animated web series where 12 hours for for 250 frames is completely impractical.
@aelghazi @wolf359
As for rendering speed of course eevee is a new class by its own though it has limitations over cycles. Also I agree the branched path tracing is a faster way by itself. The single sample is slower but we need far few samples to converge so overall it's faster.
Nevertheless I believe the strongest point of cycles is its denoiser. Compared to iray it needs far few samples to denoise. That's because cycles uses the albedo and displacement buffers to retain details while iray only relies on ai so to me it's more an advanced blur than a real denoiser. External denoisers can't help either because with the iray lpes we can't export the albedo and displacement buffers for them to work fine.
finally after almost 24 hours rendering this short anymation in cycles where I lowered the render from 128 to 16 and the bounces to the lowest I could. To be honest is more real than eevee but I am not either happy with the animation and the render quality and the timing, for the animation I guess with a facial mocap will be smoother and less mechanic as this one where I just baked some aniblocks, and I guess to be able to render in cycles I need definetly a new GPU, I tried to play with the nodes in eevee but didndt help, thats why I ended rendering in cycles. Let me know what do you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oCIwTjfEho&feature=youtu.be
@aelghazi The rounded teeth are horrible
please use the development version. Also you didn't use the denoiser. Then 24 hours for a ten seconds animation at 16 samples seems a bit odd to me. That's about five minutes per frame if you render at 30 fps. Are you sure you're rendering with the gpu ? May be you need to use the simplify panel to fit the scene to the vram. Though a single character should fit without.
You can check the gpu and vram usage in the task manager.
yes the teeth are horrrible, is the development version will fix the teeth ? I didnt use denoiser because the render was taking even more for a single frame, yes I am using GPU, is quite a lot, what is the simplify panel ? its about 3.8 gb of vram, it should not had taken that long on a GTX 1060 specially at that low quality. Any tips ?
well its weird, the task manager is saying 6900 mb at 76% and cpu 100% but in the render panel in blender Im rendering in gpu and it says memory 4100 mb and peak 4100 while rendering, what does mean all this that is different from task manager ?
is it because in system preference in blender I have checked both cpu and gpu in cuda ?
I unchecked cpu in blender and left only gpu in cuda, and chose gpu in cycles but in the task manager while rendering, is showing only 6% gpu and 12% cpu but 88% memory , any idea whats going on ?
it should be 100 % gpu in the task manager