hear ye hear ye HD morphs for diffeo
Padone
Posts: 3,688
This is exciting news thanks to an amazing addon by Xin that works together with diffeo.
With diffeo we already can import the HD shape, it is converted to multires so to get HD quality together with animation speed. What we can't do, or couldn't, was to import HD morphs, because the blender multires doesn't support HD shapekeys, that is, we can only morph the base resolution mesh.
Now Xin provides an addon to convert HD morphs to vector maps, normal maps, or true HD morphs. This is a work in progress so you can help testing and/or providing your suggestions for things to be improved. We do not want to miss suggestions from the talended daz artist out here.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/357/it-is-possible-to-read-dhdm-files-directly
Vector maps are good to be used with multires to get real displacement, so details will bump out of the mesh, and it is good for animation because it's fast. But it only works in cycles because eevee doesn't support true diplacement.
Normal maps are good for eevee, the HD morph will not have true displacement, but the result is good enough for HD expressions and skin details. Of course this is also so good for animation and you get the amazing speed of eevee as an added bonus.
True HD gets the true HD geometry the same as daz, it is also what the daz bridge does. It is not good for animation because it is so heavy, the same as daz. But it gets the maximum quality and can be good to render still pictures and comics.
Below a little example it's G8F with the Angry HD expression in eevee, with normal maps.
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Comments
Whow, great news Padone!
Great news, Padone. Thanks for sharing!
I didn't understand well... Does this mean then that the new Xin addon allows to create shape keys with a multiresolution modifier?
@marth_e We already create shape keys with multires, that's not the point. With multires we get the face expressions as base mesh morphs, they work but they lack the HD details. With vector maps we can add a displacement texture to the base mesh, thus adding the missing HD details.
I think it is time for some talented YouTuber to make a good, start-to-finish Diffeo tutorial. I got lost a while back and don't understand many of the terms being bandied about now. I can see diffeo becoming a kind of exclusive tool for the tech-gurus and beyond the ken of mere mortals.
Any volunteers?
That would be super cool. It would be a lot of work, and probably quite a few videos to demonstrate all the things and methods available though. Like one video to show how to import a posed for single renders. One that whos how to import zero posed and pose within blender. Etc etc.
Yeah, I am a bit of a tutorial junkie - so much so that I look for a tutorial whenever I install anything on my PC. When it comes to Blender, there are so many things it can do, it is difficult to know what to look for and that's before we start with add-ons like Diffeomorphic. But I'd like to know more about how to get my characters over including geoshells and geografts and morphs and HD and posed and animated and how to drape the clothes and hair and ... and ... and ...
Agree!! The same happened to me! Having some videotutorials would be awesome to better understand all the new features!
If I am not making something, I am watching a tutorial lol.
Yep, I agree some videos will be nice, though Thomas does a good job with the blog in my opinion. I have little free time and I like better to test or improve features rather than making docs. But I'll be glad to provide information and advice for what I know, to anyone who'd like to make videos.
The hard part is that diffeo is evolving very fast, the same as blender. So videos may become old very fast too. This is also why a blog is much easier to maintain.
As for diffeo being a tool for "nerds", honestly I feel the same sometime. Some simplification would probably benefit usability. But, being it an addon for blender, I feel it starts with "nerds" anyway. I mean, blender itself gets much more complexity than diffeo.
I'd love to get some tutorials, but I understand that things are evolving rapidly.
Nevertheless Diffeo for Dummies would be great.
Wow. This works great! I spent way too many hours reading about vector displacement and how to bake those maps in Blender. It can be done, I got it to work, but still had some issues with seams.
This add-on is so fast and easy. Very much appreciated.
Two things I noticed so far that may help others:
In the node editor, I think color space should be set to linear. This worked for me. The tutorial has it set to non-color.
Also, you can add a displacement modifier and plug in the newly created vector displacement map. The advantange is that you can see the effects in the 3d viewport without having to render. Use the settings in the attached screenshot. You'll have to make a new vertex group or it will apply to the whole model.
why is tue hd not good for animations? If the hd is multi res, the animation could be done with the basemesh?
Or is it about render performance? Multires renders slower than vector or normal maps?
@Krampus Thank you for your comments, I do always find them interesting. Technically non-color is the right color space, because this is not a hdri, it's a displacement map. Also thank you for the displace modifier, I was using it with scalar maps and didn't notice the "rgb to xyz" option. Please note that we can also use our own custom uv map to bake HD morphs, this way we can create a single texture for the whole figure.
edit. @Krampus, as Xin explained in the diffeo discussion linked in my first post, the "rgb to xyz" option can't be used because we need tangent space that's missing in the displace modifier. I did a test myself and it didn't work fine. That is, it needs the object space to be the same as the tangent space, that may happen for some geometry but it's by chance.
@gerster True HD means a HD geometry without multires. The difference is that multires doesn't support HD morphs and we have to use displacement maps instead. While with True HD we can use HD morphs.
oh, didn't worked much with diffeo. For my usecases I exported the base and high res obj from Daz to blender and generated a multires figure in blender. Doesn't diffeo support multires at the moment? I'm not an blender expert, but multires seems to be the option in Blender.
@gerster Yes, diffeo supports multires and it's the default option. As explained in the first post. Then thanks to Xin vector maps are another option, as well as true HD.
Blender doesn't see the addon as "installed" under the add-ons tab in preferences for me.
diffeo works fine with blender 2.91, blender betas may have issues
@Blood-PawWerewolf
Not sure if this is the same issue for you, but I had to click 'Testing' when installing the add-on to find and enable it.
oh! Never thought about even checking that category! That's usually the category for official WIP addons in beta builds of Blender.
Been using the 'test4i' and absolutely love it! I'm sure everyone has a different workflow but for me, being able to keep the base model at base resolution is huge. I can now import a base res model, import JCM's, shapekeys, etc. without having to worry about importing an hd version. With a base res model, I can add multires or subdiv, apply the vector displacement maps, pose, sculpt some final details, then reset everything for the next pose. Very awesome.
The EXR's make it much simpler by not having to figure out midlevel and scale. I also like working in EXR when possible so no information is lost.
@Padone - quick question, I'm not familiar with how the vector displacement maps work as far as what each color means mathematically, which direction, etc. So, what do you think the best way to combine two VDM's would be? I used mix RGB and also tried to average them with math nodes, which did work, but obviously took out some of the details since it took the average displacement of two values. For example, if I'm using an HD character morph like Sydney HD, and want to add an expression like Angry HD, is there any way to combine the VDM's and keep all the details from both maps?
I don't have a bitbucket login, but a big thanks to you(Padone), engetudouiti, and a super big thanks to Xin for this addition.
@Krampus First I'm not an expert myself, I believe everyone else at diffeo is much better than me for this sort of things. But I sorted out a couple of setups that seem to work fine. Basically it's adding vector maps for vdm, or using overlays for normal maps. The link below also gets interesting comments from Engetudouiti and Xin.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/406/mixing-hd-normal-maps
Very cool news!!!
I have a busy weekend playing drums, but I plan to start making some Diffeo tutorials and demonstrations in the coming weeks, if all goes well.
In the meantime, Bennie's tutorial already shows how to save poses and animations in DS that can then be brought into Blender via Diffeo's Pose tab. Just make sure to pay attention in the beginning where he "Makes All Bones Posable", or your figure will remain locked. But basically, we save the pose or animation as File > Save As > Pose Preset, then slect animation or still and save as a duf pose/animation as usual. Then go File > Export to Blender (Diffeo) and save again in the same place, same name, just like we're exporting a character for Blender.
Now in the Diffeo tab, go to Pose and import the pose to your character's armature - animated or not. Works like a charm!!!
Very cool workflow!