Conforming Clothes/Hair in Blender

Hurdy3D

Hey,

I just bought the new HumGen3D Addon for Blender.

As I expected, the new Blender human figures are not match to the current Genesis platform, but they are trying to create a similar "open" platform, with cloth, hair and pose addons.

I'm a little bit surprised that HumGen3D allows only to add hair to a character when the character has the default height of 1.83m.
I really don't understand this restriction. Does Blender not support conforming cloth/hair like DAZ?

Are conforming character addons a special thing from DAZ/Poser?

Nearst thing seems to be shrinkwrap. For testing, I created a sphere and cloned some faces. With shrinkwrap I wanted to simulate a conforming hair prop. I added a shrinkwrap modifier to the cloned faces and target it to the sphere. This worked well, as long as the cloned faces where no too far away from the targe sphere.

But is there any whay to get easy to use conforming props in Blender. Just add it and it just works, like in DAZ3D, independet of the pose,  size or position of the figure?

Padone

@gerster I'm not an expert on this subject, but from what I understand daz studio uses mesh templates for conforming. That is, when a figure is morphed the template is morphed too, then the outfit is conformed to the template. May be you can use the "mesh deform" and "surface deform" modifiers in blender to get something similar.

What is unique to daz studio is "morphing armatures". That is, the genesis figures allow to morph the armature together with the shape of the figure, in animation. That's not possible in blender or any other platform afaik. And that's probably why ik doesn't work in daz studio animations, since I bet a ik solver would have some hard time with a morphing armature, but this is my very own guess.

wolf359

I was Mildly interested in this Addon and even followed thier twitter feed.

However now that I see it 
and its pricing, there is ZERO reason for me to
consider it even for  back ground charcters 

$128 USD for a commercial use license ??
Sorry !!!spend  $71 more dollars and get Iclone Character creator3 pipeline
for $199 convert any Daz Character ,prior to Genesis 8.1 ,and export as FBX using the Blender preset

Grab the free "CC3 pipeline" Addon from gituhb by "Victor soupday"
it is the full equivalent of Diffeomorphic except for CC3 to Blender.
you wont be Dissapointed

Honzo

@wolf359  I just looked at the CC3 pipeline addon, but I'm a little confused. Is 3Dxchange needed to move the figure back to CC3? Reallusion, as usual, is quite opaque, and the outside info I've found is several years old, so I don't know if it's accurate anymore. 

Hurdy3D

Padone said:

@gerster I'm not an expert on this subject, but from what I understand daz studio uses mesh templates for conforming. That is, when a figure is morphed the template is morphed too, then the outfit is conformed to the template. May be you can use the "mesh deform" and "surface deform" modifiers in blender to get something similar.

What is unique to daz studio is "morphing armatures". That is, the genesis figures allow to morph the armature together with the shape of the figure, in animation. That's not possible in blender or any other platform afaik. And that's probably why ik doesn't work in daz studio animations, since I bet a ik solver would have some hard time with a morphing armature, but this is my very own guess.

Hey Padone,

thank you for your answer.

That's a little bit disillusioning. I always thought that Blender can do everything DAZ can do and more.

But this would mean we will not see a platform like Genesis on Blender

No easy conforming clothes and hair for Blender figures.
And no morphs/shape-keys which have drastic effects on the character, like extending the arm lengths, because a shape key can't affact the armature.

wolf359

@Honzo

the free  CC3 pipeline Addon is for animators who export from CC3 pipeline to blender
for rendering animated films in Blenders Engine as it is far superior to Iclone's internal engine.
 
Exporting animated Character as FBX from CC3 pipeline to blender
does not require 3Dxchange. 

Padone

@gerster Yep that's it, genesis is quite revolutionary even for blender. But it doesn't mean we can't import and use daz figures in blender. It's "only" the morphing part that doesn't work in animation, at least not with armatures. For example to get a human changing into a werewolf, you can import the werewolf morph and use it on the human figure, but then the following shots will use the werewolf figure instead of the human figure. This is not a big deal in animation and it's a easy trick.

Overall the advantages of blender over daz studio in modeling, animation, simulation and rendering are just overwelming.

 

edit. p.s. By the way the purpose of diffeo is not to replace daz studio, nor to implement the genesis figure in blender. It is rather to import daz assets, including figures, so that they can be used for animation in blender. So the intended workflow is to use daz studio as an asset generator, then blender to animate and render.

Hurdy3D

Padone said:

@gerster Yep that's it, genesis is quite revolutionary even for blender. But it doesn't mean we can't import and use daz figures in blender. It's "only" the morphing part that doesn't work in animation, at least not with armatures. For example to get a human changing into a werewolf, you can import the werewolf morph and use it on the human figure, but then the following shots will use the werewolf figure instead of the human figure. This is not a big deal in animation and it's a easy trick.

The advantages of blender over daz studio in modeling, animation, simulation and rendering are just overwelming.

Well, that's really a problem for me.
I would love to swith fully to Blender, at some point in the future.

But I do transformation comics. That means I need shape keys with do some drastic deformations, like changing the height or the length of an arm.

After the shape key would only transform the mesh, but not the armature in Blender, I can't add a new pose, after adding the shape key, without breaking the mesh in Blender

Workaround would be, to do all the transformation in DAZ and export each transformation step as a seperate figure to Blender... well this sucks

I think I'm stuck with DAZ for now

Padone

@gerster Or you can also use sagan for the transformation sequence, if it can't be done in blender for your specific needs.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/428856/sagan-a-daz-to-blender-alembic-exporter

 

edit. p.s. Then some "morphing" with armatures is possible in blender, that may work for some needs though it's not the daz way. See the bendy bones.

 

Hurdy3D

Bendy bones looks funny, but I don't think that this what I'm needing.

Thinking e.g. of transform a human leg into an animal lag. That looks a little bit out of souce for Bendy bones ;)

Honzo

I'm no Blender expert, but isn't it possible to tween in Blender? I really don't do animation, but I thought I saw something about deforming meshes at different parts of a timeline and then letting blender work out the inbetweens. If, as I presume is the case, the Daz morphs preserve vertex count and order, wouldn't importing the final morph serve as a target for blender animation tweening?

SDev

gerster said:

Hey,

I just bought the new HumGen3D Addon for Blender.

As I expected, the new Blender human figures are not match to the current Genesis platform, but they are trying to create a similar "open" platform, with cloth, hair and pose addons.

I'm a little bit surprised that HumGen3D allows only to add hair to a character when the character has the default height of 1.83m.
I really don't understand this restriction. Does Blender not support conforming cloth/hair like DAZ?

Are conforming character addons a special thing from DAZ/Poser?

Nearst thing seems to be shrinkwrap. For testing, I created a sphere and cloned some faces. With shrinkwrap I wanted to simulate a conforming hair prop. I added a shrinkwrap modifier to the cloned faces and target it to the sphere. This worked well, as long as the cloned faces where no too far away from the targe sphere.

But is there any whay to get easy to use conforming props in Blender. Just add it and it just works, like in DAZ3D, independet of the pose,  size or position of the figure?

Hi Gerster, 

I strongly recommend their Discord channel if you have some questions or feature requests. This is only version 1, I assume a lot of updates following the next time, especially when it comes to clothing and hair.

(Have a look at alexlashko.com and visit his blog to see some of his work) 

Hurdy3D

Honzo said:

I'm no Blender expert, but isn't it possible to tween in Blender? I really don't do animation, but I thought I saw something about deforming meshes at different parts of a timeline and then letting blender work out the inbetweens. If, as I presume is the case, the Daz morphs preserve vertex count and order, wouldn't importing the final morph serve as a target for blender animation tweening?

Hm... I did some google search, but I didn't figured out what tweening should be. But what I saw in videos about weening didn't look usefull to me.

Hurdy3D

SDev said:

gerster said:

Hey,

I just bought the new HumGen3D Addon for Blender.

As I expected, the new Blender human figures are not match to the current Genesis platform, but they are trying to create a similar "open" platform, with cloth, hair and pose addons.

I'm a little bit surprised that HumGen3D allows only to add hair to a character when the character has the default height of 1.83m.
I really don't understand this restriction. Does Blender not support conforming cloth/hair like DAZ?

Are conforming character addons a special thing from DAZ/Poser?

Nearst thing seems to be shrinkwrap. For testing, I created a sphere and cloned some faces. With shrinkwrap I wanted to simulate a conforming hair prop. I added a shrinkwrap modifier to the cloned faces and target it to the sphere. This worked well, as long as the cloned faces where no too far away from the targe sphere.

But is there any whay to get easy to use conforming props in Blender. Just add it and it just works, like in DAZ3D, independet of the pose,  size or position of the figure?

Hi Gerster, 

I strongly recommend their Discord channel if you have some questions or feature requests. This is only version 1, I assume a lot of updates following the next time, especially when it comes to clothing and hair.

(Have a look at alexlashko.com and visit his blog to see some of his work) 

I'm already in touch with Oliver, from HumGen.

I didn't knew Alex site, but it seems that he's more into game assets as in photo realsim. That explains why the textures of HumGen are all in one image, instead of using UDIM for e.g. more texture details for the face.