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Ooohhhhh, I'm so going to give this a whirl this weekend and see if I can get it to work! Thank you for the info on how to do it.
Sure. I accept all you say and I am starting to develop an urge to try my hand at making some props and geografts - the trouble is that anything I can think of to make already exists for a few $$ and much better than I could hope to cobble together. Also, whenever I download freebies from sites like ShareCG or DevArt, I find that they mostly don't work too well, so clearly the DAZ PA system allows the PA access to tools that the amateurs don't have. Still, I have played with the Blender sculpt tools quite a lot when I've been making morphs so learning how to create polygons instead of just moving them around is enticing.
As for extending scenes beyond doorways - that is something I need to do every day but I tend to use DAZ primitives and IRay shaders a lot for that. Mostly to make hallways and floors/ground.
I think that's just a case of "you get what you pay for", really. I've made my own simple props and they work just fine. While it's true PAs get access to HD morph importers and the like, geometry is geometry. If you can bring it in as an obj, then it should be exactly the same as it came out of Blender. As long as it has properly-defined materials and is UV unwrapped, it should be good to go. I don't make my own shaders, though--I do rely on Daz for that, since I haven't learned all that much about Iray material settings.
One advantage of Blender is that the bevel tools have a custom profile editor, which means you can take a rectangle and turn it into molding just by dragging a bezier curve.
I pretty much just followed this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3yzwql_2nw
Yeah, for some reason UV mapping and texturing is really what puts me off making stuff. I can imagine having fun sculpting something or even rigging a model but I've watched tutorials on UV wrapping, etc. and it looks like a PITA. Thank goodness for IRay shaders (pre-made, of course). Another scary bit of the creation process is the need for JCMs. I think that it would take years of experience and a superb knowledge of anatomy to be good at something like that.
Speaking of custom profiles, I don't know whether this falls into that category but one thing that really annoys me about many of the products I buy is that the edges are razor sharp. I mean a brick wall should not have razor sharp edges and the fact that they do is probably the biggest give-away that we are looking at a 3D model. It just spoils the whole scene. I generally have to take my render into an image editor and mess up the edges a bit but I would have thought that displacement maps would sort that out if the artist took the time.
UV unwrapping isn't that complicated if you're just making props. All you do is mark seams in out-of-the-way places and hit the "unwrap" button. If you can ctrl-click (find shortest path between two vertices) and alt-click (select edge loop), you can mark seams. The biggest hurdle is figuring out where to put cuts so your unwrap isn't too distorted. Once you do unwrap it, Blender will automatically lay the UVs out for you. Then just take it into Daz, slap a repeating shader on it, and crank up the "tiles" in the surface tab until it looks good.
I have no experience whatsoever with making JCMs, and frankly I pay Daz money so I don't have to deal with it, or weight painting, or anything about modelling actual figures.
As to the razor sharp edges, those're related to custom profiles. You can easily fix it by adding a bevel in Blender, but re-importing an environment back into Daz might be tricky. You'd have to send it back as an *.obj, losing all the Daz-specific metadata associated with it, although it should keep the materials and UVs intact, so theoretically you could just copy-paste the surfaces from the old environment to the new one and save the corrected object as a support asset.
Good advice on appending. This is something they are teaching in the CG Cookie courses I am taking over the next few months. That's something you wouldn't figure out wigging it or working through the average youtube Blender animation tutorial. Appending applies to all Blender data. All the blend files you have are a potential library you can append to your current blender project.
If the OP really wants to know the most compelling reason to learn animation in Blender rather than DAZ Studio it's the shear volume of professional animators that have created "Animation in Blender" tutorials. Where you going to find that for DAZ Studio? Learn that, and you won't have much trouble animation in DAZ Studio either once you are proficient in Blender. You would have to think the bugs that stopped me in DAZ Studio attempting to teach myself and watching work disappear will eventually go away but well no need to wait just learn in Blender and stop waiting. When I program a computer program it makes no difference if I use vi, emacs, or Visual Studio with regards to the final program and that's how it is with keyframe animating too (mostly). And like I busted my tail for 2 years in my upper classman years in college to become a competent programmer that didn't need to be constantly thumbing through basic "program language" manuals, so is it going to be necessary to become a competant animator using basic keyframe techniques.
So, I have been following this discussion with interest in the hopes that something will finally convince me to leave my DAZ Studio comfort zone and really get into the nitty-gritty of Blender. Whereas rendering used to be my most pressing reason to use Blender - especially Eevee - now that I have a 3090 GPU I have been happy with render times in DAZ Studio. So now the motivation is animation.
Over the past few days I have been trying the slightly convoluted methods of importing Mixamo animations into DAZ Studio for G8F. They "sort of" work but generally the feet slide all over the place which is a major spoiler. So I was wondering what the best way to get G8 from DAZ Studio to Blender to Mixamo and back. I think Mixamo adds its own rig doesn't it? So in that case, would Alembic (Sagan) or Diffeomorphic be best? And what to do about clothing (I do have Marvelous Designer 8)?
Other than Mixamo, there are BVH files available - would they play well with a G8 figure imported into Blender? If using Diffeo, what would be the best rig to select? As usual with Blender, there are so many levels of understanding that build, one on top of another, that it is difficult to know where to start.
[ EDIT] At this time I am not concerned about simulated speech - just body movement, preferably with soft body physics.
To be honest, that kind of sounds like a disaster in the making, since different armatures do not play well together. You'd probably end up doing so much fine-tuning and reworking that it'd be quicker just to learn how to animate in Blender from whole cloth.
Your best bet is Rigify, which is the closest thing to a standardized human armature Blender has. The official Daz bridge has a Rigify converter, and I think there are Mixamo to Rigify converters too. The Daz converter has some serious issues the devs said they're working on, but it should be fine if you're just getting practice in.
Once you convert your Daz model to Rigify, your model will explode with 8 bajillion colored boxes. But don't panic. Just hit "N" to open the side panel, find the Rigify menu, and click-drag over all the list of armature parts until they're all gone. Then, just click whatever you need to work on and animate to your heart's content. Foot IK is extremely easy, none of that Daz nonsense where feet slide all over the place. Just put the big red box where you want the foot to go and it'll stick there.
Note that you probably won't be able to import Mixamo animations yet, due to those issues with the converted skeleton. But the devs said they're working on it, so by the time you get good at just using Rigify hopefully it'll be ready.
Looking at the Diffeo instructions there is a Convert to Rigify option with that too.
Diffeomorphic: Rigging Section
I was looking at Mixamo because I am not an expert in human anatomy or the way limbs move naturally so I very much doubt wherther I could get a rig to move naturally by hand keying the animation. I've watched a few tutorials and these people are obviously artists who have studied animation. Mixamo is the cheat that non-animators need.
That said, I think it would be time well spent just learning to maniplutate the rigs (MHX, Rigify, etc.). It seems to me that the export from DAZ Studio to Blender is a one-way street. I would need to animate and render in Blender so it would become a Blender project after export.
I believe the devs are working on a way to import models back into Daz Studio. However, failing that, you could always just export each frame as an *.obj file, apply the textures in Daz, and render it that way.
You'd be surprised how easy animating is with a proper IK rig. Just gotta practice!
If you're rendering in Iray don't bother messing with the mesh. Use "round corners radius" in your surface settings - it fakes bevelling at the shader level - and honestly in 99.9% of cases does well enough
I think I saw that when I went hunting for the smooth shading options and found them in the Surfaces tab, for some baffling reason. But I'll definitely have a play around with those, thanks!
EDIT:
So I gave it a shot, and while it does look better, I have no idea what that value is actually doing. Increasing it doesn't seem to make the effect any stronger.
USE DIFFEOMORPHIC...the two become one!