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I`m just realize that I didnt notice several useful tools which already included in recent version of Diffeo . Thanks for let me know and makes me digging and reading again all documentations and information in Thomas`s site about advanced RIG layer . For what`s its worth Diffeo indeed useful addon
Although I`ll keep my opinions about Native format with UI enhancements( just like in nyscreensgit attached ) to ease transition for DAZ Studio users
About PBR stuffs which maybe sound promising but for make those Material also useful for most DAZ regular customers , their priority will be render beautifully in IRAY first . Just like they did with IRAY via the "UBER" version . I guess we`ll see how it goes
Thank you. I'm pretty sure that I watched that tutorial series (or, at least some of it) previously but thanks for the reminder, it is worth a revisit. The problem I am having right now is that I'm not translating what I'm seeing in tutorials into something that helps me with the Diffeo imports. For example, I got confused and frustrated in trying to pose the figure once I had her in Blender using Diffeo. I followed the instructions for converting to Rigify (because most of the Blender tutorials recommend Rigify) but now I have her in the scene I'm lost. So many of the tutorials that I find onYouTube start at a point that assumes you know quite a lot already. Well, quite a lot for me which might seem like trivial basics for them but it causes me hours of head scratching to try to fill in the gaps.
So, going back to Rigify - the tutorials all show some simple looking action with the mouse which engages IK and the feet stay put while the part that you grab (G) is able to be posed. It just isn't working like that for me. If I grab the box around the hip area, for instance, and attempt to drag it, the whole figure just moves in the direction I am dragging. Worse: the hair and what looks like the original armature are left behind (don't move with the body). I have no clue what I'm doing wrong.
Another issue - if I render (Cycles) the figure I have just brought into Blender, it looks awful. No fine detail, a little blurred, colours inaccurate and washed-out. I'm sure that when I tried this previously I had better results from Cycles but I don't know what I am doing differently.
I have been following the instructions on the Diffeomorphic site but perhaps I am missing something important either in the initial set-up or I am missing steps somehow. I have not tried either the "Easy Import" or the HD export from DAZ Studio yet.
Here's what I am seeing with the Rigify posing attempt described in my previous post. The first screenshot is beofre the attempted pose with the hip box selected. The second imahe is after I used the G shortcut to grab the box and move it. The whole body moved except for the hair and the other rig which is still there after the conversion for some reason.
It seems that the FK (Green) pose controls work but IK (Red) does not. The Yellow controls mostly distort the mesh.
I only used the Diffeomorphic bridge a long time ago, and after the headache from getting it running through Daz I found all the materials looked terrible, as you said. So I didn't put any more work into it.
That said, about your other problem...
Rigify uses two rigs: the rig and the metarig. You create a metarig and align the bones with your figure, and then you use that to create the rig proper. It's like a framework for the real rig. Once you create the rig, you can get rid of the metarig since it's no more use. I think the rig that you think is being left behind is the metarig, which isn't necessary. As to the hair, it sounds like that's just not parented correctly.
Instead of launching straight into using Rigify with a Diffeomorphic character, do this instead:
Now you have a full Rigify rig without having to go through the trouble of importing a dense Daz mesh. Spend some time selecting each rig layer by itself and learning how it works in isolation before you overwhelm yourself with the Diffeomorphic bridge.
Based on that screenshot, the mesh and the hair aren't parented and/or weight-painted correctly. If you look at the gears with arrows at the thighs, they're pointing right at the rectangles representing the feet. So the IK is working correctly. The mesh just isn't hooked up the right way.
This is going to get complicated now.
Go into the Weight Paint mode and check your character's vertex groups. In Blender, the armature modifier matches bones with a mesh's weight map based on their name. The Arm.L bone should have a corresponding vertex group Arm.L, and when you click on that vertex group the weight map should glow in the same place as the bone. If, however, you click the "Hip" vertex group and the whole mesh glows red, then something went wrong and the character isn't weighted properly.
This is what I mean by the yellow controls distort the mesh:
Are you grabbing or rotating? Because IIRC grabbing should only be used with IK (the red controls). The official Daz bridge has a bunch of constraints set up to prevent the bones from being pulled apart, but based on what I'm seeing the Diffeo bridge doesn't. You should only rotate the yellow boxes.
I just used the Diffeomorphic "Convert to Rigify" option. I know nothing about Rigify so I tried to watch a tutorial on posing with Rigify but my newly converted rig does not behave like the one in the tutorial. Once again, I fall short because I don't have the necessary knowledge to use the tools provided and I don't even know what to look for. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, these are unknown unknowns: things I don't know I don't know.
I understand.
Take my advice above:
Create an empty Rigify rig to get some practice with it and how it works, then try it with a Diffeomorphic character.
And I highly recommend you get familiar with hiding any rig layer you don't need, otherwise you'll just confuse yourself.
I believe what you describe here is precisely what that tutorial I was watching is explaining (except he uses a simple mesh figure with the rig applied).
Based on my brief skim through the video, it looks like it.
Don't overwhelm yourself with the added complexity of a rigged Diffeomorphic character. Just start simple and go from there, because it gets very complicated very quickly.
OK, I followed your quick instructions above and have a working rigify rig in my viewport. I think I might take the extra step and download that simple mesh from the video tutorial just to make it easier to see what is happening when I move things around.
I am still at a loss as to what I did wrong with Diffeo though.
Same here. That's why I stopped using it.
Though now that I know a lot more about Daz, I might give it another shot someday, since the official bridge has problems of its own.
Can I ask how you get your DAZ content into Blender? I've tried Diffeo and Sagan (Alembic) but not the official DAZ bridge. I understand that the problems with that are worse than the diffeo version - for me, not being able to export geografts other than the DAZ anatomy makes it a non-starter.
On the other hand, when I consider what I want to do in Blender, at the moment I would like to try out the animation tools which are supposedly much better than the DAZ Studio timeline. If I could get a basic G8 or G3 figure into Blender just to animate and then re-import that animation as a BVH or similar, that might be an alternative although rendering an animation wth IRay would be a frighteningly time-consuming process. Still, Cycles seems to be quite slow too but it does have a better denoiser which would help.
Every so often I import a character through the official bridge, try and make a walk cycle, and then I find some glaring flaw that makes me shelve it for a little while longer. That's about the extent of my animating experience with Daz figures.
Mainly I make things in Blender and export them out as *.obj files. Typically they're props, but occasionally I do figures too.
Here's an image I just created for a PC+ contest:
I imported the environment as an *.obj to Blender, posed some ripped video game assets, then saved those as an *.obj and exported them back out to Daz. I had to redo the materials, but given how crappy the models actually are, no big loss. It only took me about a half-hour to pose them all, even with the terrible bare-bones IK controls I rigged up myself.
@marble You may want to try mhx instead that's much simpler. Not that rigify doesn't work but it needs some more knowledge to be used properly. While mhx is quite intuitive and straightforward. In your case I'd also suggest to use the easy import that does the basic things for you.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/03/easy-import.html
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/rigging-version-12.html
@Padone: thanks for the advice. My thoughts are (or were) that Rigify seems to be the choice of most of the people who make tutorials. I can find very little online about the MHX rig so that's why I tried to go with Rigify. The problem being that it just did not work for me and I can't seem to get to the bottom of why it didn't work. Like I said above, people who make tutorials often assume that the people who watch the tutorials will have a level of knowledge such that they don't need to state what seems obvious to them so they omit some critical steps. This is especially so when transferring figures from DAZ Studio to Blender because most of the tutorials assume that people are working with figures created in Blender. As for MHX, the assumption is that the figures are MakeHuman.
The second reason that my latest foray into Blender has gone the way of all the previous efforts is that the results are just so poor compared to what I can produce in DAZ Studio. I know that it takes years to become competent with Blender but when I look at the thread in this forum showing renders done in Blender, I can't believe that people would think that they are on a par with IRay renders. The downside to IRay is that it is so slow and Blender's superior animation tools mean there is a genuine imperative to use Blender for animations (where render quality is not so critical). It is just frustrating to me that every time I try again with Blender I seem to hit a road block.
One day, some very clever and skilled person will produce the definitive workflow tutorial for using DAZ content in Blender. Either that or the industry will move towards universal formats that work in all applications.
Just a sideline comment about comparing render quality.
A few years ago my render options were restricted because I had an iMac and was not willing to wait for IRay to chug along on my poor old Mac CPU. So I got quite good at using the alternatives - either 3Delight or Reality/Luxrender. With the latter, I had to spend a lot of time tweaking the materials because, despite the claims of the Reality developer, the results of the automatic conversion were less than satisfactory. So I made the adjustments myself and I can honestly say that the renders were pretty close to what can be achieved in IRay. The problem was that Luxrender was also slow but it did have advantages: (1) I could let it render while I was working on the next scene, (2) I could adjust any of the Luxrender settings while it was rendering and (3) I could network render so I set up a Linux system that I had at the time to share the render load. I couldn't get GPU speeds but it was much faster than IRay on my old CPU.
The point is that I am not averse to learning how to tweak materials but the results I am seeing in that Blender Render thread here suggest that (a) Cycles can't match IRay for quality with Imported DAZ content and (b) Cycles is not that much quicker than IRay. My experiments with Eevee have not been encouraging either but it is way ahead of the DAZ implementation of Filament.
Right now, Wolf, that seems to be the most viable option. Or perhaps I just get disillusioned when I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. If only DAZ Studio had a better animation toolset, better IK and/or the ability to import animations saved in BVH or similar. I've tried Mixamo but applying them to G8 (or G3) is far from ideal.
Blender doesn't take years just to reach competence. 3-6 months and you'll be up and running. It really isn't as big of an obstacle as you seem to believe. The problem is that with Daz, there are very little transferable skills to other software so it's easy to get frustrated when things go wrong in Blender. Unless Daz is necessary for you to make a living, I highly suggest to just set it aside for 6 months and focus entirely on Blender. Otherwise it's easy to get frustrated and head back to the comfort of Daz. CG Cookie is an amazing resource. For $20 a month, you have access to some of the best Blender training courses broken down into logical progressions + instructor feedback. You can even just download all the courses you want and cancel your subscription after the first month. Don't be discouraged by the Blender Renders thread. A lot of those people are absolute beginners as well so those renders are not a reflection of what you can actually achieve.
Galactus Rising was made with BVH imported into Daz studio to G1,G2,G3. IIRC There is a MIXAMO converter from the PA who made the Iphone face capture plugin.
Which is exactly why foot/floor IK solving can NOT be truly exported in a BVH file.. even as baked FK position frames.
Dedicated retargeters Like MOBU& Iclone3DX do a decent job in exporting BVH to DS/poser after retargeting Imotion, mocap etc without "Major" foot straying except with deep squatting motions as I Clearly demonstrated with my "BVH failure analysis" video
IK pinning ( like any other active restraint) must be imposed locally in the receiving application.
Daz studio actually has a working restraint system with its
Ik chains and manually animatable reach effector.
You are essentially Describing a general purpose HumanIK control rig such as used by Autodesk Maya/ MOBU and leased By Reallusion from Autodesk.
If you want to re-invent that wheel for Blender have at it.
However I suggest studying the Autorig pro addon
($40 USD Blender market..I love that place!!), which Already serves the exact purpose of general retargeting for Blender as well as instant IK rig creation for any biped humanoid mesh.
But understand that BVH motion exported from Blender back to DS will still " know nothing about those assumptions in order to provide more functionality and cannot represent them explicitly."
Trying to move over to Blender as the alternative to DAZ Studio was sort of my initial motivation but I don't really think it is practical from my point of view. I am just a hobbyist but I wanted to take advantage of the better tools afforded by Blender. However, it has become apparent that Blender has serious limitations too. I've mentioned many of them already but to recap:
1. I have more than half a TB of content that I can load with a simple click into DAZ Studio. Not so with Blender which doesn't even have a Content Library as far as I can see (as of 2.92).
2. Importing using the official Blender Bridge is a non-starter because geografts don't work.
3. Diffeomorphic has its own issues which I have outlined above.
4. IRay materials don't convert well so a lot of work would be required to correct them.
5. HD is DAZ Studio propietary and doesn't export.
6. Figures can wear dForce clothing in DAZ Studio and, although it is painfully slow, they can be draped pretty well. It is no simple matter to export the figure to Blender and drape that clothing. Yes, other clothing can be bought elsewhere that might work well in Blender with the cloth sim but that defeats the object of using my already purchased content.
To be honest, I am not sure why Blender artists who are so entusiastic about doing everything in Blender bother with DAZ Studio at all. I remember reading some Blender users forums years ago and the comments were extremely dismissive about DAZ Studio (and Poser, for that matter). As I said above, Blender tutorials (and I have paid for several too) tend to assume that everything is being done in Blender. They do not assume that DAZ content is being imported (nor should they). So someone who wants to bridge skills as well as content is facing an immediate impediment.
I'm not sure what any of that has to do with this discussion which is about DAZ Studio/Blender interoperation.
OK so I take it that Blender does not export BVH correctly? Apparently the same applies to FBX or is that a DAZ Studio issue?
Whatever the reason, inter-operation between DAZ Studio and Blender seems to be hamstrung.
1. Content libray is in 2.93. This isn't a Blender limitation, it's a convenience thing and you're used to the Daz library.
2. Diffeo imports work perfectly fine
3. Diffeo works perfectly fine. I can't stress the "perfectly" enough.
4. Daz Iray materials don't convert well anywhere outside of Daz. This is a Daz limitation not Blenders. Download Octane for Daz (it's free), you will notice that auto-converted Daz material looks similar to Cycles. Hell, even Substance painter/Designer/3DCoat uses Iray for the preview renders, this converts well to Blender and anywhere else. It's just Daz that handles things it's own special way.
5. HD exports perfectly fine with Diffeo
6. I use Daz clothes perfectly fine in Blender. Even better than in Daz actually because I can further manipulate it and control the simulation any way I want.
There is nothing wrong with using Daz, it's a great software. The only reason this discussion is taking place is because obviously you want to learn Blender but are frustrated when hitting some road blocks. It's not always easy having to relearn everything, I get that. But what you are listing here are just excuses coming from a place of ignorance. Daz makes it very easy to get up and running quickly without having to spend any time learning the hows & why's behind everything. Blender does have it's own limitations, it's not some perfect software, but none of these limitations exist in the issues you're experiencing.
Again, there's absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to Daz. If you're unhappy about the limitations you face in Daz, then you must understand that leaving an ecosystem that's entirely designed around making things work in one or two clicks will be frustrating. Every frustration you listed, I also experienced. Learning new things takes time and learning Blender may not be worth your time, which is completely understandable. At the end of the day, if you're miserable learning Blender then that's all the reason you need to not continue.
All I can say is that "perfectly fine" is not a term I would use from my experience and I get the impression that I'm not alone in that. I feel like abandoning the quest but I know that in two month's time I will get frustrated with DAZ Studio again and look at Blender again. It seems to be my Groundhog Day.
Reality was the first plug in for Studio that I bought at once, even at $80. I really liked the physical light engine and being able to make lighting changes on the fly. Eventually the material conversions people made got quite good. I too put up some older hardware running Linux to have network renders going. I still miss many of features of LuxRender and still have an iMac as my machine Studio machine, so no Iray GPU for me either. This is what has lead me down this Blender path as my other workstation is a Linux box.