Daz to blender is great, but what about Blender to Daz?
Xade
Posts: 236
I would love to use pwtoon and a bunch of other features, like backgrounds for my webcomic but I really don't want to have to fight to get my model in Daz Studio. I mean yeah, my new 3d model with the toon shader looks okay but pwtoon pwns that with all the customizable stuff. That makes non-photo-realistic (NPR for short) look absolutely stunning. Over the years I've collected tons of older stuff and importing Zeep into Daz and creating his co-star and other things in DS would be tons of fun and make updating a breeze, just like my old Insanity of Xade comic. I would get a few updates ahead and start the transition. But how would I get all the IK and other stuff into Daz Studio or must every joint be done manually?
The newbies might not know me and heck, sometimes it's a wonder I'm still lurking around here. I was very active 14-11 years ago until Daz Ate all my save files and brought my first webcomic to a screeching halt. Daz has always held a special place in my heart so I check up on it often just to get freebies and the like. As such, I respectfully request links to get me restarted with Daz, for it was the very first 3d program that seriously got me into Blender. In particular how to get things from Blender into Daz without too many hiccups.
Thanks in advance and have a great day
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Comments
It really makes little sense to import blender into daz. That is, there are a ton of blender features that can't be imported because of the daz studio limitations and/or incompatibilities over blender. What is possible is already done, that is, you can import the geometry and the (baked) animation back to daz studio.
What makes little sense to one makes perfect sense to another. I understand that Daz cannot do everything that blender can. However, Unreal Engine 4 has a special exporter called UE4 Tools. In a nutshell, it strips all the bells and whistles, like the IK and, yes it also bakes animations. It also takes static meshes, say buildings, and exports them at the correct size and rotation. In effect, it takes all the guesswork out of exporting from Blender.
I believe that we may need exactly that, an exporter that will take a fully rigged character from Blender, strip all the non-important data, change the orientation and make a dae ready for import into Daz without hassle.
Hey Padone, when you say it can import baked animation back into Daz, are you talking about the option in diffeo now where you can animate the base skeleton without IK and export that? Or is there another way that I'm not aware of as like an FBX or something? I'm working for a company doing animation and they want it rendered in Daz and the dang feet are slipping all over the place and I just long to animate in Blender with MHX and get that animation back into Daz to render for them.
@Xade
The reason why more cool tools like this don't exist is because the Daz Studio SDK is so, so, so poorly documented. As a result, you have to be extremely motivated to create a tool for Daz Studio. And if I'm a developer competent enough to do all of that in Blender, I am probably not that motivated to re-inflict myself with DSBS (to coin a term) by getting my content back into Daz Studio.
This
Well, I can see your point. If I was competent enough in Blender scripting I would do it, despite how hard it is, or at least give it one heck of a try.
@benniewoodell It should be possible to animate in mhx then export the baked animation to daz with "save pose preset". At least this was the intent from what I know. But im my tests it doesn't seem to work. Not sure why may be it's a bug or may be Thomas dropped mhx support for some reason. Will update as I know it better.
Unfortunately there's also a bug with the blender baking, so you have to use 2.91 that's the only working version now. Or 3.0 alpha. update. Bouich reports that the latest 2.93 beta is fixed too. Not tested it myself yet.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/527/mhx-rig-major-baking-issue-with-blender
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/04/save-pose-preset.html
update. Reported to Thomas.
update. It seems to work fine with the "simple ik" rig. So you can use "simple ik" to animate in blender then export the animation to daz.
update. Thomas fixed it and now it works with mhx too, though in my tests "simple ik" seems more accurate. You have to use "transfer ik > fk" first as explained in the discussion below. Please get the latest development version.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/545/save-pose-preset-doesnt-work
If you want your custom figure working in Daz studio, it's much simplier to model it in Blender and to rig it straight in Daz studio with all the bells and whistles you want. That is exactly what I usually do.
And that is also true for materials, instead of trying to import blender materials into daz studio. Apart textures. So you can import as obj your work from blender and finish it in daz stuio with rigging and materials. This is also how every PA works, either if they use blender or maya or whatever.
I did a lot of work to my characters to get the mesh to deform right, especially the humanoid ones. I would hate to scrap and redo it just to bring it to Daz. Is there a way to keep all the weight painting and have Daz put the bones where they need to be? it doesn't need to pointed right, just the origins need to be correct.
The only way I know of is via Poser, that is, blender > fbx > poser > cr2 > daz studio. And this is because the daz fbx importer is just not good.
I might have to do that, I think I have an old poser license laying around somewhere. I need to goi through my old downloads and see. I rarely throw away my old downloads :P
PS, does poser include the ability to click and pose bones? I forget what that's called. Selection groups? Eh. I forget and cant find it in my history.
This is it, the title is not fair that's not a "stupid" question if one doesn't know poser.
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2883034
Thanks, @Padone, it never occurred to me to look on renderosity for the answer.
Oh my gosh, it works! I couldn't get the simple IK rig to transfer, I can bake it under object/animation but then when I save it as a pose preset, the movement leaves and the character reverts to the A pose and then just kind of glide downwards in that A position. So I don't know what step I'm missing and I followed the links you posted regarding this, I even went and downloaded 2.91, 2.93, and 3.0 and it didn't work, but I tried MHX and it transferred over! The huzzah I yelled was probably louder than it should have been lol. I did get the feet sliding, or more so they pushed down and came back up as I tested the character sitting, but I downloaded that retargeter thing that was mentioned as well and am going to play around with that when I have some more free time to see if I can get it to work that way, or I'll keep playing around and seeing if I can figure out the simple IK issue I'm having if you say it works better, it's just figuring out what user error it is on my end. But for my purposes right now with this client, what I can get done with MHX will work beautifully. Thank you so very much @Padone and @ThomasLarsson for helping to make my life a million times easier with this gig that I'm so very, very fortunate to have.
For "simple ik" to work you need to bake the animation before export (object mode > object > animation > bake action).
Yeah, I did that and it bakes just fine. But when I click save pose preset, that's where the person just reverts to the A pose and glides downwards. I'm stumped because I read the links you sent multiple times and tried in every version of Blender except 2.92 because I saw it wasn't working in that version. This is the story of my life, so close yet so very far lol. I'm just so happy for the time being we got the MHX figured out as the shot I did yesterday was so much easier.
so, any advice about getting fully rigged characters into Daz through poser? Does Poser create the selection areas where you click to pose or must I do it the cumbersome way?
Daz Studio will read parametric rigging for Poser content but not weight-mapped rigging.
nice, so a lot of hard work to use my models in Daz. This is looking harder and harder by the moment. Currently, youtube is saturated with the bridge. So, does anyone have any good tutorials about how to get a character From blender into daz?