!Rigging and Animating Daz characters

potatopealor

Hi,

I want to learn animating in blender. However, I'm deeply a daz user and I really like using daz assets and I'm very new to blender. I would like to use my daz characters in blender. Now I know we can easily import daz assets into blender using the diffeomorphic addon but I'm wondering if it is also possible to rig and animate a daz character in blender using blender tools. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so are there any good videos out there to learn how to do this. Any recommendations or advice are deeply appreciated!!! :

Thanks!

benniewoodell

Absolutely. The first link here is from a dude who I learned most of Blender from when I started with the program when the pandemic started and before I learned about diffeo. You 100% can bring a character in and rig them like in the video, and then if you go through more of his videos you'll find how to add IK and all that good stuff. He's really got some of the best tutorials about Blender I've found. 

Blender 2.82 Rigging Tutorial (In 2 Minutes!!!) - YouTube

I don't think I can link to the Blender Market, but if you look up autorig pro, you'll find a product that you can rig characters super fast, and it's on sale for black friday through today! It works beautifully except the face. I couldn't quite figure out how to get the eyes and all of that to work, I think I had to separate the eyeballs but at the time I didn't know how to do that, whereas now I do and I should go back and give it a try just to see, but then I discovered diffeo and gave up trying to make this work, but the rig itself for the body was a wonderful rig. 

CG Cookie is a great site if you wanted to pay for the membership to learn stuff as well. They have a whole course sequence on animation and such. Totally worth the price if you wanted to learn a ton about Blender. 

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

I love the Royal Skies guy too! "Not a Problem! Ya done!"

But something extremely important to remember is that what makes Daz Characters special is their JCMs. Without them, they are just regular models with exceptionally clean topology, and you are going to hate how they look when deformed. Try importing a G8 into iClone and you'll see what I mean.

It being the case that G8s are already rigged, by pros who knew what they were doing, and come with a great set of sculpted JCMs, again by pros who knew what they were doing, why would you want to throw that away? This is why Daz assets are worth every penny and the Genesis framework is genius. Unless you, as some do, think that to be the fun part and you want to do it yourself instead of making a movie, you are far better off using Diffeomorphic and converting it to one of the supported rigs, which includes the absolute most important thing to an animator: working IK. And they miraculously work with the JCMs exported from Daz.

Once you've made that decision, you have to decide whether you are going to go the mocap or the keyframe route.

If you'll use mocap. You'll be interested in Motionbuilder if you have a rich uncle, Maya Indie, or very soon Houdini Indie for retargetting (Houdini also has a tool for simplifying your mocap to make it human-editable), and the Animation Layers plugin available from BlenderMarket for cleanup.

If you'll be key-framing, do yourself a tremendous favor and stop all other activities and diligently work through Pierrick Picaut's "Alive" course. It is the best animation course ever. Evah! Trust me, you are currently doing everything wrong :) I was.

 

wolf359

But something extremely important to remember is that what makes Daz Characters special is their JCMs. Without them, they are just regular models with exceptionally clean topology, and you are going to hate how they look when deformed. Try importing a G8 into iClone and you'll see what I mean.

It being the case that G8s are already rigged, by pros who knew what they were doing, and come with a great set of sculpted JCMs, again by pros who knew what they were doing, why would you want to throw that away? This is why Daz assets are worth every penny and the Genesis framework is genius. Unless you, as some do, think that to be the fun part and you want to do it yourself instead of making a movie, you are far better off using Diffeomorphic and converting it to one of the supported rigs, which includes the absolute most important thing to an animator: working IK. And they miraculously work with the JCMs exported from Daz.

Once you've made that decision, you have to decide whether you are going to go the mocap or the keyframe route.

 

 

If you are truly interested in having the BEST of both worlds
( High quality Daz Figures) and a professional Character animation system
then Blender with diffeo/Rigify is the solution

I have spent the last several months testing both a manual animation pipeline
with rigified diffeo imports

And a pure bone based, mocap import, pipeline with the free rokko
retargeter and an archive of 2400 mixamo motions.

As well as the use of the Blender nonlinear Motion clip system
and bringing in Facial lipsynch information via diffeo/MOHO.

your only cost is whatever you choose to buy 
for your G8 figures(clothing,morphs,characters etc)
its a no brainer Daz studio with Diffeo/Rokoko wins.

 

benniewoodell

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

I love the Royal Skies guy too! "Not a Problem! Ya done!"

He's the best! When I have time, I want to go through his anime shader series he just got through doing. I was watching them as he was posting just to see the process, and now that it's all complete I want to start from the beginning and go through it all one afternoon and see how it pans out. 

Padone

potatopealor said:

I'm wondering if it is also possible to rig and animate a daz character in blender using blender tools

SHORT ANSWER. No it isn't. There's a reason if diffeo came out.

LONG ANSWER. As others explain here, and you're lucky because they are very talented and actually productive people, via blender tools you will lose both the daz rig and materials. So basically you have to start with the mesh and some basic textures from daz and do everything youself. That's viable but will require you to be an expert both for rigging and materials, and even so will take you a week per figure or so, instead of instantly import with diffeo. Then diffeo is not perfect and you may have to do some little fixes yourself for complex items, but it is an excellent start.

potatopealor

thanks for all the replies! sounds like diffeo/rigify is the way to go for me