Is the bridge abandoned?
Xanathon
Posts: 88
- no updates to the bridge code in months
- Octane still not supported
- myriads of bugs
- shader generation in Redshift completely wrong
Will there be updates or was this bridge abandoned and still is used as advertising for selling assets?
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Comments
Who can say... :(
I've noticed that except for the exceedingly popular products, there's not much word on what's going on 'behind the scenes'. They could simply be short staffed or maybe there's just not much incentive to keep working on it. It's not the Blender or Unreal bridges after all.
But, with it being only barely functional as it is, having it being advertized as a working Bridge feels almost wrong. It 'technically works' for me, since I rebuild my materials by hand but things like joint alignment don't work, some models just break their weighting after the export, some things wont export at all, Morphs need to be done by hand unless its a Genesis-era product, and a lot of Morphs fail to export (Showing up in Cinema but without any effect), etc. It's better than re-rigging stuff from the ground up or making everything from scratch, but its not fantastic either.
There is nothing going on "behind the scenes" at all. The bridge is on Github, if there were any development at all, it would have shown up as updates there, but despite bug reports and even pull requests with bugfixes, absolutely nothing is done there. So from Github the bridge looks utterly dead.
You also may want to notice that not s single one of the devs or the usual DAZ people says anything at all about it here. That's another hint the bridge is abandoned.
I meant at the studio itself, and I've noticed since I check this sub-forum every day "just in case". I have it in a somewhat usable state but up until I tried exporting human figures it was never a big problem for me. It turned into a disaster then, with the clothing/props losing their weight tags entirely, not fitting the character they were made for at all, etc and all on top of the 'usual problems' with the bridge (Like the joint axes being misaligned)
Sometimes I don't wonder if it'd be easier to just use the Blender Bridge, export to that, then re-export into Cinema 4D :/
But Blender fbx to C4D is a real pain when it comes to shaders/texture mapping into the correct shader ports. Aside from that I tested the Blender bridge and that also had loads of problems regarding texture plugging.
I'm more concerned with rigging and stuff personally, since I remake the textures by hand anyway. It's more trouble fixing rig/weight problems, like recently I tried exporting the Michael 3 figure and the Modern Desert Soldier? Mike came in with not optimal weighting obviously and all the joints off, but the costume? Each individual piece was opened in a separate file and had to go through manually reattaching it all to him only to find out none of it was weighted at all. Joints yes, Weights no. Then the helmet wouldn't fit him while the rest did. In the end, I end up finding severe pokethrough on the arms since even after weighting it they wouldn't fit him at all.
Maybe the Genesis figures would work better, but who can say at this point :/
Blender is selling an addon called: "better fbx" in their market. So the free build-in fbx import/export will never be good. And "better fbx" is designed to work good with Daz characters.
Better FBX seems to be an add-on by a third-party developer, not something made by the Blender Foundation, so why would it have any bearing on the latter's development plans?
Better FBX looks pretty sweet I must say.
If it can put out joint weighting and etc reliably I might take that up and see how well it works importing the resulting FBX'es into Cinema. The joint weighting being all weird every time is killing me xD
It kind of depends though, on how well the Blender Bridge imports them, since if they load broken as heck in that as well then there's no real point in going through the extra hoops.
Have you tried Diffeomorphic @rezca ?
Never heard of it, but dug it up and giving it a try right now. The Blender Bridge was slightly better than Cinema's but only just barely - the weighting's still an absolute disaster but at least the Joints orient more or less properly.
Looks like Diffeo's limited to modern D|S stuff and not the older .cr2 things, so it's no good for "Classic Content" it seems.
It's a pity that 3D interchange is still such a jumping through hoops exercise sometimes. Hope you get a good workflow going!
What's funny is that the original videos I watched for the C4D Bridge things actually worked. Not perfectly, but they worked. BUT. It didn't support R13 so I never looked into it. By the time I got a Cinema subscription I found the Bridge only just barely met the definition of functional.Considering the storefront still claims its the quickest and best way to use your content in Blender/Unreal/whatever.... That's kind of depressing.
R13 I often used a plugin called Inter Poser Pro, and it handled about 90% of the content I had no problem. The remaining 10% either just had small issues or was DAZ's modern .duf content. That being said, its actual file conversion process made DAZ's Bridges actually look amazing in comparison haha, you could convert figures sure but it'd absolutely and utterly destroy the weighting across the entire figure, more or less requiring you to redo it from the ground up.
That said, my immense and growing frustration with the Bridges aside I have to be fair to them here by admitting that IPP just wasn't the same thing. It's purpose was actually emulating Poser/D|S within Cinema 4D, rather than simply importing content in a format Cinema could read.
I've already got a workflow of sorts, but not a particularly good one. It basically isn't much different than a File>Export>FBX workflow except its 'mildly' quicker, but that's more the Bridge's fault than personal choice. After that its fixing the joint orientations and the inevitable weighting issues.
Dinoraul's raptor would like to protest the idea that the Cinema 4D Bridge works as intended! :P This is basically guaranteed to happen when importing animal figures. Eyes have no weighting on them and the jaw tugs at half or more of the head. Not even going into things like feathers, spikes, or whatever else that may be on the surface of the body elsewhere.
When it comes to human figures though its even worse. Obviously Cinema 4D's auto-weighting is a bit better when it comes to a human figure than a dragon or a bird or whatever, but its the accessories and clothing that gets me wanting to yank my hair out. I posted this over in the "Complaint Thread" in the Commons, but basically NO WEIGHTING AT ALL comes in for clothing. So in addition to having to go through and merge all the scenes together since the Bridge exports them individually, and having to apply Constraint Tags to each joint of each accessory by hand, I then have to re-bind all the joints and then weight them by hand... Only to find that they don't follow their parent as they should!!
Need to go through and not only check the weights a dozen times over and experiment with what works but also change the offsets in the constraints, also experimenting as I go along. The Bridge videos and store pages did not include any of this in their descriptions!
Thanks for the well-wishes by the way, we could all use some positve thinking like that ^^
Yeah, I see what you mean. It's the curse of working with 3D, you always run into a technical hurdle you have to overcome. It can be incredibly complex, with a steep to impossible learning curve at times.
Which supposedly these Bridges are meant to alleviate somewhat, and they would - if they actually worked as DAZ advertizes them
I want to use human figures more often, but making my own is out of the question and getting them elsewhere would likely be very expensive. Not that I don't mind doing Creatures For Days or anything, they're totally my thing - it's just sometimes I get that desire to put something else in and then I can't.
Still, learning more about how things like Constraints work will speed things up a bit. To be honest, I hadn't used the offset feature in the PSR Constrait before until I started working with conforming figures and realized what a big help they were. The next problem though is weighting, like oh my goodness gracious the default settings for these exporters is atricious when it comes to things with additional parts. Like, Dinoraul's dinosaurs as one recent example. In my recent upload to the Gallery, I was going to include his Einiosaurus in the scene but other than the usual "Poor Weighting on Import" issue, the spikes along its back and tail would not remain on its back and tail and instead float off into the distance or remain floating there. Getting them to stay was a huge trial-and-error thing, coming down to which joint should influence it and how much and when and where. Importing DAZ's clothing content is like that but ten times worse. Doesn't help that when I import that content from the Bridge it comes in without a Weight Tag for whatever reason.
Since these Bridges are apparently Open Source it'd be awesome if someone who knows something about this coding stuff could at the very least patch up the R23 ~ R25 version of it, but that's just wishful thinking... Honestly, I'd settle for just having proper rigging export so figures actually reliably load in as they should.
Honestly export in fbx in you get the same thing no need of this bridge....
piefr1 said:
Honestly export in fbx in you get the same thing no need of this bridge....
Well, no you don't really, because you don't get the full rigging setup with IK etc, which is a huge time saver.
I just wish there was a similar setup for iClone/Character Creator to import characters with full IK rigs etc, as its a much more advanced set of tools. I just don't want to be animating in iClone personally!
Maybe they meant like quality of the Bridge's export is similar to a File->Export->FBX operation?. Except for some Genesis figures, that's all you really get when exporting figures with the Bridge. Joint weights are messed up, orientation is off, morphs don't export, materials are C4D native and pretty standard, etc. Genesis figures have usually better weighting/orientation and MOST morphs work but not all, but figure clothing is a "Do it yourself" thing in my experiences. Haven't had a single clothing piece export out with weighting information yet.
Being able to bring in the IK's though is a nice addition that FBX Export doesn't do.