Having Trouble Rendering Hair Amara Braids in Cycles

hello_4493841

I'm having trouble rendering the Amara Braids in Blender Cycles. I'm using the DazToBlender bridge to transfer the character and hair and leaving nodes setting as they were.

My first render the braids were very shiny and with no detail. I added some roughness to the braids on the second render and that helped with the shine but they still seem to lack detail.

I've used some other iRay hair products that transfer nicely so not sure if there's something I'm missing or if anyone has suggestions on a better node setup.

Thank you

Padone

The daz bridge has a limited support for converting materials. You may try diffeomorphic that generally works much better. But keep in mind that you always convert iray materials to cycles materials that are not native to blender, so it is just normal that in some cases you may have to fix the material.

hello_4493841

Thanks for your reply!

I had at one point tried to use the diffeomorphic add-on but was running into trouble getting it to work, I'm on a Mac and couldn't find much info about how to install or troubleshooting errors.

I did come across another post talking about the DazForBlender add-on that also mentions converting iray materials to cycles and "handles tiled material". I haven't had a chance to try that add-on but it did get me thinking the braids looked like a tiled material that was being stretched and was losing detail. So I setup a texture coordiante node for the braids and scaled like 10x and also cranked up the bump strength.

The attached render is not perfect but definitely a lot better then the original glass look. 

Padone

FYI diffeomorphic handles uv tiles just fine, among other things. The official daz bridge misses a lot of features as geografts, shells, instances etc. that's why most daz users use diffeomorphic. To install is just a matter of copying the scripts in the right location so really easy. But not Thomas nor I have a mac to test so may be there's some caveats with the case sensitive file system ?

If you want to try let me know I'll follow you to help.

hello_4493841

I gave it another try and did get Diffeomorphic installed on the Mac. In Daz I saved the character as a Character Preset, but when I import the file into Blender it does not load the character morps, tear shape, eyelashes or hair ... it seems to just load the default Genesis 8 female character with the custom characters skin maps applied. 

Do you have an idea of something I'm missing?

Padone

You have to load your preset in daz studio and save the scene. Then diffeomorphic will import the scene, not the character preset.

hello_4493841

I went back and read the instructions again and realized I had not copied the scripts into Daz and did not do the export to Blender step and so it wasn't loading the .dbz file.

Everything is setup and working now.

Are there any articles or anything I can read about how you got to these conversions? Is it just converting the programming or something more based on artistic decisions? The reason I ask is because it’s interesting to see how drastically different the import results are between the DazToBlender, DazForBlender and Diffeomorphic and how the nodes are setup.

Thanks again.

Padone

Yes all the technical details for issues and materials are in the tracker but it's huge. If you have a specific question about a particular conversion I can point to the specific discussion. Below it's the skin basic for example, then we evolved from that but it's lots of articles. The conversion is made by faithful comparison and some artistic decision when a 100% match is not possible for technical reasons, that happens often.

The best way to study the materials is to export a specific material then look how it is made in blender.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/24/