Why G9 is not good for blender (or any other 3d app)
Padone
Posts: 3,688
And here it comes G9. The new genesis differs from G3 G8 because it is designed differently. If we look at the wireframe we see the topology is very simple and it relies on HD morphs for any body detail. As for diffeomorphic, this means you are forced to use the HD import to get the G9 figure in blender, that of course also means the G9 figure will take more cpu and gpu resources so we need a more powerful hardware.
Apart that, we normal users can't do HD morphs, only PAs can, so forget of using blender or other apps to do morphs for G9. That is, with the daz morph loader we are limited to the base mesh, so G9 will not allow us to sculpt detailed morphs.
To me as a daz user G9 is a big step back from G3 G8, in that it is HD based so it strongly limits what we can do. Unless DAZ decides to release the HD toolkit to anyone, that could be a viable solution for G9.
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Just as test I was able to get the base figure into blender the “old way”(Via FBX)
manually fix her material nodes and dump the rig and re-rig her with an ARP rig
I bind a legacy poser oufit to her for this short animation.
I even hand sculpted the shape keys for her eyeblinks and subtle smiles
alot of labor involved.
not something I would do for any real project.
@wolf359 Yes of course the bad body topology is not a issue if the figure wears a full outfit, since in this case the G9 mesh is not visible.
@Padone
To be fair,
I only look at any 3D figure eco system through the lense of its level of compatibility with my primary Delivery environment
(formerly Maxon C4D,now Blender)
And its ability to access multiple external character motion Data sources for body and face.
The reason I effectively skipped
Genesis 3 and stuck with G2 for so long, was because by the time my external animation retargeting system(Iclone 3DXchange)had actually become fully compatible with the new twist bone rig of G3 ..G8 was here and I was Migrating to Blender where I had access to the Rokkoko retargeter as well as the CC3 figures fully animated in blender
Now however, ARP has turned Blender into a universal character system for body animation from nearly any motion source.
(like Motionbuilder)
and the animated shapekey version of Diffeo ,has made facial& lipsync, a settled matter for me as well.
As for Genesis 9 specifically, this seems like what some might call a “fan service” release.
That being a figure truly for the Primary core Daz studio user base who typically renders close up stills portraits/pinups with Iray INSIDE Daz studio..not in Unreal engine, Unity Maya ,C4D or Blender.
The focus on high definition eye & brows is great for that purpose
and looks really good!!
it’s new rigging breaks ALL currently existing compatibility with Character animation data,
(unless you replace the rig in an external app as I did for the above video).
For those people who still animate& render figures inside Daz studio G9 sets them back to Zero.
And even for those of us ,who export ,animate and render in other programs and replace the rigging,
G9’s heavier geometry, 8K maps, and total divestment from any ability to import data from Daz mimic,anilip2 iphone face mojo into our external app , makes this figure generation quite moot, for now at least.
Thank you @wolf359 for letting us know your point of view about G9 as a seasoned animator. It is both interesting and useful.
While I will stay with G8.1 for a while, I like G9 so far.
The main issue is that Blender does not allow Multi Res morphs. If we had that in Blender, all the problems with G9 would be gone, and we could use G9 in Blender like in DAZ.
When I switch at a future point to G9, I will still use the base mesh and do HD via displacement maps baked by the XI addon.
Maybe this would be an excellent opportunity to integrate the XI addon into Diffeo?
Thinking of features like:
- Add a button that bakes all morphs that have HD instead of letting us select and collect these morphs manually
- Add a button to bake all displacement maps for expressions
- Add/remove displacement maps automatically if morphs and expressions are detailed in/out
@gerster None of your points are a solution to the issues I reported. You can't do HD morphs for daz studio unless you're a PA. You can actually already import HD shapes and morphs in blender via the addon by Xin, though it requires extensive manual work, but HD figures are much heavier and do not fit animation. With G9 you can't avoid HD.
My suggestions from my former post were to reduce the expensive manual work with the Xin addon. I never use "pure HD figures" in Blender because of the heavy mesh.
The solution is to use the Xin addon, but I would like to have a more manageable workflow here.
And yes, while it's true that you can't import HD morphs as non-PA into DAZ, you can still do displacement maps, which is enough for many use cases.
Yes, for the figure shape using displacement maps is actually better than HD morphs because they can use the iray displacement subd that's faster. This is also correctly imported in blender. Unfortunately they can't work as morphs so it's not the same.
Is it possible to make/sculpt your own hd morphs in Blender (ofc would lose some of its appeal to get Daz characters in in the first place?
If you mean if it is possible to bake a displacement map in blender to use in daz yes it is. It is not possible to make a HD morph, you need the PA toolkit for that.
Honestly, I really love the approach to use the HD details in Blender via Displacement maps. A lot of native character creators in Blender work with multires to sculpt the details and bake them into displacement maps. You can even use drivers in Blender to control the strenght of the displacement maps based on joint rotation or other things.
It depends. Baking to normal maps is viable for animation and it also works in eevee. Baking to diplacement requires a high level of subdivision or using the experimental adaptive subdivision, so it's heavy for animation, and doesn't work with eevee. I agree it's good for single pictures if you make comics for example.
Seems like such a huge step back the way they did G9, in so many ways. Even for plain DS renders, gonna need 3rd party nipples and genitals grafts that can autoadapt to textures probably before I will even bother messin with it at all. Gotta crank the subd up like crazy, so gonna be limited to 2 or 3 figures if they are all seen very close to camera.
Have you seen the Chris Jones thread at BA?
https://blenderartists.org/t/human-progress/1143224/1142?u=chrisjones
I think Walt referenced this one.
Wow, that's on another level! Didn't know Blender could do that!
@SDev @Paintbox Nope I don't follow BA too much, but driving normal maps is quite common in blender, and diffeomorphic already does it for the HD expressions in G3 G8, though some manual work is needed for the Xin addon.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/hd-meshes-version-16.html
@RL_Media Yes G9 is basically HD based, so it's both stressing for the hardware and limiting in what we can do as normal users without the PA HD toolkit.
The question for me was to stay with Daz or create my very own characters from scratch. I think I will stay with G8(.1) till mine are ready in one or two years^^
I do only stills, export only base meshes, add a multires and alpha brush sculpt in details where they are needed.
This is a very good exercise to gain sculpting knowledge over time ;)
Yeah, I've been thinking about it, looking at all the stuff with G9 unfold and decided to take the money I'd spend on starting from scratch with G9 and put that towards the character modeling class at my animation school. It'll save me money in the long run, plus I have a ton of G8 stuff to use as well. Sure, there's free tutorials on YT but I've learned more in the past year animation-wise than I did in five years at self teaching YT University that I'd rather pay the money and not waste years again.
Curious about what can be learned quickly from animation school and that why YT University couldn't teach that.
Followed CGDive YT channel for a few weeks and satisfied with the animations I made for my game, don't think that making animations is very difficult, but how to quickly make them needs tricks and techniques.
Well, there were so many small nuances about weight shifts and hip movements, overlap and drag and offsetting keys, polishing, lines of action, reversing curves, making the perfect silhouettes, timing, spacing, secondary actions, making sure everything is in an arc, going through every curve in the graph editor and cleaning up the keys, as well as properly analyzing and utilizing reference. Now I'm learning about facial animation which is so much more in depth than what I've been doing. Like squashing the muzzle, eyebrows, eyes, and cheeks when the character is coming down, and stretching everything when the character comes up. I never once have heard that in a YT video, but now I see it when I watch an animated film! This week we're starting lip sync and the videos I'm watching right now are showing us how to write out the audio not as what's being said, but the sounds and emphasis and I'm like oh man, I'm glad I have six weeks to work on this shot! The training is so much more in depth and worth every penny, I feel at least. Plus, every week the teacher looks at what we're doing and gives us notes on how to improve, which you don't get on YouTube, and we have a weekly Q&A where we can ask them whatever we want. Honestly, the critiques are where I've learned the most because the teachers see what I'm doing and tell me how to improve, and that's where things are clicking the most because I see what I did and how it wasn't right.
I'm not saying this information isn't out there for free, I'm sure it is, but like in five years I didn't hear about reversing the curve, but in my last two classes I heard it all the time. And now I catch myself trying to ensure that the line of action is reversed when there's that opportuity. This program is designed to take you from start to finish, to learn things in the order you should to get hired as an animator. I'm learning exactly what I need to know to get hired by a studio like Pixar or Disney. Heck, we just had Disney give us a run through of the jobs at the studio and what we need to do to get hired, same with Epic Games, we just had them talk to us. Was what I was learning at YT University alright for my needs for my own personal short films? Sure it was, but if you look at what I was doing a year ago compared to what I've been doing in class, it is a night and day difference and I still have so far to go.
But I don't think making animations quicker is going to happen unless you want to lose quality, or just start to work strictly with mocap, which there is absolutely nothing wrong with as it speeds up workflows for sure. Though I was surprised to hear from a couple of teachers that hand keying is still widely used more than mocap. I use facial mocap every day for work, my job doesn't need me to hand key facial movements, and I won't because it would take forever for the amount they need done lol. I've just come to learn animation is not quick at all if you want high quality. I was doing like a four hundred frame shot in a day, sometimes a thousand frames a day for my job, now after learning what I'm supposed to do to make it the best it can be, getting in the graph editor and tweaking every curve on every axis, etcetera, I'm taking like 10-15 hours to get through 150 frames, which is still not enough time as my teachers, who are all currently working in the film and game industry, all say the norm is 150-200 frames of animation a week, that's it, which blew my mind at first but now makes so much sense that I've delved so deeply within the artform.
All in all, it's about personal preference and what works for you, and if what you've learned on YT is exactly what you need for your purposes, that is awesome. I'm rooting for you and your game! Now that I've gone through what I have the past six years, I've found taking a curated program is what I need to be the best I can. Before I started at Animation Mentor, I thought I was just doing this for fun, but now I'm actually feeling, for the first time in my life, that I can make a viable career out of something that I truly love doing, and have the proper training to make that happen. And so now with G9 and my feelings about it, I think it's time to take that next leap and learn how to create characters and such in a way that will help me grow even more with maybe more opportunities other than animation!
Thanks for the detailed insight into what can be learned from a formal training program. The useful techniques like reversing curves, mirror poses, centre of mass and conservation of momentum etc. were also taught by the best YT channels.
That surprised me as game jams often require us to make fully working games in a week, the needed animations for such games typically are composites from various retargeting sources and webcam mocap, generally their quality is not comparable with Disney or AAA games.
The enthusiasm that you have for making quality animations is needed for successful animators, and I was addicted to the stuff like making lewd animation mods for games and recently dived into the insane Unreal blueprint programming.
@benniewoodell
Honestly Man, it makes me very happy to see how much you have matured as an animator.
(long time since “peaches”)
And of course the next step ,in your evolution, is to realize the value of not being tied to any particular figure eco system
With ARP, I have finally been able to bypass a long standing pet peeve of mine as a sci fi enthusiast.
That being fully armored background generic characters, bogging down my scenes with a fully realized human meshes underneath sometimes wearing several conformers.
Now I can use/animate lightweight “empty shells”
Like the clone troopers,C3PO,Admiral Ackbar & the Yoda character in this video
(all from sketch fab)
ARP literally opened up a whole new world of figure content for my story telling without having to worry about how they will be animated.
Thank you Bennie for sharing your experience with us. It is very interesting to hear from someone who's attending a professional animation class.
It is quite strange that Genesis 9 released without anatomical edge flow, as this is something that they teach you in character modelling classes (and the previous generations had this.)
You would think Daz3d would have endeavoured to improve the edge flow that was there, not eliminate it.
Perhaps they figured the increase in base resolution was sufficient.
This was a deliberate dcision, mallenlane (the maker of the figure) has explained it in a couple of threads. You may not agree that ti was a good decision, but it was a concious choice intended to improve the figure overall.
Lots of great informations about animation workflow in this thread especially explanation from @benniewoodell and our mighty @wolf359 .
I think I`m lucky enough ever getting " the old school max 5 animation training " in college . In those years we didnt had acces to robust animation tools like we have right now , so there is no way to learn animation without doing manual ways .
Except NLA animation stuff , there is no big differences between what MAX 5 dope sheet and curve editor offer with what we`ve seen in recent animation softwares
But TBH , unless there is specific request, this day I will go using any motion data transfer if possible ( although Basic knowledge still needed to make simple or extreme adjustments) Having special rigs to suit our animation styles or what we want to achieve much preferable . Thanks god , right now there are so many cheap services to built or modifying custom rig for you , especially if you`re using Blender .
All daz product still useful for presentation purpose . I believe Its hard for Client to say no if we`re showing them couple of DAZ items and still renders as rough idea how the animation projects - Short animation ads will be look in final stage
@Stupido3D Basically with G9 they abandoned a detailed topology in favor of HD sculpting. This is usually done in game figures, it's not a "mistake" per se but a different way to do things. I agree it is very limiting especially for us normal users who can't access the PA HD toolkit. Also game figures have a optimized single-layer geometry and use a single texture so HD sculpting makes sense, while daz figures are not optimized at all so in this case HD sculpting becomes extremely stressing for the hardware.
I'm into stills and no animation. I try to get my content to Blender, refine ist and use it in various settings, mixed with content from other applications, like World Machine, Cinema 4D and so on.
It seems that baking via multires is an option.
That's exactly what I was referring to. I got the Shader from Chris. Very versatile but also quite complex to handle....and you need the right texture maps.
One of the things to remember is that Daz Studio is made for RENDER ARTISTS ... it was not really designed for people who can actually model, map, texture, rig, and animate. It was designed for rendering scenes using someone else's models ( PA merchandise ).
The goals of Daz / Tafi are mixed among commercial, liberal, gaming, and possibly NFT related slants and what we end up with is ... Genesis 9. It will have some benefits and some deficits (just like each generation) ... but it seems to follow what one might expect with those mixed goals.
As a maturing 3D artist (who started with only rendering), my desires and needs have changed through the years. For myself, Daz Studio still covers a lot of ground in my powerpoint illustrations ... but in other work, I am increasing turning to other resources.