The #1 thing I need far above all is mesh smoothing and contouring tools...
RexRed
Posts: 1,323
#1
The thing I need "far above" all else is Daz mesh smoothing and contouring tools...
Tools inside of Daz to smooth, flatten, normalize... the seams and mesh of a clothing or messy hair item or add bumps or noise to a fabric.
Hexagon is terrible. Exporting and reimporting "morphs" is terrible (even though you can get good results).
Daz should have smooting tools natively. I have thousands of clothing items that need simple smoothing after auto-fit has done its thing.
There should be an ever expanding plethora of tools to do this within Daz.
Charge me to purchase this added smooting functionality, that is only fair, that might help generate revenue for Daz Studio.
Start selling Daz Studio "plugins" on the side... 
Something like a morph shell on an item. When you go in to edit the mesh it creates a morph shell. if you repose your figrue you can go in and reedit the shell.
#2
Expand VDB capability in Daz even further to accomodate variable color maps for smoke and emissions.
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Comments
Distinct from the existing Smoothing Modifier and SubD in what way(s)?
Sculpting tools, like MeshGrabber.
I am told Daz is not a "modeling program", but it should have modeling tools. Otherwise we have to try and export items to other programs.
For instance, when you lift a Daz character's arms up, it stretches the clothing mesh completely out of form, thus the texture on its surface gets completely distorted.
No amount of the Smoothing Modifier or SubD will correct this.
When you bend the character in a pose, or just sit them in a chair, even within limits, the crotch area of the clothes sometimes, the knee areas, the mesh is again, distorted "way" out of form.
Some tools to edit the mesh like smoothing brushes and some tools to contour mesh and give it certain characteristics like wrinkles in clothing would be nice.
Having to export and fill out a dialogue box about exporting an entire figure taking it into a program with a completely different vertex orientation is not good.
We need a few basic tools within Daz Studio to do this.
To smooth the seams of clothing and to rub over areas that the mesh has been stretched out of proportion and it will heal those areas and normalize the mesh lattices and even them out.
To make it easy to sculpt the thousands of clothing items to the various figures when Auto-fit is a partial fail, poses stretch and distort clothing in extreme ways, and Smoothing Modifiers and SubD do not act upon the problems.
Start with a few vital sculpting and smoothing tools like Smooth, Grab, and Draw and add more tools over time like Noise, Wrinkles and patterns that can be painted on mesh...
I would use tools like this in every single scene I create.
There is always GoZ, or even a weight-mapped Push Modifier for some of that. I can see the appeal of some such tool, but the potential for feature-creep is obvious. Many of those things should be handled by JCMs or the like - and of course most of that would not be useful for animators anyway.
Yes animation is definitly a consideration and how well the geometry stays put, tools like this would aid animation on a frame per frame basis it seems. It would also depend on how stable the geometery is.
No tools is certainly not better. This is an exciting area of exploration that Daz could really ues natively for a myriad of reasons. Without these tools many things are unfixable without drastic external solutions.
It is a pity because everything eles is so perfect in Daz i.e. the render engine and the artistry of the textures, figures, environments and lights are so much in perfect sync, only to be stopped in its tracks due to wardrobe malfunctions.
If you could get the wardrobe to be relaxed against the figure in frame 1 it is reasonable to believe it might fair better as it procedes with maybe a few alterations along the way to further relax the mesh.
It would be nice if these tools were solid in their function and the project saved well with these alterations.
Mesh Grabber is great, a step in the right direction but it is missing some very vital functions i.e. smoothing and relaxing of geometry. To try and smooth geometery with Mesh Grabber it currently has to be done on a per vertex, face, edge basis and this can distort the mesh even more rather than flatten and relax it. And, it takes hours and hours if one were to try and fix mesh with that tool alone. I know this, I have tried and failed miserably. I have seen these mesh problems instantly vanish away with the right sculpting tools. i.e. mesh relaxing algorithms at the end of a resizeable brush.
DS Hexagon and its bridge works amazingly well. You will need a fair bit of RAM to work with sculpt (still think a memory issue).
But to move verts with soften function on for blending around your deforms (you set threshhold) - that just works without RAM issues. Only issue for DAZ bridge (and maybe GOZ too?) is it exports everything parented to figure. So often, like geoshells, you have to delete first as exporting to Hexagon and it crashes. Have used MehsGabber maybe 2x. Too clunky. Whereas Hexagon when you set up a system is Day and Night vs MeshGrabber and it's more basic work profile.
Otherwise Marvellous Designer for relaxing mesh as its collision system and pinning is cool, and make DS morphs for those deforms. Odds of setting up something competing with that by DAZ is not very good in my estimation at this time.
Thank you for your comment Saxa,
The whole point I am making is smoothing should be done directly within Daz.
Yes, I can export and smooth but it is very inconvenient.
I am working on an animation, I have 1400 frames. My figure is dancing in jeans and every time he does a twist or stretch his jeans are pulled in odd ways distorting the fabric texture.
To export this figure for each frame when the fabric goes out is impossible. So do I just decide to not animate in Daz and do it elsewhere? That would be terrible.
All of my figures textures are made to look right in Daz Iray, all of my props and environments are in Daz and Daz hair only looks right in Daz.
It is better to bring the mountian to Mohammad in this case.
A smoothing tool(s) could work on a per frame basis and correct all of my animation clothing stretches right in Daz.
Notice the fabric, the image I included is a frame in an animation, the moment he goes into another pose, the clothing will get taut in another location and again, need smoothing.
This smoothing needs to be done in Daz to be feasible.
I just did a test and Mesh Grabber is not animatable that I can tell.
So we need "animatable" mesh smoothing and grabbing tools.
In the same way Dforce exerts force on mesh and is also animatable.
Hi RexRed, when i read your OP and following posts, for sure understood your expressed hope that it can all be done in DS. Would be thrilled myself if that was possible. Listed those 2 ways to show that (1) Hex and DS were never merged - probably reasons? and (2) MarvellousDesigner way of colliding using GPU does exist, but that's a different 3d program with high levels of sophistication and differnt focus. So totally share your wish that DS could be further featurized to include that. By my estimation, that may happen, but not counting on it any time soon. Like decades. Would be delighted to be wrong.
only tips i can give is (1) make bigger morphs allowing more range of movement and/or add ercs that trigger and work with various differnt morphs for that clothing item. Like jcms that figures have and clothes autfollow. Problem is the weights on figure vs clothing is still too large scale to accomodate all those deforms, especialy the tighter clothes are, like jeans.
the DS smoothing goes a long way. Have been thrilled with what it can overcome. Another big tip is turn off your clothing smoothing when poke-through is happening. Most often than not i find the failure is so big it is a wonder how much the native DS smoothing made that look better. Then make moprh to fix that etc. For now and long time forward, would say use the steps i listed plus ercs for that outfit if you really want. Still VERY frustrating when Viewport shows all smooth, but render is different even when both set to same level of subD. But seems it is what the current and future state of affairs.
Also very important, make sure your jeans are at subD similar to figure. Lots of clothes are at base res. Those extra polygons usually help alot..
Lots of peeps still just do 1 frame and not huge anims like you which is essentially 1400 different frames. Whole chapters are written with 1400 frames:)
In a way anims is sadly still a secondary and expensive activity, because ai and collision are not sufficiently advanced.
How do you mean mesh grabber not animatable? Output is a static morph that you could reuse and keyframe?
Even dForce system 'as Is' cannot be paused and resumed. You probably know of the 2 main dF products dF2Morph by Riversoft and latest dF product by Silas and JoshDarling?
As for dancing, it would BE so next level if DS could incorporate a bullet physics real-time. But fear the demands of IRAY photoreal vs more toony 3d physics with no jcms is just too different and techno is not there to bridge gap.
Otherwise, i share your dreams and frustrations. Would love to be surprised.
Thank you Saxa for your comment. A toggle would be nice in Daz, that temporarily converts every texture in the scene above 1k to 1k or less and then sets every mesh to base. Then animation could occur on an exponential level.
Right before the final render you switch that toggle back on and render your scene frames in high resolution. Maybe you could even choose levels in between.
This toggle could also be fine-tuned to omit all other textures and only use base textures. The race to 4k and HD has obliterated any hope of animation.
One would think that switching to texture shaded mode or wireframe mode would free up memory, but the high resolutions and densities are still there taking up resources.
Animations crawl along even in wireframe mode.