Export Gensis as FBX?????

LooneyLynn

Hi,

I am developing a raytracer for University and I want my Elven Figure to appear in a renderer. Unfortunately, all attempts to export this thing into another 3D application seem to be futile. The problem is that the primary default pose is exported correctly. But as soon as I apply other poses, like her sitting on a bench, the exported version is screwed up. It is as if it would use bone weights to do the morph instead of baking the smooth Daz3D surface into triangles. That can of course not work. Daz3D seems to be using much more sophisticated methods to compute the mesh surface under morphs, than bone weights. So it is logical that when I export it with FBX, the results are catastrophic...

Question is, how can I prevent that from happening?
Basically the solution would be simple. Tell Daz3D to bake the mesh as I see it in Daz3D into triangles, without any morphs. Just a triangulated version of the scenery I see in Daz3D. Is that too much to ask for ;)?

Anyone had similar issues? And how to fix it?
Would the commercial Daz3D Decimator fix it?

I have attached an example. Left the smooth Daz3D version. Right an FBX export. Ignore that the props are missing. It is just about the geometry. You can hopefully clearly see that the right version is a mess. It creates even more artifacts when finally rendering it with a raytracer.

Richard Haseltine

DS uses three weight maps, one for each axis - the two bend axes may not be very different, but the twist often is markedly so. FBX doesn't support that, so DS averages the weights - you can preview the effect via Edit>Figure>Rigging>Convert TriAx Weights to General Weights.

You can freeze the mesh by exporting as OBJ instead of FBX, though that is of course then a single unit mesh

LooneyLynn

Well, using "Edit>Figure>Rigging>Convert TriAx Weights to Blended Weights" and then exporting as OBJ at least keeps the geometry more or less intact. The results are not perfect but much better. Unfortunately, clothing is totally lost in this process. While the meshes for clothes are still there, there is no way to re-assign the original materials. For some reason OBJ export loses all material properties! The Genesis mesh seems to have intact UVs, if you export it naked ;)... So I suppose I will have to export Clothes&Props; as FBX and Gensis as OBJ, reassign materials to Genesis and then stuff both things together... I will give this a try.

Still I think Daz3D SHOULD have much better support for exporting stuff. It is like a posing-tool. I don't have much use for it except to work with Gensis models & clothing. But when I am done I want to re-use it in other applications. That seems to be terribly difficult at the moment. Please FIX THIS!
Just give an option to export the triangles with materials without any rigging & whatever. This would be a great help already and shouldn't be hard to implement, since the "Realtime-Preview" presumambly is using OpenGL and thus need all this information anyway.

LooneyLynn

Richard Haseltine said:

DS uses three weight maps, one for each axis - the two bend axes may not be very different, but the twist often is markedly so. FBX doesn't support that, so DS averages the weights - you can preview the effect via Edit>Figure>Rigging>Convert TriAx Weights to General Weights.

You can freeze the mesh by exporting as OBJ instead of FBX, though that is of course then a single unit mesh

Any thoughts on what other options I have? OBJ export seems to lose materials with no chance of re-assigning them (since UVs are not correct anymore, that is merged between different texture maps). Also the triangulation that is done by OBJ does not seem to be accurate. There are still visible artifacts.

jestmart

Use the right settings for object export and import and you won't loose materials.

LooneyLynn

Well that is nice to know. But it is not like there are that many options. Could you elaborate on what settings you use for export/import that preserves materials?? Or am I supposed to just push buttons and see what happens??

LooneyLynn

So I found valuable info:

http://www.4colorgrafix.net/blog/2011/06/26/dazstudio-blender2-5/

http://maddieman.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/exporting-daz-studio-4-figures-to-blender/

Both give a lot of insight into the process. For me exporting as OBJ with the given settings does the Job. BUT, you need to manually edit the material files to get texturing to work! And then you still just got a still image, which is fine by me though. The articles also describe a method to export animations, but it seems much more convoluted and maybe also prone to geometry artifacts I had above...

LooneyLynn

Here is an example of how it looks like in Unity right now... Major improvement thanks to those articles.