A couple of tips and tricks going from Daz Studio to Motionbuilder

Bryan Steagall

Hey everyone!, I wanted to share a couple of neat tricks I discovered when going from Daz Studio to Motionbuilder in a recent personal project.

As I use motion capture, both for body and for facial, I use these two packages quite a bit.  I export fbx from Daz Studio to Mobu, bring in the mocap for that project, then use Marmoset toolbag for rendering.

As anyone who uses fbx knows, many times what you see in Daz Studio, due to mesh smoothing, doesn't look the same once you export, resulting in meshes, especially for clothing, that break or don't work well (especially when using clothing designed for a different genesis character)  so most of the time, I make sure that things work right before I export, then take a look and adjust or use new clothing when needed before I start working on the animation itself.

This time, I was lazy, I exported my gen8 female character with a set of clothing for gen3, got it into mobu, applied all my facial and body mocap, then decided that it didn't work well.. Carp!.. I really don't want to go through all of the process of re-importing a character, characterizing and applying the facial and body mocap and especially having to redo all the keyframed animation I added with the control rig, etc.  Hmm.. I could just bring it in and retarget, but that doesn't do facial.. carp.

As it turns out, you can just export the new character with the clothing or whatever changes you want to do and MERGE the file directly on top of your existing genesis (will only work if they are the same version).. making sure you untick in mobu the "animation" take and untick the "solo and mute" in layers on import.. and it will preserve all the hard work you've done previously.. You will just have to delete whatever shapes of the clothing or props or whatever you don't need anymore.  You don't have to characterize or setup anything in mobu on the new character.. just import over it.

It even works if the character is of a different size and shape (although I wouldn't recommend it, as then the animation might not look right), but if you are just wanting to change clothing or hair.. it works like a champ.  This was a big timesaver for me and was pleasantly surprised.

The other is not so much a tip but an observation. When you are exporting from Daz Studio a character with animation already applied via fbx to another program., and you tick the "morphs" box, the mesh is broken in really weird and amusing ways.  (besides it takes forever).  However, if you untick the morphs, it will still export the animation, including any facial animation that you've done, and the mesh will not be broken.. but it will preserve everything you've done.  I tested this in mobu, but would like to see if anyone sees similar results in other programs.

Hope this helps anyone else and if you have any questions, please let me know..  Cheers!

wolf359

Hi Bryan ,great tips
Although I am an Iclone user
not MOBU, I agree that moving the mesh once 
and the animation Data as many times as needed is the best workflow
in most cases.

 

"However, if you untick the morphs, it will still export the animation, including any facial animation that you've done, and the mesh will not be broken.. but it will preserve everything you've done.  I tested this in mobu, but would like to see if anyone sees similar results in other programs."

 

I can confirm that an animation with lipsync& animated facial morphs
 is preserved when exported as FBX from Daz studio to Lightwave 2015.

I use C4D as my Final render environment however 
So I use .obj/MDD
The Genesis Character, in this clip, were all object meshes exported from DS and Driven by
MDD (point cache) Data  for the final render in Maxon C4D.

  

mindsong

Thanks for the tips, Bryan!

priceless time savings, these sorts of notes - appreciated.

--ms