DAZ Animation breaks in Marvelous designer

nikolayasparuhov

Hello,

I've been having issues with animations breaking when exporting from Daz to Marvelous. It's a simple animation of a figure going from an A pose to a posed state. In Daz it looks good, I've selected all the bones before creating the animation, then I export it as a Collada, but once I play it in Marvelous the arms get all twisted and not at the location they should be.

I also tried exporting as an FBX and that also breaks, but in a different way. Nothing happens except one of the arms moving and growing out of scale.

This exact same problem happened to me on a previous project, where the animation broke in almost the same manner, but on a different figure and pose.

(I posted this on the Marvelous forums, but I haven't gotten much info, so I thought I'd try here, since probably people use Daz with Marvelous.)

Any advice and solutions would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

Richard Haseltine

Did you use the PoseControls on the figure node, or only the local transforms? You could see if using Edit>Figure>Bake to Transforms before exporting helps.

I think some export formats may also have issues with the cloned properties on the bend/twist bones - you might want to make sure that any bends are set on the bend bone and any twists on the twist bone (this affects the arms and upper legs).

nikolayasparuhov

Richard Haseltine said:

Did you use the PoseControls on the figure node, or only the local transforms? You could see if using Edit>Figure>Bake to Transforms before exporting helps.

I think some export formats may also have issues with the cloned properties on the bend/twist bones - you might want to make sure that any bends are set on the bend bone and any twists on the twist bone (this affects the arms and upper legs).

So I'm not the best at DAZ and I might need a bit more explaining, but what I've done is I've moved the entire figure away from 0 world coordinates, so the entire figure is moved and rotated so it can be placed in an environment, I've activated a premade pose from the library and then I've adjusted various body parts by only moving the sliders on the right in the Posing/ Transforms menu. I've also done some shaping and scale changes on the figure before all the posing stuff.

After that I select all the bones, create a keyframe on 30 with the posed state, move to 0 in timeline, zero out the pose and create another keyframe. Then I export. The pose continues to stay away from 0 world coordinates, as I don't mind working like that in Marvelous. Could that be causing the issues?

I tried using Autodesk FBX Reviewer, to see if the exports work, and the animation doesn't play at all in that. Tried using the Bake to Transforms before exporting, but had no effect. I don't really know how to check bend and twist bones?

marble

I have no idea whether this video will help or whether it just doesn't apply to your goals. I posted it just in case. Note the use of MDD export too.

Richard Haseltine

The upper arms, for example, have two bones - Left Upper Arm Bend and Left Upper Arm Twist. When you adjust Twist on the Left Upper Arm Bend you are in fact adjusting the property for the Twist bone, and when you adjust either of the bend properties (I can't recall their names - Front to back or side to side and Bend I think) on the twist bone you are in fact adjusting the equivalent properties on the Bend bone. I was wiondering if that might not be correctly reflected in the exported file, producing the effects you report.

nikolayasparuhov

marble said:

I have no idea whether this video will help or whether it just doesn't apply to your goals. I posted it just in case. Note the use of MDD export too.

Thank you, this actually worked! I used the MDD export for the animation and it transfered with no issues to Marvelous. Since it's based on vertex movement, rather than bones, it just ignored the errors. Appreciate the help.

marble

nikolayasparuhov said:

marble said:

I have no idea whether this video will help or whether it just doesn't apply to your goals. I posted it just in case. Note the use of MDD export too.

Thank you, this actually worked! I used the MDD export for the animation and it transfered with no issues to Marvelous. Since it's based on vertex movement, rather than bones, it just ignored the errors. Appreciate the help.

Glad you had success. I haven't had a chance to try it yet but I'm looking forward to playing with the new 4.12 animation features and sending the animated characters to MD. After that, I want to try out rendering in Blender because 100's of frames will take IRay a lifetime.