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@mal3Imagery I just realized how sharp and good the shirt, tie and pants look. Could you please tell me what clothes they are?
@Padone I tried to use the add-on. Unfortunately I got stuck in the path setting up part. My problem is that I have 5 paths set up for Daz studio. Moreover, I think that the Iray uberbase default path is also considered so 6 in general. I added all 6 as youb can add more paths but I still get the not eveything could be found error. Not sure what to do next as I didn't know how to see what could not be found to adress the issue further.
@RayDAnt Thank you again for all the information you provide that's awesome. Yes of course we're talking of daz characters and they use the uber shader. That only provides volumes, not sss surfaces. Now if iray can provide sss surfaces by using the shader mixer (aka mdl features) this is interesting, but not useful since the shader mixer is not used by daz assets. As a relevant note there's a project by Jessub Kim to implemend mdl in cycles that would also allow to export shader mixer materials.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/7/
@wolf359 Actually volumetric skins don't work for eevee. Then the rendering time of volumetric skins is not horrible, though of course sss is faster. Also I discovered that in most cases you can use the "limited global illumination" preset and it works not too bad even with those few bounces. So that could be a good deal between quality and speed.
@davidtriune @TheMysteryIsThePoint Sorry I misunderstood the question. If you want to export the HD mesh I guess obj is your only option. The diffeomorphic plugin is for exporting rigged characters and that wouldn't work with HD meshes. Also it would be horrible performances in animation anyway. But you may convert HD meshes to normal maps to use in blender.
@TheKD @alex86fire Personally I just use the standard daz libraries so everything works fine here. Nested libraries may cause issues but this is true even for daz studio itself. Another issue may be if you use daz connect since those assets are encrypted and cannot be used by the plugin. DIM and manual install should work fine though. Then I guess Thomas can help better on this, he is usually very kind and fast replying to issues.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues
Damn, I install almost all my assets through Connect. I started using other places and DIM only when my main HDD started to get full. And I use other locations for my custom created stuff. At least now I know what the problem is.
I'll try a new scene with only DIm installed products and see how that works.
Clothes in mal3Imagery images are usually items they created themselves, not commercial products.
Content installed by Connect was encrypted in the first Connect beta, but Daz changed that before the general release.
Thank you for the clarification.
I manually install everything, I have one library for just G8F stuff, one for G8M stuff, one for hivewire horse etc. Also, I am an idiot. The reason it was rendering white I figured out, I forgot to delete a geoshell I was using as cloth collision object before I exported the test scene lol.
I rendered my test subject with no offending geoshell lol. In ecycles, with just the 2080 checked it finished in 1 min 30 seconds, still a lot of grain, but not bad for the teim it rendered, especially considering the fairly large size of the render lol. Adding the 1070 to the mix slowed the render down to 1 min 57 seconds somehow, I guess it must have to do with the way they do optix or something. Not a bad start though, I guess it might be time to start dabbling in cycles, now that the importer seems to be working pretty darn well.
One bit o bad news though, I tried out a woman with a newgen geograft test, came out looking mangled :( Will try the golden palace this weekend, see if that one blends any better.
That mess around the eyes, found the old default eyelashes hiding in there causing that. Upped the samples to 2k, took 24 mins to finish. Hair transmap seems to have issues, nostrils and inner mouth glowing a bit, and I think I am seeing the good old subD snaggletooth issue in there too lol.
@TheKD
As for the subdivision issue I'm going to report it to Thomas since I got what's causing it, but I don't know if it is fixable by the plugin. Meanwhile you can export at base resolution and apply the subd in blender, this will work fine without artifacts. See my prev post.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5423076/#Comment_5423076
Also in cycles you can use the denoiser to get fast renderings, it works much better than iray so you can keep your iterations low. That is, you don't need 2K samples.
The hair transmap issue is odd, it shouldn't happen. You may try to increase the transparency bounces. Please let me know if it works. If it doesn't let me know what's the hair you're using so may be I can look at it. Below the settings I use that work for most characters. You may increase the transmission and volume bounces to get better volumetric skins but it usually isn't too bad even with few bounces.
Ah found the denoise section thanks. Did this one with optix AI denoise, took 7 mins, not bad at all for that size. Bumped all light bounces to 32 to see if that fixed the transparency issues, seems not. It's called bedazzled hair, will try other hairs after.
I thought that cycles did "out of core" GPU rendering and wasn't hadcuffed by VRAM. Unfortunately I guess I was wrong, as I was just trying to do a render and got cuda error out of memory :(
I've never tried it, but I think you have to go to the Edit/Preferences/System/CUDA and select your CPU as well.
@TheKD
OK I checked those hair. The guy does some mess with materials since volumetric properties don't make sense for transmapped hair. One should use only translucency with the sss reflectance tint in this case. Also there's an old bug back in the plugin about translucency that needs to be fixed (again).
I'm going to report this to Thomas. Thank you for pointing it out.
p.s. Meanwhile you can turn thin walled on for transmapped hair, that makes perfectly sense since transmapped hair don't get volume. Then uncheck the auto-material option in the plugin so only bsdf is used. This fixes the issue.
Agree, as it's the main reason I've not bothered experimenting with it.
... Well many more than 20 actually.
Where are you finding that panel? Oh I found it, I was opening every single panel in the tool settings looking for it lol. It's in the import daz popup thingie, in case anyone else can't find it. Gotta admit, I became a lot less interested when I saw the geograph doesn't work right yet. Which reminds me, I wanted to check this weekend to see if golden palace works right. Maybe I will be interested again if it does. I may not render naked viky temple scenes often, but I am really only interested in learning another render engine/shader system if I can use it in all situations.
@TheKD afaik geografts work fine for other users at diffeomorphic, though I didn't use them myself yet. I guess for this subject you can get better help there.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/finishing-section.html
Very nice tool and great price as well!!!!
Whilst I agree that the geograft mesh can usually be merged with the main figure using Merge Anatomy with good results, I have found that where geoshells are also involved problems still exist particularly in relation to the materials created by the plugin. I have reported a couple of bugs in the past relating to multiple UVs which some geografts introduce, and these were actioned but I'm not sure that all the issues in that area are resolved yet.
I think it's worth noting that this is a difficult area due to the number of third party products based on geografts, produced by different vendors with their own idiosyncratic methods. It is unlikely that one approach will handle all available geografts successfully. Also, where Thomas L has no interest in certain products it is unreasonable to expect him to spend time and effort getting them to work with the plugin, or to expect him to acquire a product he won't use just for this purpose only.
@andya For issues with geografts it is much better to report to Thomas since I have very little experience with them. What I know is that the plugin does an approximation with shells. That is, in daz a geoshell is an actual geometry layer with its own uv map and materials. While in blender a geoshell is just an extra uv layer since cycles can handle multiple uv layers without the need to add extra geometry. So for geografts using shells it is very likely that you will need to bake the textures as you do with LIE.
I know this is a common rumor but it's not true. I reported the subd issue and a possible fix or workaround. Link below for reading.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/30/major-subdivision-bug
Oh man, thanks for pointing that out to me, I am not sure I would have stumbled upon that info myself. I have very limited time when I have work, and will be busy at least 3 more weeks with this latest job. Limited time to search for info sucks in this hobby lol. It seems the issue was the "old mesh" poking through the geograft was causing the mangled effect, and the merge takes care of that. Now my interest in cycles just went up again. Looks like I will spend my time today building a real scene and taking cycles through the paces to see how it does with indoor lighting lol. So much for working in MD today haha
Ok, well I tried and failed a bajillion times to import a full scene into blender to test ugh. I was finally able to get it all in and to render by exporting the scene as FBX and importing it, then exporting each girl seperately with the plugin, and importing them one at a time. Not sure why I couldn't get it to work any other way, kept getting an error, for some reason it's not generating an error log, so I can't find it to copy and paste here though.Accidentally did a eevee render, froze and did nothing for like 3 minutes, then poof, pooped out a finished image lol. Looks pretty dang good for how fast it took. Biggest problem is in the eyeballs, the rest looks pretty good.
The fbx import didn't convert the emissives right, so I added a few regular blender lights to the scene, the HDRI wasn't doing well on it's own even with the open wall. First try with optix in ecycles failed due to out of memory cuda error of course, but it started to render in cuda mode with cpu checked with my gpu's so it seems hybrid mode is a go. Peak memory is almost 13000 MB, so would never have been able to render in iray. The render going is 5760 x 3240 at 400 sampled with denoise checked. Been running for 20 mins, estimates an hour and a half to go, not that horrible for the size of the render.
This cycles seems worth deep diving into, will probably want to start building all my daz studio scenes/props into blend files which will be a long term project lol. Looks like blender gonna be more than just my goto modeller now.
Oh darn, blender crashed before the render finished. Blah, will try again I guess. Bummer, it just keeps on crashing(I assume as blender just closes) before the render finishes, even in linux. Does blender do log files somewheres?
@TheKD
The plugin is primarily designed to convert single assets from daz studio to blender. From characters to scenes. That said it shouldn't have any problem importing a scene with multiple characters. I did it myself many times so far. If you find a specific scene that doesn't work please report it at diffeomorphic. Or let me know what the scene is so I may be able to look at it.
The plugin log to check for errors is in the file you specify in the path section. I'd strongly advice you to read the plugin documentation before trying to use it "blind". Since there are many useful features to learn about and it's worth the time. Plus you may have better success doing your things.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/setting-up-daz-library-paths.html
The scene I was using is https://www.daz3d.com/chill-room but I am pretty sure it was not the scene causing it. I found out after exporting the scene as FBX thinking it must be the scene, that even importing the two girls together by themselves was kicking out the error, but they import fine one by one, which seems weird lol. For the error report, it doesn't seem to generate one. I checked the spot it was at default, no txt file there. Changed the path to desktop, didn't get one generated there either. I was able to get the error again, for some reson copying from console makes it paste backwards, but maybe that's just a normal pythin thing, not really that familliar with python. It looks like a foreign language to me, but maybe it will be useful to someone else lol.
I think I may have figured out what caused that error now. I had forgotten to delete some effect geoshells. Once I deleted them, I was able to import them posed together, and in a full scene without that error. So that's some progress. If you are going to use effect geoshells(if they even work at all, haven't tested them at all yet), you need to import figures one at a time it seems. Bad news is I keep getting crash when cycles rendering though, even using a different scene :(
Odd trend I noticed, right before it crashes, an already rendered tile, turns unrendered(turns to checker pattern again). Not sure if that's a clue or not, but it's strange.
@TheKD
Thank you for pointing out the issue with shells. I'm going to do some tests and report it to Thomas. I'm not sure though for this to be fixed since as I said the plugin is mainly designed to import single assets. So it will be up to Thomas to decide what to do.
As for cycles I never got it crashed in my life I wonder how you do it LOL. Ok here's some clues.
1) The plugin takes a fair amount of ram to convert a complex scene and it may not always be released efficiently since it's python code. So after importing a complex scene, save it as blender file and close blender. Then open blender back and get your scene in blender format. This will save ram.
2) In daz studio we have the scene optimizer to handle complex scenes so that they fit to the gpu. In blender cycles tries to render off core if the vram is not enough, but it is anyway a good idea to try to fit the scene. There's not the scene optimizer but we get a simplify panel instead where we can set the max texture resolution for the viewport and rendering, among other things.
3) Drivers. If you use gtx cards you should be fine with 431.86 both with daz studio and blender. That's what I use. If you got rtx cards then cycles requires 435.xx or up, then I have no experience myself with rtx cards.
Can't you not just export upper and lower teeth, subdivide them in a seperate 3d modeler without smoothing and put them back in place parenting the original figure's teeth. After that you hide the original teeth in material's opacity channel. Since your new teeth have a higher polycount, they shouldn't be as round, when subdivided in Blender.
Just an idea...
@Masterstroke no need
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/30/major-subdivision-bug
I thought it was already known that you aways are supposed to export models out of DAZ Studio at Base with no subD?
Thank you!
I've written an Alembic exporter, and while doing that I've come to understand the difference between subd level 0 and the subd cage (base resolution). I resolved myself to exporting the subdivided model and not applying any modifiers in Blender. But your explanation of the problem has made me realize that the last time that I tried to export the subd cage, Blender had not yet switched to OpenSubD. It may very well work, now.
It's strange that subd works for those teeth but not for hd details. Are HD details different from other subdivision? i guess i have to bake everyone especially woo (he looks helluva lot younger now)
Also, Im having issues with hair, the alpha maps seem to not work correctly (see attached images). Both images have nothing applied but the diffuse and alpha (cutout) maps. I tried:
-multiplying alpha by a smaller factor
-switching the map between non-color and sRGB
-converting the black and white image to png with alpha (with black as alpha)
-checking/unchecking "transparent shadows"
but it still appears thick and dark.
thanks again for this plugin.
@nonesuch00 I guess there's some confusion around between the base level and subd zero that's not the same thing.
@davidtriune
HD geometry needs to be baked to normal maps in blender. It wouldn't make sense using HD geometry for animation. As for transmapped hair that's normal, since the viewport approximates transparency so you don't get the same as in cycles. The diffeomorphic plugin already imports alpha maps with the best option for the viewport so you can't do any better.
If you need to fit the alpha map to the viewport you can edit it by changing the gamma until you get it. For cycles there's no need.
p.s. I want to be sure there's no misunderstanding here. The plugin is entirely by Thomas I just gave some help with materials.