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For those interested, the custom Blender build that integrates Iray Uber Shader has made significant progress so far.
I have attached a WIP render comparison of material ball scene between Daz Iray and the custom Blender build, where both uses Iray Uber Shader.
Completed tasks:
Current to-do list before public release:
Should be able to release the build by September at this rate.
If you would like to discuss on how this could be best designed to suit your usability needs, I have setup a Discord server for this - https://discord.gg/xQr8TRP
Having a blast with the Diffeo plug in and the vastly greater animation tools in blender, the only thing I miss from Daz at the moment is the smoothing modifier for clothing. Does anyone know of a good tutorial that will help me with preventing clipping of clothing through models and other clothing layers or something like the Daz smoothing modifier? I don't mean Blender's "smooth shade", I mean how the Daz smoothing modifier is more of a collision modifier and helps prevent layers and clothing from clipping. Also any tutorials on how to get clothing simulation to work well on a character in blender like Daz dforce does? There's so many cloth simulation tutorials out there for darping blankets on hard surfaces and what not but none of what I tried works well with clothing on a character, there's always weird results, clipping, lumpy clothes or some kind of failure. I have a feeling I'll need another program like Marvellous designer or Houdini for the cloth sim but if there's an easier way to do it in blender that I'm missing, any pointer in the right direction would be massively appreciated, thanks.
Here's a good tutorial on cloth physics, she also has one on how to create your own hair using the particle systems and getting that to sim. She starts talking about creating the clothes, you can skip that and go to when she talks about the cloth sim section and the principal still works with Daz clothes. You set the body as a collision source, and then you set the clothes as cloth sim, do the steps she mentions and bake it and it should work. You might have to putz around a bit and tweak settings as every piece of clothing is different, but you can generally get the clothes to move with her settings. I don't think this tutorial goes into weight painting, you will need to do that for Daz clothes. Just click on the clothes, go to the vertex groups and make a new vertex group on the clothing. With it highlighted, go up to the object mode tab click it and go down to weight painting. There, all you need to do is make sure everything is blue so you're on the new vertex grouop, and then just paint the areas that need to stay on the body, like the neckline and such, anything where the clothes could fall away, and then go back to object mode and you're done. Or if you want it a little more stiffer, do the gradient weight painting, start at the top and click your mouse and just drag down and everything is evenly weighted red to blue from top to bottom. It's hard to say which works better for your situation, so you just to have play around, but hopefully this video helps steer you in the right direction. I spent a solid month earlier this year looking at every tutorial to make cloth sim work so I know how rough it is. I wanted to make a tutorial myself, but life has just been getting in the way of giving me time to do so lately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpflsKs7tlA
Pretty much if you do the cloth sim, it should stop any clipping, but if not, just turn off the clothes and hit tab to go into edit mode and delete the vertices around the area that clips since you don't need to see that part of the body anyways. I've been getting into the habit of just deleting everything that's covered by clothing to save on memory usage. Hope this helps!
Awesome, thank you very much, I'll give this a shot!
@JClave That is wonderful please keep us up to date. I don't seem to be able to join your discord server but I never used discord before so it's probably on my side. Below there are some articles of mine at diffeomorphic that may help you for texture coordinates plus camera and light mathcing between daz studio and blender. I also updated your article at diffeomorphic and I really hope Thomas will get into this.
Lately my free time is very limited but if you have any question I may try to help for what I know.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz-archive/issues/181/importing-the-hdr-environment-and
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz-archive/issues/193/importing-emissive-materials
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz-archive/issues/298/how-to-import-textures-tiling-actually
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/19/better-color-values
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/22/basic-tone-mapping
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/75/better-cameras
@the5amkebab You can use the shrinkwrap modifier in blender to get the same as the smooth modifier in daz studio. Of course you also have to transfer correctives first since the smooth modifier in daz studio acts on top of correctives. As I understand it the smooth modifier is also baked in the dbz, so you may not need it in blender as often as in daz studio since the rest pose is fixed anyway.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/morphs.html
I could not join the discord server either... it kept asking me to verify my account, then complained that my account already existed. When I tried to resolve it, it said the invite wasn't good any longer.
Hm weird.
I also had some confusions in the past with web browser version of Discord, as it generated separate accounts when accessed via web browser vs desktop app.
I recommend using the desktop app version of Discord instead of using web browser one. https://discord.com/new/download
The invite in this thread above https://discord.gg/xQr8TRP is different to the one that I sent you previously. So you should be able to try this invite link if you would like to give it another try.
@Padone - Thanks a lot for your encouragement. Your words have helped with keeping me going at this since I resumed development last month.
As soon as I have more updates to show, I will do so.
Regarding material import script for Blender, I have decided to write my own instead of extending Diffeomorphic.
The reasons are:
Currently, thinking about adding a button when you right click in object viewport
https://imgur.com/jhPG1By
This button could then:
Any feedback on this idea would be great and could be discussed in the discord server
OK, I did, in fact, try it in the browser, so perhaps that was the problem.
@JClave Below is where your invite brings me in both with explorer and firefox. It's the NPR server but I don't seem to get permission to post even after the email verification. I am reluctant to install the desktop app since it seems "anachronistic" to me but eventually I'll try.
As for the viewport button as well as the independent script I guess anything that works will be fine. Can't wait to beta test.
I can't figure out why but personally I feel most people can't get what you're doing here and the milestone it is for exporting daz assets. I mean certainly I'd expect a bigger reaction and your project would for sure fit the google summer of code for blender.
So with your plugin, I could use that alembic importer for mesh, then use your plugin to make the materials magically all appear onto the static mesh as they would in DS with a click of a button? That would be pretty amazing.
So is the alembic exporter by @TheMysteryIsThePoint available as a freebie? I have looked in the Freebies form but can't find it.
@TheKD That is exactly what I do... After importing the Alembic, I have a script that associates a material that I appended from the Daz Importer created .blend file with all the material slots and re-applies them. The drawback is that these associations have to be set manually the first time, which is easy but tedious. I do have a script that "saves" the materials as they currently are, creating a script that would reapply them, but it is not yet a "one-click" operation. And because of the way Blender manages (or, rather, doesn't manage) material slots, if you later choose to ignore a certain surface, you have to adjust the script. It's not at all difficult, but one could be forgiven for wondering why one has to do it.
So I am working on another solution where after the Daz Importer is done, one runs a script that renames all the material slots in such a way that the second script cannot get confused over which material is which. When the Alembic is imported, one runs a second script, and all the materials get automatically reapplied. The remaining task is to merge duplicate materials, much like the Daz Importer does. Right now, the second scipt naively creates a new material for each surface, even if they are the same material, and so even a simple model results in astronomical VRAM usage.
That is also why I am so eager to work with @JClave and the Daz Importer team to tie everything together. If I may climb up onto my soap box for just a second, this is a powerful example of why Open Source is better than proprietary. It's not a religious war; one is simply better for the end users than the other in a very practical sense.
TL;DR - I do expect that utilizing the Daz Importer converted materials with the Alembic Exporter will soon be a one-click operation. Well, two clicks :)
It's on my Google Drive.
Thanks. I'll download it when I get home. By the way, I have the DAZ plugin but have never used it. I seem to remember you saying that the plugin has problems working with Blender so I guess I should use your exporter?
I haven't kept up with it, but the last time I used it, it had several show-stoppers. The most egregious being that it screwed up the vertex order and thus the UVs, had an arbitrary frame limit, failed completely if one had two instances of the same object in the scene, and encoded HDF5 instead of Ogawa, which Blender (rightfully) doesn't support anymore. You'd have to get the Alembic project source, compile the HDF5-To-Ogawa converter and convert all your files.
But I think the main strength of my exporter is that it's not just an Alembic Exporter, it is specifically a "Daz Studio to Blender" Alembic Exporter and has functionality that directly addresses all the pains in the neck that I've encountered because of Blender's and Marvelous Designer's quirky Alembic support.
I do have one caveat, though... there's still a bug with the normals when animating that I haven't figured out yet.
there is a corrective smoth modifier which works like a version of smoothing without the collision detecting (although a slightly better version of smoothing and among otherthings since its not smoothing back to the base genesis it actually can be a good thing to add on your characters themselves)
also if you're doing stills your best option is probably just to pop in to sculpt mode and use the inflate brush on the spots with poke through - much faster for simle fixes than setting up cloth. in recent builds theres also a cloth brush that lets you pull on meshes with a localized sim that can also be great for adding some local detail or fixing pokethrough in a more clothy looking way (I personally tend to use the cloth grab brush to fix pokethrough) Its more of an artistic process than using the cloth sim - you cant just plug in values and let the computer figure it out buuuuuuut you have more control over the final look and for very simple fixes it is signifigantly faster imo.
This is just a guess if it may help. When animating the surface may deform so the normals have to be recomputed. If you import custom normals that you "bake" or "hard code" to the surface that could be the issue.
Thanks @Padone. I just export whatever normals the DzFacetMesh object reports, and the artifacts appear with nothing special like the example you give having been done. I am fairly certain it's just a bug in my code.
dead links.
If you have a preferred online outlet for community discussion on Z-Cycles, I'm open to ideas.
The only other easily accessible one I can think of is reddit but real-time messaging app seemed better for this purpose.
Most likely because the scene render I showed isn't some epic scene that ppl would drool over.
Will post a more impressive scene comparison as soon as I can
I will also create a public website for Z-Cycles when it's time for release, listing many irresistible reasons why Daz users should use it
VIATWAS.
But unfortunately there are no irresistable reasons to use it because there are always those that just won't leave the comfort of Daz Studio under any circumstances. I mean, Z-Cycles is going to be merely the latest very good reason in a long litany of very good reasons.
Hi @Padone, does this make any sense to you? Blender has definitely changed their Alembic importer...
If I disable exporting normals altogether, in 2.80, the model is blocky as one would expect. Auto smoothing does not help, presumably because there's no normal information to smooth. But "set from faces" and then auto smooth normals, the model looks perfect.
In 2.83, with exporting normals disabled, the model looks perfect from the beginning, and "set from faces" or auto smoothing on/off makes no difference at all.
It's almost as if 2.83 is doing an implicit "set from faces" and auto smoothing. I guess I could try to divine this from the source code, but does your knowledge inform you of why Blender doesn't seem to want normal information for Alembic animations? I mean, I think I have my "fix", but I can't say that I understand why it should work, which in certain ways is worse than it not working at all.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint I have no deep knowledge of the blender alembic importer. But using auto smooth does make sense in my opinion since during animation the surface may deform so the normals need to be recomputed. Custom normals are fine for low-poly static meshes for games, that's not the case for daz assets.
The diffeomorphic plugin uses autosmooth to import daz assets with the same parameters as the daz defaults. That's not entirely correct since normals in iray are related to surfaces rather than objetcs. But again since custom normals make little sense for daz assets then this works fine enough.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/79/add-smooth-shading-for-meshes-when-import
.
Iray is a good reason to leave.
Preachin' to the choir, bro.
Thanks for that. I have not verified it yet, but I suspect that when the mesh deforms, Blender recomputes the normals from the faces, as you said. I'll just change the exporter to not export normals at all when exporting two or more frames.
Ok, I did download your Alembic exporter and now I see a DLL file. Sorry to be so dumb but what do I do with it? How do I run it?
Also, does it export mesh only but no materials? If so, how do you get the materials into Blender? Some combination of the Diffeomorphic plugin and your Alembic exporter? Or Teleblender, perhaps? Once again, I'm sorry but I'm not clear on the process at all. My idea is to make an animation in DAZ Studio (I tried posing in Blender but found it so much more difficult than DAZ Studio almost certainly because I'm comfortable with what I am used to) - then export that animation (likely Alembic export) and render the animation using Eevee because IRay is soooo slow.
(Dammit, I wish DAZ would get Google Filament working and fix the animation timeline while they are about it.)
[EDIT] Ah wait ... I found your post explaining what the DLL does. I'll try to follow that and see how far I get.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5636136/#Comment_5636136
OK - I got a character from DAZ Studio to Blender and have a folder with all the textures. I'm not familiar enough with Blender yet to know how to apply the texures or how to import animations but ... baby steps.
They should be applied if you're using Diffemorphic. Adding a camera and lights would get you something.