true iray skins for blender are on the way ..

windli3356

Wow, does that work on vendor's custom skin shaders/layers as well?

JClave

windli3356 said:

Wow, does that work on vendor's custom skin shaders/layers as well?

Hi! Wasn't sure if you were referring to my post about custom Blender build i.e. Z-Cycles

If so, there are vendor products which are actually Iray Uber Shader underneath.

You can check this by asking people who already own the shader to see if the material is actually displaying as Iray Uber when applied.

Those shaders will be compatible with Z-Cycles.

However, for actual custom shaders, they are not compatible and will have to converted to Iray Uber Shader to render in Z-Cycles.

 

After Z-Cycles is released, if there is enough interest, it's possible to implement custom shader support besides Iray Uber.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

marble said:

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.

I don't know why Blender's material slot system is the way that it is, perhaps there's a good reason, but some shuffling is required to know what material slot is what across models. I'll soon have a one-click (two clicks) script that will append or link materials from the Daz Importer created .blend file with all the converted materials to the scene imported via Alembic. Just some kinks I have to work out. I am amazed at the work our @Padone and Thomas have done, and can only imagine how JClave's work will look... the following was done without any adjustments at all.

But for now, you can mass append all the materials from your Daz Importer scene and apply them to you Alembic imported model; all the material slots will be there and the naming convention between Daz Importer and Alembic Exporter seem to be the same. That'll be a pain, but it will work until I finish the script.

marble

nicstt said:

They should be applied if you're using Diffemorphic. Adding a camera and lights would get you something.

No, I was trying the Alembic exporter mentioned above. I get a mesh in the Blender viewport plus a folder containing all the textures but the textures are not being applied to the figure correctly at the moment. I'm probably doing something wrong or trying something which probably doesn't work - like using reduced size textures after running Scene Optimizer. I'll play some more.

marble

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

marble said:

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.

I don't know why Blender's material slot system is the way that it is, perhaps there's a good reason, but some shuffling is required to know what material slot is what across models. I'll soon have a one-click (two clicks) script that will append or link materials from the Daz Importer created .blend file with all the converted materials to the scene imported via Alembic. Just some kinks I have to work out. I am amazed at the work our @Padone and Thomas have done, and can only imagine how JClave's work will look... the following was done without any adjustments at all.

But for now, you can mass append all the materials from your Daz Importer scene and apply them to you Alembic imported model; all the material slots will be there and the naming convention between Daz Importer and Alembic Exporter seem to be the same. That'll be a pain, but it will work until I finish the script.

Thanks - I was trying to follow what you had already posted in the Alembic thread so I also replied to that - as it is more of an Alembic issue rather than an IRay skins issue. Anyhow, I posted this image which shows the big problem I'm having at the moment (not a materials issue but looks like mesh to me). Here's a link to my post but I'll post the image here too.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5822426/#Comment_5822426

TheMysteryIsThePoint

@marble The texture directory is only for when you want to do your materials from scratch. But now that the Daz Importer is so good, I really see no need to set them up manually any more.

But it looks like you're getting along fine. I'll have the normals issue fixed soon, and maybe the texture script done as well.

marble

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

@marble The texture directory is only for when you want to do your materials from scratch. But now that the Daz Importer is so good, I really see no need to set them up manually any more.

But it looks like you're getting along fine. I'll have the normals issue fixed soon, and maybe the texture script done as well.

Thanks - I've responsed in the Alembic thread but just to reiterate - your efforts are much appreciated.

the5amkebab

Thank you everyone for the help, although I haven't quite found the solution I need, I have learnt new and very useful things from every suggestion so that itself is awesome! 

benniewoodell said:

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!

Her settings have given me much better results and I will definitely be referring to this video for future cases. Zero poke through but unfortunately the clothing I'm using is still getting too lumpy, although MUCH better than before, it still looks like screwed up newspaper with a variety of settings, high steps, high subD clothing so I'm unsure if its something I am still missing or if its the way blender reads/calculates the mesh?

Padone said:

@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

Shrikwrap modifier also worked great but I still got a little too much of the "scrunched up newspaper" look on what should be very smooth clothing and also things that should not shrink like collars were effected too much and just disappeared. This could be because by this stage I am unable to transfer the correctives and keep getting an error when trying as I have already gone through the process as far as converting to rigify. Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

j cade said:

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.

I'm doing animations but for some clothing its only a very small section that is clipping, like the shoulders of a vest, where its too small to hide the mesh underneath but small enough that a minor, quick adjustment like this could be the best way in this particular case. Very interested in your HD mesh import method though so I'll be going through that video soon. Since I'm animating will that still work well or is it a method only suited for static renders?

Thanks again everyone and please let me know if I've missed anything!

Padone

the5amkebab said:

Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

As best as I know you can't transfer correctives after rigify, at least I'm not able to do it. That's why rigify is in the finishing section. I have to say that most daz correctives are very minimal though. Apart those in the elbow and other few that really matter. For example below there's the G8F wearing the G3F dark storm pants where I only imported the jcms for the right leg. I didn't transfer the jcms to the pants so you see the artifacts in the right leg. The left leg without any jcm doesn't have artifacts of course since it only uses the base weightmap.

So you see that avoiding jcms unless needed may also be a viable way and you have the benefit of simplifying the figure for animation since less drivers and morphs are needed this way. Then in my opinion the best option is always to delete the unnecessary geometry, that you can do as a final step to optimize your figure.

 

nicstt

the5amkebab said:

 

Padone said:

@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

Shrikwrap modifier also worked great but I still got a little too much of the "scrunched up newspaper" look on what should be very smooth clothing and also things that should not shrink like collars were effected too much and just disappeared. This could be because by this stage I am unable to transfer the correctives and keep getting an error when trying as I have already gone through the process as far as converting to rigify. Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

Exclude areas you don't want to be affected by the shrink wrap.

Create a Vertex Group in Object Data Properties, and assign the vertices you want to be affected to it, then apply that group in the specific section in the Shrink Wrap Modifier.

Sometimes applying it as a Shape Key (think of these as something akin to morphs in Studio) and dialing it in in varying amounts can get a better result than at full.

Moving the Shrik Wrap before or after a sub division modifier can affect it a little, as can a smooth modifier.

 

One think that is important to note is that it matters where modifiers are in the stack; sometimes they need to be in a certain order to work, and others they just work better in a certain order.

the5amkebab

Padone said:

the5amkebab said:

Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

As best as I know you can't transfer correctives after rigify, at least I'm not able to do it. That's why rigify is in the finishing section. I have to say that most daz correctives are very minimal though. Apart those in the elbow and other few that really matter. For example below there's the G8F wearing the G3F dark storm pants where I only imported the jcms for the right leg. I didn't transfer the jcms to the pants so you see the artifacts in the right leg. The left leg without any jcm doesn't have artifacts of course since it only uses the base weightmap.

So you see that avoiding jcms unless needed may also be a viable way and you have the benefit of simplifying the figure for animation since less drivers and morphs are needed this way. Then in my opinion the best option is always to delete the unnecessary geometry, that you can do as a final step to optimize your figure.

 

 

Unfortunately deleting geometry won't work in this case and I'm trying to keep as much detail and realism in the model as possible, but thanks for the help!

 

nicstt said:

the5amkebab said:

 

Padone said:

@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

Shrikwrap modifier also worked great but I still got a little too much of the "scrunched up newspaper" look on what should be very smooth clothing and also things that should not shrink like collars were effected too much and just disappeared. This could be because by this stage I am unable to transfer the correctives and keep getting an error when trying as I have already gone through the process as far as converting to rigify. Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

Exclude areas you don't want to be affected by the shrink wrap.

Create a Vertex Group in Object Data Properties, and assign the vertices you want to be affected to it, then apply that group in the specific section in the Shrink Wrap Modifier.

Sometimes applying it as a Shape Key (think of these as something akin to morphs in Studio) and dialing it in in varying amounts can get a better result than at full.

Moving the Shrik Wrap before or after a sub division modifier can affect it a little, as can a smooth modifier.

 

One think that is important to note is that it matters where modifiers are in the stack; sometimes they need to be in a certain order to work, and others they just work better in a certain order.

I was thinking there might be a way to weight paint just the section of clothing I wanted the shrinkwrap modifier to effect, is that kind of what you mean?

nicstt

the5amkebab said:

Padone said:

the5amkebab said:

Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

As best as I know you can't transfer correctives after rigify, at least I'm not able to do it. That's why rigify is in the finishing section. I have to say that most daz correctives are very minimal though. Apart those in the elbow and other few that really matter. For example below there's the G8F wearing the G3F dark storm pants where I only imported the jcms for the right leg. I didn't transfer the jcms to the pants so you see the artifacts in the right leg. The left leg without any jcm doesn't have artifacts of course since it only uses the base weightmap.

So you see that avoiding jcms unless needed may also be a viable way and you have the benefit of simplifying the figure for animation since less drivers and morphs are needed this way. Then in my opinion the best option is always to delete the unnecessary geometry, that you can do as a final step to optimize your figure.

 

 

Unfortunately deleting geometry won't work in this case and I'm trying to keep as much detail and realism in the model as possible, but thanks for the help!

 

nicstt said:

the5amkebab said:

 

Padone said:

@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

Shrikwrap modifier also worked great but I still got a little too much of the "scrunched up newspaper" look on what should be very smooth clothing and also things that should not shrink like collars were effected too much and just disappeared. This could be because by this stage I am unable to transfer the correctives and keep getting an error when trying as I have already gone through the process as far as converting to rigify. Maybe if I transfer the correctives before I convert to rigify this might help?

Exclude areas you don't want to be affected by the shrink wrap.

Create a Vertex Group in Object Data Properties, and assign the vertices you want to be affected to it, then apply that group in the specific section in the Shrink Wrap Modifier.

Sometimes applying it as a Shape Key (think of these as something akin to morphs in Studio) and dialing it in in varying amounts can get a better result than at full.

Moving the Shrik Wrap before or after a sub division modifier can affect it a little, as can a smooth modifier.

 

One think that is important to note is that it matters where modifiers are in the stack; sometimes they need to be in a certain order to work, and others they just work better in a certain order.

I was thinking there might be a way to weight paint just the section of clothing I wanted the shrinkwrap modifier to effect, is that kind of what you mean?

It works in a similar way.

Select the mesh, and then Tab into Edit mode; select the vertices you want to be affected.

Under Oject Data Properties (triangle icon in the right under Properties), add a Vertex Group (rename or not depending on your needs).

Assign the vertices you've selected to that Vertex Group.

The Shrinkwrap allows you to select a vertex group as a bounding area. After you've assigned them, if not correct you can add and remove as required.

EDIT:

1 - is selecting the vertices

2 - where the Vertex Group option is; depending on what the object is, there could be many other groups there. If you add one, it will be at the end of the list,

3 - the plus symbol adds a group

4. used to assign vertices to the group; you can remove, and also select/deselect the vertices assigned.

the5amkebab

Great, I'll give it a shot, thanks!

Scarecrow

Padone said:

@wolf359 At diffeomorphic there's also a bvh retargeter, I never used it and have no idea how it works but you may like to give a look at it. That should work especially fine with daz characters since Thomas updated it for them.

http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/bvh-retargeter.html

I have been using the BVH retargeter a little and it has worked great for me so far, very simple. I'm using IPIsoft mocap. I export the default IPI rig from IPIsoft mocap studio and the BVH retargeter retargets them to Genesis characters in Blender quickly with no hassle. Just select the character then click "import and retarget" in the retargeter and then select your BVH file, that's it. There are a few more options that I guess are for troubleshooting when the first option doesn't work, I haven't explored them very much. 

 

JClave

For those interested,

Here's an update on Z-Cycles progress - a custom Blender build that integrates Iray Uber Shader Nodes for Cycles rendering.

I have done a WIP render comparison between Victoria 8 in Iray vs Victoria 8 in Z-Cycles.

The eyes and eyelashes need work. But the rest is nearly there.

 

Padone

@JClave That looks good. The specularity is not exactly the same as well as the shadows. Look at the lips and the ear. But this may be due to a slightly different camera angle or light setup. Also the tone mapping in cycles is different so the colors may not always look exactly the same.

Overall I believe that's great. Waiting for beta testing ..

JClave

Padone said:

@JClave That looks good. The specularity is not exactly the same as well as the shadows. Look at the lips and the ear. But this may be due to a slightly different camera angle or light setup.

Thanks. Good observation.

Close-up render showed that I need to apply bump map properly, which I haven't got around to yet.

Shadow is most definitely due to lighting position which was hand adjusted for both. My other render test showed identical shadows.

 

Beta release will be available before the end of September :)

Also waiting for @TheMysteryIsThePoint's latest Alembic exporter, so that my material parser can correctly handle duplicate material names.

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

JClave said:

Also waiting for @TheMysteryIsThePoint's latest Alembic exporter, so that my material parser can correctly handle duplicate material names.

I'm on it. Shouldn't be later than next weekend.

voxmura

j cade said:

Padone said:

@jcade That plugin to transfer the vertex order looks very promising I'm going to do some tests this weekend. The idea is to subdivide the base mesh then transfer the vertex order to the hd mesh, this way it should be possible to bring the hd mesh into the multires modifier.

I'm not sure I follow your method with "rebuild subdivision" I'll try to get it too. Thank you so much for your work on this. I'll point Thomas to your post for him to evaluate possible improvements.

Rebuild subdivisions is a new feature in 2.9 that takes a high res mesh and correctly undubdivides it to a lowe version

 

Also side not in re-testing in 2.9 I ralized I left out 1 step. it was something I did while experimenting trying to load expressions onto the hd mesh version, and I thought it did nothing because after you still couldn't load them until you parented the mesh to the rig, but as it turns out that this step is necesary to make the expressions visible in the n-panel

you have to go to the data api in the mesh outliner and make sure the mesh type is set to "Genesis8-male" or Genesis8-female as the case may be, fiddly, but still a copy paste job at least

 

so the revised steps

Make sure the transfer vertices script and copy atribut script are installed/turned on

Load your scene into  2.9 (yay it works, I shouldremember to double check my addon versions more)

select your HD mesh add a multiresolution modifier

click rebuild subdivisions

make sure your HD mesh is selected then ctrl select your base res mesh so that both are selected but the base res version is active

go to tools on the n-panel and hit transfer Ids by location

with both meshes still selected type ctrl c  and copy vertex groups

type ctrl c again and this time copy selected modifiers and copy the armature modifier

select your HD mesh and the armature

type ctrl p to parent

go up to your scene browser and the secnd button from the left on the top to chage from scene view to data api

go to objects > expand your base res version and scroll down to mesh type (or type mesh into the search bar and it will pop right up) copy that text

now navigate to the same location in your hd version and paste that text in

now when you load things like expressions they actually will show up in the n-panel

and in video form

honestly gettting the video set up was way harder

 

Have you been able to get this to work with Geo Grafts? I know when Geografts are exported out of Daz it exports the main HD mesh as one with the geos attatched while the base has no attatched geografts. So the problem comes when it comes to rebuilding the subdivide as it gives and error of not valid. Also Merging the Geo Grafts separatley hasn't worked out well either no quite sure if there is a solution to getting this to work.

mork

Just wanted to leave a big thank you for the Diffemorphic script! I really like the results and how easy it is to bring a scene to Blender and go for a render.  I'm especially happy that it works perfectly on linux after having adjusted the paths. That is really really great! This finally seems to make renders great again for me! :)

the5amkebab

I'm getting really dark grey scleras in Cycles no matter how much light, samples or paths used and I forgot how I fixed it last time, does anyone know the fix? Thanks.

Padone

Be sure to get the latest development version. Then try the global illumination preset for cycles to check if there's something wrong with your render settings. As a final trick you can use the brighten eyes option in the global settings but this shouldn't be necessary.

Also there's a issue in cycles vs iray since refraction shadows are computed with caustics and are much slower to converge in cycles. I have some ideas for better refraction but need some time to sort them out for Thomas.

the5amkebab

Thanks @Padone !