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Were you using the expression sliders? When you import Genesis via collada or fbx (having exported the blend shapes in DS), the jaw does not move with them (mouthopen, fear, surprise, etc). There are about 6 of them. You have to attach the lowerjaw via a set driven key in Maya. In my research, this is not uncommon and I found a really good tutorial on Lynda.com. However, getting to them in the right way in Maya to set that key is tricky. With help from a friend, I was able to do it. Once you know how, it only takes about two minutes.
Oh I didnt even realize that. Probably because when I wanted my character to open her mouth, I rotated the jaw bone first and then adjusted the blend shapes.
So, the way to solve this is to attach the rotate attribute of the jaw to the blendshapes you wanna use?
Yes, and set a driven key so that the blend shape drives the jaw.
So what are you all doing with Daz characters in Maya? Send me links I really wanna see : )
Here´s a slightly smoother version of the short animation I did with Lilith a while ago while testing the blendshapes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJM4AG9mDtY&feature=youtu.be
And I also animated something short with the HumanIK and let me tell you, it is a MESS. The joint orientations are all messed up I find it very difficult to animate using just HUmanIK with no custom adjustments/controls added to the rig.
I haven't animated yet. I have been having so much fun exploring the features of Maya. Have been re-building a scene that I have done in DS by bringing some of the elements into Maya and using imported plants and paint fx. Amazing!
My test character (I call her Genny) is all ready to animate. After I had sent her through the Human IK, I found out, via one of the rigging videos on Lynda.com, that we really need to check the joint orientation. There is a function that will show you all the rotations then you can fix anything that is out of whack. Sometime in the next week or two, I will play with some animation and see how she moves.
I used the GMH2 plugin to convert the Akaste hair into dynamic hair. Turned out beautifully. When I start animating, I will see the results.
Thats strange about Mental Ray not reading the textures, usually eyelash transmap is connected to both the color and transparency (which is wrong) I break the connection on the color channel and make it black. Depending on what versions of the fbx plug-in, Maya, and Daz your using you get different results. Right now I'm using Maya 2015 ext 1 SP5 with Collada and Daz 4.6 and everything works except the Jaw will not move with the face morphs (Blend Shapes). I have to make some eye ball texture adjustments though.
I have opened up hypershade panels and I do not see where to break the color connection for the eyelashes and eyes. Would someone be able to post the picture showing the connection or give a better description of where to find this connection? Thanks.
No body???
I recommend using mila material for transparent eyelashes. I have not rendered these in a while though so I don´t remember what exactly and where you need to plug it but mila material is where you should star looking.
My guess would be, take the eyelashes map, do not forget to check "Alpha is Luminance" and try to plug it into the mila material´s transparency slider.
I´m not entirely sure. I haven´t rendered anything in mentalray for quite some time now that I have Renderman : )
I have opened up hypershade panels and I do not see where to break the color connection for the eyelashes and eyes. Would someone be able to post the picture showing the connection or give a better description of where to find this connection? Thanks.
In the attribute editor, I have the material selected and am right clicking on the color option. "Break connection" is what you want here. Maya will always auto-connect alpha into transparency, which is annoying; this is the fastest way to do it.
In the Hypershade, I right-clicked the ShowTex material and chose Graph Network to display its contents in the lower pane. You can select a connection between nodes and press delete. This will delete all connections in that chain at once, however. You can also double-click on a connection for the Connection Editor.
When I use collada, I don't have a problem with materials AND when I export from Daz, I can choose my morphs instead of the export choosing them for me. Daz's collada used to be broken but its good now!
Thank you guys for helping.
throttlekitty: The material is coming in as phong and I just don't have the time to change all my character to mila at this point but regardless, I don't get any context menu when I right click on the color slider to choose break connection. I do have the material selected and do see the common material attributes section in the attributes editor. but right clicking doesn't do any thing
Toyen: I take it that renderman is better? what's the advantage of renderman over mental ray?
Jaebea: Tried collada and the transparencies do work for the eyelashes but the eyes come in all white.
Yep. you guessed it! I'm new to Maya. Thanks again for helping me out.
The white eyes happened to me to. Just had to reapply the textures. Took a few seconds. Nothing is going to come in perfect so you just have to choose the lesser of evils. I am new to Maya too but I have a subscription to Lynda.com and I pour through Youtube. Lots of GREAT tuts on both to help you learn. I did learn through Lynda.com how to put a link on my shelf for whatever I wanted. The outliner and hypershade I use all the time so I have those shortcuts there.
Maybe I should have clarified, right click on the text in the left side (color in this case). It almost seems counter-intuitive what with the slider action and icon for connections on the right side...
Thanks guys for the help much appreciated I did finally figure out that I needed to right click on the text.
No can do. The shaders are a set of instructions to tell DAZ Studio's built-in render engine, called 3Delight, how to render the materials. Each render engine is different and shaders made for one will either not work or produce different results with another. For example shaders for DAZ Studio will not work in Poser because Poser uses the Firefly render engine - it needs shaders designed specifically for it. I'm not familiar with Maya, so I don't know what it uses to render, but I'm pretty confident in saying that the DAZ shaders won't be of any use. If you use what is called an unbiased renderer, like Luxrender, it won't use shaders at all.
This may or may not be of much help to anyone stumbling across this thread, but here goes:
You might try mjcteleblender and then use the cycles rendering engine in blender. I've had very good results with it. The downside is that you won't get any of the rig when you do it. This may not be a big problem for you if you know how to use rigify in blender. You'll have to clean up the mesh somewhat as there are several problem areas where rigify is concerned, most notably in the toenails and inside the mouth. Still, those can be fixed with a little careful work to allow blender to use rigify with them. Another note worth making is that when you alter the vertex groups, you'll have to also fudge around a bit with the UV maps, and etc.
Any way you look at it, you have to realize that Daz Studio is really nothing more than a useful program for dressing dolls. They do provide very nice and well detailed meshes within certain limits. Maya is much more powerful, and so is blender. It's really a matter of coming up with a strategy that suits you and refining that.
Daz degrades the skin weight maps to "general" when exporting as FBX because Maya doesn't support TriAx. So the joints look terrible when posed in Maya. The elbows for example look like candywrappers if you xrotate them.
How are people handling this? Just trying to paint new maps :roll: , or is there a better way? Anybody have some tips or tricks?
It's worse than that - FBX doesn't support different maps for a single joint, even if the end application does. How would you handle the elbow in Maya on a native figure? Try applying that to the imported figure (or possibly, if it's something like an extra joint for twist only, you may be able to set it up in DS before exporting and so keep the existing weight maps - I think you could use the Joint Editor tool to insert a new bone at the elbow, then copy the twist (or bend) map to that and disable the bend (or twist on the new bone while disabling the twist (or bend) on the original bone).
Looks like I'd definitely need to add some roll bones to get good twists without TriAx weighting. The FBX is more of a starting point than something ready to use I guess, it's still useful though! Thanks for your reply Richard.