Why is 'Blender' so popular for creating daz characters?
Toobis
Posts: 967
in The Commons
What is the main reason so many character daz creators import a daz character into blender to create a new character from it to put back in daz?
I was just eager to know Blenders plus points here.
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I'm not an expert in economics, but maybe because Blender is free?
Daz Studio doesn't have modeling capabilities, so it needs to be exported to some other program to create morphs (unless you really, really love using dFormers). Of the applications that have advanced modeling capabilities, Blender is one of the only ones that is free, and it's a full-stack 3D application as well.
Zbrush and Modo are pretty popular too but costly
Free open source programs like Blender for modeling, or GIMP for 2D graphic work, offer pretty much the same functionality, although sometimes maybe not as elegantly, as even the most expensive suites of software from the largest commercial software companies. Wow. That was a wordy sentence. Sorry for that.
Blender can do pretty much everything. For free. It's hard to learn, but so are the big commercial products, and you've often got to pay to really learn how to use them on top of it.
Blender is free. That's it.
Blender has got much better recently and got rid of most of the awfully designed rubbish GUI (designed by a very angry mean person to cause maximum suffering), to one basically like all the fancy expensive things.
It's still missing a few things, like an extrude tool that works on normals properly (my main annoyance), and a project scale function (because Blender's default scale was originally made for designing reading schools for ants). Then a few of the fancy things that fancy tools have but you only really need for specific fancy things (though i'd like a basic cloth thingy that was a bit less basic, especially now Marvelous Designer has gone to an rubbish anti consumer subscription only mode).
But really if you don't need to do anything specifically fancy it does basically everything. Now with 19632x less pain then before. So it being used more for non specific fancy things isn't really suprising.
Free software "sells" but as always you also get what you pay for. I had the option to get into ZBrush and well, I definitely don't want to go back to Blender (but in all fairness I've always disliked working with Blender, so.. bias is in effect here). Blender is an amazing and impressive project, but it's definitely not for me :/
Blender does everything. And it does it well. Free or not, I think that based on its capabilities many/most professionals and serious users would scrape together the money to buy Blender if it wasn't free. You can make objects, UV map them, make some incredible materials, do post production/compositing, do rendering, animation, and make smoke/fire/cloth/fluid/collision simulations, and on and on. And like DAZ Studio you can make scripts to automate stuff, and there's tons of online support and training for it.
Of course personal preference is an issue with any software, especially with something like Blender which has 2.64 gazillion features. I developed a similar dislike (well, more than that) for Zbrush, to the extent I made a law that it's not allowed on my computer ever again.
Whenever I run DAZ Studio I also start up Blender simultaneously. I make and UV map objects/props in Blender and send to D|S, I send character meshes from D|S to Blender to use as a mannequin to develop clothing objects that I can send back to D|S to do cloth sims with VWD (awesomeness). I write scripts to automate stuff, the UV mapping is amazing, and on and on.
Oh, and yes, you can extrude faces along normals. Edit mode, select the Extrusion tool, select the faces, then rt-click and select Extrude Faces Along Normals.
Funny, zbrush was a waste of money for me; prefer blender.
Hm. I didn't realize Blender gained so much popularity. Well, it progresses really rapidly!
Why is that another hidden feature?!? I mean, surely the basic extrusion tool should do that when set to "normal" instead of the terrible pointless thing it does..
Now one 3ds thing i'd like is to be able to edit extusion sets after the tool is already started... (so you can pick some faces, set extrusion and then add/remove more faces)...
...actually since 2.81 it's become better as they revamped the UI to make it function more like other 3D programmes. Oh all the hotkeys are still there, but for someone with short term memory issues such as myself, I always found that the old UI really clunky and unintuitive which is why I gave up on it years ago (until now).
Really wish there was a Daz to Gimp bridge. Yeah it's a bit "wonky" as well compared to PS, but just as versatile, supports Photoshop .abr brushes, and isn't by subscription.
+1
I do think that the biggest failing of Blender development has been in the UI. Personally I think DAZ Studio is, and has been, far better in terms of UI design than Blender, and only when it started to take on some of the UI features that D|S has had for a long time has Blender become a lot more usable. Now I'm not saying Blender was anywhere near as bad as ZBrush (that's like world class poor UI design, IMO), but you can tell there was always more focus on functionality than usability. Honestly I think that D|S is really top notch in terms of UI design and functionality.
That being said, I think that since Blender has just an insane amount of functionality in so many areas, figuring out how to stuff 1.36 gazillion features into a reasonable number of menus and keyboard shortcuts and so on, so that it's intutive and usable to all different types of users is nearly impossible. So given its extreme functionality means that users are going to have to invest some time in learning how to use it. On the bright side, for example, if you're just going to use it primarily for, say, making and UV mapping objects, the actual number of features you have to use on a regular basis is likely quite small. Yeah, it's got gazillions of features, but you might only use a handful regularly. And if you spend a little time you can figure out what those are and assign your own keyboard shortcuts, or if you're really energetic you can make scripts and make your own menu items and such.
But yeah, if you don't use it regularly you'll forget stuff. For example, just yesterday I added a cylinder and wanted to make a tube/pipe out of it. So I inset the end caps, and thought "what the heck is the command that will take the end caps and bring them together so I get a pipe?". I thought it was Merge, but that didn't do it, so I looked around and finally found the Bridge command. Oh yeah, now I remember.
And since there's so much active development in Blender they're always changing and adding features, and maybe they'll move stuff or copy the same feature to different menus and stuff ("oh, so now it's a right click menu item....").
So yeah, it will take some effort. But between being able to map your own keyboard shortcuts and write simple scripts for stuff you do often, and just making some notes to remind yourself how to do stuff, it's really not a big deal. But for those looking for a one-button-click solution for everything it's probably not for you.
That would be my best guess. LOL
Not following you. It extrudes along whatever the Transformation Orientation is set to. Might you be confusing a hidden feature or something terribly pointless with just not knowing how to use Blender?
....primarily using Blender for modelling and UV Mapping. Sadly unable to take advantage of the sculpting tools for creating custom shapes and morphs as I lost much of the grip, pressure sensitivity, and steadiness in my hands.
Are you sure you're not confused to what it actually does?
The extrusion tool set to work on "normals" and the hidden right click extrude on normals option function entirely differently. The tool set to normals extrudes to a 3 value XYZ direction (which is basically the same as using XYZ mode with an offset, a bit pointless). With the right click option it's a single value "normal" that works perpendicularly on individual normals like the standard extrusion tool in basically every 3d software.
Putting a "normals" mode for a tool that doesn't in effect work on "normals", while having one that actually does hidden in a right click menu probably isn't the best design ever. Making it an option of the standard tool is surely better, right?
Maybe for YOUR workflow; not for mine (or, apparently, the person/people who coded the menu tree).
Is clicking into a menu rather than just having something plainly visible/a default option better for "workflow"? It's 3 clicks vs 1..
Which automatically points out another problematic point with Blender: documentation. In all fairness though, documentation is a difficult aspect and something which many (open source) projects struggle with. Nonetheless, the official documentation has many parts which leave much to desire. And this is also an area where you can clearly see the difference between commercial and open source software... When I compare this to ZBrush then pretty much every option shows a brief description when I hover my mouse over it, or when you press ctrl you'll get a more descriptive explanation. And that brings plenty of advantages... Last time I tried I really struggled with Blender to get some basic shapes set up (note: this was a few years back). At the same time I managed to get textured objects into Daz Studio within a few hours while using ZBrush. That's not necessarily because one program is better than the other (both have "bridges" so to speak) but purely because ZBrush had better documentation.
It doesn't matter if you managed to build the best tool in the world when no one else besides yourself can use it to its full potential.
There is an alternative to Blender, sort of, it's actually an offshoot of Blender and has been keeping pace with the updates. For one thing, it rely's on mouse clicks instead of keyboard hotkeys and uses windows and toolbars more. Check this video about it to find out more.
One problem with Blender is that you never know if the plugins you were using will work with the next version and the version updates happen quite frequently.
I have been using Blender for making morphs, but I'm still trying to get my head around the new UI... Just when I thought I figured out the logic, they went and changed everything...
Do you have links to material that can be read, the guy apparently is practicing for an auctioneers career...
Funny you should mention that about the Blender plugin changes. One of the things I just got finished working on this morning is fixing a plugin I wrote a few years ago so that it works with 2.9. Arrggghhh....
However, on the bright side, one great thing about Blender is all you have to do is hover your mouse over most of the menu items or other tools anywhere on the interface and it gives a popup showing the python code you can use to duplicate it. And there's a terminal window where you can enter some Blender python code and it will autocomplete to show you the options available.
@Perttia
Every version of Blender ever released can be redownloaded
at any time and you can run them all on the same machine with no conflicts.
When a Daz studio update breaks a critial plugin
you better had kept an offline installer of the older version
as it seems very difficult to convince Daz to hand over a previous version AFAIK
I have invested nearly $300 USD in Professional Blender addons( Hard-ops,Boxcutter,Decal Machine and the physical Starlight &Day light plugin that gives Blender volumetric atmospheres like the eon vue software)
And I may soon be getting Flip Fluids.
I only buy from vendors on blender market who makes plugins for a living and thus have every incentive to update them as they do not have the expense of upgrading thier application and have free access to the early alpha/beta builds to get their products ready for the stable release.
And even in the event that a Critical plugin does not get updated for the latest verion I can always fire up the previous release to get my work done.
Blender is a total win.
PerttiA let me take a look cause I'm pretty sure you can use your own textures or from other sites. Just need to refresh my memory here.
Ok went to the site and checked under features, there are two videos with information about textures/materials, One is at the top and called Materials and the other is down a little bit and called File Formats.
https://www.bforartists.de/features/
... Have to say I am deeply confused by claims that blender has bad documentation.
A) pretty much every tool has pop ups with a brief description when you hover over it
B) The blender manual https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/keyframes/index.html is constantly updated and includes in depth decriptions of what every single feature of blender does with helpful pictures.
I'll add to the blender love - I always found it pretty intuitive (well after the 2.5 overhaul, 2.49 and earlier were deeply painful) Meanwhile I've given Zbrush multiple attempts and me and its ui are not speaking the same language.
I also don't agree that "you get what you pay for" more money means theoretically more money to pay people to improve your product (although plenty of time it means more money for your shareholders and management bonuses) But over the past couple of years blenders funding has increased pretty substantially to the point where they have a bunch more paid developers (though still less than the likes of Maya and Zbrush)- and, because its open source, they also have a bunch of willing folk who can add features and fix bugs for free as well.
As to blenders popularity - well yes it being free and having a bunch of internet tutorials is definitely a reason. Personally I like it because it very good sculpting tools with the ability to switch and also select and pull individual vertices if you need to. For making character morphs - for instance - the ability to move the teeth and eyes as units in edit mode but do the rest of the morph in sculpt mode is completely invaluable.