convert genesis character to unified low poly mesh?
gibrril_fa945a6cee
Posts: 544
in The Commons
Hi all,
I was wondering if it was possible to convert a Genesis 8 figure with clothes and hair into a single low poly mesh. For my purposes it would be perfectly fine if that mesh was no longer posable. But if it is still posable, also fine :)
Can this be done inside of Daz Studio or Blender?
Thanks a lot,
Me
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If you set the Resolution to Base in the Parameters pane it will go as low-poly as it can without editing, then http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/nodes/convert_figure_to_props/start will covnert the whole hierarchy to props
Thanks! Will it convert it to one prop or will it convert the figure, the hair and all clothing items to separate props? Also where do I enter this script? Thanks a lot!!!
Separate props.
The easiest way is to download using the link above the code, then you can either drag the fuile into the DS Viewport or just place it in a convenient spot in your content library (e.g. the Scripts/Utility/ folder) and run it from there by double-click or right-click and make it a custom action if this is soemthing you need often.
Try Decimator for DAZ Studio
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/10673/start
I would like to create low poly meshes to be able to render crowd scenes in one go. :) (Without using billboards) o I have total freedom of camera ange :)
Just a quick test and I forgot to check if the hair was set at high resolution...
Geometry memory consumption: 2.957 MiB (device 0), 0.000 B (host)
Texture memory consumption: 23.192 MiB for 12 bitmaps (device 0)
2021-10-30 21:55:13.169 Total Rendering Time: 9.12 seconds
Just the Basic Genesis 8 Female with clothing and hair, and some textures are even 4K, which could be taken to 2K or even 1K, which would probably take the textures below 5MiB => Your everyday fully functional G8F that doesn't use more than 10MB's of VRAM fully clothed and with hair.
What do you mean? That I don't need to "downsize" the G8 figure? Or is this a test you did with a downsized G8? I'm not sure I follow... Thanks a lot for clarifiying!
What I did was, took the normal Basic Genesis 8 Female, removed the lashes, all the other texture maps, but the diffuse one (used Shinteo's), set the character and the clothing to base resolution, SubD to 1 and set all the parts of the figure that are covered by clothing "Not Visible"... Forgot the mouth though, so that's still another place to reduce the load.
The base resolution G8 is already quite light on the resources, it is the SubD, the textures and texture maps on the figure and everything fitted to it that are adding the load sometimes beyond the capabilities of some systems.
Instancing can also be used to add duplicate figures without adding the load.
Thanks for clarifying!
Gotcha, makes sense. Another thing you can do to increase performence is use the texture atlas to combine textures on fewer sheets to save on resources. You will lose texture quality by downsizing, but for background figures it shouldn't be an issue.
Just for the fun of it, took the textures down to 25% of the originals.
Geometry memory consumption: 2.899 MiB (device 0), 0.000 B (host)
Texture memory consumption: 9.204 MiB for 12 bitmaps (device 0)
Not quite 10MB's, but 12MB's is not bad either for a fully functional G8F with clothing and hair without using any additional tools
I'm experimenting with it myself now :)
The base G8 male/female figures are not that resource intense. The environment can be, though. I have rendered a G8.1 female character plus clothing plus a little extra plus the "Day of the Dead Street" environment. The everage GPU would just quit on that. And it was NOT the character. And it was NOT the clothing either. In fact, the environment alone consumed about 14 GB of VRAM on my GPU
I consider the G3 and G8 figures as quite efficient already. If you are not adding any HD extension and cranking up the SubD. And, yes, instancing will save quite some memory. You NEED to change optimization on your render tab, from "speed" (default) to "memory"
You should also be careful of which hair you pick for a background character. I have hairs that are over a million polygons, as well as textures. No point worrying about if the Genesis character is 20K or 40K if you then stick a 1000K hair on top. Older hairs are often more suitable, as some have 20-50K. Don't go too low poly though, or it will look bad even on a character far in the background.
you should also hide any underlying body parts before converting to a prop or use the geometry editor to delete underlying mesh afterwards
Have you seen Predatron created a line of "LoREZ" figures for this purpose? They look pretty cool including clothes and hair all in one, and currently on deep discount https://www.daz3d.com/lorenzo-and-loretta-bundle
And he has other LoREZ products aside from those https://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=lorez
Love LoRenzo & LoRetta
lots in this image
Thanks all for the feedback! Lorez was what gave me the idea in the first place, yet those figires, for as far as I can see also have some limitations when it comes to clothing and hair, especially if you go into historical contexts... That's why I wanted to explore the low res G8 option :)
I am not a big fan of Lorenzo and Loretta, although I have both and used them. They have head morphs, but I struggled to get them to look different, and even for small background figures it shows when everyone looks the same. Both figures are only 5K polys, and so the amount of polys in the head is not that much, which may be the reason that the morphs don't change the look that much. In terms of resources, there is not a huge saving over a 5K base figure compared to a 16K Genesis 8 one, particularly considering that hair, clothes and textures are likely to be of greater relevance to overall resource consumption.
Personally I think Gen 8 (or indeed any Genesis version) is the way to go for background figures. You can use this: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer to reduce their textures to 1K and strip off the bump/normal and displacement maps, which are not needed for background chars. This way you have all the morphing available for Genesis 8, so it is easy to create numerous background figures that will look different, and obviously you have a far wider selection of clothing, hair etc to use as well.
As Richard mentioned above, it is a good idea to convert the figure to one or more props, once you have them posed as you want. This will not make any difference to the VRAM used, but will save you a lot of RAM. A Genesis figure can easily consume a GB or more of RAM, due to all its morphs, correction morphs etc that are loaded with it. Once it becomes a prop, that 1 GB will drop to just 30-50 MB or so. The scene will also load much faster if the numerous background figures are props, rather than figures.
The script doesn't run for me... It appears to run, but Daz Studio just stops responding after it has run for about an hour...
You may not have waited long enough. One of the issues of converting figures to props is that it is extremely slow, and a script doing it to many such items will take a long time.
There is an alternative, which is to export your figure and all of the clothing, hair etc, as an Obj file, and then re-import it back into studio.
The advantage of this is two fold:
1) You get one mesh for the entire figure.
2) It is very fast.
The disadvantage is that the imported mesh does not have all the iray shaders correct, so you have to copy these over from the original figures. This is easy to do, but can be tedious, as sometimes the material names are messed up. Once that has been done save the final result as a prop.
Thanks for the tip! I did create a scene with all my figures in it... Can I export selected to OBJ?
Yes. When exported there is an option to only export the selected objects, in which case select the figure and all its clothing, hair etc.
Alternatively hide everything except the figure, and then export the whole scene (hidden objects are not exported, so it will only export your figure).
Thanks again!
Yes, I have tried myself and script is running so slow, that I have to abandon such an idea.
Decimator is a much faster solution.
Decimator is a useful product, but I don't think it converts a figure to a prop, or is that a piece of functionality I missed?
Ok, I have thought, that the main goal was to get a low poly figure.
Below is a render from Unity of decimated Christian 8 with clothes and the hair.
Total number of polygons is about 50000 (less than 10% of the original number).
Still looks not so bad for a background character.
https://www.daz3d.com/christian-8
https://www.daz3d.com/carlos-hair-for-genesis-8-and-genesis-3-males
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-back-to-class-for-genesis-8-males
... and iray render from Daz Studio.
Hi again, can I also export to fbx? Will that also transform the entire export into one mesh? And does an export to fbx preserve the textures? I was thinking of importing the exported mesh into blender and decimating it there, after which I would bring it back to Daz Studio...