Should I use Blender for animations?
tfis
Posts: 129
Hi there,
I'm using Daz Studio for about 6 month. I have a little 3d-background using 3dsmax/Poser about 20 years ago (holy sh*t 20 years? really? wait Star Wars 1 just came in to the cinemas (the new 1 not the old 1)).
So I'm quite impressed with the quality and the huge amount of stuff which is available for Daz Studio. The software is quite easy to use and if you can deal with some quirks you can get great results in a very short time. Very nice....until you try to animate stuff. Nevermind.
So I asked myself:
Should I animate the with blender? I know I would have to start from scratch and there is a steep learning curve because of a lot of key commands. But things like vertices, faces, modifiers, shaders aren't soo new for me
So when (if?) I learned this blender stuff (which will take some weeks/months/lifetime) how complicated is it to import Daz Characters / Props?
- Do I have to re-rig everything? (detention work)
- Are the materials/textures working correctly or at least ok?
- What about the facial expression moprhs of Daz, can I import them too? (no, I don't want to re-model everything)
- Do I have to rebuild things like JC-Morphs? (forget it, I just can't do those things)
I know, there are a lot of youtube tutorials about the daz to blender bridge or diffeomorphic plugin. But I would like to get an "real-world" opinion.
I would like to make use of all this sassy 21first (late 20th) century stuff, like softbody, collision, dynamics, liquid simluations and a viewport with more than 1.0 fps (wireframe would be ok).
Or would it be better to take a look at unreal or unity?
Is it worth it to enter the rabbit hole? (the answer, I know: it depends ;) )
Best regards
Sorry in advance for my grammar, english isn't, obviously, my first language.
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Comments
As for unreal, if you can get one of those new expensive cards, it can do real time raytracing, that's a game changer. There's also a daz bridge. Then daz assets aren't optimized for game engines and you may need to do a lot of work to fit them especially on materials depending on your needs.
As for blender, there's diffeomorphic that does everything for you. I mean figures, props, lights, cameras, materials, instances, jcms, morphs, really everything. The limit is HD morphs that are possible but not so easy to get, they require some extensive manual work. As for materials cycles will get you almost the same as iray, while eevee has limitations so you may need to fix something.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-16.html
Indeed
By using the Diffeomorphic plugin to bring Daz figures& content into Blender,
you will have access to several FREE options for importing & retargetting animations from outside source such as Mixamo.
Even after conversion to Blenders human IK control system,Rigify
Of course once inside Blender your Daz assets can interact with blenders unified physics system
but that will require learning blender dynamics beyond beginner level.
As far as Unreal there is a Daz bridge to that engine( not sure if it supports UE5 yet)
but as @Padone,
stated you will likely have to perform alot of manual grunt work to get the Daz figures materials to look really good in Unreal engine assuming you have an advanced knowledge of the unreal engine.
Should I animate the with blender?
You can, many do. Blender is pretty good at everything, not the best and any single thing. The other option is Maya, which is the industry standard but costs quite a bit unless you have a free student license (or know a student that will sign you up).
- Do I have to re-rig everything? (detention work)
Nope. The Daz to Blender Bridge and Diffeomorphic both bring the model into blender with a full rig. Diffeomorphic allows you to choose between 3 different rigs.
- Are the materials/textures working correctly or at least ok?
Materials and textures are ok but they were made and optimized for DAZ. I think all textures require some work to look good in whatever render engine you are going to use. I don't think there is any way to transfer textures from one renderer to another and have perfect results. Padone has done a lot of work helping to get DAZ materials into blender and provides us a very good starting point.
- What about the facial expression moprhs of Daz, can I import them too? (no, I don't want to re-model everything)
Yes. All of the defualt expressions import, at least with Diffeomorphic and probably with the DAZ to Blender bridge.
- Do I have to rebuild things like JC-Morphs? (forget it, I just can't do those things)
One of the best reasons to import characters from DAZ (aside from the huge selection and awesome HD maps) would be the driven joint control morphs and flexions. I looked at iClone and was shocked that they did not have jcm's or shapekeys. Maybe that has changed or I missed something, but I stopped researching it after I read that. You can also import additional morphs as shape keys such as extra shaping morphs.
I would like to make use of all this sassy 21first (late 20th) century stuff, like softbody, collision, dynamics, liquid simluations and a viewport with more than 1.0 fps (wireframe would be ok).
Ok, pump the brakes, slow down a bit. :) Blender is pretty good for animating and sculpting, but I've seen many people complain about all of the above. Blender just isn't great at simulations. You can get them to work and people have, but they are finicky and cantankerous. I've only experimented with them a bit so I'm no expert. I think the pros turn to Houdini for simulations, and Marvelous Designer for cloth sim. I have used MD, and it is awesome at simulating cloth.
Or would it be better to take a look at unreal or unity?
Unreal rendering looks seriously impressive for real time rendering. You should be able to animate and export to Unreal (from Blender) to take advantage of the rendering but I have never done it. I just switched to Maya partially for this reason. The link between Maya and Unreal looks really smooth. When rendering in Blender for animation, you'll want to use Eevee. Cycles will give better results but we'll all be dead by the time it renders an entire animation.
Hope this helps.
I agree that blender is a little "clunky" in simulation, and it's not so fast either using only the cpu with a limited multithreading (threads are per object). You can get nice results but usually needs a bit of experimentation. Then diffeomorphic helps with this too, it can import dforce outfits and provides some basic soft body effects.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/04/dforce-simulations.html
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2022/01/softbody-simulations.html
I can't really argue with that. Great things are possible, but sometimes requires a tremendous amount of messing around why settings by trial-and-error. But replacing those frameworks with something that works in realtime is on the Strategic Goals list for 2022. I don't think it'll be on the level of Houdini, but to be even merely "very good", it wouldn't have to be :)
A new hair system was on the list, and they've already started to deliver it (it's in the daily builds already) so they take this list seriously.
I should add that the next Blender Studio movie, The Heist, has as it's goal to direct Blender's development towards making it a viable tool for realistic films, and the Strategic Goals are derived from what it takes to do that.
That's why it's so hard to talk about Blender; it is improving so fast that it is hard to talk about its limitation in a way that isn't stale just months after the statement.
Thank you all for your answers!
I think I'll give blender a try.
Although I am a blender noob, and have only been using Blender for 6 months, I am absolutely in love with it as an all-in-one-solution. Is it the best solution for each cog in the workflow/pipeline...no, it isn't....not yet. My suggestion is get mucked in and learn it. The software is going from strength to strength and now is the best time to learn it. Just look what people have achieved with it! Ian Hubert's stuff is amazing, for my own tastes. Get a few good courses under your belt and persevere and you will not be disappointed. The Blender community is so welcoming and helpful, so much that I feel part of a really big family. You just need to google something that you don't know and can count on the fact that someone else has encountered the same problem and has written or recorded a tutorial. I also want to animate in Blender, but after doing quite a lot of very indepth tutorials/courses I found I wanted to learn everything about blender, i.e. modeling, uv wrapping, textures, geometry nodes, animating, sculpting. etc. etc - Jeez, I alsways wondered about the over-enthusiasm of Blender users (thinking they just weren't right in the head, and now I am one of theose people)
Thank you.
I laughed as I agreed to everything you said :) It used to annoy me that I couldn't just be a "user of the Blender software" but had to be a "Blenderhead". But now I get it... I feel associated with Blender, and I understand why, after downloading, the site says that "Blender is now yours. Forever."
To add to the part about "family", I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Ton Roosendahl, at SIGGRAPH in 2019. He had the representatives from Amazon wait while he continued his chat with me. And at the Birds of a Feather session, he didn't even really talk about technology, preferring to literally go around to each and every one of about 100 people and asking them what they did with Blender. I hope they didn't record the session because as an Open Source proponent, I gushed like an unabashed fanboy when it was my turn. And all the other guys just seemed to personally care about whether my hare-brained ideas worked out. So even though Blender is not, as Fungible User said, the best at everything (yet), it is still by far my favorite tool of first resort.
The Maya and Houdini forums are similarly full of helpful, knowledgable, and enthusiastic people, but as proprietary platforms, they simply can't match the "I know what I'm telling you is true because I actually wrote that part, and here is the exact line that illustrates what I am saying. This is what you would change to make it work for you, and you can submit your hack if you like." The only place that comes even close to that, though I've never gotten very deep into it, is the Unreal Engine Forum, with their open-source-but-not-really model.
To all of you who have expressed interest specifically in animating in Blender, I'd like to make a suggestion, and it is to invest in Pierrick Picault's "Alive" animation course if you haven't already. Previously, I had taken a sort of "just jump in an do it" attitude, but please trust me on this one, their is so much value in learning from a master. I've gotten the Daz rig to work with all my tools, but I see now that there are many, many ways in which I could have done things in better, faster, or completely automated ways, but I just didn't connect certain conceptual dots together, like Pierrick shows how to do. I'm that first proverbial cave man not even walking fully erect yet, and Pierrick is the guy at the end of the progressive series with the jet pack. Best $80 I have ever spent because before, I sometimes couldn't even understand my own scenes a week later. Be like Pierrick :)
I have been watching his free videos this week. The guy is truly a master.
Now that both of my Character ecosystem have a pipeline tool that converts to rigify
(with retargeting to the control rig!!)
I only animate Characters within Blender.
I still use external programs to generate facial and lipsync (Daz& Iclone) but after that , its all blender with no compromises
Thanks
As soon as my little "project" with Daz Studio is finished (which will take some weeks), I'll take a look into Blender.
BTW:
What do you guys think about iClone?
Yesterday I saw the promo reel (Version 8) and was quite impressed.
You can shift keyframes there! And there is a manual, i think. Crazy shit... ;)
IClone 8 and Character Creator 4 are both big steps up from the previous versions. Lots of long overdue features have been added. Downsides are, they are expensive and their tutorials tend to be scattered in terms of which features are covered in them and how.
it is in need of a comprehensive straight fwd third party master course.
it does work very very well for animations. As stated though it does not use corrective morphs or Atleast does not import them. Causing there to be less than realistic deformations in animation. But most users feel the advanced animation tools and lip synching abilities make up for it. Also it can bridge directly into the data agnostic Omniverse for rendering. AND they have been teasing a direct data link into Blender to be able to animate in iClone and have the animations update in a linked copy of blender. They have something similar already for Unreal.
I was looking into https://cascadeur.com/ recently. It still looks in its early stages, but I did wonder how the animation physics system would/could progress over the years. Hopefully in the future they consider perhaps a Daz auto-rig system, rather than having to build the rig yourself. I have upgraded now to iClone8 thanks to a big discount I managed to wrangle out of a buddy of mine - really don't think I would have paid even the upgrade price tbh. Yep, it's expensive, and I wasn't prepared to almost "re-buy" the entire software package again. I shelled out for the 3D exhange pipeline when I bought iClone7, and I have never regretted it since it is absolutely amazing in getting Daz animations into the software and also for getting iClone motions back out into Daz. Originally my idea was to take Daz animations and put them into iClone to finesse them and bring it back into Daz for rendering, but as I am learning Blender now, I'm finding it so much more rewarding (and exciting) doing it there. Diffeomorphic is such a game changer.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint I also have Pierrick Picault's "Alive" and his "Rigging" course. Just need to sit my @ss down and get stuck in with it.
Yes, that does seem to always be the limiting factor, doesn't it? :) I did find it worthwhile to finish the Art of Rigging first, though. Pierrick's an awesome teacher, but I'm not at all sure I would have groked it fully if it hadn't been the second or third time around for certain concepts. The hardest thing was eating my vegetables first and finishing the Rigging course, which was less interesting because I've got Daz's rig already and if I ever actually rig a character myself, something else has already gone terribly wrong.
I think this holds true to Blender for most things. I see what people are doing with Blender and I am just so awestruck; and it's like, "Oh-oh, I want to do that!!", and, "Oh, wow! I want to do that, too!!'. So I watch the tuts on how to do 'that', and suddenly realise I need more of the fundamentals before I can tackle it. I'm like a kid in a candy shop, and your Mum tells you that you'll spoil your dinner, so I definitely understand the veggie comparison. I have now approached things in a different way. I have an animated scene in mind that I want to do, and so I've started with the big picture and will wheedle it down piece by piece. Learning each facet as I go. I have now finished most of the practical lessons for beginners so that I feel I have a grasp (however loosely) of each aspect, but I find unless I can use Blender in a practical sense, I won't retain the knowledge. Anyway, so far so good..it seems to be working. I never knew this could be so much fun, just enjoying the journey and the community...I thirst for more, and it's actually giving me so much personal confidence in the meantime.
Will definitely take your advice and do the rigging course first. It's something I have always wanted to get my head around anyway.
I really like your videos on YouTube, they help me enormously. Especially like your Ghost in the Shell animations. Will def have a look at this add-on because I tried to learn Maya first, and spent stupid amounts of money only to realise it wasn't sustainable, and so I took a nose dive into Blender. Is it in the Blender Marketplace?
+1000
If I had to give up every addon that I had, except for one, it'd be Animation Layers.
It might at the usual suspects as well, but I got it at blendermarket.com
Thanks I am glad you found them helpful
@TheMysteryIsThePoint
indeed I was planning to get this animation layers add-on for over year but I needed to nail down a pipeline that uses the rigify controls along with mocap retargeting.
I now have these options for both my Iclone Characters( imported via the Blender pipeline tool) as well as the EXPY kit rigify retargeter for genesis diffeo imports!
@Wolf359 Your stuff, your pipeline not even to mention the final results, are always inspiring.