Is Every Product with a 3D Printing License In Fact Printable?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
in The Commons
Is Every Product with a 3D Printing License In Fact Printable? So all the hair models, and clothing, and characters, and animals - they are all 3D Print READY? Or is there going to be problems or issues with printing any of these thousands of products? Has every product your selling a 3D lisence for been tested for 3D printing? I don't want to buy a 3D print license and then find out there's some frustrating issue with having it printed.
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Dude, you could have answered the question yourself just looking at the store. Shaders, textures, and software tools and plugins have the licence.
no
You are responsible for making the product 3D printable ready. This just gives you the license to do it. You will need to create all the files in whatever format is needed for your machine.
Dude, the licence is being sold for hair and clothes and characters and figures - not just shaders, textures, software tools and plugins, so Dude, what are you talking about?
Ok, so I create my own files, I guess I can find out how to do that. The question then is can printable files be made from all the products a print license is being sold for?
I know next to nothing about 3d printing, but I assume some hairs like strand based or geoshell based ones won't work?
Also I'm curious about items that rely on cutout opacity, displacement, or certain shader based options that enhance the geometry?
What percentage of households in the world do you think own 3D printers? Most people don't even know how to get all the functions on their TV remote to work. So excuse me if I sound ignorant, but I am ignorant. It's difficult enough to just get decent 2D renders - nobody should assume that the intricacies of 3D printing are self-evident. Until 2 years ago I had never used a microwave oven. I was at work one day and my coffee was cold, so a coworker said, "Just put it in the microwave,". So I put the cup in and closed the door, and said "Ok, now what do I do?" They couldn't believe I didn't know how to set or turn on a microwave. Do I cover the cup with something? Do I set it for 10 minutes? Will I burn myself on something? Will the cup explode? Am I being exposed to radiation? I live in the 3rd largest city in North America. I know nothing about 3D printing, and there is a LIMITED TIME SALE on 3D print licenses. So I don't have time to take a course or read a text book.
There are lights and tutorials/guides that have 3D printing licence option... What does it matter if it can't be 3D printed - Don't buy them.
I think this is a very valid question to ask. I looks like Daz has just stuck 3D print licenses on all their Daz Originals, regardless of suitability. I think everyone can surmise that things like a video tutorial is not printable, even if it has a 3D print license option. But if a hair or clothing or character product has a 3D print license, it is not obvious whether it would really work for 3D printing or not. And Frank has stated that the products do not come ready to print. The user has to do whatever to make them work for printing.
Actually the licence is not for 3D printing, but for selling the 3D printed items - 3D printing for personal use is allowed by the EULA without any optional licences.
Kind of a related question:
Has anyone created a script to collect *ALL* of the Free DAZ original 3D print licenses from your library? My understanding is that before 9/30/22, you can acquire these commercial 3D print licenses for FREE, but I can't figure out an automated way to collect them.
Shop DAZ Originals, uncheck "Hide Items I own", go through each page, starting with the oldest, and look for items with the blue mark that I own them. Open those items in another tab, click the 3D print license on them, and then the red "Purchased" button turns into a green "License" button, click the green "License" button. When done with a page, scroll to the prior page, and keep a Google Drive or OneNote open that has the current URL of the DAZ original page you are on (I think there are 152 pages, at 120 a page, of DAZ originals to look through.
Tedious.
Every now and then, I hit a DAZ original I purchased, but unfortunately, I purchased it AFTER the magic 7/12/22 date, so it shows up as $1.99 or $1.39 in the cart. These are easy enough to find and eliminate, if I don't in fact want to pay $1.39 or $1.99 for a commercial 3D print license.
If you have the DAZ Dals browser plugin you can check the 'Only Show Items I Own' box
wn'
@Fauvist I hope to get more insights and less ignorant with this tutorial
https://www.daz3d.com/3d-printing--best-practices-and-approaches
which should be a freebie at the moment
Richard Hazeltine, Moderator, has posted repeatedly that Daz is working this week on getting us a solution for this problem.
There are plenty of items which have a 3d print license attached that aren't 3d models, such as textures, HDRIs, shaders, and lighting products. So to immediately answer the question: no, plenty of products with a license are fully unprintable.
As for which model assets are 3d printable, 3d printers are only capable of printing fully enclosed volumes. Hence, if you consider just the base figures without any hair/clothing attached, most character models can be printed because the models are, for the most part, fully enclosed volumes (though modifications to the model would be required if you'd want to print them without supports).
However, most clothing/hair products aren't volumes, but are a collection of faces/planes (i.e. they have no "thickness"). And even those products that are volumes would have gaps between the base figure once your figure is wearing them. Hence, you would need to make your character a fully enclosed volume by converting the flat geometry into a volume and connecting it to the base model. Note also that the eyelashes geometry on the base figures are also flat faces rather than volumes, so you would need to extrude them to make them into volumes, or just remove them.
As for strand hair, those aren't faces but are edges. To print those, you would need to connect the edges to each other first to generate faces, and then again extrude those to attach them to the base figure.
I don't believe Daz has any sort of tools to aid with any of this, and I'm not familiar enough with Blender to know whether any tools exist there to aid/automate the process, as I've never tried to 3d print a figurine, though Blender's Solidify modifier in particular could help here, as well as perhaps the Remesh modifier.
So, to answer your question as it relates to 3d model content, almost nothing related to characters is "3d print ready" if by that you mean you can send the content straight to a 3d printer with no alterations. But if you put in the work, you could make any 3d content printable, though some things will be easier than others.
The current freebie product 3D Printing: Best Practices and Approaches seems to touch on the issues I mentioned, and looks like it has tips on processing the models in ZBrush, but I haven't watched it, nor do I own ZBrush.
The only exception for what could generally be printed right out of the box with no modification at all are environments/props that aren't flat, as well as the base characters with no attachments (after removing the eyelashes).
Dude, you asked "Is Every Product with a 3D Printing License In Fact Printable?"
Do you know what the word "every" means?
Let's keep this civil, please.
I have a resin printer and a filament printer. So far, NONE of the models I've tried to 3d Print from DAZ just work. The tutorial being given away shows how to use ZBrush, but hoe many hobbyists own that? BLENDER is the way to go for sure.
There is a 3d printing Plugin for it.
Hair is very problematic as someone stated ... it has to basically be a solid model. Some of the way old stuff, or maybe the cartoon hairs might work. Proably be good enough for 3D printing. I read someplace that either Genesis or G2 is the model to use for 3D printing. I have not tried yet as I got real frustrated trying to print g3/8 stuff.
The deal being if you;re not somewhat fluent at 3d modeling, getting these models ready for 3d printing is a bit of a challenge.
Amusingly, this product also has a 3D Printing license available, despite the fact that it does not include any 3D-usable content, just tutorial videos.
@Fauvist If i get your question the only things that will need a licence are geometry related items, it does not matter if it has been tested if it will print or not as a third party program will turn the geometry into code the printer can read then use to copy the geometry of the figure or whatever you have created in daz. from my understanding everything geometric shape in daz should be printeable but may require tweaking in other programs to get it printed to an acceptable standard.
If what is being produced is an actual physical model, how would anyone ever know what character morphs were used to create it? If one is using a highly recognizable figure or character that is unaltered, then it's easy to identify. But if what is being used is GenX and 5 generations of morphs from a number of different characters all blended together? The reason I'm asking is that I have dozens of characters I've morphed using multiple figures and characters. I don't even know what figure or character the morphs came from. And if I could find out somehow (how?) would that mean I'd need 30 3D print licenses for my one model?
This is so timely if you are following the whole Beyonce/Kelis/Dianne Warren thing.
You know what morphs were used by selecting the figure, going to the Parameter tab, look at Currently used and set up a spreadsheet. It will give you an appreciation of the frustration of an artist who does 25 promo renders for a product (only one is used) and some rando asks what was that hair that was used as if the artist had a) the time to set up an elaborate spreadsheet to document every asset used in every promo render on a deadline or only did one test promo.
Next, it is important to know the difference between a dial-rolled and a created character; the dial-rolled uses someone else's product and you have have permission and license to use that asset in your product while if you have created the morph yourself in Z-brush or Hexagon. So if you didn't create those morphs, you might need 30 licenses for that character.
Well, I would hope that people would want to adhere to the license terms even if they could get away with not doing so.
The parameters tab doesn't tell you what product the morph came from. Even if I open the morph's panel where you can adjust the limits, it doesn't say what product the morph came from. No matter what I try, I can't get Studio to spit out the identity of the product the morph came from. I'm not talking about a full character morph, I'm talking about a shoulder morph slider that has a number in brackets next to it which tells you the number of times, or the number of figures/characters that were transferred using GenX. In some cases the number in brackets is 32. Which means I have to push the slider 1/32 of the way to get the morph set to 1 - but Studio doesn't tell you which of the 32 shoulder morphs is being adjusted, or the names of the figures/characters that the 32 morphs came from. GenX could have loaded the same shoulder morph from the same figure 32 times, or it could have loaded the shoulder morph from 32 different characters. It's like if a novel was written, but each word in the novel was added by a different author. So you would in fact have tens of thousands of copyright owners for the one novel. But there is no way to know what author wrote what word.
Respectfully, if a PA cannot remember or tell what morphs they used in every promo image - how can anyone expect amateur hobbiests to be able to do it?
Put simply, if the store required every PA to list every item in every promo, they would do so, and they would be more careful to keep track of it as they worked, and you would see fewer of the "artistic" promos that include many other products to create them. If the person creating the project knows it is going to be used for commercial printing and knows that they need to have licenses for all the parts, they will keep track of it as they go. People aren't as likely to keep track of things they aren't required to.
DAZ3D has made software that blends thousands of different products from hundreds of different PAs here, and from other content providers. For 10 years I've been blending tens of thousands of products to produce 10 years of my own characters, and now I'm suppose to know exactly what product, and what percentage of every morph and texture I've used, in every character. DAZ3D didn't require us to keep track of every product and every slider we pushed, or every texture we mixed with other textures. If there is a possible way for me to extract all that information from the characters, I will - but someone is going to have to tell me exactly how to do it.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/metadata/list_products_used/start
I've used this a lot to remind me of products used when I update to the gallery. It is pretty good, but misses some things like pose preset products and some lighting products. Catching morphs and expressions is pretty hit and miss for me, it seems. Maybe the script has been updated since I downloaded it long ago. If Daz says we only need licenses for the products shown by this script, or some other tool they may offer, then that is one way to go to test for compliance.
Edit: It is important to know that the script writes to the Daz Studio log. There is no direct output to your screen. You have to open the log and scroll to the end to find your results.