Looking for DAZ Studio alternatives, better rigging of G8.1, able to use AMD vid card to render?

vozolgant

I'm looking for DAZ Studio alternatives. Software that can has a better posing rig than the current one on G8.1F in DAZ (because making poses with this rig takes absurdly too long, but if we had a better rig we could make poses a lot faster), and able to use AMD vid card to render?

NVIDIA & DAZ dropped the ball on 4.20, and it's very annoying to have to deal with all these problems.

Richard Haseltine

Better rig in what way? Better posing in what way? Are you wanting pre-made content, a la Daz store, or just a tool in which you can ceate content? Are you wanting an equivalant depth of morphs (if noe why not improve performance in Daz Studio by thinning the number you have installed)?

I'm not sure there are that many final render engines that use non-nVidia hardware..

AllenArt

You could try Blender. There is a bridge from Daz to Blender called Diffeomorphic (3rd party and free) that will allow you to use Blender rigs and your AMD card to render with Cycles I believe.

wolf359

Any “alternate rigging” of genesis 8.1 will result in loss of JCM’s thus bad looking joints,

.....Except Diffeomorphic import to Blender with the basic Daz FK rig. (NO conversion to MHX or rigify)

Manually posing the FK  in Blender will be pure torture however you can import Daz poses directly via Diffeo.

Alternatively you can re-rig G81 in blender with Autorig pro($40) and manually create your own corrective morphs with the add-on.

Blender will render Daz scenes & content in both Cycles and EEVEE with non NVIDIA  Hardware ,even on Intel UHD graphics with no GPU at all.

 

such samples here:

Average render time 16-48 seconds per frame

 

 

 

 

 

benniewoodell

wolf359 said:

Alternatively you can re-rig G81 in blender with Autorig pro($40) and manually create your own corrective morphs with the add-on.

Hey @wolf359, how do you get the eyes with Autorig pro to work? I do all the steps and the eyes never follow the eye controller, but I can get everything else in the face to move just fine. I've tried both separating them as separate objects and not, but neither works. I have watched countless tutorials, but since none of them deal with Daz imports, nothing seems to work. I even contacted the guy a couple years ago when I bought Autorig Pro and asked and he had no idea. Just wondering how you do it. 

 

wolf359

@benniewoodell

Hi Benny

to be quite frank I have yet to rig a face with ARP  because, despite my utter amazement at its rigging/IK/FK Controls and motion retargeting,

I have not used ARP for speaking characters or bothered to rig a face, because I know of no way to autogenerate lipsync with an ARP face rig.

And manually animating a speaking performance is not practical for me in late 2022

 

 

I am investigating this add-on which popped up in my facebook feed today.

It appears to be able  to create  not only an ARKKIT  set of blends shapes

but can retarget facial animation from Different rigs which could mean I may possibly use an imported Anilip/Daz mimic or RL/CC3 facial performance  on my ARP rigged Characters

 

 

benniewoodell

@Wolf359 gotcha, totally understandable on it not being feasible to hand key facial movements. I've been on a kick recently to try and get autorig pro to work for facial animations now because my next class at animation mentor starts in two weeks and I'm finally in class four which begins lip syncing. I'm oddly excited for this process lol. For work, I'll still be doing facial mocap stuff because I know it's going to take a long time to do and there's no budget to spend on all the extra days it would take me to animate the face, but I want to do it for my own films for main characters. I can absolutely do it with the rig in Diffeo, but I want to use autorig pro because I saw it has a picker! 

Thanks for posting the link to the video too! I am about to head out, but I'm leaving the tab open on my computer so when I get home, I'll give it a look. Have a great rest of your day! 

wolf359

@benniewoodell

 

“I can absolutely do it with the rig in Diffeo, but I want to use autorig pro because I saw it has a picker! “

 

Indeed!!

and even hand keying those ARP rigs, along with custom key range  baking of FK/IK snapping, is an absolute joy!!

particularly  within a discreet layer from the animation layers addon.

 

Enjoy your evening.

Psyckosama

The reason it takes so hilariously long to pose the figures is because every item your character is wearing has to be not only calculated for movement, but has to be autofitted to fit the adjusted mesh and smoothed and all that, causing performance to completely tank. One easy trick to at least remove some of the grind is to set literally everything on the field to base resolution and disable smoothing on everything while posing.

As for Nvidia v. AMD, iRay is CUDA dependent and my guess is its inclusion if a long standing cooperational deal between nVidia and Daz. nVidia has always been "very good" at offering assistance to companys to intigrate their support products, such as iRay, Gameworks in Video games, and CUDA support in virtually everything that can support it to the point that some companies just don't bother with any form of OpenCL complieance and only support CUDA.

The reason for this is simple... they want to sell Quadros and the best way to ensure sales is to create a captive market.