Diffeomorphic and Blender 4.0 - should I upgrade Blender from 3.6 ?
Singular3D
Posts: 529
Just in progress setting up a new PC with Win11 and I wonder, if Diffeo can be used with 4.0 or if I should stay with 3.6 for now.
I have tons of Daz assets and I want to transfer them and enhance them in Blender, but there are significant changes regarding material and other things.
I'm unsure if I can go already with 4.0.
Any experience?
Comments
Diffeomorphic 1.7.2 supports Blender 4.0, unless new bugs are found but that's usual. However, as for converting 3.x projects to 4.x personally I wouldn't go that way, because 4.x is very diferent from 3.x. For production it is better to keep 3.x projects in 3.x and eventually do new projetcs in 4.x.
Thanks for the reply. I don't have many projects in 3.6, so I will go with 4.0 to set up my new project space. This will be a blast! :)
I'm transferring my library over. I'm doing inanimates and plants now, not characters or their wardrobes. I switched over to Diffeomorphic 1.7.3 and Blender 4.0 about a week and a half ago.
So far, no particular problems. I don't know what I'm going to think of Blender 4's shader changes when I start adjusting them, but the conversions look as good as Diffeo 1.7.1 and Blender 3.6.5.
I start by converting any old 3Delight textures to Iray using RSSY's converter. I've altered the order of operations in the options a bit, to pick which shaders get priority. The only recurrent error with this script is that if an entire object -- light bulb and lamp hardware alike -- is named 'light', I uncheck the hardware surface, don't autoconvert it, and pick a shader for it manually (else, the entire object will come into Blender bright white). (You can fiddle with the wildcard expressions that guess what Iray shader the surface should get, or add new ones, but so far that hasn't seemed desireable. There've been a couple of other cases where I applied shaders to particular surfaces by hand, but the standard guesses are usually pretty good and I accept them.)
Then I do the Diffeomorphic conversion in Daz Studio.
Then I import the converted model into Blender and save it, along with the store illustrations and the texture maps in separate folders, so I know what it's supposed to look like. Occasionally I get a Python error from Diffeomorphic on Blender import, but so far that hasn't prevented a useful model appearing in the viewport.
I expect, when I start to render these converted models, that I'll want to adjust some of their materials for the specific rendering. But right now I'm not doing that because I want to get my library over, and they mostly look OK.
You have to turn transparency on in Eevee to see some of the textures correctly in a Blender preview.