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How? What happens?
Library root not found...
Running 2.76b.
I'll try and get some more detailed info later.
That should only happen if you save to a that is not within a "DS-library". Technically, the script looks for a directory named "data" in the vicinity of the file to be saved. If it does not find a directory named "data", it gives that error.
I had a suspician that's what it might be...I had a problem a couple of weeks ago where all my drives ended up getting shuffled around and I probably left the 'test' directory out of the usual Blender save area.
Got it...
For some reason it wasn't recognizing the data folder in the folder I was saving to...switched folders and now it's working.
Sorry for the bump, but which version of Blender should I be using? I'm using version 2.70, and every time I try to enable the addon I get an error saying "ImportError: No module named dsf".
I'm using 2.77a but I don't use scripts to move items either from or to Daz. The version doesn't matter, unless you are using a script and it needs something in earlier but not later versions.
Well, this is a topic about an addon/script that exports dsf files from Blender, so presumably the version does matter in this case. Does the addon work for you?
EDIT: I've tired updating to the latest version of Blender, and the addon still won't work.
EDIT 2: My bad. Turns out I wasn't installing the addon correctly. I was unzipping the file and installing the python script rather than installing the zip file itself (hence it was missing its modules).
@millighost
I downloaded your Blender add-on to export Blender particle system grass as a DAZ scene subset. It seems to work as expected, I think, but the grass looks sparser in my DAZ viewport than it did in my Blender renders. It looks more like the density in my Blender viewport, which shows only 5% of the particles. Does your add-on export all of the particles, or only those that are visible in the Blender viewport?
Exactly. It uses the particles in the viewport. There are some pros and cons in doing it this way, but in general it should export things like they are in the viewport (e.g. when exporting objects with modifiers, the "viewport" settings are used, not the "render" settings).
@millighost
Thank you for the response. I increased the viewport particle percentage to 100% ... and Blender hung up trying to export the scene subset.
Below is a screenshot of my ground plane. The hex measures 75m across with about 12K triangular polys, and it's the ground plane for a roadside diner. I put the diner in the northwest quadrant because its windows face south and east, so most of the ground plane will be visible outside for interior renders.
I divided the hex into 3 vertex groups -- North, South, and All -- and weight-painted each group to mask out (weight=0) ground covered by pavement or water. I used Grass Free to create the grass and weeds, with short Bahia grass (25K particles) on the North group, taller wild Rye grass (25K particles) on the South Group, and Clover (1K particles), Crabgrass (1K particles), and Dandelions (2K particles) spread over All. That's a total of 54K particles, each with multiple polys. Is that too many for your add-on to process?
@millighost
I finally got it to export and the result was a whopping 54Mb file. That was unmanageable in DAZ Studio. So I decided to use a grass shader for the base material and use Bahia particles as weeds in the south. I deleted the other particle systems and set the Bahia group to 2000 instances (about 16,000 blades). The resulting scene subset was still 5Mb, but that's manageable in DAZ Studio.
Here's a quick test render. I haven't imported the new pavement yet, but the combination of a shader for the tended grass and particles for the weeds looks pretty good.
I have one other question, however. I can't hide the original grass objects (which are outsized) without hiding their instances. I guess I need to move them beneath the ground plane, so they're not visible?
@millighost
I solved my problem. By default, Grass Free makes each blade of grass an individual particle and they're very low-poly, so instancing them doesn't save much memory. The solution was to create my own clumps of grass, make them groups, and set the particle system for my clumps. The result was far fewer instances, and lots more grass, with the same memory usage. Here's a quick test with simple Iray textures for the grass blades. It rendered in less than 3 minutes.
Thank you for this wonderful product!
This looks very interesting. I'm going to play around with it and see what it can do. Thanks for creating.
I'm having problems. Yolur plugin has so much potential it isnt funny for us Blender artists. I have a fully clothed and rigged character in blender I want to bring to DS but I don't want to have to rerig everything. Another person got good results but I must be having some brain flatulence here.
Can you please tell me, step by step how to get my charactgers to daz through your wnderful tool? thanks
As I said you before there are some limits you have to follow, did you check them ?
These will not work correctly: Multiple armatures on one mesh, multiple meshes for one armature, etc. To work correctly, these conditions should be met:
When a mesh-armature combination is exported as a DS-figure, conversion of other modifiers (subdiv, mirror etc) is automatically disabled; only the simple mesh is exported.
I double and triple checked that. The armarture is even named simply "Armature" I've tried selecting both the armature first and the mesh but it makes no difference. Pardon the lips, im still working on them. Should I parent it to the armature edit or what? Last I checked you had to have the mesh parented to the armature for it to work in Blender. What am I doing wrong?
What exactly IS going wrong? Is the exporter throwing up an error message? Does it export a file, but the file doesn't load in Daz Studio?
As far as I can see you're doing right. You have a single mesh parented to a single armature. As TheNathanParable says, if you can be more specific about what's not working may be we can help better. Below is a simple example I got with the plugin.
I choose the "cute girl" from blendswap. It's a terrible model for this plugin because it has everything in the worst case. I had to join meshes and redo the armature bacause it was a rigify. I didn't redo the cycles materials so they don't export. Also there are problems with ngons. And I had to fix the bones in DS with the joint editor. But overall it works.
https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/86958
it simply doesnt output the armature to daz, no error messages no nothing it simply imports as a single mesh. Maybe it's because I have clothing applied to the armature that I don't have selected I'll make a copy delete them and try again.
here is my steps using manul bastoni labs character creation plugin
1 Create the character, it comes pre rigged and ready to go I make a few minoir changes t the shape via a saved shape file.
2 Select the armature then the mesh and hit export to dsx-props(duf)
3 I let it do its thing then click on the exported file and...fail hes I can click then clic oon to pose I simply fail at my own model.
I think I see what the problem is. Can you select the model's bones in the scene tab? Because unfortunately the plugin doesn't create the selection groups needed to select the bones in the viewport, you have to select the bones through the scene tab (or create the selection groups yourself within Daz).
oooooh, all this time I never realized that.Shows how much I remeber about daz. I miss the simpler days :P How do I create the selection groups?
Personally I'm not a rigging expert in DS so I don't know how to create selection groups (yet). But you don't need them to pose the character. Just pick a bone in the scene tab and pose it with the standard rotate tool. Below is my test with m-lab, the character poses fine.
The only issue I found is that bones are a mess. I mean they work fine but are not aligned and sized correctly. So, to have some visual feedback that makes sense, you need to fix them with the joint editor. It's a very tedious work since as far as I can see there's not a global option to fix them all in one shot. But it's doable. Below is the character after some cleanup. In the picture I didn't fix the hands so all the bones point to the root.
I got how to create and assign selection groups. I used as reference the tutorials below. Essentially first you have to create face groups from the Geometry Editor. Then you have to assign those groups to the bones from the Figure Setup tool. I just did a simple monkey puppet to play around with. I attach it too just in case it may be useful. It's saved as an asset file so it should be portable as far as I can understand.
https://www.youtube.com/user/rbtwhiz
oh wow thanks, those will get me back up to speed on Daz Studio's advanced features.I was getting into all of that before Daz ate my files in the transistion between 3 and 4. I'm hoping with lower polygon models Daz will be quicker and more stable I'm still miffed on paying the figure setup tools price then finding out that they are avalable for everyone.
Although I do wonder where you got the information on rbtwiz's page. I dont see anything pertaining to selection groups
just as an FYI I noticed that the importer ignores advanced IK features. I have IK on the arms and stuff in this version and the fingers (rotator system) and the any bones connected to the IK system are gone. It's no big deal, since I can make a new Gene Temple within minutes but it is noteworthy.
Yes there are a lot of limitations. The average model on Blendswap takes a lot of work to be fixed. The cute girl model that I used above is really a good example to understand the limitations of the plugin. If I may ask for an upgrade the following features would be great. They would make it much easier to export the average Blender model to DS. As for IK not being exported, I'm afraid this is quite normal, I don't know of any exporter/converter that handles IK, even the very professional and expensive ones.
1) Support for ngons. I don't see why they are tessellated since both Blender and DS support ngons. Unless this plugin was meant for Blender before 2.5 that didn't support ngons.
2) Support for Cycles materials and export of at least the basic features such as diffuse maps.
3) EDIT: Support for Rigify. That would mean exporting the deformation bones only, relinked in a proper hierarchy. Actually they are driven by bone constraints.
4) Automatic merging of multiple objects applied to the Armature.
5) Of course selection groups.
p.s. As for the tutorials, they are very useful to understand the way DS works. Then some menus are changed and I found the face group panel by myself. But it wasn't hard after the tutorials.
A big thanks for the script.
I'm relatively new to blender. Trying to understand the creation of instances. If I create a cube and want this cube along with multiple instances of it in Daz, how would I go about that?
I've tried creating a cube with mutliple Duplicate Linked objects but, these come in to Daz as objects not instances.
Appreciate any guidance on this.
EDIT: Thanks, I think I've got this sorted. It was my ignorance of not understanding Blender Group Instances.
I am wondering if the script has been updated for blender 2.9 X or do I have to go down to 2.79b for this