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Here's my workflow for Blender 2.8
Create your scene in Daz, use the mcjTeleBlender for Blender 2.79 (it works better right now)
I have Blender 2.79 and 2.8
If you are using windows it's all automatic, with Mac you have to load the script and run it. either way it all works.
Sometimes you have to adjust the eye moistures and corneas, but mostly all there.
Save the scene as a blend file, then open it in Blender 2.8
Have fun with Renders Lighting etc.
Quick question because I asked mCasual the same thing: is it necessary to convert all the materials to the DAZ 3Delight default shader before using mcjTeleBlender or do you just send the scene with IRay shaders? Casual advised to convert but I've seen others mention that IRay is better.
By the way, he is working on version 4 now specifically for Blender 2.8 - there's a link to the beta in his Freebie thread.
Well, I bit the bullet and downloaded 2.8; obviously I switched the select to right-click, and the A key to toggle select/deselect.
So far, liking the changes.
Working on that. The Daz half is almost done and the SDK was really not that painful, all things considered :) I'm now trying to figure out how Blender did its Alembic importer to use that as a guide. I think the trick is to make a vertex cache modifier.
Perhaps others do as well, but Ubuntu always works flawlessly with Blender and the NVidia drivers. I only run windows just long enough to run Motionbuilder, and then export the Alembic out of Daz. And geek points for xfce, but really, GDM is not so heavy that it would make any sort of difference whatsoever on a box otherwise capable of something as compute intesive as rendering. But if/when something goes wrong, you will appreciate the size and professionalism of the Ubuntu groups who are going to help you sort things out. Besides, all distros use basically the same kernel, and the differences are all in user-space, i.e. this distro puts a file here, that one puts it there etc.
Good luck and I'm happy to see another Linux users here.
Of course, I cannot try to tell you how to use your computer, but the "heavy reliance on keyboard commands" is by design. I would be willing to bet that once you learn them, you will prefer them. You can really do things very quickly and easily.
Thanks, xubuntu is one of the ones I am familliar with, so won't be that painful. If it wasnt for photoshop, daz studio, marvelous designer and zbrush, I would have jumped off windows a long time ago. Win7 is pretty good, but even my stripped down version is nowhere near as light on system resources as linux tends to be. I build my rigs to run my programs, not a pretty OS that thinks it knows better than me where my system resources should be put to use :P A nice wallpaper is pretty enough for me lol
Just having fun for now, but already got farther than I ever got - believe it or not, setting up a simple shader node for an HDRI and modeling anything in blender is kind of a milestone for me. I followed a tute by Blender Guru years ago and actually managed to create an image, but it was really hard-won. This time it seems like so much less effort. I think I'm gonna like it. And I really like Cycles btw...I like Eevee too, but Cycles is awesome. And isn't Lookdev great too? :D
Will take me awhile until I manage to create anything meaningful, but many programs have required that of me :P. But I'm really liking it so far. I remember downloading 2.5 when it was new and not being able to figure out how to even delete the default cube. LOL.
Laurie
I really want to use the VSE but performance is not there and the ergonomy is still no good. I think using a separate video editor is better
Depends on your needs. I find latest Da Vinci Resolve to be way better as a linear video editor. It lacks few functionnality that I'd like to see coming but still, just the free version is impressive
BTW for those who have an RTX card, a build can be found here https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Cfbbbc/
I tried the Octane free tier build too and octane is faster than Cycle. Have to compare with the RTX build
So far the only disappointment is the Opensubdiv implementation which is not yet optimised (ultra slow)
Blender is still intensely annoying but now it's not annoying by design, it's just annoying because I don't know how to use it (with the new UI it's no longer in my way, just lack of experience with it is). I tried the Diffeomorphic export/import from Daz yesterday with a G3. It worked pretty well apart from some materials just do not compute with it (especially fancy stuff on grafts). Otherwise it's looking like a program I might spend time becoming familiar with. The best thing about it is IT'S FREE! Whoohooo.
Wow, that is really neat looking!
I love the keyboard shortcuts; I find it is quicker for me, much quicker.
I love cycles. I much prefer it to Iray. Wish I enjoyed getting Daz content into Blender more.
That's interesting looking!
I think we were separated at birth :)
Can you tell us more? Lots of us have been hoping for a Blender Bridge for years. I've tried mjcTeleBlender and also Diffeomorphic but without much success (problems with geografts, rigging, etc.). I'd like to render animations in Eevee but I'm not sure whether I would prefer to animate in Blender too or just render my DAZ Studio animations.
I've had limited time but been trying out 2.8 - it's fantastic ... except that some things have been moved and shortcuts altered so my muscle-memory is slowing me down - a few speed improvements for workflow though so once I'm used to it it'll be much faster. Like you can now select multiple objects and go into edit mode with them all at once! The F2 fill addon is now available with Blender rather than separate (just need to turn it on) so now I've actually discovered that too. And a bunch of other things.
I no longer need to fight it to make particles work (that was surprising - I know it was my fault before but now it's no longer anybody's fault lol)
I've got double-tap-A to select/deselect all but otherwise going with the defaults (I got used to left-click select in 2.79 after I learned 2.8 would be that way) - liking right-click to open a menu (when I remember it's there instead of tapping 'W' or whatever.
3 thumbs up
If you go into Preferences/Keymap and check "Select All Toggles" A will select all and A again will deselect. Just seemed easier to me ;).
Laurie
Groovy - that's what I'm used to :)
Is there a full on tutorial video for getting the basics of this new version of Blender? I loaded up the program... looked EVERYWHERE in how to create a basic object like a sphere... couldn't find it.... so I guess I need to watch a video on the basics. I've not used Blender in a long while so my brain is rusty in any case! LOL
Shift A -> mesh -> UV sphere
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6 has the official blender fundamentals.
https://youtu.be/aX6HAn7zieg BornCG...he plans on making a series of tutorials on 2.8. This is the first one.
Following this path: blender.org > Support > Tutorials > Check out free tutorials here > Blender Fundamentals 2.80
Will take you here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6
A user manual is also available under Support here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/
There are lots of intro tutorials for Blender 2.80 at https://www.blendernation.com/
To add a primitive, in the 3D Viewport menus at the top left corner, click ADD/Mesh/ & select whichever type object from the list.
Thanks folks! :-)
Sure. First off I should say that I'm not trying to get JCMs or anything like that to work... I was inspired by my just-short-of-working-perfectly-but-just-annoying-enough-to-piss-me-off experience with the official Daz Alembic exporter. That means that my goal is to get an alread animated figure from Daz into Blender that'll be vertex perfect to the original. Like Alembic, I don't even attempt to bring textures and shaders, but intend to include some functionality so that you'll only have to texture the figure once. I don't consider this to be very bad because I find the material nodes in Blender easier to tweak, using the original Daz maps anyway.
I wrote an Alembic exporter that fixed all the problems of the Official one, but it was kind of inconvenient to use because I hadn't yet learned how to make a Daz plugin, but it did work, and allowed me to do cloth sim on a Daz asset in Blender:
https://youtu.be/dj9vd7tS8uM
https://youtu.be/Nrc4y6QIS1s
Sorry about the dark render, I forgot to hide the cieling/walls because I hadn't done the lighting yet.
But then it dawned on me that Blender is open source, so there's no reason why I couldn't just hack it to read the data in directly, without the need for a huge Alembic file. I was in the process of doing that, but that would have been Linux only, and I actually met Ton Roosendaal at SIGGRAPH last week, and he convinced me to do it in Python. But such a thing exceeds my Python skills, and so it's going a little slow (I don't know Blender's internal data model, either...).
So, right now, in Daz, once you've got your figure animated, you'll just go "Edit >> Blender Bridge" which brings up a dialog. You'll give it a port number (default to 8080), frame range, and press "Start Server". The dialog will stay open, and wait for Blender to connect to it. In Blender (and this part is not done yet) you'll do something :) and just like the Alembic importer, it'll make a vertex cache modifier for each object that it reads from Daz Studio. It reads vertex, normal, UV, and material group data from Daz as it needs it, in order to do simulations, renders, or whatever. If you feel like waiting, the add-on doesn't care if Blender is running on the same computer, another computer on the same subnet, or another computer on the other side of the world. I've also got the beginnings of some code that will convert dForce Classic Curly Hair to a proper Blender hair particle system, because the mesh is HUUUUGE. I'd like to try to add some smarts so that it'll automatically send changes one makes in Daz to Blender, a true Live Link, but I'm afraid of Daz's threading model, which the SDK provides NO INFORMATION on.
To be honest, this would be good enough for me... I do mocap with a couple of Perception Neuron Pros, retarget it to my G8s with 3DXchange Pipeline, clean it up with Motionbuilder/Maya, export it to Daz (which I may as well just call a JCM server...) and then get everything into Blender, one way or another. I've found everything in Blender to be just better. Well, I did miss Iray a little bit, but only before a few night with the Cycles Encyclopedia, and now I would never use anything other than Cycles*... it's just so elegant and straightforward.
I'm not trying to make a commercial product, just to solve the problems that are stopping me from doing what I want to do. I'm going to put both halves up on GitHub (I believe the license allows that) and hope that other people can improve upon it. That's how open source works. But I hope my work will be immediately useful to you and others.
Donald
* But I did see a demo of Octane for Blender, on RTX hardware with their denoiser. Oh, man. What took 300 iterations without the denoiser to only about 30 to look perfect. Better than 10x ain't too shabby. My only impulse buy at the entire conference was a couple of Titans after seeing that :) But Sean Kennedy, who is this bad-ass VFX guy who is also in the Blender Meetup group pointed out that unless it's a temporal denoiser, he had "zero confidence" that it would look acceptable for animation. I couldn't get confirmation of that because they guy giving the demo was an NVidia guy, not OTOY. But my current cards are non-RTX and I won't have the Titans until Friday. I'll report back.
Don't give up! Where things are is just a matter of knowing. I used this, from another guy I met at the LA Blender Meetup...
(removed unsolicited offsite commercial link)
And BlenderNation, of course.
Many thanks for this summary. I have to ask, bearing in mind that I am a complete novice in these matters, whether you tried MDD export (which comes with the Animate 2 product from DAZ) instead of Alembic. I can't pretend to know anything about the technology but this has come up in other conversations and I believe that Blender supports MDD import as well as Alembic.
You mention animating in DAZ Studio rather than Blender, which is interesting, although you seem to be talking about mocap rather than hand-animated. I wonder whether you use the Mixamo library? You also mention the Blender cloth sim and one of my goals is to be able to animate a G8 (or G3) figure in DAZ Studio, dress it in Marvelous Designer and apply the animation, then render the animation in Blender. I am away from my PC for a couple of weeks but am already scratching my head considering the workflow for that (I suspect I might also run into some problems trying to include geografts throughout).
As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.
LOL. I didn't give up at all. I liked the first link I got from Nath. That has an entire set of vids. MOST of which I watched yesterday! MOST!
I'm only four videos into that course and may take advantage of their 30-day money back guarantee. I don't mind that the instructor is French, but his lack of English grammar already sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. In particular, every time he highlights a function, he says, "You have the possiblity to," instead of simply saying, "You can...", and repeatedly hearing the word "possibility" spoken with a French accent has become especially jarring. It's as if he just learned how to speak with the accent and really likes saying that word. I also frequently find myself having to take a moment to process various terms he mentions before I can comprehend what he said. Consequently, I'm not getting nearly as much use out of the course as I'd like.