Loading...
> >

Who said Blender was hard?

1…5859616364…72

Comments

  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,169
    edited August 2019
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    While I had trouble understanding what he said maybe two or three times (and there are things on the screen that tell you what he's doing), I got a LOT out of the course actually even with the broken english...different strokes I guess ;). I was more interested in how Blender works than his accent. I can't fault a non-native english speaker for not speaking english flawlessley - after all, the only things I can speak in French are to ask for something red, black or white, only 1-10 of or made of cabbage or cheese. :P

    Laurie

    Post edited by AllenArt on
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    edited August 2019
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    Ahh, that's disappointing. I am on holiday so have not had chance to start working through the course yet. I know what you mean about jarring repetition - I feel similarly about the phrase "go ahead and ..." which seems to be universal in video tutorials, being repeated endlessly. Another is "verticee" as the imagined singular of vertices. Please people, it is VERTEX!

    Nevertheless I'll give it a try although, now that I am aware of it, the accented and repetitive "possibility" will no doubt test my tolerance considerably (though I generally love the French accent).

    Post edited by marble on
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    AllenArt said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    While I had trouble understanding what he said maybe two or three times (and there are things on the screen that tell you what he's doing), I got a LOT out of the course actually even with the broken english...different strokes I guess ;). I was more interested in how Blender works than his accent. I can't fault a non-native english speaker for not speaking english flawlessley. ;)

    Laurie

    Good to have a second opinion. Thanks.

  • Nyghtfall3DNyghtfall3D Posts: 776
    edited August 2019
    AllenArt said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    While I had trouble understanding what he said maybe two or three times, I got a LOT out of the course actually even with the broken english...different strokes I guess ;)  I was more interested in how Blender works than his accent. I can't fault a non-native english speaker for not speaking english flawlessley

    Laurie

    I don't fault him for his accent, it's just proving a bigger barrier for my learning process than I initially thought it would.  2.80 looks like the most intutive, user-friendly version of Blender ever released.  Considering how thorough the rest of the Udemy syllabus looks, I'd like to perservere.

    Post edited by Nyghtfall3D on
  • NathNath Posts: 2,804
    marble said:
    AllenArt said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    While I had trouble understanding what he said maybe two or three times (and there are things on the screen that tell you what he's doing), I got a LOT out of the course actually even with the broken english...different strokes I guess ;). I was more interested in how Blender works than his accent. I can't fault a non-native english speaker for not speaking english flawlessley. ;)

    Laurie

    Good to have a second opinion. Thanks.

    You can always play the little preview clip on the course page to see if you can understand his accent and it doesn't drive you up the wall or anything.

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    Nath said:
    marble said:
    AllenArt said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    While I had trouble understanding what he said maybe two or three times (and there are things on the screen that tell you what he's doing), I got a LOT out of the course actually even with the broken english...different strokes I guess ;). I was more interested in how Blender works than his accent. I can't fault a non-native english speaker for not speaking english flawlessley. ;)

    Laurie

    Good to have a second opinion. Thanks.

    You can always play the little preview clip on the course page to see if you can understand his accent and it doesn't drive you up the wall or anything.

    Yes, true. I could even start the course but I was holding back because I wanted to have Blender at my fingertips (my ancient little Macbook Air here with me wouldn't cope with 2.8). I'm sure I can put up with the accent so it is the actual content that I will judge the course on. I do tend to pick up on idiosyncratic speech habits which, for me, tend to be distracting but I eventually force myself to ignore them. Thankfully I waited for one of their regular heavy discount sales.

  • Nyghtfall3DNyghtfall3D Posts: 776
    edited August 2019

    Ok, I'm done trying to learn with the Udemy course.  I'm seven videos in now.  Unfortunately, the instructor's broken English and repetitious phrasing are making me cringe so much that I'm no longer enjoying the course.

    In the sixth video, he discusses 3D visualization and customization in Blender.  During the video, he makes a few references to something I kept hearing pronounced as "skeerting".  Whenever he mentioned that term, I thought, "What the hell is skeerting?"  The video is nearly 15 minutes long.  At 14:12, he clicked the Sculpting tab, and that's when I finally realized "skeerting" is "sculpting".

    I'm going to learn what I can from Blender's own YouTube course on 2.80 Fundamentals and then start developing my skills from that.

    Post edited by Nyghtfall3D on
  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946

    I can't say that anyone is wrong, but I have never had a problem understanding him and the idea that other people have really surprises me.

  • Nyghtfall3DNyghtfall3D Posts: 776
    donalddade said:

    I can't say that anyone is wrong, but I have never had a problem understanding him and the idea that other people have really surprises me.


    As AllenArt wrote earlier, different strokes...  After reading her reply to me, I decided to try pressing on, but couldn't after the sixth video.  I genuinely wish it had worked out for me.

    Incidentally, Udemy just approved my request for a refund.

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
    Silver Dolphin said:

    It would be in daz best interests to make a bridge so we can use our daz models in blender evee for animation. It may bring blender heads here for content if daz content transfered easy. For stills I would still use daz studio.

    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.

    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.

    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:

    ...

    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.

    Hi Marble,

    I did try MDD, based primarily on wolf359's comments in another thread. It was not immediately clear how to do it in Blender, and it seemed like Alembic had more industry momentum, so I didn't pursue it.

    Yes, I very briefly tried to do some keyframe in Daz, but even just minor fixes to mocap data made me want to slit my wrists. Vertically.

    If it weren't for Daz's marketplace of beautifully detailed, rigged figures with JCMs and morphs, and auto-conforming clothing and accessories all made by great artists, I clearly would not be attempting this. But the price that we pay is the minimal support anywhere else for Genesis characters. So Mixamo is not useful for G3/G8 without a more powerful/expensive app for retargeting. They used to support them, but they removed the feature that allowed it awhile ago.

    Are you aware of the cloth addon for Blender where all the comments where saying WTH... this is Marvelous Designer for Blender? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdxE6YbOSU

    As I learn more about other tools, I am more and more inclined to be quite content to give Daz all my money for their content, but to otherwise get the content out of Daz as early on in the pipeline as possible. For me, that's as soon as Daz applies the JCMs: "Thank you, Daz, that's all I needed..." and I consider it money well spent. I am actually quite grateful that Daz makes it relatively easy to export, even by brute force, as I'm doing. The C++ SDK is actually not bad, and Daz had the foresight to use the excellent Qt framework.

    I didn't really want to learn how to make conforming clothing, and I still don't, but I tried something else that worked pretty well: While in the A-Pose, I dressed a character in the Sexy Loin Dress, exported it to Blender quickly and simply via obj, and just simulated the cloth. It fell nicely, with minor initial fixes with the proportional edit tool to make it fit better.

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    edited August 2019
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
    Silver Dolphin said:

    It would be in daz best interests to make a bridge so we can use our daz models in blender evee for animation. It may bring blender heads here for content if daz content transfered easy. For stills I would still use daz studio.

    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.

    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.

    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:

    ...

    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.

    Hi Marble,

    I did try MDD, based primarily on wolf359's comments in another thread. It was not immediately clear how to do it in Blender, and it seemed like Alembic had more industry momentum, so I didn't pursue it.

    Yes, I very briefly tried to do some keyframe in Daz, but even just minor fixes to mocap data made me want to slit my wrists. Vertically.

    If it weren't for Daz's marketplace of beautifully detailed, rigged figures with JCMs and morphs, and auto-conforming clothing and accessories all made by great artists, I clearly would not be attempting this. But the price that we pay is the minimal support anywhere else for Genesis characters. So Mixamo is not useful for G3/G8 without a more powerful/expensive app for retargeting. They used to support them, but they removed the feature that allowed it awhile ago.

    Are you aware of the cloth addon for Blender where all the comments where saying WTH... this is Marvelous Designer for Blender? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdxE6YbOSU

    As I learn more about other tools, I am more and more inclined to be quite content to give Daz all my money for their content, but to otherwise get the content out of Daz as early on in the pipeline as possible. For me, that's as soon as Daz applies the JCMs: "Thank you, Daz, that's all I needed..." and I consider it money well spent. I am actually quite grateful that Daz makes it relatively easy to export, even by brute force, as I'm doing. The C++ SDK is actually not bad, and Daz had the foresight to use the excellent Qt framework.

    I didn't really want to learn how to make conforming clothing, and I still don't, but I tried something else that worked pretty well: While in the A-Pose, I dressed a character in the Sexy Loin Dress, exported it to Blender quickly and simply via obj, and just simulated the cloth. It fell nicely, with minor initial fixes with the proportional edit tool to make it fit better.

    I mentioned MDD because of the conversations with @wolf359 who seems to use it a lot. I haven't had chance to try it yet but I will be home by the end of next week so I will. I have watched a video which uses MDD for exporting animations to Marvelous Designer and it seems to work much better than FBX. I can't find much online about MDD to Blender though.

    Speaking of Marvelous Designer, I had coveted it for a long time before MD8 was offered at a huge discount around last Christmas so I redirected all my Christmas gift buying budget and bought it. Having been on my travels a lot since then I haven't really had time to play with it much but I intend to use it to make any clothing I need from now on. The speed of draping and the ability to pull the cloth around while the simulation is running puts MD on a different level of sophistication to dForce. Just my luck that Blender appears to be catching up with the cloth sim - and for free. Ah well.

    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    Post edited by marble on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,131
    marble said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    Ahh, that's disappointing. I am on holiday so have not had chance to start working through the course yet. I know what you mean about jarring repetition - I feel similarly about the phrase "go ahead and ..." which seems to be universal in video tutorials, being repeated endlessly. Another is "verticee" as the imagined singular of vertices. Please people, it is VERTEX!

    Nevertheless I'll give it a try although, now that I am aware of it, the accented and repetitive "possibility" will no doubt test my tolerance considerably (though I generally love the French accent).

    I was taught vertice (ver-teh-see) is the plural of vertex, not vertices but I guess almost universal incorrect usage has changed it to vertices or my teacher was wrong.

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    nonesuch00 said:
    marble said:
    Nyghtfall said:
    marble said:

    As for learning Blender 2.8, I too bought a huge Udemy course.

    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.

    Ahh, that's disappointing. I am on holiday so have not had chance to start working through the course yet. I know what you mean about jarring repetition - I feel similarly about the phrase "go ahead and ..." which seems to be universal in video tutorials, being repeated endlessly. Another is "verticee" as the imagined singular of vertices. Please people, it is VERTEX!

    Nevertheless I'll give it a try although, now that I am aware of it, the accented and repetitive "possibility" will no doubt test my tolerance considerably (though I generally love the French accent).

    I was taught vertice (ver-teh-see) is the plural of vertex, not vertices but I guess almost universal incorrect usage has changed it to vertices or my teacher was wrong.

    I'd be interested if you could find anyone to agree with your teacher. A google search only turned up Vertex (singular) and Vertices (plural).

  • andya_b341b7c5f5andya_b341b7c5f5 Posts: 694

    I'd be interested if you could find anyone to agree with your teacher. A google search only turned up Vertex (singular) and Vertices (plural).

    pedant mode on

    It's a clear sign of the imminent death of Western civilization that hardly anyone knows their Latin any more, including me!  But the genie is long out of the bottle; I hear 'indexes'  (indices) all the time, and 'forums' (fora) etc. etc. 

    Fun fact: Vertex is a 3rd declension masculine noun in Latin, like index.  Vertex is singular, in the nominative case; plural is 'vertices' in the nominative case.  ('Vertice' would be the singular in the ablative case, meaning something like 'from/with/by/at a vertex'.)

    Now, who said English was difficult?

    pendant mode off

    Mr Fraser, wherever you are now, 25 years late but that was for you!

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675

    i heard somewhere Blender can render vray?

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212
    Nyghtfall said:

    Ok, I'm done trying to learn with the Udemy course.  I'm seven videos in now.  Unfortunately, the instructor's broken English and repetitious phrasing are making me cringe so much that I'm no longer enjoying the course.

    In the sixth video, he discusses 3D visualization and customization in Blender.  During the video, he makes a few references to something I kept hearing pronounced as "skeerting".  Whenever he mentioned that term, I thought, "What the hell is skeerting?"  The video is nearly 15 minutes long.  At 14:12, he clicked the Sculpting tab, and that's when I finally realized "skeerting" is "sculpting".

    I'm going to learn what I can from Blender's own YouTube course on 2.80 Fundamentals and then start developing my skills from that.

    Yea, the 2.80 Fundementals is what I mostly watched on Tuesday.... learned allot.  These are only the basics though, nothing more! 

  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,169
    RAMWolff said:
    Nyghtfall said:

    Ok, I'm done trying to learn with the Udemy course.  I'm seven videos in now.  Unfortunately, the instructor's broken English and repetitious phrasing are making me cringe so much that I'm no longer enjoying the course.

    In the sixth video, he discusses 3D visualization and customization in Blender.  During the video, he makes a few references to something I kept hearing pronounced as "skeerting".  Whenever he mentioned that term, I thought, "What the hell is skeerting?"  The video is nearly 15 minutes long.  At 14:12, he clicked the Sculpting tab, and that's when I finally realized "skeerting" is "sculpting".

    I'm going to learn what I can from Blender's own YouTube course on 2.80 Fundamentals and then start developing my skills from that.

    Yea, the 2.80 Fundementals is what I mostly watched on Tuesday.... learned allot.  These are only the basics though, nothing more! 

    Grant Abbitt is good for going beyond the basics....slowly ;). 

    Laurie

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,212

    NICE. Thanks Laurie!  

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946

    My undergrad degree is in Applied Math and all of the books and all the professors always used vertex for singular, and vertices for plural. Same for matrix/matrices, index/indices, axis/axes, basis/bases, and so on. But I try to resist that urge towards pedantry as long as the person's meaning is clear; after all, there is no other word 'vertice' with a different meaning and therefore the potential to cause confusion.

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
     

    I mentioned MDD because of the conversations with @wolf359 who seems to use it a lot. I haven't had chance to try it yet but I will be home by the end of next week so I will. I have watched a video which uses MDD for exporting animations to Marvelous Designer and it seems to work much better than FBX. I can't find much online about MDD to Blender though.

    Speaking of Marvelous Designer, I had coveted it for a long time before MD8 was offered at a huge discount around last Christmas so I redirected all my Christmas gift buying budget and bought it. Having been on my travels a lot since then I haven't really had time to play with it much but I intend to use it to make any clothing I need from now on. The speed of draping and the ability to pull the cloth around while the simulation is running puts MD on a different level of sophistication to dForce. Just my luck that Blender appears to be catching up with the cloth sim - and for free. Ah well.

    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    I remember that thread while I was frantically trying to find an alternative to Motionbuilder for retargeting. I never actually tried it because retargeting is a very complex operation, and is part science, part art. Literally there are entire companies dedicated to it, e.g. iKinema. I couldn't see Daz doing it, doing it well, and then not telling anyone about it. I assumed that as soon as I tried it with a character of different biometric proportions, the aesthetic of the result would diverge.

    But to be honest, I had forgotten about that thread, so thank you. I think it's worth a try given that the original G1 armature is supported by WebAnimate, the iKinema tool that I so wanted to use for retargeting, but didn't support the additional spine bones in the G8 armature. That's the reason something deep inside me said "this can't possibly work well": iKinema said "nope, you have to buy our expensive Motionbuilder plugin", but yet Daz quietly does it? I'd love to be totally wrong! Looks like I've got another task for this weekend :)

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946
    marble said:
    Speaking of Marvelous Designer, I had coveted it for a long time before MD8 was offered at a huge discount around last Christmas so I redirected all my Christmas gift buying budget and bought it. Having been on my travels a lot since then I haven't really had time to play with it much but I intend to use it to make any clothing I need from now on. The speed of draping and the ability to pull the cloth around while the simulation is running puts MD on a different level of sophistication to dForce. Just my luck that Blender appears to be catching up with the cloth sim - and for free. Ah well.

    Your saying "pull the cloth around" reminded me of another Blender addon:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNXBYI-WPU4

     

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946
    marble said:
    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    Oh man, if the G1 -> G8 trick really works for retargeting, it just dawned on me that all of that free Truebones stuff should work on G8s as well. That's an impressive Library of high quality mocap and I don't see how this guy Joe makes money if he's giving everything away for free :) If I'm not mistaken, he offers G1/G2 versions of everything. Even if it doesn't, Webanimate could retarget it to G1.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,168

    I finally own a GPU that lets me fire up 2.8 and I'm totally lost with the interface; but it's not the first time that's happened.

    I found the fundamentals vidoes link in Nyghtfall's post so I'm headed over there now. Thanks!

  • DustRiderDustRider Posts: 2,744
    Mystarra said:

    i heard somewhere Blender can render vray?

    There is a plugin for it, see here: https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/blender

    It requires a render node license, but all I could find is the plugin+render node licenses for sale - the Blender page buy link is broken. The plugins (that include the render node for the plugin) start at $350 a year.

    But for free, if you want something other than Cycles, you could use either Octane Render or AMD Pro Render. They both have Blender plugins.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,131

    My gosh. I have a comprehensive set of tutorial for Blender 2.79 I've worked part of the way through. I hope to goodness that the Blender 2.79 keyboard shortcuts are still good in Blender 2.80.

    That is all.

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    Oh man, if the G1 -> G8 trick really works for retargeting, it just dawned on me that all of that free Truebones stuff should work on G8s as well. That's an impressive Library of high quality mocap and I don't see how this guy Joe makes money if he's giving everything away for free :) If I'm not mistaken, he offers G1/G2 versions of everything. Even if it doesn't, Webanimate could retarget it to G1.

    Isn't the Truebones stuff just the free CMU motion library? 

    Does WebAnimate need to be run for each separate bvh or can it be run on one rig and applied to the armature of that figure for all other bvh animations?

  • pdr0pdr0 Posts: 204
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    Oh man, if the G1 -> G8 trick really works for retargeting, it just dawned on me that all of that free Truebones stuff should work on G8s as well. That's an impressive Library of high quality mocap and I don't see how this guy Joe makes money if he's giving everything away for free :) If I'm not mistaken, he offers G1/G2 versions of everything. Even if it doesn't, Webanimate could retarget it to G1.

    Not everything is free at truebones

     

    G1 as a donor "works" - in the sense that the motion is quite "rough" - even if the donor and  target are same proportions, same footwear 

    I guess people have different definitions of "work"... But you get the expected foot sliding, wobbly motion problems . You need proper retargeting to have it work well

     

    Besides the motion issues - another "quality" issue is the G1 skeleton does not use the twist bones - so even if the the recipient/target G3 or G8 has the motion roughly working from a G1 source - the G3/G8 weight mapping means the joints and bends will be slightly deformed with the same motion

     

     

     

     

     

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    DustRider said:
    Mystarra said:

    i heard somewhere Blender can render vray?

    There is a plugin for it, see here: https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/blender

    It requires a render node license, but all I could find is the plugin+render node licenses for sale - the Blender page buy link is broken. The plugins (that include the render node for the plugin) start at $350 a year.

    But for free, if you want something other than Cycles, you could use either Octane Render or AMD Pro Render. They both have Blender plugins.

    Thanks.

    the other renderer i like is renderman. heart

  • DandeneDandene Posts: 162

    I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here, but the CG Cookie tutorial for modeling a treasure chest is a decent introduction to learning how to use Blender (I hadn't touched Blender in 7 years and after watching the video, I had a basic idea of how to model).  While not all the tutorials are free, the first one is and is super helpful imo.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH0Ak4cqqlo    

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,946
    marble said:
    donalddade said:
    marble said:
    Returning to Mixamo, other threads here suggest the way to go is to use Genesis (the original, not Genesis 3 or 8) as that works well with Mixamo. Then save the animation as an animated pose and re-apply to G3 or G8. This thread has a better explanation:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3675321/

    Hopefully that still works.

     

     

    Oh man, if the G1 -> G8 trick really works for retargeting, it just dawned on me that all of that free Truebones stuff should work on G8s as well. That's an impressive Library of high quality mocap and I don't see how this guy Joe makes money if he's giving everything away for free :) If I'm not mistaken, he offers G1/G2 versions of everything. Even if it doesn't, Webanimate could retarget it to G1.

    Isn't the Truebones stuff just the free CMU motion library? 

    Does WebAnimate need to be run for each separate bvh or can it be run on one rig and applied to the armature of that figure for all other bvh animations?

    Well, it's one of the things he has... he made versions for all the most poular softwares. But he's got a lot more than that.

    And the WebAnimate question is one to which I don't know the answer. But other than retargeting, there's enough other things to fix, so I don't think it is something you could do as a batch job, anyway.

Sign In or Register to comment.