Retargeting Daz figures in Blender

TheMysteryIsThePoint

This is the glaring ommission in Blender's tools, in my opinion. There are tools out there, but none so far are what I would call easy nor fast to set up.

Motionbuilder is awesome and produces the undisputed best results, characterization is pretty easy, reach and pull are nice, but it is expensive and if it weren't for James Cameron, probably would be discontinued already.

Maya does a lot of what Mobu does, but baking is an order of magnitude slower and I've experienced crashes.

@Padone pointed out that the Diffeomorphic importer has a BVH retargeter, which he nor I have evaluated: http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/bvh-retargeter.html

This guy developed a cool tutorial on using bone constraints in two layers that is actually pretty clever, works well, but is time consuming to set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSzn7qkE7Y

And this is a great tutorial on IK, which works well with G8s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-2v_CKmVE8 but again, is tedious to set up.

Can anyone add to this?

marble

I was looking for a tutorial that explained exactly what retargeting is because I've seen it mentioned but don't know what it does. With reference to your mention of the Diffeomorphic BVH retargeter, I found this video which explains how to use that utility but I'm still a little in the dark as to what a retergeter is. 

Of course, this was a result of google search creep  as I started out looking for a way to use Mixamo animations on G8 figures exported from DAZ Studio to Blender (I think retargeter was mentioned somewhere along the way).

Maybe you can request this thread gets moved to the Blender forum now.

wolf359

I agree that this is an area where the Blender devs seem to think that everyone using Blender for character animation is content to hand key everything in every situation.

Blender needs a GENERAL Characterization and retargeter like the 3DXchange app for Iclone or Autodesk Motionbuilder.

And I do not consider any "solution" that only works with a specific Daz genesis version( G8) to be at all useful as some of use have moved on to other figure ecosystems.

The Rokkoko System looked promising until I realized it only works if you are connected to their servers which could make continuous 24/7 internet ,on their end and mine, a single point of failure in animation production thus not acceptable.

Alas I am resigned to just re-importing my pre animated FBX Characters from Iclone/CC3 and switching out the materials for each new shot.