Possible to Export Posed, Simulated Character to Blender?

interestinglyaverage

I have seen a lot of questions on exporting a character and skeleton to Blender both here and on the web in general, but most of the posts deal with exporting a character that will then be posed in Blender, or exporting a character and animations for use in Blender. My question is a little different, but I have not seen information on this anywhere...

Is it possible in Daz to set up a character, apply all the morphs and poses, do the hair/clothes/other dForce simulations, and then "bake" the character into an object that I can use in my Blender scene?

Most solutions I have seen for exporting a character to Blender require reworking the pose because the skeleton gets messed up (or use third party plugins that don't seem to keep the poses and morphs) and all the simulations need to be recreated for Blender and done in the Blender engine.

TheKD

For a still render, I would recommend grabbing diffeomorphic plugin. I have no idea about animations, I don't do animating and never tried it, but for stills it's top notch. The only thing I think it can't do is dforce spline hair, as that's not "real geometry" until render time. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/389931/true-iray-skins-for-blender-are-on-the-way check that thread out.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Alembic or Wavefront will get you vertex exact models, but Alembic won't transfer materials at all, and a Wavefront .obj won't preserve them with any kind of fidelity. But both can preserve UV maps and material zones needed to re-texture in Blender. Count on having to do that, which you might want to do anyway for many other reasons.

But the Daz Importer is still extremely useful evem if you don't use the model itself because it can give you a decent starting point on the material conversion. The node graphs it makes are generated and so not necessarily the neatest things ever, but it is not hard to tell what the are doing, and to tweak to taste.

Also, expect to have minor shading issues if dForce has mangled a clothing mesh and created intersections.

WendyLuvsCatz

Animate2 mdd exporter works as a Lightwave point cache import on a matching obj export imported with vertex order checked not split but it is very resource hogging on my PC

so laggy I have not gotten a decent render yet as it freezes every step setting up lighting

lilweep

Wish someone would make a Daz - Blender set of video tutorials from start to finish

Im from a generation that cannot read anything longer than a tweet because my brain has decayed from semiocapitalist internet garbage and can only learn from youtube tutorials that spoonfed me info.

wolf359

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Animate2 mdd exporter works as a Lightwave point cache import on a matching obj export imported with vertex order checked not split but it is very resource hogging on my PC

so laggy I have not gotten a decent render yet as it freezes every step setting up lighting

I initially thought that I would be able to replicate my old .obj/MDD/Maxon C4D pipeline that was used to make my feature film, with Blender 2.8


For some odd reason Blender will not stream the MDD data but instead loads it all into the .blend file which or course bogs down the scene due to the many gigs of Data and MDD can create.


I have since transformed All of my Genesis Characters over to another program for proper realtime IK solving and superior Facial animation and lipsyncing and has a proper Alembic exporter (Ogawa)


Blender 2.8x streams the external ABC Data as smooth as wet ice and I can overwrite the alembic cache,replacing the animation with new Data without having to send the Characters out again and fix the textures for each new shot.


So what the OP is seeking is possible with Animate2/MDD but a proper Alembic exporter (Ogawa format) will yield far better performance in Blender 2.8 as Blender 2.8x will no longer even accept the vestigial (HDF5?) Alembic format.

TheMysteryIsThePoint

wolf359 said:

So what the OP is seeking is possible with Animate2/MDD but a proper Alembic exporter (Ogawa format) will yield far better performance in Blender 2.8 as Blender 2.8x will no longer even accept the vestigial (HDF5?) Alembic format.

I'm not sure if the official Daz Alembic exporter supports Ogawa yet, but the official Alembic project has an HDF5 to Ogawa converter utility.

Raitan2008

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Animate2 mdd exporter works as a Lightwave point cache import on a matching obj export imported with vertex order checked not split but it is very resource hogging on my PC

so laggy I have not gotten a decent render yet as it freezes every step setting up lighting

Man, I just used the mdd approach on just some hair alone. I have a beefy system, and blender grinded to a stand still. I am thinking maybe there is a way to decimate the mesh(es)?

Doc Acme

I'm completely out of my element when it comes to Blender, but I do a lot of exporting out of Daz via FBX.

BTW, isn't that what the Bridges are for?

Perhaps my notes will ring a bell even though I'm using Lightwave as my end app.  There's some extra work, but I get morphs, etc.  Makes ya appreciate some of the mystery & magic Daz is doing frankly.

To begin with, when I export, I use the zeroed out pose.  I used to export the posed scene but that actually complicates things severely. I even memorize everything, although what that actually does I'm not sure but it works.

Upon import, I use the default Z-Bones option. Everyone shrieks "But the bones aren't aligned", but the thing is, it doesn't matter for FK posing.

A huge advantage with that is I can export poses using just the Base Figure Pose option in the FBX Export panel.  I then import using a Load from Scene option of just this "skeleton" into Lightwave in my case, then use a utility to copy & paste the pose.  But, I'm only pasting the Rotations, so I can use ANY pose from ANY Daz figure (Humanoid for Human, etc., even animals of like structure).  I've built up quite library.

There's really no reason this shouldn't apply to other apps.  The tools and procedure names may be different of course