Scaling Gen3 model, exporting to FBX--armature & mesh not aligned in Maya?
unused account - glossedsfm
Posts: 329
Hi,
I am using a base gen 3 female body and the morph kit. I also have a non-Daz body that i am using as reference and shaping the Daz body to match its shape. On one body i've had to reduce the scale by about 75% and on another body i had to lengthen the legs and torso by quite a bit. When i was finished i exported both Daz bodies as .FBX but when i imported them into Maya the armature/skeleton does not match up with the actual mesh. Did i mess something up when scaling the mesh down? also tried to export out of Daz at 100% scale and then reduce scale in Maya but the armature and mesh downscale at different rates too. So not sure if i'm doing something in general that i shouldnt be doing with armatures that have connected meshes or what.
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Hi glossedsfm, All I have is the Student version of Autodesk suite, and not the full version , So our experiences may differ a little because I am lacking the full function of Maya.
First I found using decimator to reduce ploy and texture atlas for retexturing before transferring anything from daz into Autodesk helpful.
My experience is its best just to Export FBX the whole daz character model your working with into 3DS Max first, instead of trying to export or transfer the character or shape morphs to a pre made human shape into Maya. I never had any luck with daz characters in Maya myself other wise . But in 3ds Max the shapes transfer over over to Maya. and you can re rig & UV the character in 3ds and then bridge it over from 3ds Max to Maya and everything will carry over that way. one thing i have experienced myself with Genesis 3 and why I choose not to use it. is that the mesh does not transfer well in Autodesk software.. My experience is genesis 3 does not play well with most third party software unless its a gaming engine.. and it will not work with any Autodesk BVH motions files at all. when I fbx I am able to import the complete Generation 4 & genesis 1 & 2 character with its morph shape intact., but Maya does not accept the transfer of the Rigging or UV maps and some Mat zones for those genesis characters either.( it maybe because I just have the student version and not the full version. ) So If you don't have 3d Max Though you may try using a gaming engine like cry-engine3 or Unity and then export your character from there into Maya for some reason that seems to be a work around for this issue with gen3.
there is a tutorial on transferring Daz Genesis characters directly into Maya on Maya Zest.com maybe that can be some help to you.
Have a great day :)
Well i'm trying to avoid is re-rigging the model once its in Blender. I can make a duplicate of the body mesh and just re-rig it but i dont want to do that except as a last resort.
Is the skeleton correctly aligned in DS? Are you using custom morphs (created in a modelling application or using DForms) or stock morphs? It does sound as if there are custom morphs involved and the rigging needs to be adjusted to the shape and then the adjustment linked to the morph, but before going through the process involved I'd like to check that that is the issue.
Default gen 3 body and
http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-female-body-morphs
That morph kit. One thing that i did notice about the armature is that its a lot taller than the mesh. But if i select the bone joints and move it around the mesh moves properly. When i imported it directly into Maya i did notice that hitting "return to bind pose" resizes the mesh to its original 100% shape. But if i downscape it back to 75% then any time i do "return to bind pose" again the body wont resize back. One other thing too is that i may be porting the finished model to Source Film Maker. So i dont know if the armature being bigger than the mesh will be an issue. Is it possible to resize armatures in Maya? i think i was able to do it earlier but i was using a manipulator icon thingie and i would prefer if there was somewhere that i could just input the actual value that i want to resize the armature.
I am speaking just for myself , My experience has been If your using genesis 3 your properly going to have to re rig the character model no matter what you do in blender. Gen3 mesh is more complicated than previous generations. it requires manually re rigging gen3 in almost any third party App your using. I just started to learn blender myself so I'm properly not going to be much help when it comes to blender. & genesis 3. But my experiences with genesis 3 is no matter the third party app your transfering too , gen3 will require re rigging & and some cases re texturing as well. . Like said that is one of the biggest reasons I do not use the gen3 character model myself in third party App's gen3 never played nice and is more work than it was worth for me to use. That and it is not backwards compatible with previous daz generations,. . Have you tried a pervious older generation character to see if you get the same issue? If you are looking for a work around. sometimes working with another older character that works in the app your working with can help you find work arounds for the newer characters like Genesis3 ... But i would not hold my breath that Gen3 going to work the way you desire it too in Blender, Maya,Carrara & Iclone with out manually fixing the rigging and stuff that not transferring over.. But that has just been my experiences. Other opinons may differ.
Ivy you must be thinking i have a different problem or something or maybe i'm not understanding something on that mayazest site (like how it applies to my problem).
Base model : http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-starter-essentials
Morphs http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-female-body-morphs
Those are what i'm using. I've already imported several models from Daz into Maya a few days ago. But none of those models altered the scale, at least not to the extreme that i'm doing now. All of those past models had 100% scale and legs and torso lengths that were still close to default for the base model. I've tinkered with those other models in Maya and the textures carry over fine from the looks of it and i dont see any issues with me posing those models.
But what i'm doing right now on a new model and what i'm having issues with is i'm scaling the model down from 100% to 75% in Daz. Tweaking some morph items here and there. Exporting it as an FBX and opening it up in Maya. The textures are fine but the armature/skeleton is at 100% scale while the body mesh is 75% scale. I read that mayazest link and thats talking about a different issue in regards to importing a Daz mesh. I actually found out about that issue on my own a few days ago and i came up with my own solution for it. But thats not the issue i'm having right now with the scaling *unless* that fix on mayazest also will fix the scaling issue i'm having.
I see I'm sorry I miss understood your comment, so its a issue during export/import and tyou trying to rescale the model.& not a rigging transfer issue, Maya Zest.com was reffering to just genesis so I can vouch it will work for gensis 3 have you check the Autodesk forum to see if anyone else is having the same issue with that transfer scaling armature . though most people there are not using daz characters in their projects. But it wouldn;t hurt to ask your question there. I have ask questions a few times with some good results. I'm sorry can't give you any more advice on that scaling issue because, I only have the student version of Maya and am limited to what I can do with it in tranfering because I don't have all the export features.
Just out of curousity what file format are you saving your model in during FBX .. Have you tried different file types during your export, I know 3dsMax files carries over to blender pretty well when using exprot/import.. I dunno if that will resolve the rescaling issue your having . But it maybe worth a try.
Could you post a character preset for the problem shape? I don't have Maya so there's a limit to what I could do but I can at least check some DS-side things.
I've done several tests trying to do it several different ways. One of those tests was to open up the gen 3 model and then go right to resizing it down to 75% but the problem still exists in Maya. I've tried rescaling just the mesh and then exporting as FBX and rescaling the mesh and hip armature and then exporting as FBX. I did try exporting mesh and hip armature at 100% scale and as a DAE. When in Maya i'm able to scale down the DAE armature to 75% and the mesh will also go down the same size. But when i try take that same model/armature in FBX format rescaling the armature barely affects its size (the mesh doesnt change either). So i wonder if i can export it as a DAE out of Daz at 100% scale. Import it into Maya as DAE at 100% scale and then change it down to 75% scale. THEN i can export it out of Maya as FBX, reimport that FBX into Maya and then work on that. I just dont know what i lose out on my going with a DAE and converting it to FBX.
OK so i'm finally able to get what i want. But i dont know if either of these methods are messing something up thats hidden to me.
1) this first one is easy, i just do all the changes i want to do in Daz and export as a .DAE and import that into Maya. The armature and mesh are the same size. Only thing i notice is that when moving limbs around they no longer have limits. By no limits i mean that I can look at the front of my model and spin the arm in the X, Y or Z plan a full 360 degrees. The mesh corrects itself so its not an issue from what i see
2) https://youtu.be/DmxIWkMUhyM?t=346 thats the second method i've used. It seems like a bit of a hackjob but it does work. But again i just dont know if i'm losing anything like functionality or whatever.
3) Do all my work in Daz, scale the body down to 75%. Export as FBX and import it into Maya and just ignore the size difference. Even though the armature is much bigger than the model and doesnt line up with its corresponding limb/body part it appears to move everything around ok.
4) Import the model into Maya at 100% scale. Edit > Delete by Type > History. Doing that allows me to scale both the armature and mesh at the same rate. Dont know what all i lose by doing this either.