Blender vs Daz3D: What's Best for You?

[Deleted member 207364]

Currently, I think the best solution is using Diffeomorphic's scripts (

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)

Huge thanks! I've been looking for a plugin like this one for a while. I tried mcjTeleBlender a while ago and had a bunch of issues with it. I'm very excited to try Diffeomorphic's script out!

Also thanks Eroseason for linking mcjTeleBlender4 beta, I will be watching its development

Glad I could help out RomanHume. Nice progress, good luck!

 

[Bladebur]

Huge thanks! I've been looking for a plugin like this one for a while. I tried mcjTeleBlender a while ago and had a bunch of issues with it. I'm very excited to try Diffeomorphic's script out!

It's a bit daunting due to the number of options available, so I'd really recommend reading the docs carefully. If used to its full potential, it allows you to get something very close to DAZ's capabilities inside Blender: you can do things like import a DAZ pose into an already existing model, import all (or some of) the figure's expressions and morphs automatically as shape keys, and import corrective morphs which automatically dial themselves to the figure's position. Also includes tools to fix things like using the same armature for hair/clothes/base model or joining genitalia geometry to the base figure.

It's not without fault. The imported materials are far from perfect and will be missing some textures (such as SSS). I've also had many issues with its autorig features, too (its 'makehuman rig' seems to work better than the standard autorig), and the support for old style figures (V4 etc) is not good (perhaps mcj is better for those). In my experience, it's better if you import figures in their base pose and then use the included tools to add a pose and dial morphs (and only go with the autorig stuff at the last moment, if you want to animate).

I wish there were an easier way to import DAZ assets into standard 3D software, but DAZ themselves are not happy with the idea. In fact, it always becomes more and more difficult (they encrypt their data formats, add more and more undocumented features, etc, not to mention all the exporters they include with DAZ are simply worthless).

 

[Yustu]

You guys who use Blender, I've been hearing a lot of hype over 2.8 and Eevee, would you say this will be a game changer for the ero space or will people still mostly pre render their scenes?

For people who follow this kind of content very closely and can identify the tech, what's the most common software used to animate and render, is there a particular "winner" if we're talking numbers?

Blender will be used by Ubisoft for in-house DCC so yeah it's getting more and more attention.
I think mostly because of changes made in 2.8 with I personally love, new revamped Ui is sweet and tons of other more crucial changes.

I try to create animations (although real job don't leave me with enough time to do so) and personally what I look for is software that allows smooth playback. One would expect that most packages will allow to do so but reality is different. As many stated in this thread Daz is good as starting point to get base meshes especially humans as they are really good but animation is a black hole. Don't get me wrong it's doable but process is far from being enjoyable. Mainly slow speed on base G8 characters turns me off and forces to find alternative solutions for animations. Not to mention unintuitive interface for key management.
Case in point - try to do squat animation and see what happens with character feet (even with locked joints) - although I think for transform tools they will not go under floor level, can't recall. Or playback speed - changing viewport to bounding box doesn't change performance !!!.
Eevee is not perfect but it's good enough as render engine and rest is just light years ahead of Daz. Well maybe except skinning with is actually very good in Daz, i.e. see extreme squat position and pelvis area in Daz and other software, IMO Daz wins.

As for ero-anime I did seen some already migrated to Blender.

Note about Diffeomorphic
Currently it doesn't support HD morphs - IIRC it's due to different way that these info is calculated, as delta of base ??, and it's hard for dev. to implement. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Rest seams to be working fine exception are shells but that is something that I didn't worked on yet, but basically they will import as separate meshes with is correct so manual tweaking is required.

 

[Larry Kubiac]

DAZ just for the camera, one thing to fuck blender completely.

 

[Bladebur]

You guys who use Blender, I've been hearing a lot of hype over 2.8 and Eevee, would you say this will be a game changer for the ero space or will people still mostly pre render their scenes?

I think it will be a game changer for some, but probably irrelevant for most.

People who like to customize a lot of their scenes or make animations will find the move to Eevee worth it. As far as I understand the adult market, that's not the most common case though, and most people prefer to work with prefab/purchased material with a big push for realistic-looking skin and materials. DAZ will remain king as it already has a huge market, you can do this very easily with their software, and exporting the assets to other 3D package and get the same results is hard.

In an ideal world, 3D assets should be highly compatible between software so you could purchase a Genesis figure and some clothes and work seamlessy in Blender, Max, DAZ, etc. In fact, with PBR and physics materials everywhere we *should* be there, but unfortunately the exchange formats like Collada ended up being a disaster, and vendors are not really interested in asset portability. Even DAZ is the same (they implement weird non-standard features, and the exporters are essentially unmaintained and broken).

I think a series of Blender/MAX/Maya plugins which allows you direct access to your DAZ online content library and easily add your DAZ content to other 3D software would be in their best interest. They already get all their income from their assets anyway and serious pros in architectural rendering etc would find the content very useful.

 

[RomanHume]

You guys who use Blender, I've been hearing a lot of hype over 2.8 and Eevee, would you say this will be a game changer for the ero space or will people still mostly pre render their scenes?

For people who follow this kind of content very closely and can identify the tech, what's the most common software used to animate and render, is there a particular "winner" if we're talking numbers?

I have done some basic animations in Daz for my game (I have since stopped because Daz is ass at animation). I will say as far as animating, after watching about forty minutes of tutorials, I now have so much control and precision over animation in Blender that I'd never consider using Daz for animating ever again.

I have used Daz successfully for two years. I have used Blender for about four days. I already prefer the wider scope and broader capabilities of Blender. But you definitely have to want to learn to use it. Daz can be used by pretty much anyone right out of the box. Blender requires you to really become much more of a 3D artist. But anyone willing to take that leap will experience a level of creative freedom that Daz simply can't provide.

It's a trade off betwee Daz's ease and immediate-results vs Blender's complexity and absolute-freedom.

 

[RomanHume]

Something else I'm looking at down the road. Has anyone used Substance Painter or Substance Designer with Blender? I'm not familiar with either yet, I just know that Cycles isn't listed on the Substance pages or documents. But if all you use those for is creating our textures, does it matter since you're building shaders in Blender?

Just curious if anyone anyone has any prior experience.

 

[Egglock]

You guys who use Blender, I've been hearing a lot of hype over 2.8 and Eevee, would you say this will be a game changer for the ero space or will people still mostly pre render their scenes?

For people who follow this kind of content very closely and can identify the tech, what's the most common software used to animate and render, is there a particular "winner" if we're talking numbers?

Spoiler: Answer

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Has anyone used Substance Painter or Substance Designer with Blender?

Not with Blender, but for UE4. Substance is just a software to generate texture easily. Blender can achieve the same result, just not as easily.

But if all you use those for is creating our textures, does it matter since you're building shaders in Blender?

In my opinion SP isn't worth the cost, you can save yourself a lot of money by investing the time into learning Blender's shader node. The investment will pay for itself in the long run. Check the links below.

Spoiler: Procedural Texture in Blender

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SP is very much like Daz3d. It makes the creation process really easy, it's a simple drag-n-drop, adjust some settings, plug in some nodes here and there, package and export. Where else in Blender, the user has to have an understanding of the shader node to fully do what SP can do, but once they get pass that point, Blender's procedural texturing process outshines SP in every way.

If the above still doesn't convince you, take a look at what is achievable with a creative mind and the know how

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[NSUDEV]

You're going to have to render the scenes regardless. Eevee just makes it easier to preview the scenes without having to wait hours. Allowing the user to modify and make corrections in such a way that the rerenders don't take hours. Eevee still has a long way to go, before it gets to the quality of cycles.

Interesting, I thought it was actually a production tool and not previs, guess I shoulda done more research, but still the benefits seem great if artists can have quicker turnaround. Interesting to hear that most artists would use DAZ and not Blender or another DCC as their primary software, it certainly makes sense as if you decide you want to make ero content, most people would obviously not want to get pro training in anatomy and CGI first.

 

[Yustu]

Well eevee is not exactly a pre-vis tool. It has limitations but that speed up (vs Cycles / rest of the world) must come from somewhere.

Here is nice article eevee vs cycles:

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IMO eevee is very good, especially when comparing time vs image quality. For animation it seams to be ideal.

To be hones Daz + diffeomorphic + Blender is kill combo especially for someone that don't know how to sculpt / work with topology / unwrap / build shader / rig & animate and rest.

 

[Bladebur]

Something else I'm looking at down the road. Has anyone used Substance Painter or Substance Designer with Blender? I'm not familiar with either yet, I just know that Cycles isn't listed on the Substance pages or documents. But if all you use those for is creating our textures, does it matter since you're building shaders in Blender?

I used it some time ago. It works well, but there are subtle differences between Substance PBR and Blender which make the workflow a bit annoying. There are some Blender Market plugins which are supposed to make the transition easier, but I didn't know about them at the time.

The Substance Painter + Designer + Source combo is pretty amazing. You can get decent results very fast just by dropping a few presets, but there is amazing depth behind the software. You can freepaint in 3D using full PBR brushes and materials without having to worry about managing a set of textures, and everything is non-destructive (including your strokes). You can even change your UVs and your mesh and just reimport the OBJ and (up to some reasonable limitations) everything still works. Their material library (Source) is really good and everything is procedural, so for example if you get a 'stitched cloth' texture, you'll be able to customize the stitches' appearance, size, frequency, etc.

It's very specialized software, though. If you want to go past the 'drag & drop some smart materials' stage and really get the most of the software, you need serious dedication and art skills IMO. And even some math and programming background if you want to create Designer materials. The workflow is also somewhat convoluted, as you need to export your model with good UVs, prepare a project, export a bunch of textures after you finish, and you still need to build the materials inside Blender. This must be done for every model independently and it gets old pretty fast.

I don't know if it is worth for the casual user. If you only want a fast way to have your custom props and scenery look good, it may be better just to get a decent texture library and a few grime/dust brushes or procedurals in Blender.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I think we all share the belief that, the more time and energy you are willing to invest into creating a scene/image/game that eventually ;D the results will get better. Every program has its limit (I for one would love to be able to afford maya just for it UV unwrapping tools, I think this is the only serious weakness with blender, but then again I hear other people love it). In RomanHume's case after 2 years of using Daz and becoming proficient in its use, now you are investing in greater control by learning Blender, but it may be a while before your art really benefits from the investment into Blender. I know when I started, knowing nothing about creating custom characters, It took me 2 months to get to the skill level I had hoped to reach in 3 weeks, but I like to think that I am a pretty advanced user now .

Glad to hear that animating is going better! This past year I played around with making semi-autonomous rigs, that try to make animation easier, ie: the character naturally redistributes their weight around as they walk, and all the animator needs to do is control the sliders used to adjust the walking style. As well as trying out ways to improve mesh deformation in Blender without doing a whole muscle simulation (which I still use near the shoulder and around the mouth some times). I would suggest try adding a modifier to the mesh called "corrective smoothing" after the armature modifier, and before the subsurface division modifier. I would say play around with a repeat value of 5 to 15, and I often find that for the best results I have to make a vertex group (weight map) to control what parts get corrected and how much (since it can over correct), other than that, shape keys are key to making joints and animations look good. Daz actually uses lots of them, I think the other major weakness of blender is that the shape keys panel is a single panel, whereas Daz shaping panel has lots of categories and is organized into parts (not to mention daz combos both morphs and skeleton reshaping together in some sliders). I'll have to make a custom User interface or something. I stopped with my previous "pose space deformation" project because I learned that blender was going to change its api so I waited for 2.8 and now I need to spend time learning how to code again.

Substance painter uses iRay just like default daz, and what it outputs is textures and assets designed around something called "Physics-Based Rendering" (PBR) workflow which is just a technique to improve realism by handling material rendering by the material properties. ie, metals interact with light differently than when compared to nonmetals (aka everything else, aka dielectrics).

Blender has been compatible with PBR workflow for the good part of a decade, and uses the built-in "Principle" Shader Node to act as the only shader you need if you want to plug in texture maps used for PBR or Classical texture workflow. So yes RomanHume, Blender has been compatible with Substance Painter for as long as the two have been around, you can check out sites like

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(made by youtuber Blender Guru) which all their texture abide by the PBR workflow.

as for EEVEE NSUDEV, I have heard that people use it for final production, but it is very niche, like art for some smaller personal game projects, but nothing big. From what I have found, EEVEE in 2.80 doesn't fully support transparency properly, but this is fixed in 2.81 experimental builds. So I can't us EEVEE as I would like (but I do use it for previews), as I try to do more Disney/Pixar quality renders and I need ray tracing to do that.

I'm still trying to get diffomorphic to work on my computer, but I haven't done much yet to get it working as I am busy banging out renders.

I would say what a lot of users are really excited about in 2.81 experimental is the new intel AI denoiser which vastly reduce render times, and outperforms even the most recent cutting edge tech demo's to come out of their main graphics competitor, Nvidea. I am loving the new principle hair shader node that came in 2.80, based on a research paper published by Disney Research. As well as Epic has donated 1.2 million to the Blender foundation for further development, Ubisoft has joined the Gold Tier donator rank (offering some odd thousands bi-monthly to support the blender development) who as Yustu pointed out, plan to use Blender in their new movie-making studio.

Egglock you mentioned the 2D aspect of Blender, besides all the talk and hype of making 2D in blender and animating 2D scenes, one of the things I found to be pretty powerful with blender in 2D regrads, is something that is actually 3D based. There are a lot of Hentai games and animated Manga artwork, which is one type of art I have wanted to explore for some time. A lot of them us Live2D to animate their work, but like a lot of other Blender users, I don't have the money for these things nor willing to pay. After playing around and learning how to animate SVG's in blender (similar to flash animations) I did some experimenting and found I could replicate the Live2D ability to animate 2D drawn/painted images in Blender. Just like with Daz, Live2D is designed to be focused and intuitive for the task it was built for, meanwhile Blender can be a bit Frankenstein but after enough time is put in, it can compete with other specialized programs (I have to learn the new blender API so I can program new custom user interfaces to make things more intuitive when I finally do start sharing blender files of characters)

 

[RomanHume]

So here are the results of my third go around at creating a custom skin shader using only the textures and bump maps supplied with the Daz model. I'm very happy with these results. I've been holding off on further exploration of Blender until I could get the skin right (cause if I can't make them look better, it would mitigate all the other advantages). I'm terribly pleased with the results.

Thanks to the folks here who encouraged me to check it out and who've offered up some valuable resources and ideas. Cheers mates!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Glad this thread could help you out

 

[NSUDEV]

So here are the results of my third go around...

HUH. Didn't you start learning Blender on the weekend? These results are fantastic. Her face seems even cuter with this skin shader too.

 

[RomanHume]

HUH. Didn't you start learning Blender on the weekend? These results are fantastic. Her face seems even cuter with this skin shader too.

Well, to be honest, that includes jamming 15 hours of a Udemy course on Blender 2.76. But since I find Udemy instructors often talk slow, I usually watch that shit at 1.75x to 2x Playback speed. So it only took me about 8 hours to take it all in.

And I have prior experience working in Maya. So building shaders through nodes and modelling, vertices, edges and surfaces was all very familiar. It was just a matter of finding where stuff is at. But I think if I continue at this pace, I should be close to where I want in about 6 months or so.

And I haven't taken the time to really make anything fully custom. Everything here is taken from Daz (textures, bumps, etc.) That's why I'm calling it a place to start. My goal is to use my knowledge of ZBrush to go in and add additional fine details and eventually reskin all the models with a hi-res texture. But these are long term goals.

Btw way, I see your sig and checked out your Patreon. You're shit looks fucking awesome man!

 

[RomanHume]

Man, one more post then I'm calling it a night.

The other thing that is blowing me away is the responsiveness of this software. I can leave this thing in full render mode and move my camera around, tweak shaders, and make all kinds of changes and the update is lightening fast. I'm running Daz in the background and Blender doesn't seem to notice.

I wanted to time myself on converting a new character. I imported the .obj, added the textures, configured the nodes and clocked out as finished in about 35 minutes. It's official, I've drank the Blender-Kool-Aid.

G'night friends! Cheers.

 

[Egglock]

Interesting, I thought it was actually a production tool and not previs

Well eevee is not exactly a pre-vis tool.

What I mean in terms of preview is to get a quick feel as to what the materials will look like. It's still very much a rendering tool as cycles is. Though not on a 1:1. If any of you used pre 2.8 versions of Blender you'll know just how daunting of a task it can get trying to sample what your scene would look. Eevee just makes it less of a pain to sample the scene. By no means is Eevee a replacement for cycles well at least not in it's current stage. As the results from Eevee and cycles are really different. All I was trying to say is, Eevee can be used to quickly see how the scene is going to look without the cost of sampling in cycles.

Interesting to hear that most artists would use DAZ and not Blender

To put it in perspective, Daz3d is like a finished car. The user doesn't have to worry about how the car was put together or even worry about the intricacies. All they have to worry about is knowing how to drive the vehicle and operate it. Where else Blender is more like the mechanic who builds and understands the vehicle in and out. The former is more appealing and easier than the latter.

I for one would love to be able to afford maya just for it UV unwrapping tools

I don't disagree with you here, wish Blender's UV tool is just as good as Maya, though I'd have to say, that alone isn't worth the cost. Maybe one day Blender's UV tool would be as good as Maya's.

I took a quick look of Live2d (never heard of the software), the workflow seems a bit counter-intuitive compare to Blender. In Blender it's Draw -> apply bones/modifiers -> start animating. In Live2d as far as I saw, draw in a 2D software, import it into Live2D setup the poly zones(or constraints to the image zones) -> start animating. I don't know doesn't look efficient and probably more work. Plus it looks like a destructive workflow, for example if you wanted to make color changes or remove something, it looks like you'll have to re-import and do all that poly-zoning again. Perhaps you can enlighten me here.

RomanHume Looking good on those renders, that turn around is quite fast considering you just picked up Blender not too long ago.

 

[Synx]

Just wanted to add my 2 cents about eevee and some of the limitations.

Eevee in general won't be a game changer for people on here, as it struggles with organic forms and materials (aka humans). It can get the skin quite good, but lacks just that last dot on the i to make it look really realistic, which you just can't get without a Ray tracing render engine. Its just miniscule details in glance or subsurface scattering Eevee can't really render, which in all honestly most people won't properly not notice in the end product.

The hair is a different story though: it can't use the hair node, and that one is amazing. For black and dark brown hair you can get decent hair results with a different node set-up in Eevee, but blonde hair is just an hassle and I personally haven't gotten a decent result.

Eevee is amazing for background and environment renders though, especially indoor ones. It can simulate ray tracing quit well with the overall much simpler forms and materials. I haven't tried it myself yet, but you could maybe cut your render in time significantly if you would render your background and charcers seperatly and combine them in photoshop.

For substance painter, I'm not really familiar with everything it can do, but a quick look up shows it's a texture painter? I don't know how good it will be for skin textures (if it's good for skin texture I might look into it, as that's the part I just don't like doing), but for other materials blender actually got an inbuild material library. It's an addon called blenderkit, which is disabled by default. It has a couple hundred different materials, and with the node system you can often easily alter them.

Those renders looks quit nice for how little time your put into it. Maybe try replacing the eyes, they look wierdly flat from the side (I'm not a fan of Daz eyes). Go add some hair to her, it's the part I always enjoy the most.

Edit: Did you imported those eyebrows from daz? I make them with hair particles in Blender, but that takes ages and still looks meh. If you did, how did you export those?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Man, one more post then I'm calling it a night.

The other thing that is blowing me away is the responsiveness of this software. I can leave this thing in full render mode and move my camera around, tweak shaders, and make all kinds of changes and the update is lightening fast. I'm running Daz in the background and Blender doesn't seem to notice.

I wanted to time myself on converting a new character. I imported the .obj, added the textures, configured the nodes and clocked out as finished in about 35 minutes. It's official, I've drank the Blender-Kool-Aid.

G'night friends! Cheers.

View attachment 396809 View attachment 396810 View attachment 396811 View attachment 396812

If you are not using the plug-in's that others have suggested, I recommend exporting a .fbx instead of a .obj, since it also comes with the animatable skeleton rig. I only use .obj when I need to port a character sculpt back into daz, and as far as I know, .obj does not come with the skeleton rig or weight paints, and it would be a pain to set that all up again and try to match how daz had it originally.

I took a quick look of Live2d (never heard of the software), the workflow seems a bit counter-intuitive compare to Blender. In Blender it's Draw -> apply bones/modifiers -> start animating. In Live2d as far as I saw, draw in a 2D software, import it into Live2D setup the poly zones(or constraints to the image zones) -> start animating. I don't know doesn't look efficient and probably more work. Plus it looks like a destructive workflow, for example if you wanted to make color changes or remove something, it looks like you'll have to re-import and do all that poly-zoning again. Perhaps you can enlighten me here.

Basically, fancy software makes 2D mesh with a texture, uses multiple layers, and by animating the mesh (such as with an armature rig or shape keys), you animate the 2D image. And Live2D is also supported in the unity game engine (since it is essentially a 3D mesh in reality). You are correct in how the workflow is a bit cumbersome. Do the art in an art program, Live2D (replaced with blender) just does the meshing and animating, the user has to do all the layering work. It is a lot more work on top of the work needed to draw an image, but if you want a high quality image that is painted, and you want to animate it smoothly, you pretty much have to do this since trying to animate/repaint by hand is a surefire way to keep busy for a few years. I wouldn't say it is destructive. Since if you change the art a bit, you can just load in the new image as a texture and swap it in the material node settings. I do have fun with trying different meshing techniques to change how the joints deform (lots of sub surfacing to make things look smooth). you would want a high res image so that distortions don't stand out as making the texture look low quality. But basically you have to make a mesh either for the whole thing, or cut things up into layers, such as clothes ontop of teh body, and you have to cut your art into layers as well. there is a lot of prep work.

Feel free to jump on in Synx, Yeah, substance painter is basically a texture creation tool, and I have seen tutorials of people using it to make skin. As for the eyebrows, from experience, I know that those are just what comes with the texture. I find that having the eyebrow texture under the real eyebrows tends to help make them seem fuller/natural without having to go overboard with the hair particles (not to mention I find controlling the eyebrows on the body shape mesh hard due to the fact that I use weight painting to try and creat the eyebrows, to paint and sculpt them in terms of length and density, and the default daz mesh is not high enough resolution, you would have to dublicate the mesh, sub divide the heck out of it and cut out everything but the eyebrow area, they should still move with the armature, but after you have a high res mesh, then you can add hair particle, I also find using the solidifier with no rim, to displace the mesh under the surface, helps prevent graphical glitches caused by z plane fighting on the meshes.

If you want to get eyebrows from daz, the only ones I know of, if you aren't downloading/buying them as a kit (I have not seen if this is a thing) is to find characters who do have eyebrows that come seprate. The only ones I have found come with the Gen8F character Tess (cartoony style girl)

Earlier last night I finished up a batch of renders for someone I am helping with on a project, these may be of interest to you Synx since it tries to add life to the eyes as well.

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