Daz to .. ANYTHING? Maya, houdini... well pretty much anything..

lancelotdulak

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Nov 7, 2018
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I Love daz models. I dont think any models out there compare to genesis. Even when you compare the models built by MS etc for their ai project, the stuff built by UE4 artists for their demos.. nothing comes close. But daz is limited in a lot of ways and its slow (comparatively) . I was even willing to limit what i develop in to anything i could easily import daz models into .

But theres literally nothing. I can get daz models into UE4 with a Lot of work but i want to learn maya or houdini. Ive installed 3dexchange and i can get the mesh in.. but theres a lot more to the model than the mesh. I foolishly bought the "daztomaya" plugin to find out it doesnt work with maya lt and apparently.. basically imports the mesh. Any help ? Id really love to learn Houdini and can easily import the mesh and i think the skeletons but the thought of completely retexturing 10 or 20 daz models gives me the shivers.
 

Rich

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Ya, non-trivial task. From what I've read on the Daz forums, most people take DS content "elsewhere" by importing the asset as FBX, which (nominally) preserves the skeleton, weight mapping and textures. Part of the challenge is that Daz's shader model is different (well, every program pretty much has its own unique approach to that) so even if you have the texture maps, you have to do some fiddling to recreate things.

From what little research I've done, it seems the external program with the best support for Daz "stuff" may be iClone - they seem to be able to take the Daz figures and import them sufficiently that you can then animate and render them there.
 

lancelotdulak

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Nov 7, 2018
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To anyone checking this in the future: ive happily managed to move models fairly easily to both c4d and maya. Secrets are of course making eye moisture transparent and watching your export settings. and avoiding fbx ...
 
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Domiek

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To anyone checking this in the future: ive happily managed to move models fairly easily to both c4d and maya. Secrets are of course making eye moisture transparent and watching your export settings. and avoiding fbx ...
How did you solve rigging? Using autorigger for c4d?
 

lancelotdulak

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Nov 7, 2018
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How did you solve rigging? Using autorigger for c4d?
Not really ive sortof abandoned that. I realised im just not into programming anymore (im an expert but its not fun anymore) so dont need to rig for ue4. I was honest with myself and realised unless i buy a $5000 system C4d is silly for me. So im sticking with daz. Honestly my only problem with daz is the ridiculously small scene sizes you can useably do.

Id bet there are some custom skeleton rigs for daz for each software out there but i havent found them. Good luck if this is what youre trying for. Ive seen one person here who used them for c4d or something. Their solution was just to pose in daz then export as obj. When you need a different pose you just pose the char again in daz and export. Not useful for animations though
 

Archelion

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Dec 24, 2018
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I think Cinema 4D might be the easiest to deal with Daz character conversions. There you can also render with Redshift, which is a much faster renderer than Iray (which is good for animators).
 
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