Daz Blender DazToBlender 8 - eyes

[DaSpudly]

Hello all.

I'm having the usual problems with IRay being painfully slow to render, so I thought I would have a look at the Daz to Blender 8 asset which was posted a few days ago.

I've previously experimented with using the Diffeomorphic system, which works well, but I've found doesn't really suit my work flow.

My first experience of Daz to Blender sort of does, provided I can solve the problem I am having with materiels.

If you look at the attached files, you will see one Cycles render, one EEVEE render and a screenshot of one of the nodes in the nodes editor of Blender.

As you can see, the materials themselves have come across fairly well, except for the eyes.

I initially thought it may be a UV problem, because none of the image textures attached to the parts of the eye have a coordinates node in the setup. So I added one and tried various options, leading from the "generated", "UV" or "Object" and none of them do anything other than make this girl look a bit more demonic.

Am I being blind here? Have I missed something basic?

Thanks for your time.

 

[polywog]

 

[Rich]

My first experience of Daz to Blender sort of does, provided I can solve the problem I am having with materiels.

As you'll see from the video that polywog posted, Blender isn't the only program that has problems with Daz's implementation of the eyes. There's some tricky geometry and iRay material work that goes on in there - presumably because they wanted the eyes to look realistic even during close-ups.

I've never actually checked for sure, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that parts of the characters' eyes aren't using the iRay Uber Shader, but instead might be using something specialized. If not, however, one thing you might consider is going in with Daz's own shader editor and poking around at how the eye materials are set up. Sadly, I have zero experience with that part of Daz Studio, so I can't be much help. There are, however, a few people on the Daz forums who know that stuff well. You might consider asking for help over there.

 

[polywog]

As you'll see from the video that polywog posted, Blender isn't the only program that has problems with Daz's implementation of the eyes. There's some tricky geometry and iRay material work that goes on in there - presumably because they wanted the eyes to look realistic even during close-ups.

I've never actually checked for sure, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that parts of the characters' eyes aren't using the iRay Uber Shader, but instead might be using something specialized. If not, however, one thing you might consider is going in with Daz's own shader editor and poking around at how the eye materials are set up. Sadly, I have zero experience with that part of Daz Studio, so I can't be much help. There are, however, a few people on the Daz forums who know that stuff well. You might consider asking for help over there.

Most 3D programs, render engines, and game engines follow the same "industry standards" while Daz does some crazy shit, that takes 3 times as long to render.

 

[9thCrux]

This tutorial is meant for unreal engine but he goes into details about the eyes, that information can help you out.

You must be registered to see the links

It seems to me that some elements need to have alpha transparency, like eye moisture and the cornea I believe.
Maybe hide element by element to find which one is covering the rest.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Set the transmission slider to 1 for eye moister material and cornea material so that they are transparent like a liquid.

 

[DaSpudly]

Thanks very much guys, I'll report back when I have a chance to try it - I'm on a four on four off roster and I've just started the four on.

 

[DaSpudly]

Oh my god, she's ginger!

Hello all, finally managed to get back to this, and you know what, I think I've got it sorted.

The three images attached are using the DazToBlender script, rendered in Cycles at 256 samples @3840x2160 and resized in Irfanview. The model is using the standard Daz genitals. The two images of the hip, front and back took less than ten minutes to render, the upper torso shot took less than 20 minutes to render.

A similar result in iRay would have taken more than four hours and thousands of samples, because Daz, in all their wisdom decided that RTX was more important than people using their CUDA cores to render with.

On the whole, I'm fairly happy with it, though they are by no means perfect.

The model initially had pubic hair as well as a belly piercing, but the DTB script just about had a hernia when it encountered them, so I had to remove them. That's fine, I can model them in Blender, although I'm very much a stranger to hair generation in Blender.

Speaking of hair, does anyone have any suggestions for sorting out this hair? I had a look at putting a smoothing modifier on, but it appeared to do nothing useful. I didn't try a subd modifier, though I will. Hopefully that will stop it looking so skanky. It's supposed to be very fine and not greasy looking.

Other problems I can see are that the sclera in the eye may be too bright. I kind of like it, but its a little over the top for what I want to use it for.

The last obvious thing I can see is that the genital texture is ever so slightly off the torso texture and I really don't know why.

I'm going to have to dig into it and figure it out, which should make for some funny conversations when my wife comes into the room.

Anyway, this is Hannah. She is the first character I've brought over from Daz to use in a game I'm writing. She's 19 and is studying Mechanical Engineering. She's not fit, she's just skinny.

Thanks for reading. Can you guys see any other issues I should be looking at?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

It looks like for the hair it is not applying the alpha.
other than that it seems ok.

 

[DaSpudly]

It looks like for the hair it is not applying the alpha.
other than that it seems ok.

I'll have a look at that tomorrow, cheers.

 

[DaSpudly]

Ok, I think I've pretty much got it sorted as far as this character's general 'look' goes. I'm still not a hundred percent happy with the hair, but that may very well be a function of the actual hair object itself.

I still have a few things I need to figure out as far as DazToBlender goes.

Apparently, you can use poses you have created in Daz and apply them in Blender. I wouldn't expect that to go perfectly, but I would kind of expect to see how to apply the damn things and I honestly haven't seen how to do it yet.

In addition, I still haven't created files for this character which use the NVG8 or Golden Palace gens. The next character I bring in will have one or the other and I'll go through the process with that one. Once I have that figured out, I'll be able to drag one in of this character fairly easily, because I'll know the process.

That's what I hope, anyway.

Just for the sake of anyone else who is looking for information, I've attached a screenshot of the nodes for the hair as it stands in the accompanying render.

It looks a lot better than it did before, but it isn't perfect. I should also add that I added a SubD modifier to the hair which got rid of a lot of kinks.

Good thing too, this character is going to experience a lot of kinks in the future, I'd hate to have to deal with unnecessary ones.

Again, I'm always ready and looking for any constructive criticism anyone wants to offer.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Manchaiser]

In my opinion:
Don't expect too much from Daz in Blender. If you are planning to work in Blender then 90% of Daz stuff needs to be fixed by yourself in Blender. Including blendshapes, materials, bones and weights. I prefer to use Daz as a reference builder. Default Daz armature doesn't fit my requirements so I use AutoRig plugin to rebuild rig and animate everything right in Blender.

Also: try to play with the value of subsurface scattering shader. It makes skin look much better, not like this plastic one in your pictures.

 

[DaSpudly]

In my opinion:
Don't expect too much from Daz in Blender. If you are planning to work in Blender then 90% of Daz stuff needs to be fixed by yourself in Blender. Including blendshapes, materials, bones and weights. I prefer to use Daz as a reference builder. Default Daz armature doesn't fit my requirements so I use AutoRig plugin to rebuild rig and animate everything right in Blender.

Also: try to play with the value of subsurface scattering shader. It makes skin look much better, not like this plastic one in your pictures.

Thanks for the reply.

What sorts of values should I be looking at?

I agree this isn't by any means perfect, but it is supposed to be a very pale ghost of a girl. My initial thoughts would be to turn the specularity down quite a lot and as you say, adjust the SSS a bit. I haven't yet managed to look at the actual shader yet.

 

[Manchaiser]

What sorts of values should I be looking at?

'Subsurface' field. There is no default value that fits every scene of every 3d artist. Try to fine-tune it, but not in range from 0 to 1 but in 0.001 to 0.2 with the step something like 0.002.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

'Subsurface' field. There is no default value that fits every scene of every 3d artist. Try to fine-tune it, but not in range from 0 to 1 but in 0.001 to 0.2 with the step something like 0.002.

Likewise, skin roughness tends to one thing I like to change as skin color changes, darker skin reflects light beter, so highlights are more noticable, so I usually need to increase the roughness for darker skins.

 

[DaSpudly]

'Subsurface' field. There is no default value that fits every scene of every 3d artist. Try to fine-tune it, but not in range from 0 to 1 but in 0.001 to 0.2 with the step something like 0.002.

Good info, thank you. I'm really going to have to have a play with that shader, it looks like it could be quite powerful.

Likewise, skin roughness tends to one thing I like to change as skin color changes, darker skin reflects light beter, so highlights are more noticable, so I usually need to increase the roughness for darker skins.

Part of the premise of the game is that the girls general condition changes over the course of the game. Things like physical fitness, weight, general health and in the case of Hannah here, exposure to sunlight, which I expect would make her skin initially red, but eventually end up as a light tan. She is still a redhead after all.

I'm going to need to come up with a way to adjust that sort of thing fairly easily I think.

Thanks for the input guys, very helpful.

 

[Manchaiser]

Oh, I forgot to say: better learn how to work in cycles, not in Eevee. Cycles rendering engine requires good GPU but it's easier for beginner because it's based on ray tracing. Eevee rendering engine works more like a modern game engine do like unity or UE. They have based on baking lights\shadows\light traversal into textures to speed up real-time rendering.

Don't forget to select which rendering device blender has to use for cycles (it can be done in preferences)

 

[DaSpudly]

Oh, I forgot to say: better learn how to work in cycles, not in Eevee. Cycles rendering engine requires good GPU but it's easier for beginner because it's based on ray tracing. Eevee rendering engine works more like a modern game engine do like unity or UE. They have based on baking lights\shadows\light traversal into textures to speed up real-time rendering.

Don't forget to select which rendering device blender has to use for cycles (it can be done in preferences)

Yeah I'm pretty much exclusively working in Cycles.

Eevee is fantastic, but I suspect it doesn't yet lend itself to realistic looking skin and so on, at least, not without more knowledge from its user.