Tool Daz Blender [Development Thread] Sync Studio for Daz and Blender for easy animations

[Schlongborn]

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I have created an addon for both Daz Studio and Blender to help me animate Daz figures in Blender and then send those animations over to Daz and Preview/Render with Iray. In my opinion this is the fastest way to create animations for Daz figures because it combines the ease of animating in Blender with seeing the results in Daz easily.

I find this incredibly helpful to quickly create good looking poses and animations with Blender and then see how those look in Daz Studio when rendered with Iray. Imho Iray still looks best when rendering Daz assets, and while it is possible to tweak Cycles to come close or even look better, I find that it is a lot easier for me to just stick with Iray. Then all that time that I would have to spend on making cycles look good for my particular scene, I can just spend that on animating instead.

Features:

• Import anything (Figures, Environments, Cameras, Lights, etc.) from Daz into Blender with a click of a single button
• You can control exactly what is imported to keep things simple and fast, you can have a complex environment in Daz and only sync one figure into Blender for animating it
• You can easily add new things and import them without having to re-import the entire scene, only the new stuff
• Easily create an IK rig for figures and their followers which can be used to pose and animate all of the bones of the figure and its followers with one combined rig
• Rendered images from Blender and Daz should line up very closely so that they can easily be combined in Photoshop
• You can render a figure in Daz, then render a fluid simulation in Blender for example and they should both line up (almost) perfectly

The addon on the Blender side is built around the popular

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addon. The Blender code I've written is GPL3 similar to Diffeomorphic, my Daz code is propietary though. The addon is free to download on Itch.

Itch Page:

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Alternative patreon link to latest release:

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Documentation:

I tried to create a video that explains how to install the addon in both Daz and Blender, and then also gives a short introduction how to use the addon that I believe should be enough to get you started:



Bugs & Feedback:

Most important thing for me right now is actually to hear from anyone if this thing even works! So far, no one said anything so I am kind of in the dark about it. So please! Tell me! Does it even work?

Beyond that this thread is also meant to get some feedback from you guys in general about what you would like to see implemented. One planned change for the next update is to make the follower panel in Blender interactive, so that followers can easily be deleted on the Blender side after setting up the rig (currently it is very difficult, in particular if the follower had extra bones for which bones were created in the control rig, like for ponytail hair for example).

 

[osanaiko]

Amazing. Watching video now.

EDIT: Okay, this is a serious leap forward in Gooner technology.

Bravo, Schlongborn!

I don't see myself using this right now, but I am very excited to see how this changes the game for devs who are interested in making daz based anims. Just the addition of proper IK rigs is a huge win, and if this means that the more effective anim tools that exist in blender can be used for Daz figures with iray-accurate shaders etc..... woweee. A great leap forward for goonerkind.

 

[kessel6123]

Hi!

I just found out about this plugin so i decided to give it a try!
I just had a small hiccup during installation, basically on the itch page it states that DAZ versions under 4.16 are not supported, so i tried it with 4.23 but the scripts always gave an error (logs just stated "failed to load script"), but after upgrading to DAZ 4.24 everything worked perfectly.

I don't know if my problem was a botched installation of 4.23 (I kinda moved stuff around and installed a ton of things so it may be just a problem on my installation).

Thank you for this plugin, animating in DAZ is pure hell, and this simplifies things by many orders of magnitude!

 

[Schlongborn]

I just had a small hiccup during installation, basically on the itch page it states that DAZ versions under 4.16 are not supported, so i tried it with 4.23 but the scripts always gave an error (logs just stated "failed to load script"), but after upgrading to DAZ 4.24 everything worked perfectly.

Thank you so much for the feedback, that is good to know it didn't work in 4.23 for you.

I have started working on the script in 4.16 and so I wrote on the itch page that <4.16 is not supported, but to be honest I have been using 4.24 mostly and didn't really test 4.23 and 4.16 since a couple of months ago at least, so could be that only 4.24 actually works.

I am currently working on upgrade 1.1 for the scripts that adds a new panel where the followers (clothes, hair, etc.) can be managed better. It also contains some bug fixes, mostly for pulling poses from Daz which is quite glitchy and slow in the currently released version. I'll test 4.23 and 4.16 again to see if I can reproduce and fix the problem you've encountered.

The upgrade should be ready this week I hope, I want to make another video about it.

 

[Schlongborn]

so i tried it with 4.23 but the scripts always gave an error

You were right that it always gave an error in all Daz versions other then 4.24. I didn't know that when you encrypt the script files it only works for the Daz version you encrypted with and later versions, so since I used 4.24 only that one worked.

I have now uploaded version v1.1.0 to Itch.io:

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This should fix the issue with the encrypted scripts, but also contains a bunch of bugfixes and a new follower panel that now lets you manage the clothes/hair etc.:



You can select a follower and delete them, transfer shapes from the figure to the follower, or hide/unhide the follower, enable/disable the mesh modifiers (like smooth, shrinkwrap), or include/exclude the follower from pull completely so pulling is faster.

I also made changes so that the transfer of shapekeys which happened automatically before is now skipped by default. This improves performance when pulling poses or setting up the rig/morphs, especially when there are a lot of followers and/or hair with many vertices.

Transferring the shapekeys is needed when you need the shape of followers (clothes, hair, etc.) to adjust to the shape of the figure when shapekeys are used, for example when the figure raises its brows the hair will only move together with the raised brows if shapekeys were transferred to the hair.

Now you can select between manual transfer and automatic transfer using a dropdown in the Setup panel:



I recommend leaving it as MANUAL, and then use the Transfer to Follower button in the new follower panel to only transfer shapekeys to followers that need it. Using AUTOMATIC will ensure shapekeys are always transfered, but will slow down operations everytime there are new morphs that need to be transfered to the followers.

I still want to make a video about the new features and some more in depth details about how everything works. But this will have to wait until next week at least.

 

[kessel6123]

Hi, I have a question about geografts.
I used SyncStudio to import the scene in blender (a character with a geograft), and it imported the geograft correctly with its bones and all.
But in the morphs panel I can't find the geograft morphs (it has many). Character morphs are available and working. I tried to use the setup rig, setup morphs, setup geografts, to no avail...
Am I missing something somewhere or geograft morphs are not supported yet?

I am using SyncStudio 1.1.0, and I enabled the "sync everything below" on the character's Synch child.

Thank you!

 

[Schlongborn]

Hi, I have a question about geografts.
I used SyncStudio to import the scene in blender (a character with a geograft), and it imported the geograft correctly with its bones and all.

Which geograft did you use? I have XY and Newgens and both work. But I will try out some others and maybe make another hotfix release if I find a problem. I already found two more bugs that I just fixed.

 

[kessel6123]

Which geograft did you use? I have XY and Newgens and both work. But I will try out some others and maybe make another hotfix release if I find a problem. I already found two more bugs that I just fixed.

I'm using G8F with Futalicious.
I managed to get it to work, I rewatched the tutorial and i did miss that at the very end of it you said to create a keyframe in DAZ with the morphs, then use the pull (only morphs) button and that worked, i can see and animate the morph in blender.
At first I thought SyncStudio was supposed to sync all morphs from the graft too but I understand now that you need to keyframe those you actually want to use and pull them.

Thank you!

 

[Schlongborn]

That's good to hear that it works as expected.

Yeah, with the tutorial I kind of concentrated on the installation and all of the setup stuff where you have to add nodes to the scene to mark stuff for syncing. And then at the end I was kind of tired and wanted to finish so the morph stuff didn't get as much attention as it should.

Probably will concentrate more on morphs and related stuff in the next video.

 

[Schlongborn]

I just uploaded the hotfix v1.1.1 to itch, I fixed two small problems:

• Fixed an issue that when partially importing followers (hair, clothes, etc.) from multiple figures, then one of the figures ended up parented to the SYNC DUMMY PARENT afterwards
• Fixed an issue that pulling poses did not use the scanned morph database, so morphs where the filename and the morph name are different could not be loaded

I think it should work pretty well right now, still slower in some cases then I wish, but that is very hard to fix.

I made those little buttons in the new follower panel to exclude followers from pull to speed that up since I feel like the slowness is mostly a problem when pulling. That at least works around the problem.

Unless you guys report bugs or any other problems next update is going to take a while, like 2-4 weeks I'd say. I am planning on looking closer at morphs and how to improve loading them.

 

[Naventu]

Hi! First of all, thanks for you amazing tool. It's very promising. ^^

We followed your YouTube guide, but both Blender and Daz keep crashing and closing down from time to time. In Daz's case, the "fatal error" window pops up:



We're also having issues with pulling and pushing keyframes. They are successfully pulled from Daz to Blender, but tend to fail to look the same when pushed from Blender to Daz. We've had poses show up completely broken on Daz.

Did you test your tool with Dicktator and Golden Palace? What should we do in order to work with them? For example, we couldn't work with Dicktator at all, so we are using Daz's aniMate2 in that case. We'd love to do all the animation in Blender, so how should we proceed?

Lastly, we have some questions about the syncing. Every 10 minutes or so, we have to either delete the parent and the dummy parent and restart the sync, or create a new folder in the sync folder and change the syncing to that one in order for anything to work. Is that supposed to happen?

 

[Schlongborn]

Hi! First of all, thanks for you amazing tool. It's very promising. ^^

We followed your YouTube guide, but both Blender and Daz keep crashing and closing down from time to time. In Daz's case, the "fatal error" window pops up:

View attachment 5238724

Ok, thanks for your feedback, that is interesting.

About the fatal error that is unexpected tbh, currently I am wondering how this could even be caused by Sync Studio because essentially it is just a script, not like a C++ plugin. Could you post the entire error? Your screenshot only has the generic error message but no the logs. Are there specific steps that always cause the problem that you could post?

Also the last lines of the log.txt from your Daz Studio would maybe explain what happens there.

How much RAM/VRAM does your computer have? Could you look at if maybe your scene when loaded into Daz and Blender consumes too much RAM/VRAM? If you're loading it into both then potentially you need twice the amount of RAM/VRAM.

EDIT: It is actually possible to run Daz and Blender on two separate computers and sync them via Sync Studio. You need to put the sync path on a network share, and also make sure both computers have access to the assets in the content libraries (so also put them in a network share), and then it should be possible to have one computer run Daz, and the other run Blender, and sync between them.

We're also having issues with pulling and pushing keyframes. They are successfully pulled from Daz to Blender, but tend to fail to look the same when pushed from Blender to Daz. We've had poses show up completely broken on Daz.

Make sure you're not mixing Pose Controls and IK. In the current version when you click Setup Morphs, it just has everything checked. But that is actually kind of a bad idea to just load all morphs on a figure. In the next update I will make that clearer by providing some sensible presets and explainations what the different morph sets do.

Try making poses/animations in Blender only with bone transforms and test if that also breaks when pushing. As in just import the figure and then when setting up the rig uncheck all morphs and then try to pose and push. It should not break then.

Also, when pulling a pose from Daz that has Pose Controls, then that will import Pose Controls into Blender as well. Many PA poses actually are a mixture of bone transformations and pose controls, so that can be tricky to deal with. Try just plain bone transformations and see if that causes any problems.

Did you test your tool with Dicktator and Golden Palace? What should we do in order to work with them? For example, we couldn't work with Dicktator at all, so we are using Daz's aniMate2 in that case. We'd love to do all the animation in Blender, so how should we proceed?

I tested with Dicktator but personally mostly use XY. So Dicktator could still have some bugs that I am unaware of. But in my testing it worked. I will try to test it again before releasing the next update to make sure it works. Same for Golden Palace, I didn't actually test that, only Newgens for Victoria as that is what I use.

EDIT: I tested Dicktator again and the basics work, but there are problems with it. The reason is mostly that the rig is very complex, all of the sliders that are being used in Daz to pose it are difficult to replicate exactly on the Blender side. For example the Scrotum Scale slider changes the rigging values instead of actually scaling, that is something that only Daz supports and is impossible to do on the Blender side, so this slider just can't work in Blender. Other sliders cause problems because they are just moving a bunch of the other sliders of the Dicktator rig, Erection for example does too many things and when it is pulled into Blender there is a constraint cycle because of that, so that one should especially be avoided (it is probably a bug in my code or diffeo somewhere, but I need some time to fix it).

But if you just use the basics like Shaft Bend All, Side-Side All and Twist All and use the bone transformations then you should be fine. Also stuff like foreskin morphs etc. should work, though I would have to try out all of them to make sure and that might happen at some point but not right now.

In principle what is needed for Dicktator to be fully supported is to make your own control rig in Blender that poses the bones and then use that. My plan is to provide this kind of functionality eventually for things like Dicktator, Golden Palace, the Daz gens, XY, etc. but that will still take time until I can do that. So until then you would have to make do with the basics I mentioned above and some trial and error. Same goes for Golden Palace pretty much which I still haven't tried but I assume it will have the same limitations.

EDIT2: Btw. I tested Dicktator for Genesis 9, do you use G9 or G8?

Lastly, we have some questions about the syncing. Every 10 minutes or so, we have to either delete the parent and the dummy parent and restart the sync, or create a new folder in the sync folder and change the syncing to that one in order for anything to work. Is that supposed to happen?

No that should not happen. I don't have an explaination for that currently. I am kind of thinking it might be an issue with your computer being too slow or not having enough RAM or something like that, but not sure.

It could maybe also mean there is a problem with the files or the folder where it tries to sync. Where did you create the sync folder, is it maybe in OneDrive or Google Drive or something like that? Is it on a network share?

What are you system specs and how large is your scene? Would you be willing to share your scene (maybe not here but in discord or something like that) so that I could try out if I can reproduce the problem?

Also, make sure you're using the latest version of Sync Studio, the first one actually had a couple of bugs that would make poses show up broken when pushing/pulling so maybe you're still using 1.0.0?

 

[Naventu]

Thanks for your detailed answer!

About the fatal error that is unexpected tbh, currently I am wondering how this could even be caused by Sync Studio because essentially it is just a script, not like a C++ plugin. Could you post the entire error? Your screenshot only has the generic error message but no the logs. Are there specific steps that always cause the problem that you could post?

Also the last lines of the log.txt from your Daz Studio would maybe explain what happens there.

How much RAM/VRAM does your computer have? Could you look at if maybe your scene when loaded into Daz and Blender consumes too much RAM/VRAM? If you're loading it into both then potentially you need twice the amount of RAM/VRAM.

One of us has 12GB of VRAM (but knows nothing about animation) and the other one has 8GB. We already had a few issues with the 8GB GPU (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060) in a few Daz renders (no animation involved), so... yeah, we definitively need more VRAM if we want to use Blender at the same time.

We're used to work with Scene Optimizer and other tools to reduce rendering time in Daz. And even with that, we need to restart Daz from time to time in order to avoid exceeding VRAM limit.

Once we get a better GPU, we'll post another reply sharing our experience.

EDIT: It is actually possible to run Daz and Blender on two separate computers and sync them via Sync Studio. You need to put the sync path on a network share, and also make sure both computers have access to the assets in the content libraries (so also put them in a network share), and then it should be possible to have one computer run Daz, and the other run Blender, and sync between them.

That's cool to know! Not our case, but we'll remember it.

Make sure you're not mixing Pose Controls and IK. In the current version when you click Setup Morphs, it just has everything checked. But that is actually kind of a bad idea to just load all morphs on a figure. In the next update I will make that clearer by providing some sensible presets and explainations what the different morph sets do.

Try making poses/animations in Blender only with bone transforms and test if that also breaks when pushing. As in just import the figure and then when setting up the rig uncheck all morphs and then try to pose and push. It should not break then.

Also, when pulling a pose from Daz that has Pose Controls, then that will import Pose Controls into Blender as well. Many PA poses actually are a mixture of bone transformations and pose controls, so that can be tricky to deal with. Try just plain bone transformations and see if that causes any problems.

I tested with Dicktator but personally mostly use XY. So Dicktator could still have some bugs that I am unaware of. But in my testing it worked. I will try to test it again before releasing the next update to make sure it works. Same for Golden Palace, I didn't actually test that, only Newgens for Victoria as that is what I use.

EDIT: I tested Dicktator again and the basics work, but there are problems with it. The reason is mostly that the rig is very complex, all of the sliders that are being used in Daz to pose it are difficult to replicate exactly on the Blender side. For example the Scrotum Scale slider changes the rigging values instead of actually scaling, that is something that only Daz supports and is impossible to do on the Blender side, so this slider just can't work in Blender. Other sliders cause problems because they are just moving a bunch of the other sliders of the Dicktator rig, Erection for example does too many things and when it is pulled into Blender there is a constraint cycle because of that, so that one should especially be avoided (it is probably a bug in my code or diffeo somewhere, but I need some time to fix it).

But if you just use the basics like Shaft Bend All, Side-Side All and Twist All and use the bone transformations then you should be fine. Also stuff like foreskin morphs etc. should work, though I would have to try out all of them to make sure and that might happen at some point but not right now.

In principle what is needed for Dicktator to be fully supported is to make your own control rig in Blender that poses the bones and then use that. My plan is to provide this kind of functionality eventually for things like Dicktator, Golden Palace, the Daz gens, XY, etc. but that will still take time until I can do that. So until then you would have to make do with the basics I mentioned above and some trial and error. Same goes for Golden Palace pretty much which I still haven't tried but I assume it will have the same limitations.

Yeah, we assumed Dicktator had to be animated in Daz. Good to know you're working on a future update!

EDIT2: Btw. I tested Dicktator for Genesis 9, do you use G9 or G8?

G9.

No that should not happen. I don't have an explaination for that currently. I am kind of thinking it might be an issue with your computer being too slow or not having enough RAM or something like that, but not sure.

The machine we use for animation has 64GB of RAM.

It could maybe also mean there is a problem with the files or the folder where it tries to sync. Where did you create the sync folder, is it maybe in OneDrive or Google Drive or something like that? Is it on a network share?

Nope, no network share or cloud sync. Everything's in local.

What are you system specs and how large is your scene? Would you be willing to share your scene (maybe not here but in discord or something like that) so that I could try out if I can reproduce the problem?

Not large. Just one character with Dicktator or Golden Palace in a room.

We already wanted to upgrade our GPU. So once we test it with the new VRAM, if there's any other issue, we can discuss it in Discord, sure.

Also, make sure you're using the latest version of Sync Studio, the first one actually had a couple of bugs that would make poses show up broken when pushing/pulling so maybe you're still using 1.0.0?

We're using latest version of Sync Studio: 1.1.1

Again, thanks for your response.

 

[Schlongborn]

Thanks for you feedback, it is really important for me to hear from people how this works, or doesn't work for them.

G9.

I actually tested some more with G9, together with Dicktator, and there are a couple of unresolved problems with those in the currently released version. So the next version should contain a couple of fixes for those that should improve things.

I am planning to finish it this coming week and release it then.

The machine we use for animation has 64GB of RAM.

That should be enough, but you those crashes you are experiencing do seem like there might be some problem with hardware limitations.

A scene with just one figure though shouldn't be too difficult to handle though. VRAM wise 8GB is really low, but I'd still expect it to work unless you try to have Blender and Daz both in preview mode or run other VRAM intensive applications at the same time as Blender and Daz.

Once we get a better GPU, we'll post another reply sharing our experience.

We already wanted to upgrade our GPU. So once we test it with the new VRAM, if there's any other issue, we can discuss it in Discord, sure.

Please do! I'll also send you an invite for the support discord I created per PM.

 

[Schlongborn]

Just released v1.1.2, this is still mostly a bugfix release. There are fixes for some of the problems with Dicktator G9 that I noticed when talking to Naventu. The pull feature is still the most problematic one, but has received a couple more bugfixes and improvments. I also fixed several bugs in the follower panel that I introduced in v1.1.1

I also added a nicer dialog for loading morphs when using Setup Rig/Setup Morphs where the options now have descriptions that explain what the different Morphsets do and how they should be used. And also there are some presets to choose from which should make it easier to load the correct set of morphs.

You can check out the full changelog on patreon (or itch, but I think I want to send people to patreon rather with the problems that itch is having lately):

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Most important change to note is that I added code for collecting metrics (how long operators take, what Daz assets are being processed) and error tracking (very basic). This is so I can get some information about how people use Sync Studio, where I need to improve things, and where people encounter errors (and what assets they used when encountering them).

 

[Naventu]

We've read you, sorry for the late response! We're still waiting for the new graphics card.

Once we have the new GPU, we'll test it and give you more feedback.

Thank you very much for this amazing tool!

 

[Schlongborn]

We've read you, sorry for the late response! We're still waiting for the new graphics card.

Once we have the new GPU, we'll test it and give you more feedback.

Thank you very much for this amazing tool!

No worries, I am still here. Even if things seem to slow down here it is likely you can reach me here or through a direct f95zone message.

The discord invite I sent you probably expired. Just ask me about a new one once you're ready.

Anyone else that wants to join and get some support can message me on here as well, I'd be happy to give out invites to anyone interested.