Recently jumped down the rabbit hole of SFM, decided I want to try my skills at creating short scenes. What pulled me in was content from Jackerman and GeneralButch, insane visuals. I have seen Blender, Daz, and SFM mentioned. Out of those 3 which would be the easiest to get started with? I have a built pc that I have used for Sony Vegas 17, Photoshop, and Lightroom.
- Thread starter terabytehd
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- May 3, 2018
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If you are going to make similar animation, aka very customized, stick to SFM or Blender. Daz doesn't have a proper animation pipeline, you usually just use animations after importing them from Blender.
I'll suggest Blender if you want to
A huge deciding factor between SFM and Blender is, how long do you want animations to take. I don't mean, how long you want to make your animations, I mean, how long do you want to be sitting there doing nohing while your computer is cranking out renders.
SFM has two main advantages over Blender:
Blender hase 3 main advantages over SFM:
If blender doesn't have these features, why use it? Well, the reason I give the daz example, is SFM is similar to it, both are like a power tool. A power tool is really good at doing it's job... but only it's job. It's a nightmare and very tedious to try to pose and impossible to animate characters in Daz. Similarly it is a nightmare trying to shape characters in SFM and impossible to make new characters. So if they are power tools, what is Blender? Blender is more like a tool box, full of hand tools. Blender can actually do a lot of what both daz and sfm can do, including some of the automated behavior, but you have to do a lot of set up. For example, exporting a character from daz to blender, I have to overhaul the animation rig so that it includes a lot of the automatic features you would find with SFM. The reason Blender can be a hassle to learn is that you don't get to work right away with making animations, you have to start learning all these smaller steps inbetween zero to animation, and a lot of them have to deal with how to use the program, learning concepts like IK rigs, playing around with shaders that offer the best compromise between great looks and not taking forever to render. I'll only render in daz if I want to preview a character, but it takes a while, even if I lower the quality. Blender, not only do I get more control over the graphics, but if I'm doing an animation or any other work, I can usually get it to run much much faster.
In the case of GeneralButch, I think they started off with SFM, but eventually moved to Blender when SFM could no longer do the things they wanted, or could not do them to the quality they wanted (I've seen people do stretch physics with sfm, but the quality of the 3D model limits the quality of how this looks and works). Both artist are now using Blender. Learning blender means learning the fundamentals of 3D animations, so I'd actually recommend toying with Blender. You could start with SFM to have an easier time getting into projects, if you want to do simpler animations (lewd models found at smutbase's sister site
starting from nothing, I starting Blender with the idea that I could make a custom character in a month, completly custom, while learning blender, having the character ready to animate. This is when I was in college and had more free time, but it still took me 3 months just to make something fairly polished and 'deliverable,' and much longer toying with it and causually watching videos to learn a lot of the tricks that can be used (to get the daz export model to have an automated animation rig like with SFM, I pretty much had to invent my own techniques since there is no one go to guide on how to do this).
Best of luck!
I'll suggest Blender if you want to
A huge deciding factor between SFM and Blender is, how long do you want animations to take. I don't mean, how long you want to make your animations, I mean, how long do you want to be sitting there doing nohing while your computer is cranking out renders.
SFM has two main advantages over Blender:
- Source Engine Graphics
- Dedicated Animation Pipeline
- Is you never have to worry about spending too much time perfecting the visuals because there's not too much you can do,
- The visuals are good enough for most,
- It renders pretty quickly, Almost no down time to render and export an animation.
Blender hase 3 main advantages over SFM:
- Vastly more powerful graphics (has both a proper renderer in terms of light simulating, or a realtime render as well, with the ability to make custom shaders using graphical nodes).
- It can export data to various formats to work with other programs (I sculpt and animate daz characters in blender, make custom clothes in blender, and blender is used to make new and custom FBX characters for SFM)
- It can do anything.
- characters with custom shaping (bigger breast and ass) (also you can get the base model of the character for free from
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- Jiggle Physics
- Stretch Physics
- Soft and smooth lighting and skin glow
If blender doesn't have these features, why use it? Well, the reason I give the daz example, is SFM is similar to it, both are like a power tool. A power tool is really good at doing it's job... but only it's job. It's a nightmare and very tedious to try to pose and impossible to animate characters in Daz. Similarly it is a nightmare trying to shape characters in SFM and impossible to make new characters. So if they are power tools, what is Blender? Blender is more like a tool box, full of hand tools. Blender can actually do a lot of what both daz and sfm can do, including some of the automated behavior, but you have to do a lot of set up. For example, exporting a character from daz to blender, I have to overhaul the animation rig so that it includes a lot of the automatic features you would find with SFM. The reason Blender can be a hassle to learn is that you don't get to work right away with making animations, you have to start learning all these smaller steps inbetween zero to animation, and a lot of them have to deal with how to use the program, learning concepts like IK rigs, playing around with shaders that offer the best compromise between great looks and not taking forever to render. I'll only render in daz if I want to preview a character, but it takes a while, even if I lower the quality. Blender, not only do I get more control over the graphics, but if I'm doing an animation or any other work, I can usually get it to run much much faster.
In the case of GeneralButch, I think they started off with SFM, but eventually moved to Blender when SFM could no longer do the things they wanted, or could not do them to the quality they wanted (I've seen people do stretch physics with sfm, but the quality of the 3D model limits the quality of how this looks and works). Both artist are now using Blender. Learning blender means learning the fundamentals of 3D animations, so I'd actually recommend toying with Blender. You could start with SFM to have an easier time getting into projects, if you want to do simpler animations (lewd models found at smutbase's sister site
You must be registered to see the links
), but since it automates some things, you'll be skipping learning some skills and concepts (and if you want jiggle physics, you have to animate it by hand a lot of the time with SFM).starting from nothing, I starting Blender with the idea that I could make a custom character in a month, completly custom, while learning blender, having the character ready to animate. This is when I was in college and had more free time, but it still took me 3 months just to make something fairly polished and 'deliverable,' and much longer toying with it and causually watching videos to learn a lot of the tricks that can be used (to get the daz export model to have an automated animation rig like with SFM, I pretty much had to invent my own techniques since there is no one go to guide on how to do this).
Best of luck!
- May 24, 2020
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Jackerman and GB I think both started in SFM and have transitioned to blender. I havent been able to get into 3d yet but I've been hovering around the topic watching vids and reading about it before bed. This is roughly what my homework after I finish my programming grind
Okay So realistically, you probably arent going to make it much further since the bar beyond learning that much is pretty low. You are 250+ hours in at this point between random tutorials and working on your own even then you've just been kind of floating through praying you understand something but hey, luckily you had this random ass post to help you google things. With the amount of time i've spent digging through sporadic unhelpful info to make my own curriculum I hope you find this more useful. After all that you should look into skinning, weight painting, texturing, and shader programming. If you've made it this far then I have about where to go from there.
- Sculpting looks like the easiest place to start. Despite what people say, blender's controls aren't intuitive at all but once you start figuring out how to sculpt, the real artistic skill comes in figuring out how to build. Here is a quick run down on the 3 main sculpting workflows, concepts for when you start and that you can refer back too:
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2. So after you barely have scratched the surface of sculpting, like just barely enough knowledge to sculpt independently and making your own things. Most people start with a base mesh and that's what you should do, dont create a ton of work for yourself. Move to looking at animation , do yourself a favor watch
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and join the discord with us. Don't bother learning rigging, just steal an asset off smutbase. The community is really good about answering most questions but advanced topics are off the table.3. After that you will probably learn how to create the most basic rigging, which is creating a simple skeleton by adding bones, and you'll probably be happy with that. Maybe you'll even start to make pretty advance rigs to try and get the animation to be just right, with thinfs like shape keys, but it will still look kind of ugly. You'll be stealing textures and wondering what's the fastest way you can make something look good with as little effort as possible
4.You need to move away from 3d for a minute and learn about lighting scenes. Its a real skill that will get you on par with jackerman and definitely above GB. You should learn about skydome vs global illumination. Then point lights, directional lights, spotlights, where and when to use all these plus some others. You might feel like skipping this step, but dont, it literally is make or break for a lot of people. Along the way you'll learn about baked lighting vs dynamic lighting and it will make a hard wrap back around to 3dcg
Okay So realistically, you probably arent going to make it much further since the bar beyond learning that much is pretty low. You are 250+ hours in at this point between random tutorials and working on your own even then you've just been kind of floating through praying you understand something but hey, luckily you had this random ass post to help you google things. With the amount of time i've spent digging through sporadic unhelpful info to make my own curriculum I hope you find this more useful. After all that you should look into skinning, weight painting, texturing, and shader programming. If you've made it this far then I have about where to go from there.
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Well, wow! 1st of all I'd want to thank you both for the in-depth and thorough reply with what I can now call "homework". I appreciate you both taking the time to outline the differences in the 3 software programs and what is needed to learn them. I did download all 3, watched a few starter YT tutorials, tried Daz and Blender so far. From my experience Blender has a huge learning curve, Daz was much easier to use and the controls are a bit easier to use.
I will take the advice you both have stated and start with the basics. My background is video and photography, so lighting I am experienced with although I don't know if the lighting in SFM is the same. What I can see is there a lot of time, effort, and creativity that goes into learning and making SFM work. Time to start learning, thanks again!
- May 3, 2018
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Glad to hear, the secret to success is simply toying around with neat ideas every now and then, maybe a video playing in the background while you are busy. Just so long as you take a look at the programs now and then, taking your time and not expecting fast results, you'll get there eventually. These programs are a box of toys, a lot of time your just toying around and experimenting rather than actually knowing what to do. I consider myself more of a technical artist because I have more fun setting up the technical stuff (like rigging a character, making custom shaders) rather than actually making art (I'll give the character to someone else to pose, animate, and render).
Since OsamiWorks mentioned sculpting, this is what I'll mention: While I have had a lot of experience sculpting, and tried out different retoplogy techniques (making an actual usable mesh), and I have a lot of fun with both, I've never been able to beat the quality of the Geneses 8 Female topology (found in Daz) mainly in shoulder and hip loop areas, which are the two hardest loops to make clean. My actual workflow consists of lots of protyping a character in daz, exporting to blender to either do some fine tuning with sculpting, and then I'll export back to daz. This way I have made a variety of character styles and body type, and since they all use the G8F body, which has all the same topology, its possible to use daz to morph between characters to generate new designs. Daz can only do a single reference transformation, as far as I can tell, so I've acutally started to make new body types by exporting morphs and characters to blender, where I can do more complex and advance morphs, and then re import into daz so that daz can re rig the character as well as fit clothes to the character. Also, I always add a smooth modifier to daz clothes and set the top (ie tank top shirt) from 40 to 120 smoothing so that the clothes look like they are poropely being stretched by the cartoonish large breasts.
So if you want a place to start, daz, toying around with body types, toying around with outfits, and then probly blender to do more complex things, such as animating, posing, or scultping.
Since OsamiWorks mentioned sculpting, this is what I'll mention: While I have had a lot of experience sculpting, and tried out different retoplogy techniques (making an actual usable mesh), and I have a lot of fun with both, I've never been able to beat the quality of the Geneses 8 Female topology (found in Daz) mainly in shoulder and hip loop areas, which are the two hardest loops to make clean. My actual workflow consists of lots of protyping a character in daz, exporting to blender to either do some fine tuning with sculpting, and then I'll export back to daz. This way I have made a variety of character styles and body type, and since they all use the G8F body, which has all the same topology, its possible to use daz to morph between characters to generate new designs. Daz can only do a single reference transformation, as far as I can tell, so I've acutally started to make new body types by exporting morphs and characters to blender, where I can do more complex and advance morphs, and then re import into daz so that daz can re rig the character as well as fit clothes to the character. Also, I always add a smooth modifier to daz clothes and set the top (ie tank top shirt) from 40 to 120 smoothing so that the clothes look like they are poropely being stretched by the cartoonish large breasts.
So if you want a place to start, daz, toying around with body types, toying around with outfits, and then probly blender to do more complex things, such as animating, posing, or scultping.
Thanks again, I did grab some Genesis body types in Daz, I think 3 and 8. I'll have to experiment in making my own. I like the hourglass figure models, I want to make a few of them in different skin tones. The smooth modifier you mention, I have noticed that in a lot SFM, didn't know there was a edit for that. So much to learn!
Great info! I'm in the process myself of learning how to animate. I've been using Daz for like 4 years now and I'm pretty decent at making poses (scenes) and creating characters (but not from scratch).
If I read correctly, we are able to import characters into Blender correct? But what about a whole scene?... or do we have to create the scene in Blender?
For example I have plenty of G8 characters with certain clothing. When I import them to Blender, can I import the clothes as well or is it just the body.
Thanks
If I read correctly, we are able to import characters into Blender correct? But what about a whole scene?... or do we have to create the scene in Blender?
For example I have plenty of G8 characters with certain clothing. When I import them to Blender, can I import the clothes as well or is it just the body.
Thanks
- May 3, 2018
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Body, Body with Clothes, (sometimes bodies with poses), whole scenes are all exportable, but each technique offer different benefits and different sort comings.
Diffeomorphic, FBX, OBJ are the three main mediums I use for transferring data from daz to blender. There is an official daz to blender 'bridge' which I was going to explore (I think its free?) to see how feasible it is. More comments on this later.
Diffeomorphic is a tool/addon for daz and blender that parses a Daz Scene data into a json file that blender can decode to read the scene data. So far I have not testing this with importing 'enviorments.' I sometimes use diffeomorphic because it sometimes imports poses more reliably than FBX.
FBX is my main method of transfering a character to blender (with clothing) if I want to do more intensive posing or animating work. But I find it also does whole scenes (environments) pretty well.
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Monolithic vs modules: I'd actually suggest not importing a whole scene into blender, depending on how regular you do this. The issue is, when you import everything, there's more chances for things to go wrong. However, breaking up a scene into parts means you can work on said problems individually, rather than having to keep re importing everything anytime you want to test a fix. While I mainly use OBJ for transferring the raw mesh of a character for sculpting and importing morphs back into Daz, I'll also use it for props, scenes, and environmental objects. Thats because it keeps things simple, OBJ is the simplest data type (thus the most limiting, can't do rigs, poses, lights or cameras), it only has the mesh, the normals (per vertex I believe), and UV data. I suggest breaking down a scene into its pieces and assembling it in blender as having each assets already corrected allows you to 'standardize' the assets. IE really like a beach scene? convert it to blender once and import the blender file instead so you don't have to keep fixing it. alternatively, you can 'link' or append assets instead of importing them fully to keep the size of the file down, minimize corruption, it also tends to speed a few things up as blender can unload a lot of things it doesn't need.
Materials: Just about every import technique I use can't import materials correctly. It may just be something buggy with my Blender, but all materials import with metal at 100%, the alpha mask uses the alpha channle when it should use the black and white pixel textures, and even when its set up properly, I still need to go into settings for EEVEE and toggle on and off the 'alpha blend' to get the alpha to work (even if I'm not rendering in eevee I like it for previewing). With OBJ, materials are not imported. For the most part matterials are simple for me and I have lots of fun making custom shader/materials so its a non issue for me. It is really anoying to have to fix it every time, so I actually set up my blender default to have a Daz character already imported with all the right materials premade, so when I import a character, I just switch materials and then recursively cleanup the data (in the File/Clean Up section) to get rid of the old stuff I wasn't using.
Daz to Blender Bridge: Like I mentioned, this looks to be the official tool or plugin to get the two programs to sync up, but I haven't looked much into it, or how good it is., However I mention it because I'm hoping it solves the two current issues, importing materials correctly, and the corrective morph issue (see notes about corrective morphs), I just haven't decided to spend time looking into yet as my current workflow is good enough for the character prototyping I'm doing currently.