How to make characters for blender?

[lancelotdulak]

IF you want to stick to poser PLEASE just stick to poser. You're in the heart of DAZ territory right now. Daz is the best software on the planet at what it does. Blender is good at Everything. You can always install daz, export the characters aas objects and use them in blender

 

[lobotomist]

~ Lastly, Genitals. They tend to be meshed up, having two meshes and messed up UV's. I have been thinking on making a tutorial for how to fix imported genetals, becaus you have to transfer the uv map of one mesh to another, and cut up teh body and attatch the genitals to that, and then you have a perfect mesh, it is a fair amount of work, a bit advance, but without it having genitals is worthless in blender.

I think differmorphic does this on auto, there's also aparently some pretty recent work on udims too.

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[Saki_Sliz]

I think differmorphic does this on auto, there's also aparently some pretty recent work on udims too.

You must be registered to see the links

I know I got Diffeomorphic to work, but I don't think I have tested genitals with it y

Saki_Sliz - Have you done anything in terms of adding IK rigging to the Daz rigging in Blender? Or do you convert to a different rig when you export to Blender? (e.g. diffeomorphic or equivalent)

I've been pondering doing some Daz animation in Blender where I'd want to bring the animations back into Daz for rendering. One of the big limitations of the Daz rig is the lack of IK (despite the additions in 4.12, which fall short), but I haven't had time to spend seeing if I could add IK rigging on top of Daz's own bone structure.

Diffeomorphic does import the daz skeleton. I do add IK and a range of other automated features.

For example, say you have the leg, the thigh has two rigged bones. One bone controls the hip area, the other bone controls more of the knee area. the idea is that you should be able to twist the thigh without causing the hip to twist. This is not something you can do perfectly if you tried to do manually, you need to automate it. The second bone (controlls the lower knee area) is connected to the first bone (controls the part of the leg near the hip). I go into edit mode and make it so that both bones are connected to teh him (Preserving translation/transform aka not connected. I then resize the second bone (knee area bone) to actually start at the hip joint. So you basically have two bones for the thigh bone. The longer bone connects to the knee and controls the knee area, the shorter bone controls the part of the leg near the hip. By setting the shorter bone to IK just the shin bone, what happens is that when you set the IK for the foot and move the foot, the knee will bend (assuming you set everything up correctly) the leg will twist around and do all it needs to do, and the hip will not tear itself apart because by setting the him controlling bone (for the thigh of the leg) to track the knee (shin bone) independantly, since it is a single bone it will just move and pointto the knee but without twisting on its personal y axis, so as a result you get natural motion from the hips and you can do all sorts of crazy poses without causing artifacts in mesh deformation.

That is one of many tricks I do. another trick is driver set up, but everyone does that differently. I also use a bunch of transform and math tricks to do various automated features like simulating weight displacement (shifting on ones legs and moving your weight around) and tricks with the hip (using controller bones). That way I can change the animation process from worrying about frame by frame, but instead turn it into a parameterized process. Parameterization is like make a process programmable, meaning, I more like, program how to walk, than actually animate it by hand. I have a slider for how much hip sway for example, lean, foot step size, how foot step size controls hip sway and weight distribution.

Now if you want to port the animation back into daz, the process is similar to porting the animation back to a game character. Basically what happens when you animate my way is you make the rig much more complex, more bones, or strange connection/order. game character rigs for unity and unreal, and even daz, tend to be much simpler. To convert my complex, math driven animations back to key frames on a simpler skeleton, I just have a back up of the original, I set all the bones to copy the global position and global rotation of the bone from the complex rig that represents them. I then bake in the key frames, and then use tools like this one

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to clean up the keyframe bake.

I am not at my main computer for the winter break, so I won't be able to test any questions you throw my way just yet.

 

[Nilx_games]

Here is one of my blender renders with makehuman used for the character:


And although I love blender way to do most things, I feel like for a VN, characters are the most important thing. The time it would take to transfer a character between Daz and Blender, is to me too long for making multiple characters. So therefore I will probably go with Daz3d and make the environments in blender.

Thank you everyone for your answers!

 

[lobotomist]

And although I love blender way to do most things, I feel like for a VN, characters are the most important thing. The time it would take to transfer a character between Daz and Blender, is to me too long for making multiple characters. So therefore I will probably go with Daz3d and make the environments in blender.

Thank you everyone for your answers!

Blender has a much faster render thou, and better animaton tools. If you feel like the few minutes it takes to transfer a daz character is longer than the hours upon hours of time this would save, you might be doing something wrong.

 

[Nilx_games]

Blender has a much faster render thou, and better animaton tools. If you feel like the few minutes it takes to transfer a daz character is longer than the hours upon hours of time this would save, you might be doing something wrong.

I suppose your right, the investment of time that I'll make to transfer will in the end be worth it.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I suppose your right, the investment of time that I'll make to transfer will in the end be worth it.

Are you using Diffeomorphic, because I find it only takes a few seconds to transfer.
are you talking about the time it takes to update all the materials to work properly, that is usually fun for me cuz I love playing with the shaders, I have a few premade for the skin and eyes for

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. Once I have my shaders set up and a script to automate application, it should be a 1 click solution, but said work is on the back burner.

 

[Nilx_games]

Are you using Diffeomorphic, because I find it only takes a few seconds to transfer.
are you talking about the time it takes to update all the materials to work properly, that is usually fun for me cuz I love playing with the shaders, I have a few premade for the skin and eyes for

You must be registered to see the links

. Once I have my shaders set up and a script to automate application, it should be a 1 click solution, but said work is on the back burner.

I actually don't know, I only tried to transfer once but then the rigging and textures disappeared, so I pretty much gave up on that. But I will probably try again using Diffeomorphic, and I agree that it's fun to play around with the shaders so I don't have any problems with that!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

the rigging and textures disappeared

oh, yeah that is a deal breaker, it takes a while to figure out what method actually does the job well. I use to do fbx (you have to change some settings to get it to work), but I would need to run a script to fix the bones, but in the new version of blender the scripts don't work so I moved to diffeomorphic and it has been the easiest yet. One issue with the shaders from it is that it passes the texture through a color mix node before passing it to the shader, and it passes the texture into the color mix node's second color input. It will then have some color set for the first input and some weird setting. I don't know why the creator thought this was a good idea, not putting the texture in the first color slot means it looks like you loose the texture, but really it is just being replaced with a random color, and you don't even notice because the nodes are so close together, so it was a pain in the ass to figure out why it seemed like there were no textures for a while.

 

[theZod]

Saki I would love to see your process of Daz to Blender. I've been messing around with the diffeomorphic plug-in but keep having problems with the morphs.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

you probably don't realize the json step, that took me a while to catch.

So say you want to import a character, you click import, you select your file, and you get an error message. 1 error message say daz content is missing, and another may say something about a json script error.

I moved my daz stuff to a different hard drive, during the process I realized that most of my installed daz stuff was not where i thought they were, in all the tutorials it was in My Documents, but I foud my daz content (installed) was hidden in my %app data% folder. The key to moving daz content around was the DIM the daz installer, if you click the gear and look at the installation tab, it shows you the places that the daz content is actually installed (in the bottom-most section with paths and a label). read through the different stuff and it will give you clues of where to find the installed daz content, making sure to update that in diffeomorphic and saving. now the daz content error messages sohuld be gone.

now if the only error message you see is something about json, that is good. The idea is that, blender even with diffeomorphic, can not read the daz file it won't be able to understand it. So the trick around this is that the creator makes daz run a bit of code, and that code creates a json file which blender would look for to give it instructions on how to understand the daz file.

to figure out how to get daz to run this code follow this guide

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So say I want to make a character, I do everything, shape, textures, clothing, even a pose (though i would avoid posing as what ever you use acts as the default). you save as scene. And then, if you completed the above tutorial, you should have another button below your save options, this button should allow you to export a json file, YOU MUST GIVE THE FILE THE EXACT SAME NAME as the name of the scene you just saved, ie test ChArAcTeR 1.duf give the json file the title test ChArAcTeR 1.json, then you can close daz

Then in blender, you only need to click on the diffeomorphic tab (the n key, and check for it's tab) and use it's import button, find the scene .duf (or whatever file daz uses) and accept, and the character should be in. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT HAVING MATERIAL PREVIEW OR RENDER MODE SELECTED when you do this. just have normal shading. Else if you had it try to render or preview the character, well daz uses multiple 4k resolution textures, which takes some time for it to all load in, and it could mess up if you don't have enough memory in your graphics card. After importing, saving, it should be safe to preview or render without causing blender to seize up or crash.

have you already tried all this?

 

[theZod]

Wow thanks. The setup is all good and ya some of my file paths were a bit wonky so got them fixed.
The main problem I have is with the morph section.
Lots of my expressions are not showing up in the pull down list, so I try and manually import morphs but half the time they don't import, but that could be selecting the eCTRL, ejCM, FBM, PBM files mixed up or not knowing what one to use.
Then morphs for the body (expanding breasts ass kind of thing) and again not knowing what type of morph to use, then applying them to clothing, then importing morphs for clothing. ect ect ect...

I have been just plying around with it trying to find a path that works for me but getting much better results then with fbx
so ya I was more wondering about your work flow, find out the steps you take to get a daz figure setup in blender.
And yes the first time I tried the plugin blender would keep chashing till I relised it's trying to load 40 4K textures !!!

 

[HadazzH]

CC3 actually makes better characters than Daz. Especially if you want to use the characters in another program or game engine. The problem is in Daz' proprietary iray crap (fake ray). It works for pictures, if you have hours to waste, but iray doesn't do 60fps

You must be registered to see the links

You can also import Daz character to Iclone and animate and adjust textures if you will.
However, licensing can be a expensive if you buy lot of assets.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

theZod Oh yeah I get ya.

To be honest, I prefer to stay close to the basics. I'll use Daz to experiment and try to block out characters, or get an idea. I'll try my best to replicate what I think I want in daz. I'll save that, then I experiment with clothing and save that as its own file (to help keep the original file clean). I'll port over to blender, but I'll keep all the default basic settings, I don't need morphs or other things. What I end up doing first is rescaling and positioning many of the bones to get body proportions I couldn't get with daz (as I try for more toony things) I focus on something that I would want to draw rather than going for realism. Then after that I'll make different shape keys where I try to sculpt different parts of the body, (each shape key for different parts, so I can adjust things later, such as maybe makeing the boobs bigger, and then realizing they seem too big but I still like the shape, so I can just scale down the shapekey value. Materials are likewise customized.

However, if you try to be more familiar with Diffeomorphic, it is supprisingly very powerful and can do things like import many of the daz morphes or corrective morphs, and be able to automatically attach drivers to them and figure out the math. you can as well click on the right check boxes, and it will correctly import the shaders (no matter what, it still tries to scale the normal map strength by 3 instead of 1 or .1, and as a result, I sometimes get inverted normals where the light illuminates tho opposite sides.) I Really haven't explore trying to import all these daz features into blender, right now I am not trying to master the skills or tools, so I don't fully utilize the tool as one could, so I don't know how to do it, but rather I just use this workflow to experiment with how I want to evolve my art style, as I explore body shapes.

 

[theZod]

Saki_Sliz
Ya I think i'm just trying too much at once, need to start simple figure out what works how the base figure is put together before adding more complexity, master the basics before tackling everything.
Thanks

 

[AxelN]

I am bad 2d artist (and 3d too but still much better in comparison of 2d) so I prefer to generate character base in apps like MakeHuman or Daz3d, then export it to the blender and then modify models based on the refs. And afaik there are alot of artists over the world who works in the same way.

And it works like a charm

 

[Nilx_games]

After a long time I finally decided to try again, this time using Diffeomorphic. I was able to export it with little problems and was able to render a few first test images in Blender (Cycles), which I'm quite happy with. It also went quite fast to render too, although I'm not sure what happened with her eyelashes lol. So now that I know it's possibleand works well, I will most likely continue using this method! Thanks everyone for their help!