DAZ has the finest collection of talking animals to be found. Personally, I prize them.

I find iClone to be easy to work with, but their import tools are limited. I can import a DAZ cat, for example, keeping its bone structure and its animations, but losing its visemes. I can import the cat as a humanoid, giving it speech ability but losing its bone structure.

What is needed is a hybrid of these two. A custom iClone import filter. One that leaves the DAZ animal bone structure intact, able to use the DAZ animations, and adds iClone speech ability. I'm no programmer, or I would have done this some time ago. DAZ itself does not appreciate the value of their animals with visemes, and their future cannot be assured.

DAZ animals with visemes include:

Cats, Dogs, Horses, Pigs, Sheep, Lions, and a few others. The realism is high. Anyone considering cartooning would value these characters.

Anyone care to comment on this?

I know there were some problems with importing Visemes with various versions of Genesis (DS to iclone) and there were numerous discussions regarding workarounds here and there for each figure, even Genesis 9 with it's split mouth rigging. I'm pretty sure they all relied heavily on 3DX via FBX export from DS to iclone. Possibly, it's also more of an Iclone suggestion for modification of it's import process, and I see you already have a thread over at Reallusion discussing the process. But it can't hurt to cast the web wider to see if anyone can help out with something like this. I agree the results would be interesting and useful for iclone animators, especially if streamlined and easy to enact.

The best person to ask regarding the feasibility or any potential major issues surrounding your suggestion is probably @WendyLuvsCatz or @wolf359.

I suspect it just may not be possible without a major plugin or possibly a converter of some kind to translate, tbh I have pretty limited experience with Iclone so I couldn't say for sure. 

I use iClone 6 and have no issues other than having to set up everything manually in expression editor in 3DX6 every time

I cannot speak for the later better improved pipeline

I just do everything manually, even use my own bone based facials for genesis 3,8,8.1 and 9 

I do this for Unreal Engine and Twinmotion (which doesn't support vertex morphs/Blendshapes) too

WendyLuvsCatz posted at 10:08 PM Tue, 22 October 2024 - #4490676

I use iClone 6 and have no issues other than having to set up everything manually in expression editor in 3DX6 every time

I cannot speak for the later better improved pipeline

I just do everything manually, even use my own bone based facials for genesis 3,8,8.1 and 9 

I do this for Unreal Engine and Twinmotion (which doesn't support vertex morphs/Blendshapes) too

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I've used CC4 to bring in all the bipedal humanoids, it works satisfactorily, if not perfectly. I do find it easy to bring in animals through 3DX, even though the unscaleable UI is blinding on a big monitor. (RL is overall a bit weak on scaling.) Getting animals to speak in iC is another matter. RL thinks that only humanoids can speak, but when I convert an animal to a humanoid, the skeleton is mangled into a grotesque t-pose. I've tried mating a talking head and a correctly converted body, but the results are disappointing. Closeups show the seam, and animations are uncoordinated. A hybrid import filter is such an obvious cure that I wonder if RL has intentionally avoided it. Short of a proper filter, I stick with still images.

DAZ doesn't grasp what it has in these animals, and new DAZ animals are created without visemes. I thought I'd test the water here to see how techie we are. You never know who might read this.

yeah posing them in a sort of Tpose is needed to set them up but it will play imported animations correctly

WendyLuvsCatz posted at 8:03 AM Wed, 23 October 2024 - #4490680

yeah posing them in a sort of Tpose is needed to set them up but it will play imported animations correctly

Maybe I should play with this a bit more. Even posing and speaking would be OK.

OK, I thought this over. My plan is, do nothing at this time. ;-)

1. I'm going to assume that DAZ will never (never is a long time) go 100% rentware.

2. The RTX5080 is coming in JAN25. ~2.5K. I assume DAZ will adapt to this. Imagine being able to render an animation in a reasonable length of time.

3. It's possible that DAZ will fix their poorly scaling UI. That, I'd like to see (literally). Not likely but possible.

4. "Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow doesn't exist." I'll worry about the future when I see it.

Don't forget that the last few rounds of new nVidia chips have had a gap of a few months before iray can use them at all - unless this time is different I wouldn't expect to buy one of the new series for use in DS until later in the year (the actual wait hasn't been consistent enough to make a guess at how long it might be this time).

RHaseltine posted at 5:29 PM Tue, 29 October 2024 - #4490882

Don't forget that the last few rounds of new nVidia chips have had a gap of a few months before iray can use them at all - unless this time is different I wouldn't expect to buy one of the new series for use in DS until later in the year (the actual wait hasn't been consistent enough to make a guess at how long it might be this time).

Yes. That's normal. January is the show month. Any price competition their might be would come later. There's no hurry.