Thanks Lobo?

Ive been trying to learn blender & zbrush so I won't need daz anymore

There are now several methods to easily get all generations of the Daz Genesis figures into Blender with animation.

Genesis 1-2 being the least difficult as they require no special "bridge plugins"

Just standard FBX export from Daz studio 4.12086 or Higher

I am starting a series of video tutorials on exporting figures from Daz studio to Blender starting with Genesis-1

Excellent Video

I am starting a tutorial series on using the various methods to get animated figures exported from the major character programs into Blender

I would love to see one the original Daz to Blender bridge was based on an add-on >that was being sold on Gumroad and the creator either approached Daz or Daz >approached him and bought the rights to it I am sure there has to be a way to >reverse engineer it and port with Poser.

Actually the original Daz to blender plugin was being sold as "Daz G8 to Blender" by a vaguely entertaining person called "Mitchy".

It had some major bugs, did not sell well, and "Mitchy" apparently lost interest and he open sourced the code under the GPL

That is when Daz Co-opted & rebranded it as their product but they do not actually own it either and anyone could theoretically take the code from github and alter & redistribute it, I am given to understand.

This is not a criticism of Daz BTW, in fact I applaud their wise business accumen.

Why spend resources to build a genesis 8 to Blender plugin from scratch when someone else does ninety six percent of the work and tosses it into the GPL freebie bin?

I am curious to see how difficult or easy it would be to do a Blender plugin.

On the matter of a similar bridge to Poser there remains the problem of Bondware not truly having a set of official figures built to an "enforced" uniform standard.

Yes ...I know all about LF/LH but apparently poser now comes with Dawn/Dusk and some older legacy figures as well,(Mikki 2?) to say nothing of the various third party figures still being salvaged by poser users (Bella,Project-E)

All of which are built to whatever exotic standards thier makers chose which is why they can not natively share the same UV/textures or clothing (without yet another third party utility)..hence the lack of broad vendor support.

Not a problem for the poser faithful apparently but a tremendous problem when you start expecting third party "bridge to Blender" plugin makers to pick a "poser" figure when there is no unified Character ecosystem with an easily accessable knowledge base or "SDK" if you like.

With Daz Genesis the choice is easy even for the mutiple genesis generations, that the (Far superior) Diffeomorporhic,Daz to blender Blender plugin supports.

This is because there is a uniform standard structure for G1,2,3,8 enforced by Daz

The same is now true for the Reallusion CC3 avatars.

Even when we "import" a Daz genesis figure into CC3 pipeline that FBX figure is Copied via shape projection,UV/texture map reeassignment onto a blank base CC3 iclone native Avatar

Avatars that all share the same Base mesh and UV's so when "Victor Soupday" decided to create our Blender Auto setup/import plugin, he only had to point the Blender addon to ONE set of resources in our rigidly structured Reallusion core content directories to look for normal maps ,UV's Subsurface scatter, masks even auto lighting the Blender scene with the same Default Studio HDRI's that Character creator 3 uses to light the viewport in CC3 .

Finally there is the inexplicable attitude of the poser forum moderators who seem very afraid to see any other software discussed in the poser forum, even in the context of exporting Poser content to other applications.

There is a person who(it would appear)is trying to resurrect His long dead "Antonia" figure for poser and recently revived a 13 YEAR old ,400 page, thread about her.

Note how as soon as he & I mention the current state of exporting figures to Blender from the other major figure apps ( Daz ,Iclone)a moderator quickly steps in to squash the Discussion.

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2753785&page_number=397

Not very encouraging incentives for any potential developer considering investing time in a poser figure to Blender plugin when communicating with the poser users where they hang out is forbidden.

Yeah, I've noticed that. Ten years on with many improvements in the software, and the >galleries still look exactly the same. :-) I just can't see selling new versions of >Poser to people who are only buying because they're used to the software as a viable >long-term business model,

It would not be viable except that the RMP derives income from selling Daz genesis 8 content (mostly female), which subsidizes poser

I guess I'll be using Antonia and DAZ as my hook to get into more powerful software >with steeper learning curves such as Blender.

I create all of my Clothing and prop content for the CC3 figures in Blender

Right now there are three major plugins to get Daz studio content into Blender. the official "Daz to Blender" plugin (free) the free "Diffeomorphic plugin" which has more features than the official Daz option

and an amazing free third party Alembic exporter from DS to Blender called "Sagan".

So if indeed you are considering a Daz/Blender pipeline now is a great time to learn Blender.

The old layer system was one of the many things that kept me away from blender.

Good riddance ?

NO..It is not a general, alternate FBX importer.

It faithfully re-creates the skin shader Adjustment interface from Iclone, inside Blender with custom Shader nodes,linked to our installed iclone resources based on the Iclone/CC3 Avatars and UVs

.

this is possible because ,like daz genesis, the Reallusion Characters are based on uniform standards enforced by Reallusion,

Thus making all of my custom built or Daz converted clothing content universal across all iclone figures by default.

This has nothing to do with the various Poser figures/Shaders/UVs

However as poser 12 is now updated to Python 3 I see no reason why a skilled programmer could not make a similar blender bridge for specific poser figures such as LF/LH

Snarly gribbly??

Been getting this for a week from the forums

Looks like they decided to make my soft ban official ?

Too bad the poser physics plugin was never updated.

wendyvainity posted at 9:49PM Sun, 13 June 2021 - #4421206

I keep forgetting about the graph editor in DAZ ?

It is usable although the graphmate /keymate plugins from the defunct go figure are better

@Wendy

Ivy summers No longer posts at Daz and with you under a "soft ban" Sometimes it is hard to resist responding to a post when you see some really bad advice being given about a simple animation problem.

For example someone asked why his G8 female walk cycle aniblock dropped her feet below the floor ,after frame one, when he Bakes the aniblock to key frames.

The advice he was given was complicated to the point of utter absurdity including links to video tutorials that did not address his particular problem and advice on using subtraks in aniMate 2 when the G3/8 figres are not even fully supported by animate 2 due to the twist bones

I posted the obvious simple solution, which was to marquee select All of the keyframes of her Y axis in the Graph Editor and raise them up unitl her feet are above the floor during the walk cycle.( see attached Pic)

Well the Weekend mods did actually approved my post.

" yeah, I think I understand what you are saying. There seems to be a contingency of people who are just looking at Blender as perhaps an alternative "free" render engine and may only be interested in the software for that purpose alone. There appears to be a very high demand for plugins and bridge addons that will port geometry and scenes created in other commercial software to Blender, then Blender would just be used to light and render those scenes. That's perfectly fine to do, of course, but I think people underestimate the rendering aspect of Blender and they may not realize that the render engines in Blender depend heavily on the overall workflow of the software itself. In other words, both Eevee and Cycles are just small parts of a much larger ecosystem within Blender that depend on other areas of the software to work efficiently. Especially in the case of Eevee, the render engine results will depend very deeply on the way the scene is lit and the shaders that are used. Settings in the Eevee setup depend largely on PBR maps and shaders, as well as lighting and volumetrics in order to get the most out of the render engine quality. So there is a rather large learning curve involved with Eevee that I think many >people don't seem to recognize immediately. "

@LUX you have described exactly what I am talking about.

And there is nothing wrong with only wanting to use one or two aspect of the program more than others but as you said ,all of the features of Blender are interconected and there is really no way of slipping one or two fingers outside of your comfort bubble and discreetly accessing one feature of the program while being completely insulated from ever touching the other features.

That said I am a big beleiver in "objective based" learning and the famous Doughtnut scene is a great example of making newbie learn several aspects of the program with the clear objective of creating a specifc scene.

I consider myself primarily a Blender user,(formerly a maxon C4D user

I am all for plugins to import animated figures from other programs Like Iclone/CC3 or even Daz studio. particularly those that auto set up material and shader nodes like the CC3 addon we have for Blender or Diffeomorphic for Daz studio

However I am also fine with standard native exchange formats like FBX,Alembic as well and sorting it all out myself once everything is in Blender.

I agree that trying to start a feature length film project when you are new to blender is way pre mature.

However I have noticed that in my Facebook Blender user groups you see total newbies Posting their(very primitive) renders/models every day and asking for project specific help which they get in abundance from the many skilled users in my groups

Yet in certain other "3D character" communities I see people who appear to be only collecting tutorials and engaging in endless theoretical discussion & criticism of Blender year after year, yet they never actually show any examples of any attempts to actually use the program.

Not even the ubiquitous "Doughnut "tutorial

When I ask them directly what are are their objectives in using Blender (modeling,Character animation, VFX etc)

Too often I hear very vague answers such as: "well I heard that blender was suppose to be this great program but all of the gurus in the tutorials use too many keyboard short cuts etc".

IMHO learning any Full 3DCC without a clear creative objective (Immediate or long term) is sort of like attending a university without ever majoring in anything.

Boni posted at 6:13PM Tue, 08 June 2021 - #4420803

My approach is to learn what I need specifically for the project I am working on.

Exactly!!!

IMHO too many people approach Blender like some general all encompassing university course.

I think you learn best with an actual project that is requiring you to learn what you need to meet specific objectives for that project. which makes learning that aspect of blender immediately relevant.

Just installed the 2.93 LTS update. It transferred all of my third party addons no problem.

I always use the .exe/msi installers

never had any issues leaving previous versions but I always cease using older builds when upgrade and never install experimental builds but wait for the stable releases.

YMMV.