Best way to get Daz content into Bryce?
Woolyloach
Posts: 0
Not so much people, but buildings/props/etc. - maybe the occasional monster.
Is it best to import the OBJ and re-surface, or does the Bryce/Daz Studio connection actually work?
Inquiring minds want to know! :) All help appreciated. :cheese:
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It seems the bridge does work quite well now.
I of course use the obj route, but that is because I don't use DS :coolsmirk:
For monsters and buildings and props the bridge has worked fine for me. Here is an example Getting a Little Green Man from DAZ Studio to Bryce - a 10 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
For people things get a bit more challenging. I've also done some tutorials relating to this topic, but it is a bit of a nightmare because what DS sends over is not suitable for use in Bryce without some considerable tinkering. And, critically, Bryce lacks easy access to SSS (Sub Surface Scattering) which is essential for realistic skin I've come to conclude. For a long time I wondered why, in spite of all their other technical excellence, the DS gallery (filled mostly with portraits) failed to interest me. Now I've seen the light transmitted by SSS and am convinced this is what makes the difference between a lifeless manikin and believable characters. At least for me. I tend to fret over the lack of things like SSS and normal/parallax mapping.
The Studio bridge has always worked for me, from Bryce 5.5 up to now. As David says, some material properties don't come over correctly because Studio and Bryce are not fully compatible in this respect. Characters particularly appear a bit disappointing in Bryce due to the lack of appropriate render options like sub-surface scattering. Most of what I bring over to Bryce are props and those work a treat. If I get an issue now and then, I export as OBJ from Studio and import in Bryce. Characters, if at some distance from the camera, render quite acceptable in Bryce.
I find my figures are reasonable close up as well.
Ah, thanks lot all - especially for the tutorial link! :coolsmile: :coolsmile:
I have DS 4.5 Pro but haven't installed it yet, since I normally use PPro 2012 for my character-type work.. but I'd like to do a few Bryce landscape/worlds with some Poser props thrown in, for stills and flybys. :)
I'll install DS 4.5 this weekend to play around. Off to read the tute now.. thanks again! :cheese:
On the issue of importing, I'll add to the chorus saying the bridge works fine. Things to be careful of though are the limitations of Bryce. In spite of all the wonderful things Bryce can do, it's been severely hamstrung in that it's still stuck in the 32bit realm while 3D graphics is moving on to the 64 bit realm. This creates for new users usually having more powerful and greater amounts of memory that afford them far more flexibility in populating a scene. Bryce based on it's programing can only access 2GB out of the box. If you make use of a free utility called LArge Address Aware, Bryce can be made to be able to access up to about 3.5GB of memory but then that's it. I mention this because Bryce does pretty much everything in memory and so when you overload the memory then things don't work. I think much of what has been percieved as problems with the Bryce/Studio bridge was as much if not more due to people trying to do too much.
For example, if you buy the Dream Home Great Room product from Daz it comes with a file called a BCF which stands for Bryce Companion file. What it contains is a blank Bryce scene already set up for a specific scene using the product it comes with (in this example Dream Home Great Room) If you follow the directions and set the scene up everything will be fine. If however you go beyond and fill the scene with all of the available accessories you'll be pretty close to maxed out with only enough room to import one relatively low resolution character. If you go beyond that or try to import one high resolution character you'll crash because the memory is maxed out.
Now you can improve things somewhat if your goal doesn't require really detailed images. Many of the textures used in todays products are fairly big, this makes for a much more impressive and realistic looking object when rendered. However for many scenes it's not necessary to have such detail. Like if most things are being viewed from a distance rather then upclose. In those situations you could make a copy of any the textures to be used to have a set just for Bryce, and you could probabbly get away with cutting the resolution in half and most everything will look more or less the same. It would be a hassle to have to copy, alter and then load and apply each texture but it would reduce the memory overhead on the scene maybe enough to squeeze something more into the scene.
Wooly I export all my stuff from Poser as OBJ. OK you have to set up a bit more in Bryce ( she says with tongue firmly in cheek) but I get by pretty well without DS.
Oh sure. I mentioned the close-up limitation if a lot of skin is shown. It is not easy to get skin really good in Bryce.
I know it is not easy, which is why I rarely do closeups of people. But then I think that I have seen more dire renders of skin in other programs than I have seen really good ones, so it is not purely a Bryce problem. That includes some of the ones done with SSS as well.
so, Bryce does do sss skin textures?
i haven't used Bryce in many,many years. water looked so good in Bryce 4, I'm curious to see what the new version does.
my hugest problem with Bryce was clicking on the triangle to open the library was difficult. it would flash open and then close when i moved my mousey. there was no keyboard shortcut to open the lib, either.
You can sort of fake SSS
Not really... not as such.
It is possible to fake the effect, but the process is fiddly and takes a long time to render.
And from a while ago http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=4463&mode=search
If you are curious what Bryce 7.1 can do... with less difficultly, Horo and I have some tutorials, the latest ones are here http://www.youtube.com/user/davidbrinnen/videos?flow=grid&view=0 if you go back a page or two, you might find some more relevant to your question or something more interesting.
Well, if you use a 640 x 480 size screen, it might work better than with 1920 or 2560 wide one ;) More seriously, sometimes you click and it closes. Just keep on clicking. It's a bit annoying but it eventually works. Bryce is so much fun that a bit of nuisance is quite welcome :)
thanks. :) remembering, there were some kewl scifi looking material presets.
I'll have to give that a shot. I hate to admit I've barely scratched the surface of PPro 2012 :red: but I really REALLY want nice backgrounds and environments, I own Bryce so I'd prefer to use it and not choke for something *coughVuecough* that's stupid expensive. :-S
Too much to learn, my head hurts! :sick: