Genesis in Poser
DAZ_ann0314
Posts: 2,847
For more information on using the Cr2 Exporter, please refer to the following thread on the old forums:
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=175224
Please feel free to also use this thread to post renders of your Genesis in Poser experiments as well as to discuss how it is going...tips and tricks and anything else you feel other members also attempting this may want/need to know :)
Post edited by DAZ_ann0314 on
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Hello
The "doll" in my w.i.p. image here is, so far, as far as I've got...
It is due to be posed some more, by the way... was just sitting handy after I'd been playing around with the CR2 exporter.
However, since I got the Genesis Evolution Morphs, I am determined to experiment some more on this front.
Obviously, without subdivision of the exported Genesis mesh, there are some limitations. But I *think* the non-subdivided mesh will still work well for me in Poser, in due course, for crowd scenes (e.g. lower poly count and I could make a lot of different body shapes, quickly, to make a crowd realistic).
Clothing is currently also an issue though, still, relative to this... I think?
What I'm further curious about is whether, if I posed the CR2 Genesis in Poser, and then exported in pose as an obj, subdivided it in (e.g.) Hexagon quickly and then brought it back into Poser... how would that affect the UV mappings?
Is there a viable... if somewhat convoluted... workflow possible somewhere in that idea??
cheers ;)
Here are some of my observations...
With smoothing on and a crease angle of 170 for the figure, it works quite well naked.
However, Clothing is problematic, as the conforming doesn't work properly in Poser on clothing exported form Studio. It can be fitted by conforming the clothing after morphing the figure and selecting Copy Joint Parameters from the Figure menu (I don't know if this is in Poser 9). This procedure (which is much improved in Poser SR-2) gives decent results on reasonably tight fitting clothing. I haven't yet tried it on a skirt, but I'd expect it not to work as well, nor on shoes...
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This from Wim van De Bospoort (I've done it without reconnecting the bump/displacement/specular maps; only fixing the eyelash transparency, and it gives good results with less work).....
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I attach the missing bump/displacement/specular map textures in Poser, correct the [eyelash] transparency map and then save it as a materical collection.
Then I load a V4 and apply the material collection to it. Then I run EZSkin on it and save the result again as material collection.
Then the last step is to apply this new material collection again to the genesis figure with answering "No" to add additional material zones.
Now the genesis figure has its own textures with EZSkin applied.
All of the material zones in genesis have the same name as in V4 so applying the material collection applies it to the correct material zones.
Having said that - it is a bit of a hazzle to find out how strong the displacement should be. A too high value does not seem to work well with the subdivided mesh. Also the shadow bias has to be increased a little to prevent artefacts. I raise it from the default 0.8 to 1.3 and that seems to fix it (this is when displacement is used)
EZSkin applies Bagginsbill's VSS skin shaders for Poser 9 and PP 2012 automatically, and can be downloaded here...
http://snarlygribbly.org/3d/forum/viewforum.php?f=6
The problem with conformers is that Poser isn't matching animated joint centres in the conformed clothing to the conformee - in theory it could possibly be fixed by copying the ERC setup for the morph from the parent figure to the conformer, which could probably be done with a Python script now they have made the feature available to Python (it wasn't in the original release, not sure if it was added in SR1 or SR2). However, I'm not certain that would fully work.
Richard,
The problem is that something isn't super-conforming that should be; the clothing should be picking up the morphs/scaling from the figure, with the ERC' s handled within in the figure. This gave us fits when we were working on Outfitter for V4WM; we realized that the ERCs transferred to the clothing were resulting in the application of the helper-bone rotations twice, and removing them fixed it. My guess is that it is the joint centers that are not super-conforming; I don't know if this is an issue with the exported clothing or is a limitation of Poser.
I've tried running exported Genesis clothing through Outfitter to make sure everything was carried over, but Outfitter blew up. However, I haven't tried it since SR-2 came out....
Yes, the joint centre ERC is what I've been told isn't getting picked up by the conformers. I was speculating that placing the ERC in the conformers as well as the base figure might work, but I wasn't sure the super-coforming would kick it through from conformer morph to conformer joint centre.
I've got a new tut out in the store on the topic:
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/new-releases/genesis-to-poser-cr2
it's certainly possible to get clothing working better, though there are still issues - including, bizzarely, all the clothing's morphs locking up.
Cliff, could you tell me what the scripts do?
Is there one for animated joints?
I have been able to cloth the genesis figure and add hair as long as there are no single axis scaling involved. Do the scripts and the tutorial add value beyond that (automating of the adding of morphs for genesis in DS4 for example)
I noticed the morphs locking up for clothing as well. Also the problem that all morphs are hidden in the bodyparts of the cloth
I've got a (confirmed) bug report in on the locked morphs issue.
There are two scripts - but i was hoping to be a lot more coy about the scripts for at least a BIT longer!
One script fixes up all the joints of the selected conformer to match the underlying Genesis figure (whatever character it has applied - and wherever it's joints have been moved to) and the other does the same but for all conformers attached to the selected Genesis figure in one go. Really quick, and easy.
In this image I've manually tweaked some materials, and run one quick script, to get from the top image to the bottom one.
To be perfectly honest, humans aren't really my bag (I mostly prefer toons, monsters, and animals) so I don't have a lot of clothing for Genesis - but shoes don't seem to be much of a problem.
Now I'm going to run away before I get accused of commercialising this thread too much (A bit is OK to be informative, but I don't want to turn this into a marketing zone).
Cheers,
Cliff
Thanks Cliff,
good enough for me to give it a try
I'm hoping that between the tutorial being in the store and the competition, we can show DAZ that there's a bunch of support for both DAZ and Genesis - from people who, like me, just happen to prefer Poser :)
So don't forget to render something up for the competition!
Cheers,
Cliff
Your exporter tutorial is pretty much the same as I do, except that I have tried this without "zeroing" the figure and this seemed to work and had the advantage of not having to redial the morphs because they were already set.
For clothing my experience is pretty much the same, except that I deleted the genesis figure before exporting the cloth - if that is not needed, it is a timesaver.
Regarding applying/correcting the textures in Poser. I am used to Snarlygribbly's EZSkin and while it does not work directly (because of the autogenerating name for the obj file), there is a trick to get it to the genesis figure. Use the following steps: Load the genesis figure (no need to correct the textures), and save the material collection to a temp fille in the library. Now load a V4 figure (or M4) and apply the material collection while ignoring errors. Now use EZSkin on the V4 and save the result as a temp file material collection. Now you can delete the V4 again and then load the new material collection onto the genesis figure (ignoring the errors). Now you have a correct SSS material on your genesis figure.
I have tried the scripts now and they seem to work fine in most circumstances. You have to be careful though to export all the morphs from the genesis figure in the clothing.
You also have to reapply the script when you use the morphs on genesis (which is only a very minor inconvenience)
The scripts are a lot easier as moving the joints by hand in the joint editor, so they are really useful
One thing I forgot to add: the Match Endpoints when conforming was introduced to fix a problem with M4, but it does seem to help with genesis as well - usually when there is a problem in the chest area
so if I got this I could use M5 and V5 in poser but would those figures still be really low poly like in the first experiments with the daz studio cR2 exporter? ARe the lcothes low poly too?
love esther
Looks good.
There's no change to the poly density over what the CR2 exporter SHOULD do, if operated correctly - though I would note two things about this. the first is that it's possible to accidentally create a too-low-poly version of Genesis if you don't set the right options so it's possible the answer to your question is actually "yes" if you experienced that previously, the second is that Poser "mesh smoothing" doesn't do a horrible job of improving the issue.
All of the promo images were rendered in Poser Pro 2012. There's no post render work to make things look prettier or smoother. There ARE areas on Genesis, with various characters, that could use improvement (the ears come to mind immediately) but that's beyond the scope of the tut (which was originally meant as a "quick" update on the original tutorial video which is now so out of date, but kinda grew...and grew... and grew!).
Clothing, so far as I have seen, is typically NOT low poly at all, but is reasonably high poly - sometimes higher poly than you might find on Gen4 stuff because the extra polys help the DS4 "morph follower" to accomodate the often rather extreme morph capabilities of Genesis characters.
I think it's fair to say that I don't think I'm the best artist in the world - my imagery is sufficient, at best, and the quality of my promo images somewhat reflects that. Having said which, if there's some render I can make that would help you judge poly density, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Maybe I can come up with something myself - but I don't know how close you want the camera to be to what feature (IIRC someone said the elbows were a bit iffy at times?).
Cheers,
Cliff
Regarding zeroing the figure before export: The disadvantage is that the morphs are zeroed as well. Zo when you load the figure after exporting, it is a default genesis. You then have to dial in the morphs to get the character. This is rather tedious if you have a character with lots of dialled morphs. You can (probably) export the morph character file with PFE and use that to get the dialled character, but that brings its own little annoyances. Keeping the figure in zero pose, applying all the morphs and then exporting the figure seems to work fine.
Hi Cliff,
thanks for that detailed explanation. I will definitely buy your tool and see what I can do with it. Yes it was the ears that put me off to a large extent the first time I tried genesis in poser. I think I probably did export the highest possible poly version that time as I followed all the instructions on the video to the letter.
Well I will give it all another try at some stage.
Love esther
Genesis hair is a problem now.
If the hair figure contains separate head and neck bodyparts (which most genesis hair seems to have), the automatic scaling of poser scales the head and neck separately. But it looks like the hair pieces only scale with the head. So the mesh breaks when auto scaling is used. Scaling the entire figure does not help either here if you use conforming because it needs to move along the y-axis. Parenting and scaling will work, but then you loose some other features.
Anyone a solution for this?
If you prefer using Genesis in DS4 but want to render in Poser, is there a way (or a thread) on exporting an obj into poser? Complete with clothes, hair, textures etc? I'm using PP2010.
Yes - you'll have to do all the posing etc. in DAZ Stduio, and you'll have to do a bunch of material corrections in Poser, but it should be pretty straightforward - just export to a .OBJ from DS and Import the .OBJ in Poser. If you have multiple objects with the same material names, make sure that you export those as seperate .obj files.
Cheers,
Cliff
It absolutely does a better job IMHO than at least 4 of my scripts. Get SR3 - now :)
Cheers,
Cliff
DS4.5 has now been released/
No mention at all about the CR2 exporter. Skimming through the fix list, there are some fixes and provisions for SR3, but nothing seems to have been done about the workflow to get genesis into Poser. (having to do zillions of dialUP/DualDown sequences for each figure and clothing item)
Disappointing
Maybe they will save each exporter improvement fix to coincide with the release of each new figure (it happened with V5 and then M5 and each time I bought a few things to try it).
I'm assuming DAZ are waiting for me to write some form of workaround/solution in DAZ Studio's own scripting language before they release something better.
There is now documentation for the DSON format - someone could write a Poser importer, with no need to have DS open. If the new extensions in Poser 9/2012 SR3 allow it might even be possible to write one that's fast, being binary. Someone != me, I fear.
You could do that of course. But in that case you could also create the Poser files directly.
Or - if that cannot be done - you will have write a complete replacement for the library which will take care of all the interaction such as applying the correct morphs to the clothing, hair and translating the material files. And that is a lot of work
Writing a way to add all the morphs into clothing, perform geografting duties etc. as "a lot of work" seems like an understatement from the point of view of a 3rd party. Perhaps it's a task that DAZ would like to tackle :D
Cheers,
Cliff
Anyone any idea how to get props from DS format to Poser format?
I have a problem with WildMane Hair from DAZ. If exported, the file remains invisible when loaded in Poser
I checked the CR2 file which was created and it does not contain any weight map information at all (it is 54K instead of th 7MB+ sizes of other exported hairs)
Now I am beginning to suspect that the hair is actually a (hair) prop and is not a figure at all (although the cr2 exporter accepts it)
So that leads me to the question: How do you export/import a dsf prop?
The PFE does not accept and props or hair props (only poses and expressions)
Or maybe I am missing a checkbox somewhere.....
The CR2 Exporter accepts it, certainly, but there's precious little actually in the .CR2 as you've noticed - including a distinct lack of morphs.
I've seen DS users ask time and time again for a way to export props to Poser, so unless it's been very recently added I suspect there isn't a convenient ".pp2" export route - one would have to do it "by hand".
Of course, for just the basic shape the CR2 Exporter has created a basic mesh at:
:Runtime:Geometries:DAZ 3D:WildMane Hair:WildMane for Genesis:WildMane for Genesis_048e9f2d_58e3_1c5b_7f92_ee4a0a3e7bb8.obj
which can be imported into Poser and used as a prop - but you'd need to manually transfer materials and any/all morphs that you want. Unless .pp2 exporting was added to DS really recently (sorry, I don't hve it to hand right now).
Cheers,
Cliff