DAZ content in Maya, questions
I'm thinking a little bit about adding Maya Indie or Blender to my workflow a bit later this year, but the most important thing to me is that DAZ content work properly in them. I've used Diffeomorphic to import DAZ figures into Blender, but found it difficult to adjust morph and posing dials because of how Blender organizes parameters. There appear to be some very good importers for Maya as well (one is in the store here), but I've also heard they are not working properly with Maya 2020.
I'm more familiar with the current Blender importers than those of Maya, so could someone more knowledgable about the Maya process share any relevant information? Is there currently a working way to quickly get a Genesis 8 figure poseable and otherwise adjustable from Studio to Maya 2020? I'm not as concerned with material conversion, just if the figure, geografts, props, poses, and other stuff can be made to work without major headaches. Thanks in advance for any information.
Comments
First of all, I need to add a caveat to what I'm going to say. If you want to do still renders in Maya, I'm not quite sure how you will benefit over Daz Studio. DS is purpose-built for digital photography and it is currently the native and best tool for this use with Daz figures. I don't see it as a step up if you are going to Maya or Blender for still renders. That being said, I can say that getting figures to Maya, intact and perfectly functional, is trivial. You don't even need a plugin, though there are plugins to make it easier. Texturing is also easy and getting the characters to look good will depend on your artistic skill. "Other stuff" that is specific to DS will not work Dforce and other simulations in Daz Studio have equivalencies in Maya, but are not compatible. You will need to learn new tools. To re-emphasize, Maya is primarily an animation platform and it is assumed that those who are investing in it will be using it for its strengths. The learning curve can be steep and I don't recommend going through the trouble if animation isn't your goal.
Geografts, props and poses load in Maya easily but there may be extra steps with geografts. There are a couple of guys who have experience with this in my Maya group and we all have extensive experience with anything having to do with Daz in Maya. Feel free to contact me. I can let you into the group and you can ask away.
There is currently not a single one click solution. All solutions have some problem in one area. Like rig, deformations or materials.
You can use alembic exporter to have all the geometry exported. But you have to do all the materials.
I would say the same is true for exports to Blender regarding still rendering.
Blender does out-of-core rendering with only a moderate performance hit vs CUDA. It doesn't yet work with Optix, though. That would make a tremendous difference to some.
Daz has an update it seems.
Maya has a second plugin, it enables renders in Keyshot.
Renders in keyshot way far ahead of Daz renders