Export Animations to Daz brings back wonky arms

benniewoodell

Hi, 

I hope someone can help me out here. I've been using the Daz to Maya Bridge to animate and bring the keys back into Daz. I didn't actually start animating with arms though until this past week (I've been doing everything that needs IK in Maya and stuff with arms in Daz because I've needed characters to hold things and felt it would just be easier to do that in Daz), but now I'm doing some walks and such, in the shot I have a still of to show her arms out of whack, in Maya her right arm is at her side and her left arm is resting on her hip after she walked into place. When I bring the keys in, after about twelve frames they start to move into these positions and I have no idea why. Happened the other day with a walk cycle, and the guys arms were just supposed to swing and instead they contorted at about twelve frames in. 

I am not all that knowledgable about Maya. I'm taking classes through Animation Mentor so I have access to it with a basic understanding of how to animate within, so I figured I might as well get some real IK in my Daz animations, so it very well could be something that I'm not doing that I'm not aware of, so if there's anyone out there who can lend a suggestion, it would be greatly appreciated. 

Thank you! 

WendyLuvsCatz

while I have utterly no idea about Maya, this looks like a difference in how the software read rotations.

some do degrees, some like DAZ do quaternion 

benniewoodell

Hmm, I'll have to experiment and see which rotation Daz doesn't like if that's the case as it seems to be a crap shoot on what's working and what's not as a few animations have ported back just fine and others the arms are all over the place. Le sigh, I might have to figure out how to render stuff in Maya through Arnold. Well, first I need to figure out how to get the characters into Maya with their clothes on and then be able to get the rig set up with the bridge as it never works for me, I can only bring the characters in without anything on them and then the rig conversion works perfectly fine.

Thanks for your input, @WendyLuvsCatz, it's definitely something I'll be experimenting with today after my class. 

Asari

Actually the fbx export settings with patented clothes (which I believe is also used by daz to maya) works quite well for clothing. If you bring over the entire figure it should work out well.

If not, you can export the clothes separately as an fbx export. Never tried that myself, but I guess you will run into issues with the zero pose - HIK standard is in T-Pose, but daz fbx export brings your character in A Pose. This can be easily fixed within Maya bit you need to tweak the skeleton manually.

The major time consuming issue might be that you need to convert the shaders to Arnold. The auto conversion is very basic and won't give you good results. Unfortunately I don't know of a shortcut and I am not aware of any tools to help automate this - you will need to setup your shaders and play with the values. Good news is: The aiStandardsurface is one of the most flexible shaders in the market, you can do almost every material with it, it is well documented and not too complex. The drawback is that not all maps for Iray are directly compatible with it, and you will need to understand the shader very well in order to get good results.

benniewoodell

@Asari thanks for the info! I didn't try doing an FBX export to bring the character into Maya because I don't know how to rig the character from scratch, but I learned how to rig characters in Blender, I'm sure I can watch some tutorials and figure that one out pretty quickly. I did think about exporting the clothes separately, I just wasn't sure if it was like Blender where if I parent the clothes to the skeleton, they'll move perfectly, or if it's like Daz where there's more steps involved. I just haven't had a chance to try that, but maybe I'll do that later today when I have some free time. 

And you're right, the auto conversion doesn't give good results with shaders which is why I was trying to bring the keys back into Daz to get good looking renders. When I started classes at AM, they have a couple of tutorials in the resource section that go into shading, I started going through them but then something happened lifewise and I never went back to finish the videos. I might have to do that as well, especially if you're saying the aiStandardsurface is flexible as I really do find animating in Maya to be the easiest and most enjoyable to use of the three (Daz, Blender, and Maya), so if I can get the materials to look great, I'll just render with Arnold then. I appreciate you taking the time to give some tips! 

I did try deleting each of the shoulder axis's for rotation separately but none of them fixed my problem with the wonky arms. Learning materials and rigging do seem to be in my future. 

Asari

I don't think you need to rig the character from scratch. What you can do is transfer an existing skeleton in Maya. This should be covered in your rigging exercises, as this was the first thing I learned when I started learning rigging. If you use Daz to Maya to start out you should already have a working skeleton. You can always adjust the joints as you need with an existing skeleton definition and it's way easier than starting from scratch.

Yes, I totally agree with you, animation is easier in Mata, also with more options, but that's not surprising given this is Maya's main purpose. The moment I decided to learn Maya I never looked back and never do anything else in Studio except assets over or setup stuff. So therefore unfortunately I have no knowledge about how to bring back animations back to Daz but Wendy's guess looks spot on to me.

The setup of clothes or props should be relatively easy, most of these assets use bump map and/or normal maps. In animation sometimes you ca get away without these maps of the prop is far away because you won't see them anyway. I think the major challenge are characters, especially Gen 8 characters, because some Iray maps are incompatible with Arnold and still relevant for non close-ups, like the specular map. Also, Arnold is seemingly built better for displacement maps because normal maps can cause some weird bugs but displacement maps are heavy for animation rendering.

What you can also try if the shader is the problem or just you tiresome to tweak - you can import the clothes character and export the animation sequence in alembic. If you keep the standard materials during conversion these should be properly translated into material zones in Studio, and you can assign the shaders like you do normally to characters in Daz Studio.