Solution Share: Import MMD motion into Daz Studio with body, facial and camera motion[Need Blender]

butaixianran

Ok, now this old topic has a good solution. 

 

If you don't know what is MMD:

MMD means MikuMikuDance. Most of  its motion files are high quality dance motion. Most of its animations are dance animations. For years, people ask how to convert MMD's dance motion into Daz Studio. Now this issue ends. Because we have a perfect solution now!!

 

You need Blender to make this work. This solution uses 3 blender addons. These addons do everything for you. You just import a mmd motion, bake motion, then export to Daz Studio. Everything is done.

 

Just check this video tutorial, it's only 8 minutes, and shows everything.

 

Result example:

Following video got about 3million views for using a Daz character and a mmd dance motion. In the past, it takes a lot of effort to achieve this. But by following above tutorial, everyone can do this in a few minutes now. 

 

 

 

 

takezo_3001

Thanks for this, yeah, while I love Daz they offer some truly mediocre dance animation made by old men as the “dance moves” are decades old… MMD is much more varied and current, with the added bonus that the female dancers used aren't most likely performed by men.

benniewoodell

Wow, I have been trying to get it to work since diffeomorphic got the capability to bring animation back into Daz and have never been able to, I wasn't checking the right boxes apparently. I just watched your video, followed the steps and I have a character moving like I had them in Blender. Thank you so much, I'm saving this video to my favorites for future reference! 

wolf359

Correction of  statement  she made @4:10

 

 

For general information

Diffeomorphic now supports converting G8 bone based facial animation to morph/shape key based  animation.

Carry on.

marble

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

butaixianran

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

1. Some Daz and MMD user may not familiar blender. But they can handle just import and export a model.

2. In most cases, after converting motion onto Daz character,  you gonna still want to try other clothes, hairs and stages to find the best choices for your song and animation. In mmd, people may try a dance motion on 30+ characters with different hairs and clothes before rendering. 

3. People may not want to ajust material again. But if you don't adjust material for cycles, your rendering result won't be as good as in Daz with iray. The converted material is just an ok level, and not very easy to adjust.

 

 

marble

butaixianran said:

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

1. Some Daz and MMD user may not familiar blender. But they can handle just import and export a model.

2. In most cases, after converting motion onto Daz character,  you gonna still want to try other clothes, hairs and stages to find the best choices for your song and animation. In mmd, people may try a dance motion on 30+ characters with different hairs and clothes before rendering. 

3. People may not want to ajust material again. But if you don't adjust material for cycles, your rendering result won't be as good as in Daz with iray. The converted material is just an ok level, and not very easy to adjust.

 

 

 

Did you make the video sample (IRay) and, if so, how long did it take to render the one with the dForce dress? Just out of interest - and what GPU do you have? I have a 3090 and I struggle to get a frame in under a minute. I guess in this case with no background props and a single light, sub-one-minute frames might be possible.

butaixianran

marble said:

butaixianran said:

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

1. Some Daz and MMD user may not familiar blender. But they can handle just import and export a model.

2. In most cases, after converting motion onto Daz character,  you gonna still want to try other clothes, hairs and stages to find the best choices for your song and animation. In mmd, people may try a dance motion on 30+ characters with different hairs and clothes before rendering. 

3. People may not want to ajust material again. But if you don't adjust material for cycles, your rendering result won't be as good as in Daz with iray. The converted material is just an ok level, and not very easy to adjust.

 

 

 

Did you make the video sample (IRay) and, if so, how long did it take to render the one with the dForce dress? Just out of interest - and what GPU do you have? I have a 3090 and I struggle to get a frame in under a minute. I guess in this case with no background props and a single light, sub-one-minute frames might be possible.

Seems you don't know about this dance animation world. It's ok, this is not for every one. You can just ignore it if you don't need.

 

For your question:

There are so many ways to cut down rendering time.

1. Set max sample to 150, with denoise, you will get a frame about 30-45s. With 1 character and a good enough stage.

2. Rendering 48 hours for a ray-traced dance animation is normal.

3. If you do not rotate camera, only push, pull and move, then you can render background scene into an image. And render character's dance motion with alpha backgound in 6-8 hours. Then put them together in video editing tools. That means, you can start rendering at night, then get a full iray rendered dance animation when you wake up in the morning.

 

 

marble

butaixianran said:

Seems you don't know about this dance animation world. It's ok, this is not for every one. You can just ignore it if you don't need.

 

For your question:

There are so many ways to cut down rendering time.

1. Set max sample to 150, with denoise, you will get a frame about 30-45s. With 1 character and a good enough stage.

2. Rendering 48 hours for a ray-traced dance animation is normal.

3. If you do not rotate camera, only push, pull and move, then you can render background scene into an image. And render character's dance motion with alpha backgound in 6-8 hours. Then put them together in video editing tools. That means, you can start rendering at night, then get a full iray rendered dance animation when you wake up in the morning.

 

I have rendered a video as example in Daz with iray, rendering time is about 7 hours:

...

There are so many people use these tricks to render dance animation with ray tracing render engine. Just search "mmd" in youtube.

In the past, they can only use C4d and blender cycles for this. Now Daz is a fair choice too.  

 

As you say, I have no real interest in dance videos but I am interested in ways of rendering animations in less time. I just play around with very short animations, all hand-keyed rather than imported animations. That in itself takes a long time to get the movements looking natural but I just don't have the patience to sit around waiting for hours for the render. I'm quite surprised that you suggest using denoisers when in my experience the quality drops significantly. I would have thought that Cycles (especially since it was updated in Blender) would be a better quality. Nevertheless, I do prefer IRay (still) renders to those I have made using Diffeomorphic and Cycles. That's probably because I am not good with the Blender material node system.

benniewoodell

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

I need to bring animations back into daz daily for work because a frame that takes me one minute to render in iray takes usually three or four minutes in cycles, and it stilll looks kind of streaky from the denoiser unlike Daz which the post denoiser works great if you bake typically to 88%.. My clients want the photorealistic look so Eevee is not an option. Normally I animate in Maya since I have that and bring the keys back into daz via the bridge. But  I can't get the environments into Maya and match perfectly with daz for whatever reason. So there's a lot of touchups in daz which sometimes it's not fixable due to Dax's horrible IK and I have to redo entire sequences in Maya (typically I can just fix arm and head movements in daz). I know if I bring the environment into blender through diffeo, it'll be much easier to build an animation around an object since the proportions will be exact. 

And yeah, I have two computers, each with a 3090. I animate on one and bring the file to my second computer that I strictly use for rendering so I can continue to animate on my main computer, and then if I need to render on two pcs at once, I can! 

Personal projects I just use blender since I don't care if a frame takes three minutes to render as I'm not on any deadlines then. 

marble

benniewoodell said:

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

I need to bring animations back into daz daily for work because a frame that takes me one minute to render in iray takes usually three or four minutes in cycles, and it stilll looks kind of streaky from the denoiser unlike Daz which the post denoiser works great if you bake typically to 88%.. My clients want the photorealistic look so Eevee is not an option. Normally I animate in Maya since I have that and bring the keys back into daz via the bridge. But  I can't get the environments into Maya and match perfectly with daz for whatever reason. So there's a lot of touchups in daz which sometimes it's not fixable due to Dax's horrible IK and I have to redo entire sequences in Maya (typically I can just fix arm and head movements in daz). I know if I bring the environment into blender through diffeo, it'll be much easier to build an animation around an object since the proportions will be exact. 

And yeah, I have two computers, each with a 3090. I animate on one and bring the file to my second computer that I strictly use for rendering so I can continue to animate on my main computer, and then if I need to render on two pcs at once, I can! 

Personal projects I just use blender since I don't care if a frame takes three minutes to render as I'm not on any deadlines then. 

Thanks for sharing your considerable experience.

I'm quite surprised to discover that IRay renders quicker for you than Cycles. I thought that when the Blender devs updated Cycles it became a much quicker option. Certainly if I use it in the Blender Viewport it seems quick. Not instant like Eevee but then, as you say, Eevee has a long way to go before it can qualify as anything close to realistic. I did a series of tests with Diffeomorphic, Cycles and Eevee soome time back and I have to say that I could not get close to IRay quality but I thought Cycles might be good enough for animation. I don't like denoisers because, to my eyes, they produce a smeared look where the natural graininess is smoothed out. Perhaps I need to try the new, improved denoisers though.

As for animating - transferring scenes is a pain even with Diffeo so I don't bother for my little amateurish efforts. I just put up with the limitations of the DAZ timeline and keep posting hopeful reminders here for DAZ to develop better tools within DAZ Studio itself.

wolf359

Blender Viewport it seems quick. Not instant like Eevee but then, as you say, Eevee has a long way to go before it can qualify as anything close to realistic.

 

 

I prefer a stylized look to my animation and thus do not chase the holy grail of photorealism.

EEVEE creates that “Computer animated” look  I frankly prefer ,especially the the blooms& glows.

Like  @benniewoodell

I have two Blender capable PC’s , as well as  an old gateway netbook and  model  2017 intel  Imac.

 

Thus render times are not an issue as I can tie up my big Dell desktop for as long as needed  for animation renders and still have a second PC for set up work work and the Imac for internet&entertainment

I do switch over to Cycles for Smoke& Pyro simulation VDB’s, imported from Houdini ,because they look so much better path traced.

For commercial Clients ,who need Daz formatted motion data,
I use Iclone&3Dxchange pipeline.

 

left1000

butaixianran said:

marble said:

Looks interesting but a couple of questions spring to mind. Why export back to DAZ Studio? Why not render in Blender using Eevee or even Cycles which is still probably a lot faster than IRay. I hate to imagine how long it would take to render 3000 frames (that was a number mentioned in the video) in IRay. Even at only a minute per frame that's over 2 days. Then there's the version with the dress which needs cloth simulation. Perhaps it isn't possible to do that in Blender with clothing exported from DAZ Studio? So that would require DAZ Studio and dForce over those 3000 frames. OK for someone with a spare PC which happens to have a 3090 installed. Or maybe a professional studio.

1. Some Daz and MMD user may not familiar blender. But they can handle just import and export a model.

2. In most cases, after converting motion onto Daz character,  you gonna still want to try other clothes, hairs and stages to find the best choices for your song and animation. In mmd, people may try a dance motion on 30+ characters with different hairs and clothes before rendering. 

3. People may not want to ajust material again. But if you don't adjust material for cycles, your rendering result won't be as good as in Daz with iray. The converted material is just an ok level, and not very easy to adjust.

 

 

Hi there, I'm hoping to be a " Some Daz and MMD user may not familiar blender. But they can handle just import and export a model. "

But I am struggling to follow the video, because it starts with the daz character perfectly imported. However my daz character... when I follow the video, as soon as she gets her vmd animation she leaves her clothing behind. Could you or someone else in this thread maybe write a detailed guide on the steps to choose in importing to blender? In order to best prepare for a VMD like in the video? This is the page I am following https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/import-into-blender-version-16.html but there are a great many choices to make.

I could import her to blender naked, but the video and the instructions on the blog I am following say to import her wearing clothes. So the fact the clothes don't gain the animation vmd must be something I've done wrong prior to second 0 in the video. Maybe I'll try naked another time.


edit: Anyone know if genesis8.1 works with the import tool? because when blender crashed I was using genesis8.1 although I just retried to bake a 500 frame animation instead of a 7000 frame animation and didn't crash.

edit2: Okay, I got the animation working (I went with 400 frames to test it). But she is naked and without any morphs, I guess because I'm supposed to add those in daz3d myself? But if that's true? Why did I bother exporting her with clothing and morphs on? In the future do I just export the base genesis8 figure? VMD her a dance? Then back in daz load the dance animation, then design her clothing and morphs?

edit3: autocamera does work, I just had to reselect camera to export.

edit4: TLDR; why don't I just export a base gen8 figure to blender, then save that .blend file, then do all my VMD addon onto that? What's the point in exporting the specifically morphed figure with the specifically set up materials from daz to blender for the vmd? If when I export the dance back I just get a pose that could be applied to any figure? Will this pose look best and fit best if I re-apply it to the identical figure it came off of? The girl in the video is too generic for me to tell/notice.

crosswind

Just need to merge rigs for the clothing, ref: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/07/changing-outfits.html. Or you use Diffeomorphic Daz Importer - Easy Mode to import char from DAZ~

left1000

crosswind said:

Just need to merge rigs for the clothing, ref: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/07/changing-outfits.html. Or you use Diffeomorphic Daz Importer - Easy Mode to import char from DAZ~

Easy import made my head spin, I couldn't follow what all the options did. Any chance there's an easy answer? As in easy instructions in which easy import option to press and which not to?

crosswind

left1000 said:

crosswind said:

Just need to merge rigs for the clothing, ref: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/07/changing-outfits.html. Or you use Diffeomorphic Daz Importer - Easy Mode to import char from DAZ~

Easy import made my head spin, I couldn't follow what all the options did. Any chance there's an easy answer? As in easy instructions in which easy import option to press and which not to?

You may have some in-depth understanding of DDI on its blog,  e.g. http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/03/easy-import.html or on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/396/easy-mode

Padone

@butaixianran You don't need a custom script to unlock the bones, just do edit > figure > lock > unlock selected nodes.

p.s. Can't understand why you need to export back to daz though, I mean once you have it in blender you can just render there, with the benefit of faster rendering and lower hardware requirements than daz studio.

left1000

I have another maybe solvable issue. ATM I'm just planning to live with exporting naked, and reimporting naked. But the only "successful" import back into daz that I've done results in an animation where when the girl tries to wave her arms in the air... she brakes both her shoulders dislocating her arms to spin them at an impossible angle.

I figured okay well that makes sense the video had me unlock rotation of all bones. So, I redid the import without unlocking the bones, and it didn't help the issue at all, if anything it only made it worse. Anyone got any clue as to what I screwed up? 

This is the moment the shoulders start to become broken/deformed: 

This is the VMD I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_4TKRgEr9U

I guess maybe I should find a VMD with less arm motion to test, but well, I just wanted to grab one randomly as a test of the process.
As to why I want to import back into daz, well, I can't get the hair or clothing to work in blender, I don't know how to set up lighting in blender, but I do already know how to do all those things in daz, so by reimporting the pose/animation back into daz, I don't actually have to "learn blender".

I just have to follow the 8minute video tutorial instead, unfortunately, yeah, broken shoulders. As you can see below.




I don't know if anyone has encountered anything like this using the steps in the video tutorial, and happens to know which step I did wrong? It's a long shot but doesn't hurt me to ask. It's strange though that the animation manages to follow the dance so perfectly EXCEPT for the issue of the shoulders. I'd imagine if the process was done totally incorrectly the limbs would all flail about randomly, not result in an almost perfect copy of the dance except for one set of joints getting it wrong.

left1000

Okay, uh, I can't export this as a pose preset to daz. It won't work. My guess? Lack of keyframes. But somehow this action that is missing all it's keyframes still "works" if I play the animation in blender the figure dances. Not sure what I screwed up though. I can't just start over because this song has 7000 frames and baking 7000 frames hangs blender.

I did find a shorter song though and used that as a test and it went just fine up to 3000 frames. I still want to get the one in the screenshot working though, because I really need to understand what's wrong with it. I'm learning how the exporter tools work, they need to be very specific. Like to export a camera you need the camera animation to belong to the camera, instead of both the animation and the camera belonging to the same empty parent.

So exporting an animation from blender will only work if I have keyframes. But blender doesn't need keyframes and sometimes seems to not include them?

left1000

What I really need to do is learn how to delete frames from NLA, all these glitches keep occurring when I ask blender to bake an NLA to an action but I ask it to only do so for 10% of the NLA.

But I only know how to delete keyframes, which is what you get after baking the NLA into an action. But I can't bake 7000 frames it's too long (my computer hangs indefinitely), I need a way to delete an NLA's frames above X. But no one likes NLA's so it's hard to ask anyone anything about NLA I guess(blenderdiscord).



Edit: Problem number a million, my animations are a little lifeless because they don't have facial animation. Not sure if this is an import problem, or if the vmd files I'm using just don't have facial expression data in them?

butaixianran

The vmd motion you mentioned works perfectly well on my blender.  

If you are using vmd retargeting addon, you must already know, there is a very detailed video tutorial for that blender addon. Follow that video, there is no way you can not make it work. 

 

Like other users already told you, also video tutorial told you too, check "merge Rigs" when importing your character. 

And there is no any glitches on the vmd motion you mentioned above. Both G8 and G8.1 works perfectly. 

 

Also, the tutorial about how to export animation back to Daz, there is a Daz script in its description, which will make your character ready to import animation in Daz Studio.  

Document is already explained why you need to unlock hidden properties, if you ignore that, your motion won't work on the character. 

 

From your posts here, I think you are keeping making excuses to not follow video tutorial. Once you don't follow video tutorial, something will be wrong, and you don't know how to fix that. 

 

Here is what you should do:

* You can learn everything from beginning about bones and blender, then you can ignore video tutorial and mess up everything you want.

* Or, follow video tutorial, do not skip any step, like every other users of vmd retargeting.  

 

There are some female users of vmd retargeting, they barely learned anything about blender or Daz. They just follow every step of video tutorial and make it works perfectly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

left1000

butaixianran said:

The vmd motion you mentioned works perfectly well on my blender.  

If you are using vmd retargeting addon, you must already know, there is a very detailed video tutorial for that blender addon. Follow that video, there is no way you can not make it work. 

 

Like other users already told you, also video tutorial told you too, check "merge Rigs" when importing your character. 

And there is no any glitches on the vmd motion you mentioned above. Both G8 and G8.1 works perfectly. 

 

Also, the tutorial about how to export animation back to Daz, there is a Daz script in its description, which will make your character ready to import animation in Daz Studio.  

Document is already explained why you need to unlock hidden properties, if you ignore that, your motion won't work on the character. 

 

From your posts here, I think you are keeping making excuses to not follow video tutorial. Once you don't follow video tutorial, something will be wrong, and you don't know how to fix that. 

 

Here is what you should do:

* You can learn everything from beginning about bones and blender, then you can ignore video tutorial and mess up everything you want.

* Or, follow video tutorial, do not skip any step, like every other users of vmd retargeting.  

 

There are some female users of vmd retargeting, they barely learned anything about blender or Daz. They just follow every step of video tutorial and make it works perfectly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I 100% followed the tutorial.  Although the tutorial I was following was this one
Because it was the first one you linked.  I didn't realize there was a second tutorial video I needed to watch. The tutorial posted in the OP that is 8minutes starts after using daz import. Which left me to try to figure out the import from this https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/import-into-blender-version-16.html which I did only partially well. The 4 minute tutorial uses daz easy import. I was using the non-easy import. Because I couldn't figure out the easy one. I needed to follow the 4minute tutorial then the 8minute tutorial, but that wasn't really clear to me at all since the tutorials overlap each other in the topics they cover. Another problem I had is that the vmd in the tutorial is using a short test clip. My system has 64gb of ram. The 7000 frame animation I randomly chose to test things out on requires more than 64gb of ram (or dips into pagefile). I ended up disabling my pagefile and testing it again and crashing my system, which is why I'm sure the long animation was using more ram than I had. So, yeah, I sought to alter the tutorial and edit the animation and only bake/export part of it. 

Also when testing how things work, using an entire song, made for a bad test, making it hard to figure out what mistake I may or may not have made. It would be really nice if I could learn how to edit NLA animations in blender to delete 90% of them. I did learn how to bake the full animation in blender then delete 90% of the keyframes before importing back to daz, that worked well. But when I tried to bake less than the full NLA things went haywire. I suppose I should've tried harder to find a sample VMD that was only 8 seconds long instead of 3minutes long. So, yeah, I'm still quite curious of if there's any way in the blender UI to fully delete segments from an NLA. Since baking 3-5minute long animations is extremely rough on my computer.

TL;DR Thank you for pointing me towards the second video, the 4minute one. That was quite useful. The first tutorial linked in this thread is not enough for me to have figured things out. I'm not sure I was willfully refusing to follow the tutorial. I was just following the 8minute video tutorial, not realizing the 4minute tutorial was critically important. If you really want there to be no way someone can do it wrong, you should link both videos in the OP of the thread.


Edit: Notes to self, now that I have my pagefile on my ssd, I can bake a full 7000 frame animation, but the keyframes are a little hard to edit/delete due to there being so many 1000s of keyframes (they're harder to see and the UI lags a lot), but it is possible. However upon redoing things using the additional tutorial, it turns out that there was nothing wrong with my original efforts. The vmd I randomly chose just does include a pose in which the character has to dislocate their own shoulder. I guess I was unclear, when I said broken, I didn't mean the animation or render broke, I meant the pose was such that if the character were real they would have broken their arm. I grabbed another vmd from a different dance though and preffered that. So, the TL;DR was, nothing was ever wrong, and it always worked. I just didn't like one of the poses in the vmd file I happened to be using. Sorry :P