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I did. I said it was hard.
Like that jokes not been made in 37 pages.
I'mma jump in say Blender has, hands down, the best UI of any comparable 3D program.
Blender's problem isn't that the UI is poor. It's that Blender does too much stuff. Comparing its UI to Daz's is like comparing the US Tax code to Ikea build instructions. For reals. And by reals, I mean real numbers, but I digress.
The issue with Blender's UI is that it isn't intuitive. The icongraphy doesn't mean anything to the neophyte. But it can be learned, and once learned it presents vastly more information to the user than, say 3DS Max, and does so quickly. As the man said, the learning curve is steep, but the payoff is sizable.
All that said, I wouldn't recommend Blender to anyone who has another means of getting the results they want. It's the nature of the beast. The human animal doesn't climb steep curves because they are there, regardless of what our sci-fi writers want us to believe. It climbs them to avoid pain or gain pleasure. So until you have a task that you really want to do, or really hate not doing, and until Blender is the only tool you can reach to solve the task, you just aren't going to put up with the pain.
Unless you will, but in that case you are, in fact, a special snowflake. Not everyone gets to be the special snowflake.
Well one thing about spinning up different interfaces is that it will allow people to create focused interfaces such as one specifically for video editing. Few people know how powerful a video editor Blender has in it, and the ones who do are often "That's something I plan on checking out (at some point, when I get time, etc...) Having more specialized interfaces where certain parts of Blender are given their own space to shine is in my opinion one of the things that would not only drastically simplify things but would highlight just how multifaceted of a tool Blender is. Pretty much the only thing Blender doesn't have for multimedia production is a set of sound tools along the line of Pro Tools or Ableton.
Oh, I agree. Totally. It's part of that whole "not intuitive" thing, though.
If you're like me, you've opened a blend file some else created and commenced the headsratching, at least once. Looking at the state the left the UI in and wondering how they get anything done (and maybe a bit how they did that to the poor thing).
Of course, one wonders if there's really any intuitive UIs out there. A lot of what people grok these day just looking at UI has been trained into them. Most "daily" UI's don't have a "Click me to reconfigure for Video Editing" button. To the extent that they do have that ability, they use breakout windows or modals. (Daz loves some modals). Blender not only has that button. It lets you customize it. But it doesn't prompt you to recognize what that btton is just by looking at it.
That's the UI's main weakness. It's designed to maximize the information given, at the expense of hand holding. even optimizing for one task, the UI still presents a huge array of options for that task because Blender has a sizeable menu for just about everything it can do. That's hard on the new user. Blender is hard.
The things, every 3D UI i've seen that isn't hard is on a 3D program with a vastly limited scope in comparison. Daz is a fairly powerful for what it does, but ti's still somewhat idiot savant compared to Blender. And in that context, DAZ Studio's UI is kinda crowded and rigid. It's one rails, or taining wheels, if you will. That rigidy makes it easier to approach. If your basic computer skills UI learning is Making a paper airplane, then Studio is scratch building an RC plane.
Blender is building an F-22 that somehow has complete Falcon 9 Heavy inside of it. And for some reason, also makes coffee.
Yes I have to admit that learning Blender is akin to learning multiple other very advanced programs if one tried to truly understand it's full scope. Many Blender Gurus actually have very limited knowledge in many areas of Blender and are Gurus in a subset of what it can actually do. :)
This so very much. I know Blender because one day I had an idea and commenced to figuring out how to do that one thing. (I asked you to kill Superman, and you could even do that one, simple thing).
It would be a great, too, for externally editing morphs by any n00b if users didn't tend to balk at a new UIs. There's only one thing to learn: How to move a vertex/verticies. Because if you do anything other than move them, you'll break the vertex order, and the morph won't load.
As you get more familiar with the UI and tools, you can learn aditional methods. But, my experience at becoming competent with blender boils down to learning enough to understand how phrase my google search for the thing I don't know and a laser focus on what I'm trying to do right now. I'm pretty sure Blender is well past the point where any one person knows how it works or what it can do. Fortunately, there's Stack Overflow.
This depends on what one is trying to accomplish with Blender. It is true with creating morphs, as mentioned. However, Blender is also used for importing from DAZ to use the powerful animation and post effect tools for instance. There are many workflows with DAZ and Blender and each have their own tools, methods and necessary conceptual frameworks. See, that's part of what makes it easy. ;)
On a related note, if Blender does make good on creating an environment where specialized interfaces can be spun up without having to 'fork' Blender, where using a specialized interface is as simple as loading a theme, then it opens up powerful options. Specifically, with integrating with DAZ for instance, one could create an interface just for creating DAZ morphs, another with importing DAZ assets for animation or post processing, each with only the tools necessary for the task at hand and each with those tools arranged in a logical pattern that makes sense for that particular task. There is no 3D tool on the market that is attempting this type of customization at the moment. It's like turning Blender into an 'app maker' for 3D, animation and fx that can also integrate with other tools via standards based import/export features that can also be customized. (No need to memorize import/export for a given product integration, it's saved in the specialized 'app.') All of this without having to risk breaking the app with upgrades to the base Blender tool since the changes are in an abstracted interface component. It follows best practices of coding (which are almost never followed) of tight integration with loose coupling.
On a side note... Many people think the whole 'app revolution' is new. It isn't. A fundamental concept of Unix from it's inception was to have smaller specialized tools that could be linked together in a fluid manner and swapped out lego block style to facilitate fluid and changing workflows. Apps vs the larger 'programs' are going through their next phase of vs... Blender, with the customizable interface is a whole new paradigm of having an engine that can support a large set of modular features that can be exposed app style. It's revolutionary. The next step to this would be to modularize the base application so one could create load scripts to only load the modules of the base package that would match a given task at the moment. If the base program were modularized like this, with load scripts, it would create an environment where all of the pieces were designed and tested to work together but could be assembled on an as need basis. Again, no one is doing this atm afaik. I haven't broached this in the larger Blender community yet am considering it. It takes some persistence to evangelize a shift in course like this though as I learned in trying to push the whole separation of interface and base app after Andrew Price first proposed redoing the Blender interface.
Has anyone played with the 2.79 new render engine features such as Filmic, Eevee realtime or the Cycles Principled BSDF Shader? If so it would be interesting to hear what your experiences/thoughts are. :)
If you aren't familiar with them yet, there are plenty of YouTube videos out on them and ofc I have links for ones I have found useful at my Pinterest/ Texturing, Lighting and Rendering boards.
I just wish the International Committee on Standardized User Interface Design for 3D Applications (I just made that up...) would make a universal law that all of the standard stuff that all 3d apps do (navigate the scene, have rotate/translate/scale gizmos, etc.) would be defined by standard keystrokes, features, and procedures. And every 3d app had to at least have a user preference that would enable that. So as you move from app to app you always know that to zoom in on an object you use the scroll wheel, etc.
There is no reason whatsoever not to have those things standardized. And if they want to employ different stuff, fine, but at least have a selectable user preference for the standard.
Yeah, I saw the principled shader and evee, and I'm excited to try them. But I have this rule against using beta applications. I think those are still unsupported right?
Oh, I don't mean to limit people to just use blender as a tool for moving verticies. I just mean, when you mention Blender to someone who live Studio, they tend to be overwhelmed by all the thing(tm). By having a focus on "What am I trying to do right now," the act of getting that done becomes the gateway drug. And we all know where gateway drugs lead.
I'm also not one for betas. I do jump on them now and then when I need to get something done and don't want to wait, but since I use Cycles for NPR, nothing on the horizon has jumped out as must have.
The Functional UI template approach Joe is describing only leveraged for workflows using 3rd party programs like DAZ Studio or Unity is exciting. Has anybody made such UI templates yet?
Many programs, including Blender have a way to import/export shortcut key settings. Blender can emulate other software package shortcut keys with a simple template switch.
Yes they are in the beta builds but since Blender is totally self contained, trying a beta version is as simple as having a separate folder such as Blender 2.x Beta and running the Blender version from there to play with while using the stable version for any actual projects. Since Blender doesn't need to be 'installed' but rather simply run from a folder, different versions are totally isolated with no chance to step on each other.
There are some, but they are a 'fork' of Blender since Blender itself doesn't support the features I was referring to, they are still in development. If you want to see an alternative, Google "Blender Sensei." You will find training videos as well as free/paid alternative to the standard Blender setup. It is the best example of an alternative interface that I know of. It is not a simpler, more streamlined version but rather has features to simplify/automate specific tasks in Blender with it's own panels etc... As to interfaces that are specifically designed around integrating with other tools, no, no one has done that yet. Again, it doesn't make sense to even consider this until the core Blender team sorts out the issues related to being able to do this in a 'skinning' fashion, hopefully in an upcoming release. If the Blender team can fulfill on this, then there could be multiple interfaces for integrating with DAZ alone depending on what one wanted to do, morphs vs animation vs post work for instance.
Thanks
Is it possible to import figures from DAZ Studio and animate them in Blender? I guess I'm thinking about scenes more than individual figures because they need to interact with each other and the environment. I was under the impression that most of the export options from DAZ Studio to Blender lose the rigging but, then, I really don't know much at all so my impressions could be way off base.
I am one of those who only use Blender to create morphs - mostly to fit or move clothing. I use the sculpt tools and, occasionally, the proportional edit. I also use the Video Sequence Editor for creating movies from my image sequences from the DAZ Studio timeline. I don't use the Teleblender script because, to be frank, I don't see the point. It could take hours to tweak the materials for Cycles and for what? To end up with a similar quality render to the one I could have produced with IRay in 20 minutes?
So I'd love to explore the animation or soft body physics capabilities of Blender but only if it doesn't mean starting with a Genesis 3 shaped piece of digital clay and going through all the rigging, weight mapping, etc., etc., that would take months to learn.
Yes, you can. I don't know how. As I understand it, however, JCMs and MCMs will not be carried over. Blenders function of shape keys and Daz morphs don't have a format of exchange that I'm aware of. You can still transfer them, but you'd have to do it manually. Unless something exists I don't know about.
As far teleblender goes, the basic code would, indeed, but a time waster, unless you are happy with default materials it creates for cycles.
However, teleblender has two options that mitigate this somewhat. The first involves rewriting some code in the python, and is what I use at present. The second, probably more reasonable, method involves the fact that the teleblender code can load previously saved materials. The instructions for doing so are on the mcj site somewhere, I forget where. This is one of those things I know how to do, but thinking about explaining is giving me fits.
Anyway, the answer to question of why you'd bother: Depends on you need. There are some things Iray does better than Cycles. OTH, there are things Cycles does better than Iray. (there's a reason Poser Superfly is a port of Cycles. It's good at what it does.)
Then there's this: Which, frankly, Iray can't do.
(That's Genesis 8, BTW) Obviously, you choose the tool that serves your need. If Cycles can't do anything (or do it better) you need that Iray can't, you've no real use for Cycles.
Quite nice job of it too.
Unfortunately, animating in Blender means re-rigging, and yes there is a learning curve. There is rigify and other rigging add-ons that help quite a bit but there is no way to currently exchange rigs between 3D packages.
We can export an alembic cache which bypasses the need for rigging, but this has it's own workflow issues that need to be researched to be able to use. The DAZ Alembic Exporter isn't free and I haven't tested it for integration with Blender so I can't say how nicely they play together. Note, bringing anything over from DAZ also means retexturing.
Another option though is to render the animation in DAZ Studio then export with an alpha channel and composite with the scene file in Blender. While this sounds like a bit of work, and is, often it ends up being the best solution anyway since rendering an animation with characters and complex scenes will overload most non render farms. With this, no character assets need to be retextured. Doing this would often require proxy assets for properly setting up the animation in DAZ, using DAZ animation tools rather then Blender's, and finally, matching cameras between DAZ and Blender renders. It also means not being able to take advantage of any Blender features in regards to the characters such as physics, hair, etc...
To take full advantage however does mean importing DAZ assets and characters, rerigging the characters (usually with much more sophisticated rigs and animation tools, but at a cost of rerigging) retexturing everything (textures can be imported but they would need to have the materials recreated in Blender) and finally, understanding all of the animation, camera/render engine settings and procedures, compositing, etc... in Blender itself.
In the end, there is no simple solution currently. Short of a lot of time and learning, the only other option is to do what studios do. Put together a team which have individual skills that come together to create the final product.
I've played with the principled BSDF Shader quite a bit, it's really handy and easy to use. There are some things I don't like about it such as the roughness is on a curve, based on what cynicat pro did with the roughness with fresnel. The fresnel is in the specular input and the range is from 1 to 1.85, i think, but you can overdrive it. What I hope they do is improve it and make it the default shader for conversion.
Filmic is nice, I didn't like it when it was an external add on, but the way they integrated it into 2.79 works quite well and can make a nice difference. I also like the false color mode.
The new shadow catcher is great, although it doesn't render shadows in reflections yet.
The cycles denoiser is very nice but can cause cause some issues. Hopefully they continue developing it because it kicks butt on fireflies.
Evee isn't in 2.79 but will be in 2.8 and is amazing.
I also tried real camera which is an external add on, and while it is cool and fun to play with I don't see any need for it as it doesn't do anything that cycles doesn't already do.
I just rendered this using cycles and filmic, shadow catcher and the Principled BSDF Shader. I didn't use the denoiser, but it would have helped.
Confirming all my fears and reservations, Joe. :)
Such a pity that DAZ animation is so limited. I recently wanted to animate a figure with a realistic breast bounce and something like that included with DS would make such a difference. As would a near real-time cloth simulation which works with store bought conforming cloth. Just those two things and DAZ Studio would be a killer app, IMHO.
That's why tedious or not I am committed to learning more than the 40 or so hours of tutorials I've done in Blender so far. There is no other way for me to ever do the animations I want to do in DAZ Studio and Unity is still trying to get up to snuff too.
Nice render. It looks like the jeep from the CG Masters course. Thanks for the feedback :)
Very nice, Freestyle has a lot of options that aren't readily available in any other render engine that I know of.
It's amazing we have so many good options to choose from even if it does cause some confusion as to what might be the best option for our own particular use-case scenarios. :)
..the day Daz "Officially" pulls the plug on Hexagon, is the day I stop dealing with modelling.
Yeah, when I explained that I had additional work flow to do lines and contours, Freestyle is what I use for that. But Freestyle with Cycles causes poor results, so I generate the lines in BI and composite. Which means I have to duplicate the scene over to BI, and make sure the render settings are correct, then make sure all of the render layers are pointed at the right scenes and layers in the compositor. Then prerender to make sure the Items designated as line free don't show up in Freestyle. It take a bit of doing, though the scene set up is all automated or saved. The objects in the scenes are different each time, so that has to be accounted for.
This render was all Cycles, though. No Freestyle at all. The contours are generated by abusing the hell out of normal data and color ramps.
Wow, nice. I did assume it was Freestyle+BI since that's what most people use for npr rendering. Traditionally, as you mentioned, cycles hasn't leant itself to npr types of rendering the way Freestyle+BI has. Also, there are so many setups already using F+BI.
@Marble I was thinking about your situation during the night and realized that it isn't as dire as it sounded originally. Between Rigify, being pretty much an automated rerig of your bipedal character (imported from DAZ) and the new shader coming out in 2.79 (see previous post) vastly simplifying much of the retexturing, the real issue will be things that one would be bringing the model into Blender for anyways, like animation, cloth simulation, hair... i.e.. things one would have to either know about or study anyways. So the real answer in the end is not so much how much work it is to bring an asset into Blender anymore but how much work it is to learn those parts of Blender that are skill sets on their own; hair, particles, physics, animation, cloth, post production, etc... The point in the end is that using all of the features that would motivate one to bring something into Blender is in itself the challenge.
I would have sworn that I originally got this link from somewhere in this very thread, but now I don't see it. This guy has a DUF importer and a semi-complicated way of getting rigged DAZ figures into Blender:
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer.html
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/export-character-from-daz-to-blender.html
I haven't tried it myself since I mostly do static renders, but it looks pretty good, although it's not exactly one-click easy.
Woah.
/Keanu