I JUST GOT PERMISSION TO USE THE BLENDER NORMAL GROUPS add-ons OPTIMIZED EVEE NORMAL MAP NODES in DIFFEOMORPHIC

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

now daz studio models brought into blender with diffeomophic can use optimize normal maps that make evee use GPU to process them… I have gotten real time animation using them in blender…

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Another note as hair will always slow this down except toulouse hair doesnt... whatever kind of hair toulouse hair is it doesn't stop you animating a character and then playing back the animation at 24 frames per second.. if u could covert any daz hair to be the same as touluse hair with diffeomorphic like a button on the add on interface….. Then real time animation using diffeomorphic would be possible … else if Daz Studio would allow it then just add the actual toulouse hair or similar to diffeomorphic then you could just add it in blender so you could animate your character fast… then disable it in the viewport and reenable your original hair then render Kind of a workaround .. that would make it a default thing and something you don't have to worry about doing in daz every time

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but here is the Github issue where all this was discussed And he said you could use blender normal groups in diffeomorphic… I have been testing these nodes for a couple months and they never fail

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[Alessandro Padovani]

please use proposal instead of bug when you make suggestions

[Alessandro Padovani]

As I understand it this is a “trick” to compute the tangent space with the gpu, so that normal maps are faster, since blender uses the cpu to compute the tangent space. Please note that this is needed only for objects that change shape during the animation, since static objects as props don’t need to recompute the tangent space.

It seems the addon replaces the blender normal map nodes with custom groups, or vice versa. So it doesn’t seem there’s need for integration the addon can be used together with diffeomorphic as a final optimization before rendering.

As for toulouse it’s just that it is a “low poly“ wig, while most wigs in the daz shop use tons of geometry, especially with G8 G9. There are a few dForce wigs using strands that are fast too.

note. Another simple way to speed up animation is to use bump maps instead of normal maps, since the bump node uses the gpu.

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

I was just saying if you used these optimized normal maps whenever diffeomorphic imports a character and creates the node tree instead of the normal maps that you're using that diffeomorphic would really just rock as far as performance… the loading time of a Genesis 8 character would take would take like 1 to 3 more seconds If you did add these nodes at the most

and then when you started playing with the model in blender you would be impressed at the performance that you're getting… nobody knows about the blender normal groups addon but everybody knows about if diffeomorphic you could just help people out by making DAZ studio models have this performance boost…

good to know about the toulouse hair…. if you could add an option to diffeomorphic… where you select the hair and click a button and that button duplicates the hair and converts it to strand based hair right on the characters head and puts the original hair in a collection that's been disabled in the viewport and render that would further strengthen my idea… if you could make these two things happen then every Genesis 8 would run at 24fps in EVEE RENDER… of course with simplify on zero… that would just be so beautiful which is why I am really advertising this idea….

i'm not really sure what you meant I meant about only needed for objects that change shape I did wanna clarify that I do have direct experience that these normal maps speed up Genesis 8 animations a lot ….more than double

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thanks for the info now I know in the future i could grab a bump map instead of a normal map

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[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

I'm adding this functionality to my add on so when you click my version of activate diffuse then “blender normal groups” will be activated automatically so if you did not want to add it… You could always make a page of companion ad ons on the diffeomorphic download page that work well with it and put mine on there…. Also my activate diffuse button is at a slightly better place more easily accessible… So That would be another benefit of touting me as a companion add on.. And even one more benefit is the next update that I'm making which will include a nudge function like daz has and a scale xyz… And because I'm avid diffeomorphic user.. it's all I use… I'll be constantly upgrading my add on to make blender more dazzy and work well with yours…

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

And there's a bunch more like Set a key frame for all shapekeys for when you convert your morphs to shapekeys

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Import multiple BVH

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A button in the item n panel tab To unlock all properties Save you going to the keyboard

Delete all childless empties

And an advanced material preview mode button that when you click it it saves your file and THEN goes into material preview mode because how many times does that happen to us when we're trying to edit a material blender crashes and we lose work

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

Import multiple BVH is good because sometimes when I download a huge pack from true bones.com I like to see what they all do so I have a default file with them all in there where I could just See what they do before I add them with the BVH retargeter(which is a godsend)

[Thomas Larsson]

I seem to have implemented an improved (in some sense) normal map group. It is not used anywhere in the addon, but you can generate it with Advanced Panel > Materials > Make Shader Groups, enable Normal. Is that something similar? I guees I could add an option to use that normal group rather than the standard normal map group.

However, in general I think this plugin is approaching its limits. I don’t want to add a lot of new functionality,, except for bug fixes and changes due to Blender updates.

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

Yes you should really add those blender normal groups add on node groups… I just told this to Andrew D the creator of extreme PBR and showed him how I got real time animation in EVEE Render mode with a DAZ studio character …GENESIS 8 ..with these node groups and he was interested… If it does weigh down diffeomorphic in any sense just make blender normal groups as a tickable option in the preferences…And warn of that underneath… You could load all the functionality you want in the diffeomorphic if you make it optional… And then if you give the option to convert any hair to strand based hair or the option to load toulouse hair onto a character or another strand based hair onto the character within Blender…. then Importing a dazz character with diffeomorphic would result in an extremely high performance character… And just inform people that the combination of strand based hair and the optimized normal map nodes is what's Giving them real time animation in EVEE render mode and I will promote you personally Constantly in my YouTube tutorials and promotions…Especially to Andrew D the creator of Extreme PBR cause if he hears that chose to do this…. then he might too on his ….I'm trying to get him to make all his materials that he adds…. all his PBR materials use this node Group… as I feel all Blender add on maker should do because it's been tested and it's very high performance… Then if you do it and Andrew D does it …I could contact askNK the esteemed YouTube blender tutorial creator… to make a video about what happened so that the world could find out and addon makers could start adding this to their code and really pimp out the whole VFX world…

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Duplicate of #1340.

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

I am so excited those normal groups you made… look awesome But what do they do Do they speed up animation… I got real time animation with my add on which uses blender normal groups solely for the normal optimization

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they just let me use it the code.….

but I got real time animation in EVEE render mode in a scene with two million faces on a character with 1118000 faces So you should use your normal groups as a benchmark to compare against what I got and if what I got with blender normal groups is better since it is so quick to add and light and practically invisible I I really recommend you do add it!

👊🙂

[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

here is the video where I got the fast-anim https://youtu.be/4FFJ5B_9MME