Export options

[sc]

Hi guys,

I exported a character (lewis) yesterday and found some materials messed up. the IOR of the face went south so the face was full black. It took me an hour to clean up the shaders from cycles nodes in order to see more clearly and debug properly (i rarely use cycles).

The idea is to give people the ability to choose between shaders when they want to export from daz with some kind of UI and some tick boxes like EVEE and CYCLES, so if they wanna have both they can do it too, we can also add the subdivision level, the subsurface level…etc. I know that daz has an api that let’s you create a UI for your script. so i think it will not be a big problem to implement.

The real question is to know whether the result will outweigh the work like does it really matter for people other than me? And also does it improve performance too?.

Let me know what you think

Thanks

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[Thomas Larsson]

Materials are not exported but read directly from the duf file, so any export options would not help. The dbz files only contain the vertex and bone locations, and the HD topology if you export the HD mesh. The rest is taken from duf and dsf files.

The import script does a fairly good job with iray materials, but it may mess up old materials, in particular DAZ bricks. You can convert all materials to iray before saving the scene. DS does that behind the scenes before rendering anyway, I think.

[engetudouiti]

I hope Thomas confirm if vendor or user use custom MDL iray shader with shader mixer (it is actually what nvidia iray offered)

maybe plug in can not convert most of properties without vendor perfectly follow DS iray uber shaderproperty name way.

to read custom iray shader (with shader mix, we can directly load MDL file then compose shader)Plug in need to serch other shader files (it may be encrypited)

eg,, as default we have many iray MDL shader, as NVIDIA MDL example. Can this plug in convert those shader added material as Cycles?

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Now I rememeber to conversion work, we need to use iray uber shader, and material preset which saved with iray uber shader (daz custom made iray blick shader)

Some vendor just change shader labell name, or hide some properties with setting, but it is actually daz uber shader.. about this case most of properties may wrok. without vendor customized shader porperty name.

[Alessandro Padovani]

For materials to work fine you have to convert everything to the uber shader before exporting. This is quite easy just select the materials and apply the uber base. New G8 assets are uber already. The plugin tries to import old 3delight shaders too but the result may be not so good. As for mdl examples and shader bricks there’s no way to import them.

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[engetudouiti]

I saw,, last years, blender Ton tweet, there seems plan to offer MDL for blender,, as same as AMD offer shader blick for blender. in twitter,, (but I do not remenber detail, and do not know any new news about it.

[sc]

Sorry for the late response, i had no access to internet, so @Thomas Larsson , i’m not talking about materials, i’m talking about shaders assignement, what’s the point of having duplicate shaders for both eevee and cylcles when you only use one of them. @Alessandro Padovani Thanks for the tip i’ll try it out. @engetudouiti good new if this is true!

[Thomas Larsson]

No, there is no point to have duplicate shaders if you only use either cycles or eevee, and I know that Alessandro agrees with you. However, some people (like myself) may not have decided on the render engine and may switch in the middle of a project, and if the renders are messed up with the other render engine, I will get bug reports, and that is something that I want to avoid as far as possible. In particular, materials made for cycles can make a haze around character in eevee, cf https://blenderartists.org/t/solved-eevee-bounding-box-fog/1245271

[Alessandro Padovani]

Thomas, not to go on forever on this you already know my opinion. And diffeo is just great whatever you do. But on the daz forum a number of people is confused about this. I believe the bsdf option is only good for cycles, and if one wants a “switchable” option then he should just go with principled that’s good for both cycles and eevee.

Cheers and thank you forever for this amazing diffeo importer.

[sc]

Ok guys, i’m just giving an idea, i am sure you have valid reasons for thinking differently. anyway thanks for your time. One last thing, i saw a bug on the rigify rig, with the leg target poles, they are twisted.

Cheers

[jendi Hana]

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