Critique on an exported model I had made earlier.

[John Smith1]

https://smutba.se/project/05e6300e-729a-4420-ae00-b3f833de7269/

I’m exposing my identity a bit but I figure it might be necessary to do so for a problem i’ve been having with working on daz customs and importing them to blender. this was made using one of the older releases at the time and as i would try to improve or refine the model it would only get worse.. tbh daz models in general are rather heavy so i’m not sure of what i can do to optimize them but also keep good functionality for animations for everybody to use.

It might be alot to ask and I apologize if you don’t have the time or are too busy to check but, would it be possible for someone here to go over this model and see what issues it had and what’s been fixed with current versions of diffeo for me to try a second attempt at? and what i can do to make this more useable for everyone? you can contact me on my twitter handle MetalWolfHowl or on discord with the same name if need be if this isn’t the right place but would like to help.

Its got quite a few outfits and accessories so that’s one thing that’s bogging it down. i need to learn how to properly make an Asset Library so the core body in the blend file doesn’t get too bloated for starters. and i would have liked to use physics for making animations run smoother but that also hinders performance.. shapekeys for the faces, hands or vagina sometimes don’t work is another common problem i have even with most recent versions of diffeo and i can’t understand why even with clean installs..

really i try to follow the instructions on the site and what you send me in the issues as best as i can but it can be a bit overwhelming at times so its hard for me not to mess up without feedback i guess. so if i could get some general or even specific tips/workflow to help me out with i’d greatly appreciate it.

[Alessandro Padovani]

For animation avoid HD figures and assets, including G9. Not everything in the daz shop fits blender. Especially some hairs and outfits can be very heavy you have to avoid them there’s no workaround. As well avoid extensive morph sets adding gazillion of morphs to the figure. You can use HD or extensive morphs for posing where the viewport performance is not critical.

As for face morphs each generation has its own, for example G9 doesn’t get face units. Easy import has presets for each generation.

p.s. important. You can not redistribute daz models, even if modified in blender. Be aware that you are violating the DAZ EULA.

[John Smith1]

Well i’m mostly sticking to G8 and G8.1 because of that, its very rare for me to look into G9 or G3 stuff when alot of the G9 NSFW stuff really doesn’t work at all, especially in daz. HD i also try not to use but for the teeth i kinda HAVE to, because without that HD morph they’re pretty hideous and spindly. it looks like the character has some kind of teeth disease or decay so i’ll just yoink it and merge it with the non-HD model i have and it surprisingly works without a hitch.

But really its that specific model which was giving me the biggest issue. well that and morphs/shapekeys for whatever reason deciding not to work the more i follow the daz to diffeo work flow. like right now i’m trying to load a G8 UV for a G8.1 character and its giving me an error.. and i had done a clean reinstall just recently for that gynoid i was working on remember? hence why i wanted someone to take a look at the blend files and see what’s going on.

i get this isn’t an exact science and transferring between the two platforms isn’t easy but i feel like i don’t even have a way of troubleshooting this myself if something goes wrong again and its frustrating having to constantly reload and restart the whole process from the top. especially when morphs and clothing are involved.

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[John Smith1]

here’s my current settings as well. maybe there’s something in here that i’m doing incorrectly without realizing it too.

[Alessandro Padovani]

4.1.0.2148

For teeth you can disable the HD morph in daz studio before exporting the dbz. If you keep the teeth HD morph and export as non-HD then you get the teeth deformations you’re talking about.

steps:

1. in daz studio disable the teeth HD morph
2. export to blender as non-HD

Using G8 materials on G81 figures works fine here, I don’t get any error, unless there’s specific steps.

steps:

1. in daz studio load a G81 figure
2. apply a G8 material
3. export to blender

p.s. As for your settings, personally I’d uncheck “subtract rest pose“ and lower the “max subdivision level“, but that’s up to what you need.

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[John Smith1]

ok well lets see fingers crossed.. but what about the model i had posted above on smutbase…? i mean i still have the daz file so i can always reimport it but have you tried to manipulate the shapekeys n etc? is it working properly for you or do you notice any obvious problems?

[Alessandro Padovani]

Again, you are violating the DAZ EULA. Personally I’m not going to download any of it and I highly recommend you to remove all your models there if they are based on daz.

[John Smith1]

oh hell ok so now its crashing for me every time now that i updated to 4.1.0.2148. so when i try to load a model it, blender just crashes.

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[John Smith1]

and as for the daz eula i mean i dunno what to say to that because there’s whole libraries of models people have made doing that. i mean if that’s how you feel that’s fine you don’t have to download it, i was just suggesting so you could actually see the problem hands on.

[John Smith1]

did a full uninstall and reinstall of both the plug ins AND blender. setting them to factory settings. but the UV issue from earlier is still persisting.

[Alessandro Padovani]

As for the uv error I can’t reproduce it, unless there’s specific steps. Then @Thomas may avoid the crash with a more extensive test.

As for installation, be sure to delete the old folders and rename the new ones.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Install/Installing the Blender add-ons

[John Smith1]

okay yeah this is a problem. I did a COMPLETE wipe of everything blender related I could find in C drive and in APPDATA. reinstalled Blender 4.1… grabbed the newest Diffeo from the downloads and MHX. hard crashes when you try to use easy import. Now what?

[John Smith1]

so manual import seems to still work. but this error pops up when i do so.

[John Smith1]

sadly trying to Load a UV set still doesn’t work and gives me this error.

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[John Smith1]

Moving this to major or critical cause this has gone from being a simple problem to now a big issue.

[Thomas Larsson]

Both issues should be fixed in the last commit.

The uv set bug was trivial. The uv set was no longer stored when loading a file because I had forgotten that it was used in the Load UV Set tool. It is now restored and I added a comment to remind me why it must be kept.

I cannot reproduce the second issue in exactly this form, but I could trigger a hard crash which probably has the same origin. It is caused by daz images that were introduced recently. In a final cleanup step, mapping nodes are combined with its texture in a node group, and are removed from the main material. However, this causes problems if the same mapping node is linked to several textures, because then the plugin tries to remove the same node several times. The material below shows an example. As a workaround, daz image groups are no longer generated.

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[Thomas Larsson]

Daz image groups are created again, but mapping nodes with multiple output links are not included.

[John Smith1]

well i’ll try it now and see, fingers crossed

[Alessandro Padovani]

My bad, I couldn’t reproduce the uv issue because I didn’t get you meant “load uv set“ in advanced materials. I was trying with a G81 figure wearing G8 materials, as per my steps above, which works fine. That’s also why providing exact steps helps.

As for daz images, there’s a misconception there. Those mapping nodes are from the pbr-skin detail, not from the daz image, the addon should distinguish. Then I still don’t understand why LIEs are treated differently since they have the very same structure, each image inside the LIE can have its own mapping, a daz image is a simplified version of LIE.

if the daz image has default parameters
    generate a blender texture
else
    generate a daz image with eventually its own mapping, if there's any

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[John Smith1]

There’s definitely something going on with texturing. the plug in is mostly working now but i just tried it with another character and i got this strange error about.. “color”? not sure what it means but i guess diffeo doesn’t like something i added to this character and doesn’t import anything afterwards.

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[Thomas Larsson]

This should not happen anymore.