Victoria 8.1 Setup for Blender

[Marti]

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Can a brighter soul than me, help me figure out how i can mirror Victoria 8.1 setup in Blender with all the correct Drivers, Properties and Morphs.

These are the steps/questions i have so far:

Exporting with HD, am i right to delete the non HD collection in Blender and only work on the HD collection?
I really like that i have all the detail in Multires and that i can easily disable it in viewport for faster navigation.

1. merging and applying rest pose (i untick “Create Mesh Collection” as this deletes eyebrows and eyelashes)
2. I click the merged rig and “Add Extra Faces Bones” - This does not seem to do anything, do i need to import morphs first?
3. I click the mesh and import Units, Expressions, Visemes and body morphs. All these does not seem to work, Units only import a few of them and it’s setup as drivers?
   I read on this forum that Importing with “Custom Morphs” is the way to go now, but this also does not seem to work for me.
   When do i import with Property Drivers and when with Bone Drivers?

I like that in the Offical DazToBlender plugin all morphs and rig is automated. I understand that this plugin has a lot more control. But i think it would be really nice if it was able to import basic morphs for the given character and setup up the rig with ease.
And user can import custom morphs if needed beyond the morphs that comes with the given character.

I know DazToBlender is open source, might be worth looking into an automated setup for Morphs?

[Xin]

If your problem is exclusively with victoria 8.1 and you can use the addon in other cases, then it’s just a problem of victoria 8.1 being new. If not, continue reading:

Read the documentation in the blogspot site: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-15.html to understand how everything works. It’s not fully updated, but it will give you a better idea. I recently wrote a script to create a local copy of the documentation + blog posts, which makes navigation easier. You can give it a try if you feel like it. The script is in #343 .

I wouldn’t use HD characters in Blender if I were you, unless you are gonna do sculpting yourself later, in which case you can keep the mesh with the multires applied and import morphs as usual (those morphs affect the base mesh). Again, read the blog, it has a few articles on it.

To sum it up: you can only get in Blender whatever HD details you have at the moment you export the HD mesh from Daz using this addon’s script. You can’t later import HD details in the form of morphs/shape keys you can dial. You can import morphs for the base mesh and those will still affect the HD multires mesh, but those aren’t true HD morphs. HD morphs are not public so you can’t import them separately. What you can do is export the HD mesh with morphs active and those will be reproduced in the HD mesh imported to Blender. Perhaps better, you can bake normal maps as explained here and work with the base mesh: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2020/09/baking-normal-maps.html

The proper way to deal with HD details in 3d applications is by baking normal maps. You usually sculpt an HD mesh and bake its details to normal maps. Here, you can also do something somewhat similar: you first pose the character and activate the HD morphs you want in Daz (this would be somewhat similar to “sculpting”), and then you export the HD to Blender. Then you bake maps as the article above explains (see also #300 ), or by manually baking them yourself in Blender without this addon.

What Daz does by throwing an extremely dense mesh at you is not standard in pretty much any other software for good reason, High quality HD details are usually achieved by using “tension maps” instead of super dense meshes, and those depend on normal maps too. Only for sculpting you would use an HD mesh, and you would bake its details to maps you use in later stages. Dealing with an HD mesh at all stages is terrible performance wise and has a lot of issues/artifacts with the way the rig ends up deforming the HD mesh if you look closely. HD meshes are very unfriendly from an animation standpoint.

See also my comment in #311 for other alternatives if you really want to deal with an HD mesh.

[Marti]

Hi Xin

Thank you for the detailed answer, this is much appreciated!

I was thinking keeping the HD mesh to subD 1 or 2 just to keep the overall shapes and keep as much detail in the morphs as possible. The HD mesh is Daz3D’s way of doing displacement, this is of course not how the industry would do it, i know.
I'm currently looking into getting the best and fastest possible results from Daz3D Characters for animation pipeline. If that is doing it the Daz3D way, industry way or somewhere in-between is still something I'm trying to figure out. You say morphs are deforming when using Multires, is that because the morphs is targeting a lower subD? or why is it causing issues in Blender and not in Daz3D?
So only subD 0 Morphs is able to be imported into Blender?

As mention above my thoughts would be to have subD 1 or 2 in multires from Daz3D just to keep the overall shapes of the face/body, and to get the best results with morphs. But yes if HD morphs is not possible unless i have to export them individually then it’s probably not the best way…
I would want to bake displacement maps and not normal maps. The baking normal feature looks great, is there a similar for baking displacement?

This looks interesting #311 this would require to export the expressions individually right?

[Marti]

This is a quick test baking displacement from HD, first time I'm using blenders bake it’s actually really great!

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[Alessandro Padovani]

I am impressed myself seeing what we can do with daz figures in blender these days. The overall quality got really good over time, thanks to the nice work of Thomas and all the contributors.

As for your questions, Xin already answered. If you’re looking for confirmation then yes, you can import the HD shape with multires, that’s good for animation too. Then HD morphs are somewhat supported by baking normal maps, but this requires extensive manual work, and this feature is fresh news thus not reported in the docs yet. Honestly I didn’t play with it myself.