Viewport shading/Render & Floating objects issue

[Balkazzaar]

Hi,

I am using the latest commit of the plugin where dbz files are used. I am using the standard “Export to Blender” from DAZ and not the HD one.

I am seeing an issue where the render is just giving a white model when i click on Viewport Shading. I tried both Cycles and Eevee and seeing the issue in both.

Also i am seeing an issue where the model’s accessories like earrings and bangles are just floating in the air.

Am i missing a step here or doing something wrong?

[Alessandro Padovani]

The material preview does not work fine for volumetric materials such as G8 skins. If you want a good preview of G8 skins in the viewport use the rendered method with low samples. Also volumetric skins don’t work with eevee so you need to render with cycles.

As for the floating accessories this is fixed in commit 36239cc (latest now).

[Thomas Larsson]

No, this bug was not fixed before. The script subtracts the pivot point (center_point) from the vertex coordinates. For some reason I thought that it wasn’t necessary with dbz fitting, but the example with earrings revealed that it is. I have now tested with both rigged earrings and earrings that are parented directly to the head or ear bones, and everything seems to work.

[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani , @Thomas Larsson

Thank you for your responses.

It sucks that render previews dont work with EEVEE. Is there any chance this will be fixed in the future? Or is that a hail mary situation?

[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani ,

I tried decreasing the samples and dropped it to single digits for the rendering and tried it for both EEVEE and CYCLES and it still shows the same render.

This completely defeats the purpose the plugin if it does not support rendering in EEVEE.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar The issue with eevee is that it can’t do volumetric materials with the same quality as cycles. Unfortunately iray doesn’t use sss but true volumetric for skin materials. That’s why eevee doesn’t work. See #24.

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[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani

So in simple words you are saying that we have to create our own skins for imported daz models in blender? and not use iray skins? So does that mean, we need to have indepth knowledge of nodes in blender?

[Thomas Larsson]

Volumetric nodes are not created if the active render engine is Eevee and Auto Material Method is enabled. But I don’t know that much about Eevee, and using it with Daz characters doesn’t work well for me. Eevee seems to load everything into ram memory, which is a problem for Daz characters which have many materials with many huge textures. So when I try to render with Eevee, Blender usually freezes and I have to kill the process.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar Yes as Thomas says. If you use eevee the plugin creates an approximated sss trying to match the volumetic material, this may work fine or not depending on the skin. So you may have to fix the skin yourself and to do this some knowledge of blender materials is required.

If you use cycles everything works fine.

As for the eevee vram allocation you may use the simplify panel to set the max textures resolution for the viewport and rendering. Also Thomas did a nice resize textures utility if you want to permanently scale textures down.

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edit. For eevee you may also try the translucency option for volumes. This disables both sss and volume and only uses translucency to match iray that in many cases is better than sss.

To quickly test this you can turn thin walled on in the skin material in daz studio. If the skin works fine with thin walled on then the translucency option is the way to go.

[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani

Apologies for being a nuisance by asking abt this, but is there an easier way to setup the materials in Blender or could show like step by step on how to fix the skin in Blender? My knowledge in Blender shaders and materials is really shit.

For example, in the image above shown, what nodes or shaders would i manipulate in the node editor for it to render the character skin correctly?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar There are really plenty of tutorials on the web about blender nodes and materials. Also depending on what you’re after your setup may be very easy or very complex. So the answer is it’s up to you really. But if you want to edit the materials yourself with a very minimun knowledge, I can advice to use the principled options. This way you only need to learn the principled shader and you can edit most materials easily to your needs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ0qtcSymDI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H5W6C_Mbck

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[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani , @Thomas Larsson

I did some more digging into my issue and i just may have found something. But i dont know if it has anything to do with the render issue or not. Here is what i did.

1. I imported a different DAZ3D model into blender with your latest commit using the following material options and as you can see in the picture below it, the model renders perfectly, even with the Volumetric setting.

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Also for this model, if you check node Genesis 8 Female.001 and check its materials, you will see Torso-4, Face-4 materials etc loaded correctly.

2. Now i loaded the model which is facing the render issue exactly the same way (as above model)using the same material options. And i also loaded it using @Alessandro Padovani 's “Principled“ “Principles“ “SSS“ material options and in that case too, it gave the white render as shown in the screenshot below.

But for this model, when you select the node Genesis 8 Female.001 and check its materials, you will not see Torso-4, Face-4 materials in the slot. Instead if you click the material dropdown, you will see all the materials there. Its as if the model has no UVs for it to map all the material pics. This model uses a lot of accessories. Is it possible that because of sheer number of materials it has to load, the model did not render correctly? or is this a bug?

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar The sss approximation that is used for eevee may work fine or not depending on the skin. The volumetric option always works fine in cycles. In your case the first figure gets a skin that works fine with the sss approximation.

edit. The empty material slots in the second figure is odd though. If you can point to the assets you’re using I can verify it for you.

[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani

thank you for your response and my apologies for my delayed response.

To answer your questions

1. Below are the assets i use. I pretty much used 95% of each asset bundle shown below:

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/63829/start
https://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/61849_Realistic-Nipples
https://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/57311_Golden-Palace-For-Genesis-8-Female
https://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/57471_Hairy-Armpits-For-G8F
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/hot-summer-2015-for-g3-female-s-v7/111368/
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/52865/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/52831/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/35901/start

2. Empty Material slots are weird. The strange thing is when i load one of the materials, for example say the Torso, it renders the nipples perfectly as shown below. Something weird is happening here. I just cannot figure out what. As you can see the Hair renders fine, thats because the hair materials are loaded in the material slots, but for the rest of the body the material slots are empty. I am pretty sure, once all the materials are available in the material slots, the model will render perfectly.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar For debugging purposes you should try to get the issue with a minimum set of assets. Please start from the base character then add one asset at a time and check what’s the asset causing the issue. From your list I suspect it may be some incompatibility with realistic nipples plus golden palace so I’m going to check them, but the rest is up to you.

edit. Indeed I found some issues with the realistic nipples that I’m going to report separately to Thomas for better handling. See #70. Once we get the realistic nipples to work fine I can go back to checking it together with golden palace.

[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani

I stripped her bare and still nothing

The shader she is using is iray uber. Can custom face cause this issue? I removed that face morph and still the same issue. Now i am thinking this is a shader issue.

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[Balkazzaar]

@Alessandro Padovani

UPDATE: I now removed her iray skin and put on the base G8F skin and then rendered and still nothing. I then zeroed out all the morphs and now its a base G8F model and believe it or not still no rendering.

I am now sharing the whole scene file with you. i hope you can figure out what the issue is.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar There’s something very odd with that scene. It gives me a whole set of missing morphs. I’d advice you to start from G8F base then add up instead of starting from the full character then strip down. I guess you didn’t “remove” things correctly in daz studio.

edit. As for the skin in your example it renders correctly for me in cycles, it’s not white. If you mean it’s white in the material preview then it could be something odd in your blender settings. You may try file > default > load factory settings.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

@Balkazzaar With #70 fixed I tested the realistic nipples together with golden palace and they work fine. You have to manually fix the shells in daz studio as explained in the realistic nipples docs, since it doesn’t get a shell fix script the same as Meipe’s grafts.

[Thomas Larsson]

Is this still an issue? Closing because the material code has changed a lot since May.