DAZ to Blender vs Diffeomorphic (Deep Dive)

hello everyone my name is kevin with mru studios and today i wanted to go over the use of two different tools to export scenes or sets characters and props from daz studio into blender one of them is the dazz to blender bridge which you see here which is available available from daz 3ds website the other is diffiomorphic now i've done some tutorials already on the use of daz to blender bridge specifically some issues you might experience with hair after the export into blender there's some settings you can make in the cycles render engine to adjust the hair so it looks good you can check out those videos i'll link them in the description below for easy access but i'll kind of go over some of what i discussed in those vid in those videos here today but we'll go over the das to blender bridge we'll go over diphyomorphic we'll kind of compare what they what they look like and what the characters look like after export and i'll discuss why i feel diffiomorphic is the better tool so i want to thank those who in my previous videos suggested in the comments hey why don't you try diffiomorphic i knew about the tool before but it's something i never tried until recently and i'm very thankful i did special shout out to otto mott one of the viewers here of the channel that kind of helped me out with diffiomorphic and i got it set up it's a little more complicated to set up but i think it's worth it there's a there's more you can do with it so with that i wanted to let you know that the new visual novel i've been talking about so much in my videos is finally released link above if you want to check it out click that link and it's a 30 minute episode it's an animated visual novel a journey high quality audio and 3d animation i've been working on it's what i'm using to push myself to get even better at 3d animation and the series will become will improve as time goes on but i hope you enjoy it please check it out uh click click the like button if you like subscribe hit that bell notification icon and uh check it out so joining me today to demonstrate both the use of the dazda blinder bridge and diffiomorphic is the amazing sharon walker who you will see in the visual novel say hello to the audience here sharon absolutely beautiful let's get started all right this is where you obtain the daz to blender bridge it's on das 3d's website and this isn't necessarily a step-by-step process for installing the dazz to blender bridge or diffiomorphic uh from what i remember it's very straightforward to install but you might have an issue with the version number of blender you're using particularly if you install the das to blender bridge and you update blender you either have to reinstall the add-on or you can move the contents of the add-on from the previous version folder to the new one the thing you have to make sure of is when you do install the daz to blender bridge all of the add-on files are located in the right folder so an example of this let's say you know daz i'm sorry blender 3.0 is the latest version so we have a con configuration folder and a scripts folder the one thing you have to make sure of is when you have the add-on installed that it's here in this that it shows up in this folder because this is where all the add-ons are dtb is the daz to blender bridge and this is all the files associated with that so what i do particularly if i'm updating to a newer version of blender let's say blender 3.0 is the latest version now let's say blender 3.1 comes out and we have this folder here okay and all our scripts are here but we don't have the das to blender bridge files in that folder i just go into the previous folder path and i select the dash to bring blender bridge folder and then i place that in the add-ons for the new blender folder which in this case would be 3.1 when you do that the daz to blender bridge will show up properly in blender now i can show you where to get to the add-on so you can install it and that will allow you to access that has to blender bridge from blender so let's go into daz studio right now and we are going to export a character i'll show you how to access the daz to blender bridge there so let's open up daz studio here we are in daz studio now this is diffiomorphic i'll get into that a little bit later but what we want to do is load a character and i've already got a character selected sharon as you saw earlier i'm going to select her and she's set up here go load her into the scene make sure she's ready and i'm going to add some unrigged props to her attach them to her based on some smart content that i have the reason i'm doing that is i want you to see what can potentially happen with the dazz to blender bridge it doesn't manage unrigged props properly or at least from what i've seen with the smart content i have if the like clothing works well because the clothe the rig of the clothing is connected to the rig of the character so it works fine but unrigged props don't and we'll take a look at her here she is in all her glory in the in nvidia ira but we have her set up and you'll notice she's in the t-pose there's a particular reason for that we won't get it in we won't get into it in this video it has to do with the way i export the characters to apply miximo animations in blender we're not going to be doing that i will create a future video on that and i'll also show you the tool i use that comes from a third party i think believe it's a published artist artist named agent unawares and they create this genesis 3 to genesis 8 pose translation from the a-pose to the t-pose because genesis 3 uses the t-pose i believe genesis 8 uses the a-pose so what we'll do is select the character and we'll go into the pose controls we're gonna go to that i believe it's a script and we're just gonna set her to the a pose like i said right now you don't have to worry about this when you bring in a genesis 8 character they will be in the a pose already next thing we want to do is apply some of the smart content i have and in particular it is a this harbinger machine pistol really cool asset available from the daz store and we're going to attach these parts these ammo pouches to her combat armor so let's go there that's one of them let's select the there's another one here we'll select that and let's put two of them on her waist uh one of them could be a pistol but it doesn't matter uh i just want to make sure that that un something unrigged is attached so on that side and the next side will be here all right so we have some unrigged props attached to her they look fine in dad's studio the way they should and the next step is just to export her using the das to blender bridge now i have a tool over here you can see to export but you won't have that i had to set that up where you'll see by default is under scripts we go to bridges blender and dazz to blender and it will ask you here if you're you know if it's an environment or prop genesis 8 or genesis 3 character or both it's a there's important note that you can only export genesis 3 and genesis 8 characters i have not tried to export genesis 1 or genesis 2 i do have a michael iii character and i have tried to export him using the dazz to blender bridge and it did not go so well the the the rig was outside of the mesh it didn't attach it just looked horrible okay you can do it with diffiomorphic but there's some extra tricks there's some extra steps you have to do and i'm going to be creating a video on that it may work for michael iv also we'll find out so is genesis 8 genesis 3 just go ahead and accept that and in these settings these are the settings i use now i use subdivision level 0 because we want to have the lowest possible subdivision you can you can set because when you export to blender you're going to supposedly or likely want to be able to pose the character and the more subdivision levels you have the slower your system processes it takes more processing power and the harder it is to pose so we'll just set it to zero include morphs i would be very careful with including morphs one of the reasons is when you start including a large number of morphs morphs actually export over as i believe shape keys in blender and the more of those you have you have a ton of those it can really slow things down massively it caused problems when i did it so unless you are you absolutely need or want some morphs exported with the character i recommend not even doing it i'm not gonna do it here i don't have any morphs i need to have so we're just gonna uncheck that collect textures now what this does i kind of talked about it in my previous video but i've learned more about it since then and if you don't select collect textures what it does is dazz studio points blender to the textures in the smart content folder where this smart content is installed so it uses the actual textures where they're located if you collect the textures what it does is it makes a copy of the textures in the smart content folder and places them into a an export folder and i'll show you where that's at there's a potential problem related to that if you export more than one character and i'll show you that as well so right now we're going to collect textures to show you what kind of issues and what you can expect include animation data we don't have any animation on this character remove any incompatible nodes i don't see any difference when i check or uncheck that i'm sure under certain circumstances this does make a difference but not in anything i've done so we'll just go ahead and select it now we'll click accept and the script starts to run okay and when it completes we'll go and show you how to import the character into blender while that's working what i want to do is show you where the these files are exported this is where the default of where the character's textures or the object's textures are placed it's a figure it goes into figure zero and the textures are located here so what we're going to do what you want to make sure of is if you export a character you're going to want to place these textures in a location where they're safe or where they're outside of this folder so what we'll do is just take the textures right here or even take just exports all together we can copy it out and we can remove that folder path because the dasda blender bridge generates it every time you do an export so what we'll do is just create a let's say a default folder location here and just go character and we'll put it right here just right inside of the right inside of here so we're going to take that and move the exports folder in here now the reason i do this is if you go to where this exports folder is located now it says figure zero and you would think that the next time you load export another figure it would export it as figure one so it would be placed in another folder location where it wouldn't overwrite what you just exported but that's not the way it works maybe a future version of the dazda blender bridge will work that way but if i export another character it obliterates the folder here and we're going to lose access to the textures we just exported so that's why i moved it into this folder path over here and you'll see that when i get into blender i'm going to remap that or you will want to remap to this folder path here and i'll show you how to do that so let's go to blender here's blender 3.0 to import the character we go into the add-on here now if you're looking for how to install add-ons in blender you go to edit preferences and there is an add-ons location here and then what you do is you select daz to and there is the the armature daz to blender that's what you want to select just check the box and then there will be another tab over here called daz to blender so once you do that the dazz to blender tab shows up here and we want to import genesis figure which is what we exported from from dash studio and it takes a minute and we'll see what it looks like as soon as she's imported here we go now you saw that there it showed up briefly there was there were some python errors i haven't traced those errors down to figure out why that's happening because whenever i import the character it seems to import the way it should so i'm not sure what's going on with that the other thing is in blender 3.0 i notice this pad here where the character standing on gets imported i didn't notice that in blender 2.93.4 and i haven't updated the daz to blender bridge it's the one i've been using which is 2.0 it's been out for a while so to get rid of that plate there i'm not sure well let's see if it shows up in cycles i'm not sure if it does let's go gpu compute and let's go to cycles and see if we see it yeah it does so the way to hide it is there's two of them cube one and cube two so you just hide those two and it hides that here's the character you'll notice and one of the things is if you're doing this in in blender 2.93.4 which is the last one i used that there's a ton of extra shapes and a hidden folder i believe it's something that the dazda blender bridge uses to create the armature for the character you can safely ignore them if you can't delete them otherwise it deletes the armature i found so normally i just gather those all together and place them in a folder and then hide it so that way i don't see them they don't interrupt me with anything i'm doing with the character in the viewport the other thing is i like to hide the pose controls there if i want to see what the face looks like and you do that by just going to the character it looks like a stick figure over here and you just clicked the eye icon and that hides that some of these other shapes it's one of the things about the dazda blender bridge i don't necessarily understand but you can hide these are extra shapes right here you can just hide those shapes i recommend not deleting them i tried deleting them before i began this tutorial and it looked like it deleted the armature one of the things you could do though is you can go and move them into this daz hide folder which is what i normally do move those into here and then in the das folder das figure zero folder we just have the character with all of their mesh and then we can collapse this over here and usually what i do is just hide das root or delete das root which you can do here and so das height is here and we could just collapse that and not even worry about it anymore so it also brings in the dazz to blender bridge brings in a daz sun which lights the scene it's kind of nice if you don't want it you can delete it i normally like the scene myself with hdri or point lights i could create or my own sun in here but you'll notice what i was talking about over here and that's these props here these are unrigged props and those ammo packs are not anywhere near they're they're hanging upside down they aren't in the right position anymore on the on the thighs and you have to manually go in and reposition those sometimes what i've also noticed is that those if it's one of the weapons i put on her side or sometimes the pouches their vertex groups are assigned to the arm so if you move the arm it starts to move the pouch and it does some kind of what appears to be some very strange things so that's just a manual process you just have to manually move them the other thing is it looks like she's been dumped in a coat of clear coat her her skin is not the best either and i can show you how to work on adjusting that so if we come over here to shading and we wait for this to load whenever it does then we can go in and start accessing the nodes down here and i'll also show you what happens if you lose access to that folder where you exported things from which you will if you export more than one character as i was saying so we'll come over here and this i believe let's go into cycles and let's first look at the skin like i said i don't like how the dazz to blender does the skin i think the skin overall and the eyes look better in diffiomorphic which we'll see next but let's select the character here we're gonna select her mesh so come down here and go to female shape and we will go over here to shading oh we have to get out of pose mode for this you can't be in that's just a tip and a tip to myself reminder myself too if you're in pose mode you can't i from what i've seen you can't access the shading nodes so to access them you have to get off the character go back in and now you have access to the shading nodes it doesn't work if when you're in pose mode so this is where you would go for the skin if you wanted to change some of the the settings to see if you can fix it and get it to the shade or color you want you would come into the character and you have different materials here for the different parts of surface of the body these are like surfaces surface settings in das studio so we come to the face over here and you have the image maps that are used for the face in this case the face you've got a bump map i believe it is and a texture map and you have some ability with the texture map connected to this irae uberskin which is a node that's created i believe by the dazda blender bridge to change some of the subsurface scattering of the skin color but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the skin and what it looks like so even if i change let's say the subsurface scattering to green it does change it a little bit and maybe it has an effect on the tint but it's not a massive effect on the color of the skin the actual skin color comes from the diffuse texture over here and to change that diffuse texture you're going to need to disconnect the image map now doing so means you lose some of the eyebrows that are part of the original skin texture so you might want to in this case i didn't import specifically import separate eyebrows for the character i was just using the default but if you did import eyebrows that were separate from the skin you could add them and they wouldn't be affected by removing the texture map here so i could actually literally change the skin color now because the diffuse color the map has been removed so the but the bump the bump texture is still there so i can literally literally change this to any color i want i don't like the i think it's harder or controlling the skin color isn't as effective here based on the way this is set up with the diffiomorphic you'll see it actually uses standard blender nodes and you have more or at least what i feel are better control over skin tone okay one of the characters i'm using in my visual novel her skin is blue so i did use the dazz to blender bridge initially but i'm going to be using different diffumorphic and literally i had to detach the image and apply a skin color and i i added or imported a unique separate set of eyebrows that actually attach to the character where i could change the skin color so you can do that here you have an effect on the subsurface scattering color of the light underneath beneath the skin and you can affect some of the texture the the the intensity of the bump image map that's been used for the texture of the skin so you do have some effect over that now if we come down over to the clothing if you select let's say you select the vest here you do have let me come down here vest and you do have materials there as well what we're going to do is select the shirt of the vest here and we'll go it also has everything is connected to this ira uber either skin or a material here and you do have the ability to set some of these values to impact the the specular lighting that's coming off of the clothing here if i believe i said if do lobe specular i believe if i affect that change the value of that okay let me bring it back change the value of this in addition to glossy layered weight let's go 0.100 okay and we'll bring this down to 0.100 it does you start to see that the clothing the shirt right there is not as glossy as it appeared to be before so you can use a combination of the dual lobe specular and glossy layer to kind of tone down or increase the shininess of the material if i go to shirt here that's kind of her underarm area we also have a different material and we can impact that as well i tend and with diffiomorphic it tends to import shiny also but i think it's how i set up the character in uh daz studio i had kind of a shininess to the clothing and the armor which i'm going to get rid of but if we reduce the dual lobe specular over here and we bring that down to let's just go zero points uh five zero so we'll do it over here 0.050 and that further reduces the the other part of the shirt underneath the underneath the uh armpit there and i can control that on all of the surface of the character here so every part of the character i can kind of change that and to get it the way i want it to look there's another issue that i have with the dazda blender bridge and i seem to get a lot of poke through with characters fingers and feet and toes through boots and gloves i do have somewhat of a problem with that with diffiomorphic but not as much as i do with the dazz to blender bridge one way i resolve that since i'm not taking the character's gloves off is just literally to lead the faces of the polygons and how i can do that and that may not be the best way or optimal way to do it depending on how you want to set up your character and what you plan to do with them i'm going to go in here and select the i'm going to select the character's body which is over here okay i'm going to go into edit mode and her body is selected so i can come in here and i can just say you know what delete all those polygons or delete the vertices and now all the vertices are gone but her fingers parts of her fingers and the faces of the actually i think i'm doing it by vertices vertices of the fingers are missing so if i take the gloves off part of her fingers are going to be missing in this case it's not going to matter for me there may be a better way to do this or there's a better way to do this if you don't want that to happen so i noticed i noticed a lot of poke through like that when i'm using the daz to blender bridge just less of it in diffiomorphic and you manually have to adjust these right here you can move those by going back into object mode you can grab one of the pouches and you can say g for grab and you can move it around how you want to there's a few more things i want to show you before we get into looking at diffiomorphic and one of those is what i talked about earlier where we can lose access to the textures that we exported if we leave them in that export folder where the das to blender bridge places them which is here so it's fine now but let's say we want to export a second figure as i was saying before whatever textures we have in here get obliterated they get overwrite overwritten with the new textures we export so we moved the textures into this character folder save them off in a safe place i'm going to show you what this looks like we have to close blender because it's accessing these textures in this exported folder so we're going to close that let's go ahead and save this we'll save this in the same folder the the character so we're going to save it and then close so if we delete this exports folder here which we can because the daz to blender bridge will regenerate it if it needs to we'll delete that all right so we're going to go where we save the character and here she is now what you'll see when we go to cycles is she is going to basically our surfaces are going to look all pink and what that indicates is cycles can't find textures you've indicated in the folders where you said they're supposed to be so let's go to cycles and now she looks almost completely pink so the way to resolve this is because we save the textures off in a different location we can re-point to those textures going to file here in blender we'll go file and go to external data and you go all the way down to find missing files and it's going to ask you where are the missing files that you we can't find and what i'm going to do is come in here to the folder location where we saved everything and say find the missing files so this should actually fix most of it but what i found is the textures don't always point to the right location you'll notice here on her breastplate that the texture just doesn't look right and let me show you in shading in the shader nodes what's going on there and why it's happening so we'll come over here to shading let this load up okay so we're here looking at the character definitely the textures don't look right so let's go in to the vest at first we'll just start there we'll go to vest and we'll look at one of the materials here let's go ahead and select female vest armor plating and that's going to bring us over here to we're in pose mode get out of that and here is our texture or the materials these are textures over here it's importing and the problem is if you go down through these textures here you'll see let's select and right now the texture for the vest is actually if you can see that it's actually pointing to the pants so it's applying the pants textures to the breastplate which is the wrong texture and what we have to do is just go and remap that by selecting vest okay and selecting there and say open image now it kind of fixes it you start to see the the labels here and if you go through all of these and fix that just go and remap these to the correct folder path you don't even have to select the particular file it needs you just have to remap the folder so we just need to say okay it's in the vest folder come down and we go to each one of these okay that's actually pointed to the right thing this is pointed to the right thing this is not pointed to the right thing so i'm going to select vest here and the last one is the vest here from the pants just say open image okay and you see now the breastplate looks right so it's a manual process it's not a hundred percent because you have to go through every single one of these materials and remap them so collecting the textures this points out that collecting the textures can be a painful process usually what i would do is i would just use the textures where they are in the smart smart content folder and not collect the textures but there may be a reason you want to do it let's say for whatever reason you want to uninstall daz studio and you lose access to the textures in the smart content folder you're going to need to have these textures in a location where they can be accessed so collecting the textures the way we did is important but normally you know daz studio is not going to be something i uninstall i'm going to be using more characters in the future so i wouldn't recommend necessarily using this path i would just not collect the textures if you don't collect the textures it's much easier to deal with in here it's just in the daz to blender bridge you have the option of using the textures where they are in the smart content folder or collecting them and having them in a separate location the next thing i want to discuss one more thing before we go and move over to diffiomorphic and this will apply to diffiomorphic as well because it's more it has to do with subdividing the character so they the character looks good in the final render when we export the character we set subdivision to level zero so when we look at it in here in blender or i'm sorry in cycles we see the edge of the ear looks pretty jagged and other surfaces the hair looks a little jagged too depending on how close we are so to fix that what we do is for the character it already the das to blender already sets a subdivision level now i want to point something out there is something called adaptive subdivision and it is in the experimental features here you go to experimental and you can set the maximum subdivision level to use it's default of 12. now i've messed around with this so i set the default to three and when we go into our subdivision here we see a new checkbox called adaptive subdivision it's great because what it does is the further you are away from the character the less it subdivides the character's mesh the closer you are the more it subdivides up to the maximum subdivision level you set here i believe that's correct which is three now what i've noticed is that for whatever reason with adaptive subdivision even though i set it to a level of three if i get close to the character like this and i go to render it just takes forever for it to load the meshes and get to the point where it starts rendering especially with the hair and so when i set a non-adaptive subdivision i set it to let's say set the hair i'm sorry set the the render for the render for the character to three which is fine and then we go into the hair and we add a subdivision modifier and if you're if you're close you probably want to do this because the hair will look blocky if you don't and i set the subdivision level of that to about two or three so we're going to remove adaptive subdivision and let's just set it to viewport level to zero which is what we have and let's set render to three two might be fine i'm going to set it to three don't turn on the viewport or the editing which won't matter because the viewport level is zero anyway and before we render this let's get a camera over here go ctrl shift zero and that will move the camera over to where we are right here so right there we'll get the camera it'll focus in on our ear area so we can see how smooth that is that should be fine let's go ahead and render this i do want to point out unlike in das studio you can actually render from perspective view you can render from a camera or perspective view in blender you only render from a camera so it's important that you set up a camera into the position that's in your perspective view so that you can actually render what you see because if you don't what you're rendering is going to look very different from what you have set up in perspective view in the viewport and here we are it's starting the render right here everything looks good you see her ear is much smoother there could be some de-noising i need to use which will be done after we finish all of our samples because of the way i've set up compositing in this particular case but the hair is smoother because it should have subdivision level 3 applied and the character's mesh has subdivision level 3 applied which is much smoother than we saw in the viewport and it's important to note too that you have to be careful with the subdivision levels you choose three may be too much you may have to go down to two uh two is still better than none one is better than none and you just have to be careful with how much memory you have because the more subdivision you have the longer it takes to to load the mesh both into memory and into the gpu and the longer it's going to take to render so just be careful of that this looks pretty good you can see the character smooth and that's just really what i wanted to point out um and this like i said is going to apply not only to when you export using das to blender bridge but you can also use this in diffiomorphic the same technique for setting up subdivision levels now i don't do it on any of the clothing because the clothing looks pretty good already and um looks fine so we're good there one last thing i want to point out because this is about tips and tricks for effectively using the dasta blender bridge and diffiomorphic before you actually export the character you can do the following let me bring up daz studio all right here we are in daz studio and what i want to point out is before you actually export the character one of them one of the other things you can do to lower the resolution you can select the character and anything attached to the character so we're gonna come over here to sharon walker and we're gonna go into mesh resolution here select that and you'll see it's at base resolution which is great i think that when i saved this character i had set all of her resolution to base what you'll probably likely find is that the resolution level is high resolution that's a default higher subdivision level so you may want to lower this to base and all of the items on the character you can just check to see if it's base also and the reason i was mentioning i mentioned this as as before when you have the subdivision or the resolution set higher it increases your processing the amount of processing you need to do and when you're animating you'll get much smoother movements of the character and it'll be easier to position the character by reducing the subdivision levels you don't add subdivision levels until you get to the point where you're actually rendering and just as before this applies to whether you are exporting using the dash to blender bridge or diffiomorphic so let's go ahead and check out diffiomorphic before we start exporting in das studio using diffiomorphic i wanted to show you the link where you can download the tool the version i'm using is the latest version that's daz importer version 1.6 and this is the website where you can download that it's absolutely free i'll provide a link in the description below but what you want to do is select this zip file here it's stable version 1.60 also there is a great link down here under documentation and tutorial tutorials setting things up this provides a page that has a perfect information with a lot of screenshots that show you how to set up the tool it's very self-explanatory if you have any questions you can ask me in the comments below but it's pretty clear how to use it how to set it up both in setting up the script in das studio and also connecting the add-on in blender so with that let's head over to das studio we're back in daz studio and what we want to do now is export sharon for use by the diffiomorphic plugin in blender and one thing i want to do is take her clothing here take her attachments the pouches i don't have her saved right now with the pat the those attachments on so what i'm going to do is just go ahead and select save and we're going to save her in the location where i have her for export so come over here there it is library scene subsets and i'm going to select sharon over here save that so she saved yes i want to replace it so she saved in the a pose and her pouches are connected we're going to select export to blender and we want to go into the same location where our duff file is located where that contains the character we want to export into blender it's important that this dbz file be in exactly the same folder and i believe there's a note of that in the installation for diffiomorphic so we're going to select her going to remove the duff because it adds a dvz extension anyway and select that and select save so she the dbz file is going to be in the same folder same exact location as the duff file so that's done and you can see over here in the folder dbz duff and the duffpn.png so we're going to go now in to blender let's bring that up here select so now we have blender we're going to delete the default cube and we're going to use the diffiomorphic tool which is daz importer one of the things i do want to mention is before you use diffiomorphic it needs to know where all the library paths are where the paths are to all your libraries related to das studio content because the diffiomorphic plugin goes to the location where the smart content textures are and it accesses those for the character here so it just uses your smart content folder it doesn't have a means like the daz to blender bridge to export the or collect the textures into a different folder although you could do that manually it just uses the textures in the folder where they're located so what you want to do is go to global settings and part of the process of setting up diffiomorphic you'll see in the steps it has you create a json file that contains the paths to all your libraries so what you have to do in here is you open the global settings and make sure you load root paths and go into that json file that's saved during that setup process so you come in here go to audio series i've already got a folder location where i've placed that json file which for me is under diffiomorphic it's right here and load root paths and you'll see all of the folders are exactly the ones i use for my library they're non-standard folder paths a non-standard from daz studio and this was already correct i just wanted to show you the steps that you need to make sure you do that before you export otherwise it'll give you an error so one of the things we'll do is i want to show you what import das does and why you probably want to use easy import das because it does a lot of things for you so let's select import das we're going to go to the audio series folder so das 3d we're going to go to different not diffumorphic sorry we're going to go to the library we're going to see in subsets and we're going to select sharon the duff file the dbz file is in there that tells the importer how to import her into into blender so it's going to run for a little bit okay so you get some warning saying that there's some updates and the lighting may not be enough for the scene they're not errors they're just warnings so you can say okay we're going to move in and we're going to look at her there's one thing i want to point out so let's go into pose mode and i'll show you why you probably want to use easy import so we're going to select a bone right here use rotate and we're going to rotate her you see what happens the rig is attached to the mesh of the character but the character rig of her clothing isn't attached to the rig of the character if you use easy import that's done automatically for you so i just kind of wanted to demonstrate if you see this happening it's likely you want to switch to the importer now you can do that manually i haven't done it manually there's some settings and configurations here where you can you can likely uh set that up if you want to do it manually i don't because i think that the das importer easydaz import does a very good job of it so let's re-import her back in here there we go and we're going to go back in select her and now you'll see how much better it is okay so we don't have as many warnings because the daz importer did a lot for us i think the only warning i saw there was hey you may not have sufficient lighting to really light the character properly for cycles i think it said so before we even go into cycles or anything else we're going to select the bone actually let's select we're going to go into we'll select the character here and we're going to go into actually we got to select the pose over here so we're going to open this up and go down to where it shows pose the figure here and that'll allow us to enter pose mode under here under object so go to select pose mode select a bone and we can rotate it and now you'll see when you rotate when you select that bone everything moves as it should so you don't have to set that up manually so one of the things i want to do is let's take the pose let's take the hide the rig so just go to the character here looks like a stick figure just click the eye icon and that hides the rig and let's go into cycles let's make sure we're we've got the we're going to go into cycles we're going to make sure we have the gpu selected and i think i'll probably just set it to 500 samples okay and this is cycles x and cycles x and 3.0 3.0 is nice i like it so let's go here and we're going to go to cycles let's see what she looks like so i think she looks a lot better the skin particularly i mean look at the skin now one of the things i want to do because it doesn't bring in a daz sun so let's get out of pose mode and we're going to go to object mode let's select the light over here and what i want to do is grab the light and we're going to move it in the should be the y direction do that bring it back g x okay and that may be kind of high up and that's pretty far away so let's bring it a gy actually bring it over here so what i was doing is i was just clicking on the object and hitting g for grab and you can hit select g and then x to move it in the g x to move it in the x direction like this or g y to move it in the y direction or g z to move it up and down in that direction so it restricts the movement of the object okay or you can just grab it and move it around freely but if you look at the character i think the character skin looks a heck of a lot better in diffiomorphic it doesn't look pale it looks full it looks proper subsurface scattering looks amazing it looks in cycles right now exactly the way she looked in irae in daz studio her hair looks good everything's just better i believe so even the eye textures and the the images for the maps for the eye textures it all looks fantastic looks so much better now i do have a problem with the specular lighting on the clothing is definitely extremely high and one of the things we can do to fix that is the same thing we pretty much did with the dazda blender bridge we go in here and we look at the shading nodes now the shading nodes are going to look very much different because diffiomorphic doesn't create the irae uber shader nodes it just uses the standard blender shader nodes and i feel you have better control over certain features like skin tone and changing specular lighting and controlling the surface of the character okay this is what she looks an eevee which is not terrible but if i wanted to do some more in eevee i might have to bring the light in closer or what i could do is change some of the skin tone if we come down to where the character is located we're going to go to her mesh all right one of the things is it separates the mesh from the character it's like a i guess it's a pointer or reference in here but the meshes are actually stored under a different collection i like to bring them in all under one collection into one convenient area so what i do is i grab the meshes and just drag them down to where their i guess their references are here underneath the stick figure sharing where the pose and the pose sets are so just bring it down in there so it takes it out of the meshes collection and just delete the meshes collection and then it's pretty much set up and organized the way i want you noticed in the daz to blender bridge there's a bunch of containers collections it creates and you just don't have as much i guess it's cleaner with the diffiomorphic is what i'm trying to say so what we're going to do is come over here and you'll notice the nodes are definitely quite a bit different and i think it's easier to deal with if we come over here and look at let's say her shirt sleeve so we come down here into the materials and let's look at the shirt i believe it's just shirt sleeve one or the other it's they're not clearly named so what i'm going to do is change the specular lighting on that let's go back into cycles get a better view here because it really looks bright here in cycles so we're going to go to the specular and the way to remove some of that specular lighting is just we've got and i hope you can see that let me bring this over a little bit the microphone might be cutting that off so bring it over here we got another image node down here so let's come over here to our principal bsdf and we go down to specular and if we if we change that that is going to change the specular lighting on our sleeve here you see as we head it up it's really really shiny really glossy we bring it down it's not so glossy so we go 0.50 we can leave some specular on there if we want to we can go to the armor details or actually the armor plating right here and we can zoom out it also has some specular lighting as well or so it also has a principle bsdf this is almost like you can think of materials as like surface areas in da studio but they're materials here and you can affect them through the shader nodes so we're going to lower that which you can see the armor isn't as shiny as it was before and we can just do that these sleeves are a little bit bright so we're going to come over here i thought i set those i'll probably need to reduce them some more though bring it down even more and we can affect the arm and you can see how the specular lighting is being reduced we can do it on like the armor as well the i believe i had some colored areas and one thing i want to point out is if you change the color let's say you have like a glove here and it has different surface areas on it but you didn't change the default textures or colors of the surface areas of that glove then it imports in with one material and you can only affect the material on that one surface which is the entire glove if in daz studio you go in and you affect the surface areas you change any of the surface areas you can change like the the colors or the textures of those then what it does is it actually will create a different material area in blender to summarize if you take the glove and although it has different surface areas let's go ahead and look at it in studio i'll show you what i'm talking about i hope i'm clear on this if if not then hey let me know in the comment section i'll try to explain it better but if i go to the gloves here okay sharon walker's gloves and i go to the surfaces it's got all these surfaces on the glove okay and those surfaces are there whether i change the default colors or not all right if i don't change the default colors and i just use the glove as it is from smart content then when i import it into blender there will just be one material area and i'll get one set of nodes and i can change the specular lighting and things but it'll affect the entire glove there's some characters i have like that but since i went into daz studio and and and literally changed the base color of all of these areas of each area of the glove or most of them i don't think all of them then it actually added a new material zone here when i imported to blender i didn't change all of them because there are one two three four five six seven surfaces on the glove but one two three four five surfaces that come in as material areas for the glove when i bring that into blender because i think some of those surface areas i left as default that's just one thing i kind of want to point out you can add materials into blender but you would have to define those material areas on the surface of the object it might just be easier if you want to be able to control each of those surfaces through materials in blender to go and slightly change the default color of those material areas so it generates material separate seven separate material areas in this case for the glove just it's just something i wanted to point out and allow you to be aware of but you'll also notice in diffiomorphic here look at this all of the attached unrigged props are placed exactly where they're located in da's studio you have two on the hips here okay and two on the thighs you go over to blender two on the hips two on the thighs you don't have a problem with unrigged props being placed in random locations or different locations that you do with the dasta blender bridge so that's one thing you don't have to worry about like i said the other thing is skin tone the character looks amazing by default in cycles right here sometimes with some of the characters that i import i notice that the character's skin in eevee it's maybe a little bit dark and i have to do some modification if i want it to look good and evie some of them like one of my other characters she looks great when i import her but i guess based on her skin tone i provided her skin looks really red and eevee i'm not going to be using evie for anything i'm doing i'm going to be using cycles mostly maybe some of the materials i add to my next version of the visual novel but she looks amazing in cycles so and you can now you can see why i prefer diffiomorphic so much more than the dasta blender bridge it just does things i feel at this point much better the dazz to blender bridge has improved greatly from 1.0 to 2.0 now the armors and everything as you saw look pretty good so it's a significant improvement but i think they have a long way to go i think diffiomorphics is actually older it's been around longer so they've had more practice at making it good and that's it pretty much this looks almost identical in cycles as it does to nvidia ira as you can see over here yeah just um i think i've got some um reason i've got some uh denoising on over here that i don't have in cycles but uh looks amazing so that's it right there if you have any questions on anything let me know in the comments section and you will also find and i found that when i import props into blender using diffiomorphic it seems to work better there too there's just something about the dazda blender bridge it's not quite there yet so anyway i hope this helps out whichever tool you do decide to use i hope you are able to get your characters in there and have them working well because blender is an amazing tool for animating tons of tons it's just so powerful you know daz studio is a great tool uh but the level of animation and i wanna what i want what i want to do in the future with uh procedural materials and doing some cool vfx i just can't do in daz studios so anyway if you have any questions please let me know in the comment section also i have a link in the description to my discord feel free to join there is a channel in there it's a work in process excuse the mess but there is a channel cgi and animation where you can go and you can talk i'll try to be in there answer questions and we can help each other out i want to be able to help other 3d animators to tell their story i think it's 3d animation is the greatest combination of advanced technical skill and artistic expression i just absolutely freaking love it so anyway if you like the content please consider subscribing to the channel i'd really massively appreciate it i'm really trying to make a go of doing this as well as creating my visual novel so like i said the visual novel is cool it's out now a lot of fun uh it was a lot of hard work but i have some amazing friends that help me make it the quality adventure it is and i'm working on episode two right now i am going to try to continue to get tutorial videos out every monday i'm gonna try my best it's going to be a lot of work especially when all the work i have to do with a visual novel but i'm going to do my best to do weekly tutorial videos and i'm almost also might throw a stream in there every once in a while i might replace the weekly tutorial with a stream or i might have the stream extra and i'll try to schedule that advance so you know when i'm going to have it i like talking to other animators it's a lot of fun getting in there and just playing around with blender and studio and showing you what i'm up to but anyway click the subscribe button click like comment let me know what you think and we will see you in the next video take care everyone

Channel: MRU Studios

Views: 13,729

Keywords: #3d, #3D, #Blender, #DAZStudio, #DAZ3D, #DAZtoBlender, #DAZtoBlenderBridge, #Diffeomorphic, #Tutorial, #Tutorials, #3DAnimation, #3DModeling

Id: R8yyxv9fzhs

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021