Finis' Experiments and Scribbles

[Finis]

I've been trying to export a rigged human model from Daz Studio, import into Blender, and apply mocap BVH from the cmu archive available at http://www.cgspeed.com. Some progress but no full success yet.

I'm using the Daz friendly sets. I export/import a daz figure using .dae collada since that is the only daz to blender pipeline I've found that sends the rig and mesh and textures.

In blender the figure becomes twisted when the mocap is applied. I think the thigh bones are rotated or have a bone roll that is incompatible with the mocap. Changing that fixes one area but twists another. The Daz friendly cmu sets are said to be for genesis 3 and 4. I found that they do work in Daz for genesis 1 and 2 but not with 3 or 8. None of them work in Blender so something is happening with the transfer.

Attaching the skin to the bvh skeleton works (https://vimeo.com/309015474) but I want retargeting to use the mocaps on various figures with their own skeletons. Reattaching should be suitable for my Christmas animation.

Blender 2.8 does not have the motion capture tools add on and the add on may not be maintained anymore. There are other add ons for that.

TO DO
- Continue to surf the web for solutions.
- Try various for options for collada export/import.
- Try the motion builder friendly mocaps.
- Detach and reattach the imported daz model's own skeleton in blender.
- Explore the tools and their options more.

[RAYMAN]

Daz collada is not Collada! 2 pairs of shoes!
Collada is a fileformat that peaked around 2007 and was developed for around 3 years! Its not developed anymore and fbx was a fileformat until motionbuilder gave it to Alias!
Dont transfer the rig in Blender but retarget with the Blender autorigger! That works..and works with mocap!
Collada is a good format but has never been implemented well!
To many variations!
I posted the solution for Collada mess some time ago!
Its Okino!
Okino even transfers Truespace to Blender!
Not my words but Landsdales words..and he closely worked together with Roman and Pavol! He IS THE file format expert!
He closly works together with Nasa.... Pixar...Disney....
.

[RAYMAN]

https://blendermarket.com/products/auto-rig-pro

[Finis]

For ambitious projects I'd make characters from scratch. For things like my Christmas animation attaching the skin to native, non-imported, skeleton is good enough. Tevu is a morph from Daz attached directly to the BVH skeleton. (See my video linked in earlier post.) I had some success with a rigify rig.

Thanks for noting auto-rig-pro Rayman! It looks good and can replace the outdated re-targeting add on that is missing from B2.8. It has a full set of rigging tools including face controls. Reasonable price. Probably will buy it.

I found that the Daz to Blender collada transfer works quite well when not using mocap. If I move the bones the skin deforms nicely. The textures come with it too but can need tuning. IK is lost. Shouldn't be too much work to add IK. So it is ok for still poses and animating the character by hand. Retarget (map bones to bones) a bvh skeleton to the Daz skeleton and there will be trouble.

Discovery: With the mocap rig retargeted to the Daz rig some bones in the Daz rig are displaced and rolled or rotated. So detaching and reattaching an imported Daz skin to its own rig doesn't fix it. For mocap on imported Daz characters the Daz rig must be replaced.

[RAYMAN]

Give the Alembic exporter for Daz a try!
Im experimenting with it too!
Alembic works differently..because it bakes the motions ...its not a file transformer per se!
Could be the way to go!
I got it through a sales thing a few weeks ago!
Might be something for cyber Monday deals!
It moves whole daz scenes to Blender..and Alembic is newer and not an Alias thing! Fbx is good because it moves instances..but not for Blender! Alias deliberatly makes it not nice to use for Blender..and thats not my words ..I heard that in a dutch accent from somebody who should know Blender better then I do!
https://www.daz3d.com/alembic-exporter-for-daz-studio

[Finis]

I got Auto-RIg Pro for Blender 2.8. So far it is good. Having some trouble undoing mocap re-targeting or applying a new mocap instead of an existing one. Contacting the programmer about that. Then I'll learn about it's face rig.

[RAYMAN]

The problem with rigs is that there are no standards and standard naming convension!
Very often because of that models with bones come in as scrambled eggs!

[Finis]

That's not this problem Rayman but it happens! I've had some funny "transporter accidents".

The maker of Auto-Rig Pro answered my questions. It was me misunderstanding how ARP works and lack of knowledge of Blender's NLA.

I tested render limits on my system. I found that 5 million polygons takes 30 seconds or more to prepare in Cycles then renders in several seconds at 1440p on the two used 1070 ti's I got from ebay. 7 million produced a Cuda error out of memory. Cycles has partial out-of-core memory in B2.8 to use system ram but it only puts textures there. Geometry ate this memory.

A much smaller scene with more lights, closer to my current animation project, took around one minute per frame. That's tens of hours for two minutes of video. Plus extra frames for editing and renders for some customized parts. Work season is still going so I don't have a lot of time but I need to get the bulk of this done well before Christmas. See Christmas Card 2019 thread for updates.

[RAYMAN]

Cant reproduce why you need so many polygons??!!
Please make a very rough scribble of what you plan to do!
I doubt your scene needs so many!
With realtime renderings you can always save on memory and you have to!
Lod...or backdrops or front scrimms..or low poly with normal maps...!
Since this doesnt sound like a George Lucas Star Wars city it shouldnt need that much ram!

[Finis]

Cant reproduce why you need so many polygons??!!...I doubt your scene needs so many!

My curiosity and thoughts are not limited to the immediate things around me here and now. I like to know things just to know them.

I'll guess the Christmas project will have less than one million polys.

I learned to use the resources more effectively and my system can handle 15M polys or more with a long preparation time. At 20M the system runs out of ram and virtual memory/swapfile. Then it becomes unresponsive.

Hyper-poly scenes impractical for animations of course. As Rayman pointed out there are plenty of ways to avoid them.

Time to work on the Christmas scene.