I'm hoping someone can tell me the likely timing for a daz export with facial animation. It would be of great help if I know that if an export has not completed in a few minutes that I should abort. (I'm hoping for a quick answer as I know this is about 3dx and is not a Daz forum).

I purchased the Facial Animation pack a little over a week ago and armed with the facial DUF files for both Gen 1 and Gen2 characters (Thanks @rcsinger for this great gen2 resource!). So far I'm not having much luck.

To cut a long story short, I'm having a dickens of a time getting my FBX exports to work. I've been getting memory access errors in the DAZ log which seems to be more related, I'm guessing, to the props I'm trying to load, on my characters rather than the characters themselves. It happens whether or not I try and load the facial animation duf file. (I'm also being careful to make sure that I use matched gen1 character/prop/animation duf and gen2/gen2 props/gen2 animation duf files).

I'm working with Gen2 'female bot' and Gen1 'bot genesis'

Trying with completely different characters - loaded with different clothing/prop items, I'm finding that the exports with facial morphs is taking forever .. So long in fact that in one case I left it going overnight and it still hadn't finished the next morning (but it WAS progressing thoughbeit slowly).

Yet, if I take a naked character and do a straight export. .. it works fine.
If I take a naked character with facial morphs/animation .. it works fine. (no more than a minute or two though I didn't progress through 3dx to prove it out fully).

I've been trying to do some research on the daz forums and so have ensured that I have base resolution selected. I've also ensured that the division checkbox is NOT selected. - I've even tried decimating the characters prior to export... which didn't seem to do anything other than stuffing up their mesh.

I think I'm loading the right character/clothing/prop combinations.

Sorry if this is a bit basic but Daz is as new to me as iclone and so Im a little overwhelmed atm. .. I'm now assuming its going to take a fair bit of time to work this one out and it will help me no end if I know when I should abort an export job if it is taking too long.

Sorry if this is way too much of a daz issue to be uttered here.

Simon

try making frame rate 1fps in Daz studio
hide body parts covered by clothes by clicking eye icon

Thanks Wendy!

I spent a good part of Saturday experimenting and made some progress. I have finally been able to export gen1 and gen2 characters with facial animation from Daz right through the pipeline to iClone. (thanks once again to RCsinger for the Gen2 duf. .. Worked just as well as the RA Gen1. File).

I worked out that my long exports were due to the number of poly's I was trying to export. It would appear that the characters I was trying to export were over 400K!

I went and revisited a couple of the 'decimator' how to videos and realized that I wasn't using the tool properly. Now I kind of am and getting down the number of poly's prior to export... That in turn is shortening the export times considerably.

Your advice re hiding hidden faces works a treat! .. Thanks for that. I'm still trying to work out how to set the export to 1 fps but I vaguely remember seeing it on one of the RA tutorial videos, so I will revisit that.

I guess the pain I'm going through at the moment is forcing me to finally get to know DS. Whilst I would rather be concentrating the skills growth in IC, the benefits on offer in being able to take advantage of daz assets has really got me excited.

Simon

no the framerate in Daz studio timeline to 1ps
the FBX export calculates every frame but the pipeline facial animation preset duf only needs 1fps so you reduce the time it takes for the FBX export to convert the animation by 30!!!

Here's the best solution so far :

1) Activate DAZ face Morph on genesis manually or DAZ Mimic or through ICLONE Daz face template in DAZ Studio .

2) DELETE all the frames on the timeline, just keep 1 frame

3) Export

You will get the quickest export with the full face profile.

It will take less than 30 sec.

@prabhatM

Awesome! .. I'll try that when I get home tonight.


@wendy. Yeah. Sorry I meant the DAZ timeline (not the ic timeline). .. I didn't realize it was doing it 30 times... OMG. .. No bloody wonder!

As I have not yet progressed to wanting to check/adjust the facial morphs/animation prior to export - Nuking the timeline (to 1frame) and accepting the mapping file is going to be a time saver.

This thread has been quite instructive to me. ... All I have to do now is practice my decimation and work out why some character props are causing the exports to fail? Fortunately, I don't think it's a problem on the 3DX side of the pipeline. :-)

Thanks guys!