So far we support the following two character standards.

DAZ Genesis Character Import

With the DAZ Genesis Extension, not only can you easily convert, and fully animate all DAZ Genesis characters in iClone, but you may even define your unique expression styles through the DUF file, or create body morph effects in iClone. You can get this Extension as a free bonus after purchasing the Facial Pipeline Character Pack.

iClone GameBone Characters

The simple bone structure uses 51 body bone segments and 25 facial bones, which optimize your game performance and character rigging efforts while retaining the articulation of body movements and vivid facial animations. Characters designed using iClone's GameBones can enjoy the function of automatic import.

If there is any profile settings for your preferred content types other than these two, please share them with us under this thread.

If you have purchased the Facial Pipeline Character Pack you should have also received a zip file called "Designer's Source Pack". This contains the iCloneFacekey.DUF file.

it is appearing as though we will have to purchase the pack in order to get it. a 99.00 value free with the facial animation pipeline.

Hi Roberto,

You can see everything that is included in the Facial Pipeline Character Pack by clicking the link below. The Genesis Extension files are free to those who purchase the Character Pack.

http://www.reallusion.com/ContentStore/promo/2013_Facial-Pipeline-Character-Pack/default.html

Without the Facial Pipeline Character Pack, you can still add facial animation to your characters using the Expression Editor but the Genesis Extensions automate the process for you.

You need the Facial Pipeline Character Pack and Genesis Extensions to get the DUF file. The pack also includes the GameBone rig that you can use to build your own full bodied characters.

The Expression Editor for adding facial animation to your own characters is included in the 3DXchange 5.4 upgrade so you can manually setup facial animation for your non-standard characters.

Apologies for the Daz tech speak.

In previous versions of Daz Studio they used the .DAZ file extension. In Daz Studio 4.5 they introduced the .DUF extension for saves. The "Genesis Extensions" which are included as a free bonus with the "Facial Pipeline Character Pack" includes a special DUF file that when dragged onto a Genesis character allows 3DXchange 5.4 to automatically recognise and setup facial animation.

The sliders are not available for selection.

it would appear... for 99 bucks..

I am growing disappointed

I WILL purchase the facial pack due to the extra features, but I am VERY VERY disapointed if not downright angry that I still cannot make my Daz characters talk. all they do it look around.

to be clear, I cannot afford to purchase it at the moment and I changed my work off-day to tomorrow JUST SO I COULD USE THIS NEW TOOL!

Hmm, am I complaining?

How?

I cannot get the mouth to move.

a simple checkbox seems to be the key between an ecstatic customer and one full of rage!

The Genesis Extension files supplied free with the Character Pack allow you to automatically add Genesis characters to 3DXchange5 and have the facial mapping done for you.

However you can add facial expressions manually yourself in Daz Studio 4.5, and then after exporting as FBX, map the expressions in the 3DXchange 5.4 Expression Editor.

Thanks
Visconti
=============
Forum Moderator
Reallusion, Inc.

I also hope the RL takes the time to get someone with clear diction who is not in a rush to get a tutorial out about al this. Written documentation would even be better. Right now it's as clear as mud...

The DUF file should be provided at NO COST to those of us who have already paid for the DAZ Genesis pack a year ago. I upgraded to 3dx pro for this purpose and this purpose alone. I bought the Daz Intorductory Content Pack, I purchased hundreds and hundreds of content for DAZ, for this purpose. And now, after all of this, I have only a handful of expressions that I must spend a significant amount of time adjusting. This was marketed all along as if we were going to get this for free, but now it does appear that the automation of Daz import with facial will cost another chunk of change.

I say again, I am very interested in the pack and will almost certainly buy it because of the dummy prop rig and the gamebone character. but the DUF for full daz animation should be provided at no cost.

1.) What exactly does game bone allow yo uto do? can you rig an non skinned object with it?

2.) are all the necessary morphs for iclone facial puppet included in DAZ or were some specific morphs purchased/created for the iclonefacekey.duf?

upnote, here is an example of the difference between the spring and extended bones using the same rig. This feature is awesome.

If you still do not have the iclonefacekey.DUF and you are still having problems with your DAZ facial animation. I've got your answer.

1.) Install the 32 bit version of DAZ Studio 4.5. Install all of the programs provided with the ZIP archive.

http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-4-pro/

2.) Load your character. The libraries are the same even though the directories are not.

3.) Select your characters head (not sure if necessary).

4.)Select "Window" - "Panes" - "Lip Sync" from the top menu.

Lip sync is not available in the 64 bit version unless you purchase mimic.

5.) select "Load" from the "Lip Sync" window.

6.) Select a file, I myself chose "JackJill_Female.

7.) Click Analyse

8.) Once this finishes, open the timeline to ensure your character lip syncs the words.

9.) Click "File" - "Export"

10.) FBX format, name your file, make sure that Animation and Morphs are selected in the FBX Export options.

11.) click "Edit Morph Export Rules"

12.) Delete everything except the "Final - Anything - Bake" line.

13.) Export the file.

You will see the avatar make all sorts of winking and talking motions as the file exports.

14.) When in 3dx5.4, open the FBX, make sure import animation is checked.

15.) when the dialogue box opens, click Yes to let it do half the work for you.

16.) the head and eyes will already be mapped, the jaw must be adjusted with the sliders.

17.) continue with the morph mapping for your exporessions.

*** You will not have a Jaw Left/Right option ***

***you will not have an inner and outer brow - only L brow and R Brow***

Make sure you save your expression profile, you will need one for each character base you have (Aiko, Victoria, Michael, Freak, Stephanie, Etc)

Once this has been done, you can export the character OR you can select "Convert to non Standard character and map your extra bones.

In the upper right corner, you will see a head with some bones, this is theface/extended bone mapping tool. Any unused bones can be assigned as extended. Some DAZ clothing, Hair, and props have bones that can be mapped to extended. There are also bones in the breasts.

select all the unused bones and click the mustache button under the bone tags menu to assign them as extended.

Once these bones have been mapped to extended, click convert.

Now, select "Edit Spring" in the side panel to assign spring properties to select bones. Select your extended bones in the left panel, then avtivate spring and mess with the settings until you are happy with the result. There are preview motions at the bottom you can view. Be careful, if you are wanting to watch the animation again, clock the stop button in the 3dx timeline, not the apply button.

Once you are satisfied with all your spring settings, click apply. You should be ready to export to iclone at this point.

***note, spring can be turned on and off inside iclone. This is particularly useful with items like capes and rigged hair. In any frame, you can turn spring off and articulate the bones manually, once the manual animation sequence is over, you can turn spring back on and the extended bones will act as a pinned cloth, hair, or other spring item***

I hope this helps

In the RAR, you will find a Batman and Superman avatar as well as a project. These are the same rig (maya with added bones in cape). In the roject batmans spring is off while supermans is on. It is the same project from above, minus the iClorama HDRI, this is available in the marketplace.

If you load the characters in 3dxchange, you will see a rig similar to the game bone rig. these are facial bones you must assign to the face, eyes to each respective eye, and lips and jaw to the jaw. I will upload another character momentarily that is the same rig, but without any of these bones mapped so you can do it yourself. All of these models were free at 3dxtras or one of the other sites.

The superman body only characer is a maya rig with only the body mapped. You will have to map the eyes, face, mouth, and extras yourself.

there are 4 buttons on the bottom you will need in the face/extended mapping panel.

Right eye (select only the right eye before you click this button)

Left Eye (Select only the left eye before you click this one)

Jaw (select all lip and jaw bones, then click this button)

The remaining bones in the face area should be mapped to face. This will allow you to set expressions.

The "unused" bones that are left should be mapped as extended, then you can add spring and/or manually animate these bones inside iclone.

_________________

stay tuned for "Hair Morphs"

If they are free, can you upload them here?

If you wish to import your DAZ hair with morphs, and you do not have the dummy bones, it is easy to do.

first, you must have a bone structure that iclone recognizes in order to morph in real time inside iclone.

Load a genesis base, and add and texture the hair, if you only wish to use the hair and not the avatar, ignore the texture on the genesis base; you will decimate the mesh out later. If you want the hair to morph on that specific character, then load it up as you wish.

for the Hair only option, open up the timeline and scrub across to a new location and morph your hair as you wish, continue this process until you have all the hair morphs you want.

Once this is done, select the genesis character in the scene tab, select surfaces and slide the opacity slider to 0. with genesis selected in the scene tab (do not selecy your hair), open decimator, ensure "remove invisible surfaces" is checked.

click prepare to decimate.

This will remove the genesis character and leave only your hair, but the genesis rig is still there.

Export fbx, include animation, be sure to edit the morph rules.

Import into 3dx5.4, it will automatically recognize the daz rig. open up the expressions tab and the morphs you loaded in your timeline should be available in the cutom tab of the expressions window.

Select your mouse motion (upward, rightward, etc) and move the sliders next to your morphs until you achieve the desired appearance. do this until you have all the combinations that you want (be sure to click set after each one), then export your hair "character".

You can now puppet these morphs with the facial puppet if you select the 3dx custom template at the bottom of the puppet panel.

link the hair to an avatar and puppet away.

I have a comment about Mimic 3.0, which I have. It does not work with Genesis characters. I wouldn't want people to spend $99 on it.  It is called from the LipSynch function in DAZ, so it also would not be available in 64 bit.

Mimic is a very nice program and it's a pity it hasn't been updated in years. DAZ has a tendency to abandon capable software that they acquire.

BTW, I received an email that the DAZ Introductory Pack has been updated. The included characters are now fully facial-animatable. It would save you some time if you want to experiment and you don't have to run out and buy the new pack.

I tried to save the Expression profile in 3DXchange of one of the Introductory characters and apply it to another DAZ Genesis character (to use instead of the DUF file), but no luck.

Of course, I'll admit that I don't know what I'm doing...

I tried to download the updated pack but I was not clear on specifically WHAT link to use.

I added some keyframes with the outer and inner brow motions, then tried to load the lip sync track. When I did this, the character didn't lip sync to the track. The track loaded, the eyes moved, but the mouth and other expressions didn't occur.

I didn't uncheck the head tilt and rotate so it looks a little goofy. I fixed this in another vid and it looks much better.

It's the first link, for the converted DAZ characters that are installed for iClone. The characters for use in DAZ didn't change it looks like.

I have toyed with this a bit in the 64 bit version and have found that entering "head." into the match field and setting to export will load every possible head morph included with DAZ. The problem is, only the head rotation and eyes actually transform the mesh.

I used the .ctrlvs and the same thing happened, all the viseme's loaded in the morph list, but did not have any effect on the mesh inside 3dx.

What do you do, step by step, after you load your character, prior to export.

This is a MUCH easier way to customize your morphs.

note, I created an export rule called "head."  - export.

This exports every possible head morph there is. all the viseme's, all face morphs, all head morphs.

This imports 113 unique head morphs on my system, including all the emotion morphs I have. (expressive for genesis - emotional morphs such as fear, anger, sadness, etc.)

Using the Export rule "head." - "export", I was able to export emotion morphs and configure them using the custom morph panel.

Angry

Fear

This is such a powerful tool, as angry as I was when this first came out, I must say that RL certainly did a fantastic job on these updates. I apologize again for my attitude, but at first it seemed disappointing.

Some really interesting effects may be possible with the puppet using certain body morphs.

an example which I plan to work on shortly, is to export some head and full body morphs to take a model from victoria 5 (adult) and morph her into a young teen.

Morph a male from muscular to pot bellied, all in real time.

Yeah, if you use the export rule "head."

It loads 113 morphs in my panel, including the left/right jaw, pucker, pucker wide, cheeks balloon, With this particular character, I made 3 different custom puppet profiles, one with the preset expressions, one with pucker and cheek balloon, and one with mixed morphs for unique expressions.

I will probably steal your scheme for general mapping of characters. Right now I am just playing around and seeing what all you can do. I particularly like the expressions. Cheek Balloon and pucker are pretty cool. ATM, I am trying to figure out how to export body morphs to try to animate muscular morphs and things like head proportion, morphing from one character to the next, (ala-terminator).

EDIT: What are the other families called? "head." works but does not include things like crows feet and other head morphs. Torso? feet? what are the other names?

I just watched a tut on the old daz that said FBM's were not exportable, but there was a workaround where you loaded the morph (character) then exported as an unwelded OBJ, cleared the scene and loaded a different character, then using something called "morph loader" loaded the previously saved OBJ as a morph (he used aiko as the morph and vic 4 as the new character. This then gave him a morph slider in his export to morph the character from vic4 to aiko4. I do not have time to toy with it tonight.

**note: some hair meshes and other items not made for the genesis character do not fit or adjust properly and at times this cannot be corrected. There are engines inside daz that wil convert certain items from the last generation to Genesis, but its success is a coin flip.***

If the above method does not work, load your hair by itself and export as OBJ. Load the hair in 3dx, smooth, add the texture (will be in the DAZ folder for that product, easy to find if you go to the surfaces tab in DAZ and select "browse" from the drop down beside the diffuse map). Select "embed texture" after loading the diffuse map (click on diffuse if the embed button is not available), this will load the opacity map. You can also load the opacity map using the same method as the diffuse.

Once you are finished, export as a prop to iclone.

Once inside iclone, Load the hair and an avatar, align the hair to the avatar and attach the the hair to the head. Then, with the hair selected, right click ->add to library and it will save the hair as an accessory. Now you can use the hair on any avatar you wish.

If you are loading morphs with the hair, you can export it as an FBX and load the hair morphs into your custom puppet panel. **note, you must have the complete DAZ rig in order for 3dx to recognize it as a non std character. This isnt a problem if you have decimator.

The hair morphs carried over with the avatar even though the body morphs dont. Something interesting happened though.

Without the iclonefacekey.DUF file, normally the viseme's arent mapped at all and must be manually performed. In this case however, every mouth morph and viseme was mapped to various morphs of the hair.

My facial animation was exported using my export rule while the hair morphs were exported using the final bake rule of the timeline animations.

For this reason, I am curious. If we manually load each viseme along the timeline along with the specific facial movements (effectively, create our OWN iclonefacekey.duf) if 3dx will automatically configure the facial animations?

I am also curious if the software interperets the morphs based on their name or if it is a particular order of the timeline keys.

, hmmmm

I am going to buy the facial pack so I don't know why I care so much. I do like to know how things work but I still think that if we can figure out how to do it, those who do not want to buy it can create their own template and get the automated 3dx mapping by doing a lot of work once rather than a moderate amount of work over and over with each avatar.

I have saved the presets for each character base I have and I still have to edit almost every morph when I import a character of the same base.

There are a few things you can try though before taking such drastic measures. One is to use Quick Shading instead of Pixel Shading while animating (or the other kind of shading whose name escapes me). Another thing to look at is DAZ's texture size and the number of textures, which may do more to account for slowness than the number of polys. You could temporarily replace the textures with lower res equivalents, or you could try to set real-time texture size to a low value. Another option is DAZ's texture atlas to somewhat contain the number of textures.

My concern is that exchanging characters with different polygonity (if that's a word... ) may not work so well.

BTW, don't retrain yourself asking questions. As far as IC 5.4 is concerned most of us are newbies! Except perhaps for the betatesters.

Is that correct?  I have the .DUF file, have spent the day upgrading Daz 4.0 to 4.5 (and have lost animate2 as a result) and trying to "load" the .DUF file into Daz.  I can't drag & drop it onto genesis, and, despite copying the file to   My Daz 3D library/ People/ Genesis/ iCloneFaceKey.duf searching for it in Daz Content Library just draws a blank.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong other than not spending the $60?

You can convert to Non-Human, but not non standard when you load the clothingby itself. It also will not march your mesh for the avatar you try to use it with.

You cannot load motions from the libraryand must edit motion layer for all animation (I havent tried the reach target method yet).

There are morphs for the clothing (fit morphs) that allow you to expand and contract various parts (waist, breast, hip, etc) that are particularly useful when you decimate the clothing. This will do you little good inside iclone.

It works great (for me) to load my character, add the cloths, then delete genesis. The full rig is there but without the character. The weighting is the same as if the character were there, and you can now convert to non std and use all the motion files.

If the reach target method works with the non human character, let me know. It might change the way I do things.

This will retain the full genesis rig and the shape of the avatar you used when fitting the clothing.

Unfortunately not.

The Daz Genesis Extensions are only available with the Facial Pipeline Character Pack.

I returned to DAZ last night and could drag & drop the .duf file onto Genesis without problems.  Still don't know how/why this happened.  I'd tried a simple reboot before without any success.  The .duf file now has the proper icon and I still have my $60!

Think this was probably due to a problem with my PC which won't let me post text to this forum for some reason - hence the 2 commentless quotes above!

Also moved .duf to a different file location which can now be found by DAZ search.  So happy to report that the program works properly - even if my PC doesn't!

Greetings! I pretty much a noob here on the forum. I’m more an orchestral composer but have really gotten interested in animation with the help of iClone some inspirational members here on the board and now finally the Daz facial animation. All I can say is WOW Realillusion!!! The update was well worth the wait. I will miss reading the angry threads though with complaint after complaint but I digress….

When using export rules with no timeline animation, the export is mere seconds.

When using the DUF, it takes longer, sometimes a couple of minutes.

If I have other software running (as I normally have iclone, 3dx, daz, sometimes IE and Max open), it can take up to an hour.

The export gets hung up when baking the animation. The same thing happens when baking body and hair morphs (although not near as long).

The DUF file is nothing more than a chronological morph list that 3dx is programmed to recognize in a specific structure. This is what allows 3dx to automate the facial morph mapping. You can accomplish the same thing fairly simple using the "head." export rule or follow Rampas export rule list from a few pages back.

It has nothing to do with the computer, its less than a year old, 8G ram, 3.1g 8core amd.

I wonder if we could encourage Reallusion to update 3dx to interpret the morph names instead of a morph order to automate the process. All of the morphs have the same respective name regardless of the export method.

I didn't expect 32 and 64 bit to make much of a difference since its' really the Graphics card that is being taxed.  So obviously something is awry on my end.  I think I may have stumbled on the problem.  If I save just character as a scene it saves in seconds but now if I try and export the figure as a poser figure CR2 file (no DUF file or tmieline animation), it still takes forever and a day.  I started using Generation X to port some older firgures into Genesis.  I've used it with little success.  But what has happened is that my base Genesis character has 100's of new morphs now.  As I was saving my male figure it was also saving morphs for Victoria, Stephani etc. etc.  Perhaps I need to sweep out all of those Gen X morphs.  Thanks for the help guys!  Now back to the Daz forum for help with Daz!  I think I'll get there eventually.

tonilandau (6/11/2013)

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Peter, so now I'm confused: Do we have to buy the animation face pak,and the Daz extension duf file separately or it comes in the bundle?

If you require the Daz Genesis Extensions including the DUF file, then you will need to purchase the "Facial Pipeline Character Pack". Everything you need is included in this package. You can find it HERE for more information.

Thanks,

ML

An update: Mr. Lagel in another post mentioned deselecting "subd information" in the Daz fbx export box, and that did the trick!  Thanks for your advice as well.

Regards,

ML

3dxchange will indeed map bones but there has to be bones in your object for it to map to.

So you would need to take your sketchup robot into the likes of Blender Max Maya etc

and then add the Game Bones to it. You would need to adjust the bones to fit your robot and then skin those bones to your robot mesh then export as fbx take it into exchange where it would then have some bones to map against.

Hope that helps.