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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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In my Daz character FBX export steps I am exporting some extra morphs that I have interactive licenses that I use further downstream in Unity.
Is there any way to save these in CC3 once they are imported via transformer? Or is my only option to just save the figure avatar itself?
Up till now (still learning) I have been exporting these with the figure each time. But it adds a lot of waiting time on the export process and tedious management of the janky daz studio morph filter export dialog data.
So for a morph that I might use with any of my figures, is there a way in CC3 where I could save an individual morph dial and thus import it once, instead of every time? And also maybe be able to use it on native cc3 figures too?
That said, one other question slightly related, is it possible to delete or remove a morph, for instance if the daz export/import has picked up some extra morphs I don't need to be carrying around? And/or control if that morph is exported from CC3 to fbx clothed for unity?
Thanks!
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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Hmm, maybe my problems here are even worse. Is it possible to carry a figure morph from daz to cc3 to unity? I had thought that it was.
In the past before messing w CC3 I used to take daz characters right into unity and bring along morph exports (blendshapes).
With CC3 I am definitely able to export morphs of clothes and hair, carry those into CC3 from Daz, and then into Unity.
Now I just tried to export from Daz a figure w morphs, w attached hair w morphs of its own.
Brought that into CC3+ via transformer. And then exported it to Unity. What I ended up in unity with was not great. I got the figure, missing the expected blendshapes(morphs), and I got the hair, with the hair's morphs as expected, but then the hair also had all the morph names that should have been on the figure body.
I'll try again without carrying along a hair for the ride from daz to cc3 I guess and cross my fingers.
I could swear way back I even had followed and done some CC3 tutorials that included loading viseme morphs in daz, exporting those to CC3 along with the figure, and then from there into unity with the visemes for lip syncing.
edit: just went back and checked in my CC3 project file and yep the hair is showing the missing (expression) morphs on its modify tab, so it must have gotten garbled by daz fbx export, or transformer import I guess. And not a problem with the cc3 export, or unity import.
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By Rampa - 6 Years Ago
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body morphs are not carried over into CC3. Hair and clothing morphs are.
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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Wow huge bummer : (
Any chance to get that as a feature update anytime soon?
Daz and CC3 ought to both have nice gui lists filterable/sortable with checkboxes for what morphs to include or not include for exports.
Maybe Daz Bridge will solve this, there is an unreal bridge and unity bridge coming soon. But then no way for me to leverage my CC3 and skingen.
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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So, here is a kind of content workflow you are missing by not having that feature, and in the market most seem to really be chasing a lot these days, game dev, and seems to me small indies especially when it comes to reallusion and daz.
Look I think reallusion store is great but it only has so much content. I own it all mostly already, but its not enough stuff to make games and other products with on its own, not even close for even a simple project to work with. We can't all hire a huge art and animation department staff, I can't even find other decent programmers most of the time for just corporate work. Daz is huge marketplace, plus rendo, and others etc, free market is great, lots of artists, and material to work with. Basically infinity of stuff when your platform is OPEN for business. For small indi this is great, then stuff can be kit bashed, modified, and augmented with small custom made stuff.
Probably you are aware, there are value priced figures and bundles which often even have included sets of dialable morph facial expressions made tailor to the specific figure, and many other cool sets, and all with a now very low interactive license for the whole set. Or body morphs for figure shape changing at runtime, etc. For which if you are doing a game engine workflow... you could export all those expression morphs onto your figure and code up the nice smiles and expressions made for your figure live action in your game. Boom, I could take a big chunk of stuff and use it right now with just a few import/exports. Yes I know I can make new custom ones in reallusion and will, or it would be nice to tailor/edit these even perhaps and intermix the stuff with my reallusion library and tools to really have it all the best.
Why can't I do that and still have all the great features of skingen, iclone, mocap, facecap, etc that the reallusion stack gives me?
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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So, I just reconfirmed with testing I can still definitely take daz g8 fbx exports straight into unity and all the exported morphs work great, including daz morph expression dials, as well as body shapes etc. So daz exporter is working fine.
So the choice is sweet easy unity materials setups via cc3 Reallusion, plus awesome skingen enhancements, but no morphs and tons of fabulous content not usable.
Or tedious materials setups... :crying:
But the bridge is coming.
I hope you guys add the morphs import/export soon. Seems like a no brainer, I can't imagine reallusion is making much money on body morphs being a closed shop. I came for the reallusion bridge but stayed for the iclone and skingen.
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By AutoDidact - 6 Years Ago
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Just my personal opinion on the matter as animated filmaker who makes my own clothing/prop content and renders animated CC3 Avatars in Blenders realtime EEVEE engine.
Right now Daz and Reallusion are competing ,Character generation eco-systems.
I personally feel that the CC3 transformer to import your favorite Daz shapes & base skins/clothing/hairs is about as generous as Reallusion needs to be with helping Daz $$sell DAZ store content$$ to Iclone users.
Particularly considering the fact that this thread/subject would assuredly be promptly vaporized from the Daz forums as the features of CC3 are a strictly forbidden subject over there.🙄
As you may know ,the CC3 transformer does not literally "import" your Daz genesis figures but merely creates a reasonably accurate CC3 Avatar Dopplganger, via shape projection.
The CC3/Iclone avatars are built to a uniform standard so that we can have 100% compatibilty with ALL of the current Iclone native features basic&optional (Live face headshot,lipsync,facepuppet etc).
The Daz G3/8 face/expression morphs would not work with our native facial animation system. in fact Daz G3/8 figures are not even fully compatible with Daz's own nonlinear motion clip system aniMate 2. Daz studios native audio based lipsynch system is only available by installing the 32 bit version of Daz studio the 64 bit options are expensive third party plugins including "mimic live" which does not even support prerecoded audio tracks only live microphone recording.
Thus I see no reason
for RL to "update" OUR core software to support the morphs of a third party figure who's development cycle they do not control, when Daz themselves have not bothered to with G3/8 and their own Daz studio.😌
Daz has their own means to export figures to the game engines and other 3DCC's and we have ours.
I personally believe you should stay in one Character eco system for maximum pipeline compatibilty but we have the option of using both with (some extra work of course) And IMHO Reallsuion's is superior and it is part of Reallsuions game dev business model to give priority Reallusion Avatars connecting to those engines or 3DCC's..not Daz's figures .
I personally dont use game engines as they are only as good as the content you import and I create my own content in Blender where I have a realtime engine.
However, I am thrilled that the CC3 Avatars, I export to Blender, come over
with the face morphs as animated Blend shapes that are accessible with Blenders Advanced Curve/Graph editor.
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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Well, I suppose if they want to just be a niche hobbyist tool, I guess that is the right philosophy.
But they appear to want to be a part of the toolstack for game development which is a big rich space in which to operate.
And they have made some great decisions to encourage that which involved a lot of development focus. Such as transformer/3dexchange to bring in daz figures, models and props, skingen pro features to now be able to bring in and use daz L.I.E. graphics. Live Link for Unreal, supposedly live link for Unity eventually. Figure, clothing, hair export and auto setups for Unreal and Unity.
So for a game/experience developer this is a many thousands dollar toolstack that is great for working with content for the game development pipeline (which includes many other tools). Blendshapes missing on the exports to game engines is huge (not just daz bought morphs but blender, zbrush, maya, etc all blocked from the game pipeline use of cc3 figures this way). Folks doing hobbyist video creation, have a severe tunnel vision as to what the vast and expansive real possibilities are when working in a game engine space. You could spend weeks of tedious work hand animating each aspect of each figure and baking it in... Or I could whip up 10x more live, realistic and dynamic animated character/creature content in an afternoon of coding character controller behaviors with blendshapes. And then they're totally dynamic I can reuse them all around where they behave differently and my character becomes alive, reactive, adaptive, not just a pre recorded animation. But then also I could record that action from inside the engine as 4k video with a few clicks. But they are not mutually exclusive, this is your total lack of understanding of game engine space. We certainly want the iClone animation exporting as well for baked animations and bone movement.
I will agree with you though on the bad heavy handedness of the daz forum mods. I totally get you, have read a lot of your posts over time and generally I agree with a lot and enjoy the posts, being a curmudgeon myself as well. But then on this forum there is a much lower level of users and engagement. Which is sad, maybe if there was more welcoming and focus on the game dev world which is a much larger marketplace of people to be tapped into.
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By AutoDidact - 6 Years Ago
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Folks doing hobbyist video creation, have a severe tunnel vision as to what the vast and expansive real possibilities are when working in a game engine space. You could spend weeks of tedious work hand animating each aspect of each figure and baking it in... Or I could whip up 10x more live, realistic and dynamic animated character/creature content in an afternoon of coding character controller behaviors with blendshapes. And then they're totally dynamic I can reuse them all around where they behave differently and my character becomes alive, reactive, adaptive, not just a pre recorded animation. But then also I could record that action from inside the engine as 4k video with a few clicks. But they are not mutually exclusive, this is your total lack of understanding of game engine space. We certainly want the iClone animation exporting as well for baked animations and bone movement.. Indeed some astounding work is being created with game engines(UE4 inparticular), but frankly when you look at the really impressive showcase Demo UE4 animations from Epic(and other experienced teams,) you dont see Daz Genesis figures or Iclone Avatars & marketplace content do you ??. You do see high quality, purpose built figures & environmental content (designed from scratch) for those engines shading lighting systems. This IMHO is the factor that Both Daz & Reallusion seem to ignore when pushing their Iclone PBR/ Daz Iray built content, as some "instant resource" for game engines and this is what I meant when I said game engines( or all render engines) are only as good as the content(specifically) created for them.
Most of the Reallusion store content looks generally better when sent to Unreal/Unity/EEVEE/Cycles, because of the Raytraced or screen spaced reflections and SSGI are such a visual improvemnet over the Iclone engine by comparision.
But there is reason youtube is not full of new high quality movies /shorts (similar to the asthetic of the official Epic demos) coming from the Daz/ Reallusion eco systems.
That said, I still use the CC3 bases because their Iclone facial& body animation tranfers to blender with ease and can be replaced/updated with new Iclone animation via the Blender action editor. But all of my clothing environmental props & sets are look developed & built within Blender for the realtime EEVEE engine.
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By animagic - 6 Years Ago
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I wouldn't say that there is little involvement on the forum re game engines, especially Unreal. One user started a whole dedicated thread on how to get things working in that pipeline and RL has put a lot of effort in that.
I'm personally not interested in that path, and I do make movies my way. Autodidact has started a similar thread on using Blender, which to me is more viable. I get the thinking behind Blender, which is more of a regular 3d application.
I've used RL products for over 14 years and there has been an enormous expansion of capabilities. Many new features have been included based on user suggestions.
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By garrettg11 - 6 Years Ago
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Oh and I meant to add to my previous that... Staying to one character format (cc3+) is exactly what I would like to do. But with no way to import/export blendshapes to game engine for CC3, its a frustrating limit which I guess I still have to figure out the ideal workflows and solutions. I kind of kick myself for missing that, how did I miss that while getting so far deep into the toolset - just too busy with too many things and complicated workflows, while doing many things for prototyping all along the way which just didn't hit that exact path till now. But I can work around it.
As far as CC3 vs Daz as competing products, I think they don't have to be, though clearly they have been. Daz won the content marketplace war, for better or for worse, but I buy most of the CC3 stuff as it comes out too. But for them its like one thing to choose each month instead of a bunch of new stuff every day. And bummer for you if this weeks new thing is cartoon animator stuff. I think Reallusion won the indi animation, mocap, headshot and faceware war, and certainly has the currently leading winning solution for indi game engine pipeline solution due primarily to the automatic materials setup of the game import tools, and live link on the unreal side. Its a huge terrible tedious time consuming and mind numbing task to do the daz figure materials setup in unity manually - just that alone is worth the total price of admission for Reallusion for me at least.
But the daz bridge is playing a catchup on that race, though I'll admit I have not been very optimistic on how good that will turn out or not. One could argue also it is not actually daz Reallusion are competing with now but other tools like Maya. Is reallusion the poor mans Maya? I don't know, maybe. With blender the poor mans Max? Reallusion becomes, I think, a more affordable small studio solution for game dev pipelines, and there are two factors to that, one is the cost of the other tools themselves, but the other is cost and availability of staff with skills for using those tools. They're way more complicated to use, or used to be. I also have a distaste for subscription vs perpetual licenses. Give me the perpetual license every time. So I really hope reallusion brings on the morphs eventually. It seems it ought to be doable from a technical perspective.
When we are looking at big studio produced content/videos, sure they have all custom cloths, models, figures etc. But as I have gotten to know the daz market catalog deeper. I do see daz stuff used all over the place, much moreso in the indi games space. I see stuff all the time on steam where now I am like Oh I know where they got that part! The hilarious ones are when they don't even bother to make a custom figure face/blend/etc and its clearly victoria 8. But a normal person, they have no clue so did it matter? To the pure consumer it may even seem like the face of a familiar actress they see repeatedly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It seems to me fairly easy to camouflage daz assets with customization, kitbashing, mods, derivative works, textures, shaders, etc. There are a lot of figures I buy for the base sculpt, but then others I have for the skin, for example, and then go mad with dials and bake and now I've got my own unique character nobody else has it. Also the interactive licenses used to cost a lot more than they do now, so I imagine with the new pricing we will see much more used in the future, $5 to cover everything in a big bundle. So, basically free... relatively speaking. Well, except now I could pay someone to just sit around and organize content.
But also I think Reallusion and Daz themselves are to blame somewhat in this lack of produced content, being there has been so many years of it being a total kludge to try to use these platforms in game development. And also there are too many generations of very stale tutorials out there that mislead or complicate the noob experience. I am also one of the originals who got burned on buying the Morph3D MCS debacle many years back. So the big studio does not want to mess with this buggy small fry stuff when they can just have a big line of people all doing 3ds and Maya, etc. They've already had the direct game engine Live Link to those for years. Maybe I should instead just buy the 3ds and Maya subscriptions, but ugh I just do not have the bandwidth or the time of learning curve on those tools I don't think. So my fear is throwing down 1500 for maya and then barely using it. Maybe they are simpler these days than last I looked years back. But even blender is a bit of a barrier, but its just that my time is on other things than if I was using it every day. At least with Reallusion it is accessable enough yet rich enough in features that I can have it open using it every day getting value out. I need to get myself out of the tools pipeline quagmire, and instead be focusing on developer work, design, direction, scene creation, and story telling.
Using Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) I am getting some pretty fantastic looking results with cc3/daz derived stuff and customizing/modifying/kitbashing commercial assets. Sometime I plan to maybe pick up marvelous designer and try to make clothes, it looks really nice, but that is maybe a stretch for my time. I have substance painter, sureforge and other tools for retexturing assets, etc. But the big problem is just being one person it is hard enough to master the whole creative and development pipeline, but there is just not enough hours in the day to go around and do all the jobs. And as much as I'd like to be, I'm not a modeler. But kitbashing, retexturing, etc I can get a lot of mileage out of market assets. Unfortunately too often all my time gets eaten up just trying to get toolsets and workflows worked out, stable and reliable, prototyping the next thing, etc rather than actually making an end product. And then once you do get it worked out some major monkey wrench or technology change hits. Its especially annoying when its a long workflow that has lots of lengthy import/export/bake steps etc where its 6 hours later you find out nope no good, next...
But anyways ya totally, the lighting, just like in daz, reallusion, blender etc. Lighting in Unity HDRP is the secret sauce. But the cc3/daz stuff can work great. Long ago I have a background in photography too and I love using those same skills in 3D land be it daz or unity. And I have daz/cc3 stuff looking I think pretty awesome in HDRP Unity so far, but long way to go for me still on getting a lot more together. I'm a developer professionally for decades and managed to turn unity into my primary development environment commercially about 5 years ago, unless I am writing custom server stack stuff which my unity apps are connected. But sadly no hdrp, no action figures or sci fi is involved in those particular paying commercial unity projects. Eventually I will get out of the corporate space via this path though. And mostly have fun along the way. And I really like Unity overall, I always feel like I can do pretty much whatever I can dream up inside it. And I can do so much more if I can just manage to squeeze the art content into it in a timely and friendly manner. : )
Well that and if I could modify the space time continuum to provide more hours in a day and more days in a week. Its bad enough I barely get sleep.
Love the purple space suit! Very Awesome! That is great that you are making your own clothing and props in blender. It sounds like similarly you are using reallusion for feeding to blender in a similar way I am trying to get that pipeline to feed Unity.
Crazy I did not mean to type so much, well hopefully some other folks can relate also.
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