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I spent the last five hours unseccessfully trying to do a simple DForce simulation. One character, no hair, one dforce dress. Some times this fails - then that, the mesh is eploding, the next time the dress doesn't fall correctly - and so on. I am spending huge amounts of time which are completely annoying. The pose requires a simulation from the neutral pose and each try to simulate costs around 30 minutes . On an i9 9900 with 64 GB RAM and a Geforce 3090. I am kinda fed up.
Should I take the plunge and try Blender? I didn't find too much info so far in terms of physics simulations and photoreal character rendering.
DAZ has a bridge to Blender - would I be able to use my models in Blender or would I have to rebuild everything again?I am reluctant to try Blender, because I find the interface a bit coinfusing and am just used to DAZStudio. But right now I am so much fed up that I am willing to learn another program. What do you guys think?
Yes, you should learn Blender.
Blender has a better render engine than DS. By a lot imo. And it renders in a fraction of the time that DS takes.
Blender has a gazillion tutorials on youtube.
Yes, you can export your DAZ objects to Blender. I haven't upgraded to beyond 4.12, so haven't done it with G8.1 yet however.
You can also import FBX models with mats and animation blows DS away.
Take the plunge and create the donut.
I was experimenting with rendering in Blender yesterday (using the Diffeomorphic plugin, not the Daz-to-Blender bridge). I found that single-character renders using Blender's Eevee 'realtime' render engine are incredibly fast, usually just a few seconds. The Diff plugin does a pretty good - but not perfect - job of converting materials as well. Skin transfers well as do most clothing and prop mats with the exception of some glass materials. Cycles (Blender's PBR engine) also looks very good and without doing any proper tests, feels faster and, in my opinion, look better than IRay as well.
However, A large scene (FG Beach house + 3 x G8 characters) refused to render in Cycles and resulted in Blender crashing after quickly running out of RAM (32GB). The only way I managed to get around the crashing was to use the 'Memory Assistant' script in daz to reduce texture-map sizes and also cap Cycles texture size to 512px.
To be fair, I don't a huge amount of experience with Blender, I've 'only' got 32GB of RAM and I was rendering on a 8GB GTX1070 so take my problems with a pinch of salt.
First of all: thanks for all the info.
I watched a couple of YouTube clibs and started to tinker around a bit. The possibilities of Bliender are obvioulsy huge, butso fdar I am not coinvinced I need most of them. Let's see how this goes.Don't pass Go, don't collect $200...go directly to Blender and dive in.
Ignore the eighty eleventeen billion ga-trillion tools and concentrate on the simple basic ones. I've been using Blender regularly for almost 20 years and still only use a handful of tools. Sometimes I'll learn something new for a specific modelling purpose but mostly I stick to the basics.
I know how they work and can get stuff done quickly.The dForce hair and clothing is for Daz. Too much problems export. Better in Alembic (Sagan plugin for Ogawa format, no the old hdf5) or obj/mmd sequence.
been learning / using blender for around 3 years now. its steep but once you get a hold of the basics its super easy. Youtube tutorials are a must. google how to and read. once you get the hang of things blender will be your go to for creation. daz and blender go together like peanut butter and jelly !
also another side note ... using blender to simulate clothing , drapes, blankets ect. is 10x quicker than daz. but for hair daz is the way to go.
Bforartists is a fork of Blender.It's supposed to have a better graphical UI and a better usability.
Bforartists was a great attempt to make a usable GUI. It was mostly in response to the awful mess of the pre-2.5 releases. 2.5 brought with it a revamped and modern GUI that folks could actually use. I used Bforartists for a few years but abandoned it when 2.5 came out.
What about geomorphs (such as NewGenV8) from DS to Blender ? It is a non starter for me if unavailable... Just a question, not an assertion.
@Corbeau, I have no problems with the Golden Palace Gens transferring, using either a direct .obj export or by using the Diffomorphic plugin.
@Terahurts
Thank you for the confirmation, I am so sad about the future of DS that I am almost ready to take the plunge to Blender again (I tried it before DS about 10 years ago and was not impressed, I also dismissed a fast decaying Poser at the time despite its popularity and blind fan support... I am afraid DS is now in the same brown waters).Blender, yes. Just do it.
The interface is now the best it's ever been, but even that can be overwhelming for a newbie.
The best thing above all else is LEARN YOUR HOTKEYS! Don't add a dozen fancy add-ons with their own hotkeys, and may require remapping keys... you won't need any of them anyway until you have a firm grasp of vanilla Blender.
I think the easiest way to do this is just dive in with some generic "Donut" and "Let's Make A Bulldozer" tutorials, even if you are familiar with box modeling and such. Just find some projects that don't look totally boring, and follow along paying most of your attention to the keystrokes, where all the most-used functions live. It's amazing, but withing your first 100 hours with it, you wind up tickling the keyboard like Mozart.
Then you can wallow in the wicked world of add-ons, and wrap your frazzled head around node editing... :^P
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