Alternatives to Daz3d

[Losersriot]

DAZ poses to Unreal render pipeline and 3DS MAX 3D models of environment

 

[Baka plays]

Just did a quick test with Babina 8 (not a bad skin), the lastest dev version of

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and lastest Blender 3.0 alpha (the one who have

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I believe). Just using "Easy Import Daz" (was curious since I didn't remember it was there). Only thing I did was to mimic Iray max paths lenght, -1 is around ~21 (or 24?) bounces iirc.


View attachment 1427306

Default setting nodes after import:

View attachment 1427317

There is few minor problems (teeth/gum, eyes, bit strong SSS) but so far it's a solid base imo. Re-creation of dual lobe, top coat & translucency is neat. Not really 1:1 but quite lot of progress were made in a year or 2.

That's one for my Knowledge folder.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Thomas and the core group of Diffeo volunteers have really made some incredible progress, especially with translating Daz rigs and incorporating morphs, expressions, jcms, pose library.

The default skin conversion is totally acceptable when it comes to using Daz Official figures. My hunch is that Daz is at least consistent with their texture maps. Auto converting other vendors is a total gamble especially since roughness/spec/gloss seems to be interchangeable depending on the vendor. I've had auto converted chars come out several shades darker or lighter. Vicky 8.1 comes out looking pretty great too.

The biggest issue however is the performance of this shader. They're trying to replicate Daz Iray in Blender, resulting in performance inefficient setups with the biggest offender being that volume node. It's generally significantly slower to render than a proper PBR shader. I can't really complain though as Diffeo enables people to very easily transition to Blender, even better than the official bridge.

Thomas even built a BVH retargeter which I think should allow the transfer of animations back to Daz, but I haven't tested to confirm this.

You could add HD morphs with the multires trick o/

I think something like 2/3 of Iray skins have shader problems, more or less serious.
Either outdated, and you can't really blame people for this but also sometime just flat out wrong.

For interchangeable spec/rough maps, I got you lol. Not sure where does it come from tho, my guess would be some never really transitioned for specular model (mostly g3 base at that time) to roughness model (coming around g8 iirc). You can trick by inverting ratio or color, but yeah correct maps at the start could be great (and with dual lobe, no one should use gloss layer ever imo).

When exporting to Cycles with diffeo, having a 'clean' and correct Iray shading before will definitely help (you can mostly correct any skin outside terrible maps). For performance can't really comment, I don't use Cycle enough, but yeah put some burden on engine shoulders I guess.

Not related but just saw Cycles denoiser (either OptiX or Intel) now with albedo/normal buffer by default. Just one click . Now do other engines pls.

 

[PlayfulUK]

Just did a quick test with Babina 8 (not a bad skin), the lastest dev version of

You must be registered to see the links

and lastest Blender 3.0 alpha (the one who have

You must be registered to see the links

I believe). Just using "Easy Import Daz" (was curious since I didn't remember it was there). Only thing I did was to mimic Iray max paths lenght, -1 is around ~21 (or 24?) bounces iirc.


View attachment 1427306

Default setting nodes after import:



There is few minor problems (teeth/gum, eyes, bit strong SSS) but so far it's a solid base imo. Re-creation of dual lobe, top coat & translucency is neat. Not really 1:1 but quite lot of progress were made in a year or 2.

That looks pretty fantastic to me actually

 

[Losersriot]

That looks pretty fantastic to me actually

That looks plastic to me actually. Top DAZ renders look like Wallmart's Barby dolls.

That is Metahuman face. Export to Unreal Engine ready.

 

[Selek]

Does the Daz EULA limit the use of Genesis in Blender? The EULA speaks of using its content only in such a way as to "encourage" use of the Daz store -- presumably by buying Daz assets. Maybe that's not a problem if you use the Genesis model in Blender along with props etc from the Daz store, also imported into Blender?

Metahumans do look great. At least, what I've seen on YouTube is impressive. I don't know how much clothing is available yet. For now, you have to use it with the Unreal Engine, yes?

Apparently a new Unity-friendly digital-human creator is coming too:

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I don't know much about it.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

MetaHuman is great, Maya bridge works rather well.
But it's missing the entire problematic and technical debt (literally) that comes with it.
Day dreaming is free & cheap tho.

 

[TheEroticRabbit]

The reason daz is popular is because it gives you all of the tools you need to produce the end result (that is the render) in the same place.
Even though it's tools are subpar , no other software gives you a more straight forward path from nothing to result.
Most programs expect the users to know where to get their models, how to import every format, how to create morphs that often are not included, sometimes rig and texture, etc...
All of those steps are standing in the way of the creator that just wants to create the asset they need for their games. And daz is the fastest train to get there.

Not really true. Character Creator for example gives you much better, realtime engine ready characters with a much nicer user interface and its own animation ecosystem. It's also fairly expensive and doesn't have anatomical elements.

arguably just buying characters for a game engine and animating them in-engine will give you better tools than DAZ has, it's that bad

DAZ is however free, and I would doubt most people developing adult games are paying for their assets so it's accessible.

 

[KiaAzad]

Not really true. Character Creator for example gives you much better, realtime engine ready characters with a much nicer user interface and its own animation ecosystem.

Well, since most adult games I'm seeing around are made of 2D renders of 3D characters and not actual 3D games, I think my point is still valid.

 

[recreation]

Character Creator isn't free and I haven't seen any render made in iclone that can compete with good iray renders.

Blender is heading the right direction, they even introduced an asset library a short while ago. It's still a long way ahead, but if they keep doing things right, they'll easily become the first choice for people now using Daz in the future....if they can stop being so stubborn with their damn shortcuts >_>

Regarding meta human, it's great, but it'll take a while until it's properly usable (unreal 5) and then there's the question: will we ever get the naughty bits?

 

[TheEroticRabbit]

Character Creator isn't free and I haven't seen any render made in iclone that can compete with good iray renders.

reallusion has an iray plug-in for cc/iclone so... but like I said in my original reply CC is more aimed at real-time engines. For rendering in a professional setting you'd export via alembic or whatever and render in something sexy like vRay.

My biggest hope for metahuman is that it makes DAZ and reallusion realise they're both shit in their own ways (DAZ being bafflingly bad UX wise and reallusion charging stupid prices for features that should be built in) and that it's time to shape up.

 

[KiaAzad]

The main weakness of blender for porn render workflow is: Lack of an easy to use library. Unlike daz you can't simply open blender, choose a model and start cycling through poses, cloths and morphs. In other hand is has more powerful tools for editing the models.
Of course the new version is getting a library, let's hope it's as easy to use as daz. And recently daz have been pushing it's content into blender, I assume they want to capture a share of the market that's opening to the blender users.

 

[TheEroticRabbit]

Yeah everyone's doing blender integrations... which is great in its way, makes content more accessible to everyone. Still Blender is the hobbyist software which is what Daz has traditionally been seen as as well Which probably goes some way to explaining the poor user experiences in those apps. Not that all industry standards have great UX either zBrush is a nightmare and Maya has a great UI hidden behind a brick wall learning curve of way too many options.

 

[Domiek]

The main weakness of blender for porn render workflow is: Lack of an easy to use library. Unlike daz you can't simply open blender, choose a model and start cycling through poses, cloths and morphs. In other hand is has more powerful tools for editing the models.
Of course the new version is getting a library, let's hope it's as easy to use as daz. And recently daz have been pushing it's content into blender, I assume they want to capture a share of the market that's opening to the blender users.

I wouldn't say that this an entirely fair assessment as none of the big names (Blender, Maya, C4D, etc) offer this natively. Daz is built entirely around an asset store that works as a convenient plug & play application. Even when the Blender Asset Browser library is fully implemented, you still won't have the same convenience as Daz since you'll still need to know how to fit and apply clothes onto a rig for each character.

My workflow is actually super simple. I load my character into Daz and use Daz's library to cycle through clothing. Once I've found what I like, I simply export just the clothes as OBJ into Blender and then manually fit and rig it onto the character. This process takes less than a minute. Yes, Daz is more convenient but on the flip-side I can quickly equip any clothes to my character even if it's not a Daz product.

This outfit, for example, was made from scratch in Marvelous Designer and works just the same as if it was purchased from the Daz store.



Daz Poses and morphs are also not as convenient to apply in Blender as they would be in Daz, but still it's not much additional work. Using Diffeomorphic, I can import poses through a browser window, where I select the pose .duf file from the Daz library directly, or simple select the .png thumbnail image. Although after working with a fully functioning IK/FK rig in Blender, I can't even remember the last time I reached for the pose library.

The convenience Daz offers is unmatched compared to any other software. The tradeoff is convenience for technical limitations. Depending on the artists use case, the technical limitations may even go unnoticed. I wouldn't even really call Blender an alternative to Daz as it often feels like comparing apples to oranges.

 

[Leeduva]

Not really true. Character Creator for example gives you much better, realtime engine ready characters with a much nicer user interface and its own animation ecosystem. It's also fairly expensive and doesn't have anatomical elements.

arguably just buying characters for a game engine and animating them in-engine will give you better tools than DAZ has, it's that bad

DAZ is however free, and I would doubt most people developing adult games are paying for their assets so it's accessible.

Wait I I thought character creator had genitals?

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..

 

[PlayfulUK]

Using Diffeomorphic...

I wish someone would do a proper, full tutorial on using it with Daz figures, especially Daz figures with grafts like Diktator and Futalicious. I know Diffeo has detailed explanations, but there's so much, especially as Daz users probably aren't all that familiar with Blender (took me ages to work out how to prevent stretchy limbs, for example).

 

[MidnightArrow]

I wish someone would do a proper, full tutorial on using it with Daz figures, especially Daz figures with grafts like Diktator and Futalicious. I know Diffeo has detailed explanations, but there's so much, especially as Daz users probably aren't all that familiar with Blender (took me ages to work out how to prevent stretchy limbs, for example).

I plan on covering the whole Diffeomorphic workflow in my dev articles, but they're patron-only. (Although I have no doubt they may "fall off the back of a truck" and end up here anyway.)

Still, I pretty much invented geometry node geografts in Diffeomorphic, and much of what I came up with is publicly available anyway, so I could give you some help if you need it.

 

[Eliont]

alternatives

Illusion games with their Studio mode.

 

[PlayfulUK]

I plan on covering the whole Diffeomorphic workflow in my dev articles, but they're patron-only. (Although I have no doubt they may "fall off the back of a truck" and end up here anyway.)

Still, I pretty much invented geometry node geografts in Diffeomorphic, and much of what I came up with is publicly available anyway, so I could give you some help if you need it.

If you do that, shout about it somewhere so I can go and see them. I only usually follow Patreons when there's something specific I'm looking for.

 

[MidnightArrow]

If you do that, shout about it somewhere so I can go and see them. I only usually follow Patreons when there's something specific I'm looking for.

Sure. But I can answer your questions here too, if you have any.