Daz Avatars to CC4

[@3dchick]

I always change the eyes and teeth too. No amount of fiddling makes the Daz ones look as good as the CC ones.

[@MikeDKelley]

You are right - the only time I don't (as I showed here) was when it is a monster or some very odd type where the eyes are just supposed to be weird. But otherwise they aren't worth bringing over.

[@nizd3128]

Cheers Mike, always appreciate your videos, thank 👍you

[@MikeDKelley]

Wow - in rewatching this live stream I note that it keeps jumping around. At first I thought it was some sort of KZbin censorship but that's not it. So, sorry - the live stream looked better and had more info. I'll see if in the future (assuming I ever do another live stream) I can save it out myself and post it.

[@3dchick]

@@MikeDKelley I think that depends on what you use. It's pretty easy with Steamyard, but that's the only one I'm familiar with.

[@3dchick]

@@MikeDKelley also, I didn't notice any jumping and I had it full-screen on my 35" monitor.

[@jacekfr3252]

Of course I am interested in what you do and I take this personaly :D and I appreciate it a lot! Thank you! I watch it after the live but wanted to say a word because I would love to watch you educating in the future! Take care mister Mike, I wish you all the best

[@MikeDKelley]

Thanks for the kind words. My hope was to have more folks online at the time so they could ask me questions but it's okay to ask afterwards as well.

[@3dchick]

Wow, you went live and I missed it! Congrats on doing a live! ❤

[@MikeDKelley]

Thanks - not so sure I'll ever do it again, but it was interesting.

[@3dchick]

@@MikeDKelleyI hope you do! If you do, you might post an announcement here on KZbin. I bet a lot more of your followers will see it here than in the forum. Thanks for all you doy, Mike. It's wonderful! 🤗

[@MikeDKelley]

@@3dchick Yeah, I didn't really know how to make an announcement in KZbin - did a tiny search and nothing really revealed itself. But maybe I'll try a bit harder.

[@3dchick]

@@MikeDKelley I'll record the process and email it to you tomorrow. 😊

[@marcusvillaboim4705]

Hi Mike! Very nice tut. It`s interesting to watch your workflow and tricks&tips. I think life`d be easier if Daz lets the user select if he wants to hide characters parts or not.

[@MikeDKelley]

Yes for sure - I do have a tutorial where I show how to unhide parts for those Dav devs who do it for clothing items. It's a big more work but for clothing it's worth it (at least you can workaround it for avatars, but for clothing there isn't much you can do other than edit the file as I show).

[@hubotic2020]

I love this, thank you. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the CC4 Daz UV transfer in skin gen, but that’s still a work in progress for me. Have you figured out a way or have script for geograph clothing, genitalia etc?

[@MikeDKelley]

I think I have a tutorial or two on geographs but they are so old I'm not so sure they can't be done better nowadays. If you have a specific one or two you have in mind let me know and I'll see what I can do and perhaps do a video on them. As for genitals - for men it's almost impossible - the best you can do is fudge some things because they will always be sort of "accessories" that don't really blend into the skin. Women are far easier (easier to have an "innie" versus an "outie" :>). There are morphs from Renderosity I use that are pretty convincing when combined with the right textures (and while you can use those supplied by Daz you are better off creating your own - just cut and paste the appropriate stuff gotten so easily now from the web onto the body texture). If you are just interesting in the women let me know and I'll see what I can show without getting my channel banned .

[@hubotic2020]

@@MikeDKelley Thanks, Mike. I'll have to check out the morphs from renderosity. I wasn't aware they even had Reallusion stuff on there. I'm still kind of new to this so, alot of it (specifically textures and such) is still kind of Greek to me. I've watched your old geoshell stuff. I guess I was kind of hoping to see if you had some new developments. I have clothing like spandex and body suits that use geoshell. Plus, I like the bre***tstacular morphs more than what reallsuion provides. And please don't go out of your way for me. I was just wondering. If I did have a video request, I would like to learn more about getting textures from daz to iclone. "Why can I use both a normal and bump in Daz but not Reallusion" and such questions like that. But, I doubt too many people want to watch lol. Thank you, again.

[@MikeDKelley]

@@hubotic2020 Hmmm - a normal AND a bump map? What would that accomplish? In PBR textures such maps are used to provide the surface, to "raise" the texture up a bit (and lower it down). Or are you saying you'd like to combine them so you get perhaps some skin texture overall but then some individual details? I guess I'd have to see exactly what you are talking about to know how to accomplish it in iClone/CC but I'm sure I could figure it out. And I will look again at Geoshells - someone else was just mentioning them the other day and I wanted to see if anything else had happened that might make them easier. Here are the genital morphs (or at least similar ones) that I was talking about): www.renderosity.com/marketplace/products/129369/twizted-anatomical-details-morphs-g8f You transfer these into CC just like any other morph (and I have a couple of tutorials on that process). I've built a couple of "gen" morphs that I can apply then to any CC3+ avatar (although I have them it mostly ends up being one of those "hmm, let me see if I can do this" because I've yet to find even a single case I could use them - I don't make any sort of videos where it would be appropriate. Not that *I* mind looking, but just don't see what I could make that others would want to see :>).

[@hubotic2020]

@@MikeDKelley I have no clue what it would accomplish 😂 I’m still learning and I noticed a lot of the textures in daz have both so, I figured I was missing something. On some textures I do notice a difference between the bump and normal, leaving me to choose one over the other. The normal will be the folds in the fabric and the bump will be the cloth type. Thank you for the link! I will definitely be looking into it. Btw I used your avatar transfer script today and wow! Not only did I learn a lot about what’s under the hood, but my imported characters look exponentially better. Thats a heavy hitter of a script. Thank you! You made my character creating/animation life much more fun and less painful.

[@MikeDKelley]

@@hubotic2020 You're very welcome. If you subscribe to my channel you'll get notified of when I go live just in case you want to ask me any questions I can answer online (I think we'll be doing that at least weekly for a while). Also - you might want to look at my script which transfers all the textures from clothing and props as well (it's a separate script from the avatar one and you run it AFTER you bring in the avatar. You can also use it on Daz props and sets you bring into iClone).

[@KiwiHawk-downunder-nz]

Does you script work if one unifies the skin before export so they maps are all on UV space using map transfer by right clicking the surface's tab please?

[@MikeDKelley]

I really don't know - the script analyzes the Daz file (so at the very least you'd need to save the Daz file, as you have to do anyway) and perhaps in this saving of the file it also saves where the new skin textures are located. Best thing to do is to try it out - it can't hurt anything (the other test, though, is what happens when you load back the Daz file into Daz. Are the skin textures still unified? If so, then it would be fine. But if this unification only takes place on an export then, no, it wouldn't work. This script is only as smart as the actual Daz duf file can be.

[@MikeDKelley]

Okay, just looked and I don't see any "unification" in that tab. I see "use baked textures" - is that what you are referring to? Or are you talking about Texture Atlas? Remember - I know almost NOTHING about Daz. LOL. My only expertise is in getting things FROM Daz into RL products. If you want to tell me what you are doing exactly I'd be glad to try it.

[@MikeDKelley]

I did just now play around with something called Texture Atlas, which apparently remaps all the textures onto a single UV map and this wouldn't be at all useful for iClone/CC. Again, what you want are the individual textures so that CC can remap those textures onto the relevant parts. No need to do anything else with the avatar so no sense in jumping through any hoops (the only reason I could see for wanting to remap the UV would be if you were going to use this avatar as is in some other program - CC will already remap its own UV stuff and cannot use anything else anyway).

[@KiwiHawk-downunder-nz]

@@MikeDKelley Actually your maybe right, it's usefull if your taking the character direct to UE5, BUT that said not so going to CC4 or iClone, thanks so much for looking into it and opening my ole eyes and reminding me RL apps still use seperated maps too

[@EricTareDenedoteentalk]

Hey Mike, great tutorial as usual. I have a question. How do I point the script to the hard drive I saved my daz content, also does it work for Gen 9 characters? Also it is not writing the textures or I cannot locate where the textures are after I run successfully run the script. Instead of having a .ini file I have this Daz_ini_File_Creation_2_5.cpython-38.pyc

[@MikeDKelley]

You must create the Dazconfig.cfg file in your user/documents directory - I show this in the start of the tutorial (and, yes, it works for Gen 9 - the first character I do is Gen 9). It's not writing the textures because it needs to know where your Daz content is located (so in the DazConfig.cfg file make sure you point it to the right directory - watch the start of the lesson again and if you have any other questions about this perhaps I'll make another short tutorial. One of the reasons I did a live version was so folks could try and ask questions but I guess I didn't promote it in advance enough - next Sunday I'll do another one and make sure everyone knows).

[@EricTareDenedoteentalk]

@@MikeDKelley Thanks, I was actually with you live, however, I was in bed watching with my phone. I decided to try it out today. I will watch the tut again from the beginning and let you know. Thank you for all your efforts

[@MikeDKelley]

@@EricTareDenedoteentalk On your phone it would be tough to see - I should have spent more time discussing the DazConfig.cfg file needed but it was my first live stream and I honestly wasn't *quite* as prepared as I should have been. My next one, this coming Sunday, will be a LOT better (and if you haven't figured out the file before then let me know and I'll cover it first).

[@Babiii-g8n]

Please do a clear tutorial for characters with furs like dogs or cats or creatures, those are the ones im really having trouble to transfer to cc4

[@MikeDKelley]

Unfortunately fur from Daz cannot be used inside of iClone/CC. Your best bet is to use a displacement map but until RL gives us a fur shader we will never really have a fur like material (and we've been asking for that for at least a decade now).

[@Babiii-g8n]

@@MikeDKelley Any news when next iclone and cc4 update? ive got the latest 8.4

[@MikeDKelley]

@@Babiii-g8n They are working on the next release, but I wouldn't expect to see it any sooner than the end of the year (although early 2025 is probably more likely). A point release is possible, but right now version 9/5 is what they are concentrating on.

[@Babiii-g8n]

@@MikeDKelley do you know of any fur accessory or material we can use? please make one please

[@MikeDKelley]

@@Babiii-g8n As I said, displacement maps are about the only thing and while it will work a *bit* for things like fur accessories (cuffs or collars) it really isn't a substitute for fur as we might want it. The only real alternative is to use another renderer (so export to Unreal or Blender, for example). However, on my live stream Sunday I'll show the fur collar approach.

[@DanSpartan177]

Hey there Mike! Thank you for making the code! It works well until 5.52, the current latest version, or atleast its not working for me. It kept saying nothing selected here even thought ive already did. Is this happening to you to?

[@MikeDKelley]

5.52? My current version (and it says it's the latest, at least according to the RL Hub) is 4.52. Is that what you meant? If so (and you are using version 2.5 of my script - although the prompt says 2.3. Sigh. I need to fix that) it's working fine for me. What character are you trying? If you tell me I can try and see if perhaps there's something wrong with that particular character.

[@DanSpartan177]

@@MikeDKelley well idk what happen, i restarted my pc, came back and it worked, apologize for the false alarm. Maybe i just install everything back recently? I really dont know, but it kept saying "nothing selected" or something like that. ohh yes, that version, its confusing sometimes. PS, you may not hear this as often as you deserve to, but thank you for your videos, know that there are people that trully appreciate what you do :3

[@MikeDKelley]

@@DanSpartan177 Thanks for the kind words - it does help to hear that because it's the only reason I do them (my channel isn't monetized or anything). So it's those thoughts that keep me doing them. But if you ever have a problem in the future don't hesitate to tell me (also - mike at kelleytown dot com is my email).