Daz to Blender approach (bridge vs other addons)

nibdaman

Hi, 

I was wondering what everyone thinks of the Daz to blender bridge vs the diffmorphic addon?  I noticed a ew issues between the two and wanted to see which one is better to start out with

Bridge:
Pros:
The level of detail is really high, though the character model seems to suffer from some sharper edges not found in Daz Studio.
The rig is set up perfectly for my needs right out of the gate.  I can set up IK and it doesn't stretch or warp the mesh in weird poses

Cons:
Not all morphs come over (like posiing morphs)
3rd party geo grafts do not come over

Diifeomorphic
Pros
Can select whatever you want to bring over
Can easily incorportae grografts and the respective rigging
Waaay less resourcce intesive.  It mainly uses existing Daz assets instead of copying them over.

Cons
Model quality seems lower (sharper lines even when using the dson file for HQ mesh)
rigging and posing is more complicated to set up. 
The model always seems to warp and deform in cringeworthy ways if I move accidentally move a bone a little too far etc...

I'm still really new to this so I'm not sure if there is a benefit to converting to rigify or mx vs. using the standard Daz rig in Blender.  Any thoughts?

Also, is there a way to get the 'best of both worlds'?  Ideally I woud like to use the bridge model with the existing DAZ rigging, and also the same grafts and posing I use in DaZ.  Has anyone had success with that?

 

Padone

As for the diffeo cons:

1) Sharp edges can be easily removed by switching off autosmooth that's set to 89.9 the same as the daz studio default. We didn't find a better way to translate sharp edges to blender.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/79/add-smooth-shading-for-meshes-when-import

2) In diffeo you can use different rigs so of course you have to press some more buttons to make your choice. Also because you can choose what morphs to import to optimize the figure for animation. So yes, it is inevitably more articulated to setup.

As for the "warp" poses I can't help here because I'm not a rigify fan, so I don't know how to use it. I build my own simple rigs that I like better. But rigify is very versatile so it wouldn't surprise me if you just have to set something to get it work the way you want. This is a rigify "issue" though, not a diffeo issue.

As for importing poses and animations it's better to use mhx that's more daz friendly.

 

As for the diffeo pros:

Here I'd stress that "can select whatever you want to bring over" is really whatever you want. Including lights, cameras, hdri, instances (yes real blender instances), poses, animations, HD meshes (static at this time), geografts, shells, lie, and I feel I may go on forever here .. Then of course there's the material conversion that no other exporter around gets a minimal attempt at, apart importing basic textures and colors that's not material conversion at all. With diffeo we get skins, glass, metals, fresnel, dual lobe, anisotrophy, emission, all good and ready to use, apart some approximations that need to be made for eevee.

 

p.s. That said I do love the way daz is distributing free bridges to bring daz assets to professional platforms, including blender. Of course they just started up and have time to improve. So kudos to daz, really.

p.p.s. Uh, and do you know why diffeo works ? Because there's passion there .. Yes, we do it for fun. Apart Thomas being a genius that sure adds up "a little".