Uploaded August 2014 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Trying to iron out the process of exporting figures from Daz 4.6 to Lightwave 11.6, which is still messy. I was primarily curious how the long hair geometry might look with cloth dynamics. The figure motion was exported as MDD, and the body and hair meshes were each exported separately as OBJ. I made a simple skirt in LW.
Bullet cloth rarely works for me. Bullet only 'exploded' both the cloth meshes and the collision mesh on the first frame of calculation. Syflex weirdly refused to apply dynamics to either the skirt or hair mesh, and I could not figure out why- it seemed to not like something about the Daz-exported geometry that I did not pin down(?). ClothFX worked but was slow, but it would not allow a fixed weight falloff from the scalp so the hair is too rigid at top- for some reason, any weight values between say 1% to 100% only apply at 100%. The skirt is a little too bouncy. I threw on SoftFX for jiggle on the breasts and it is almost not noticeable on the thighs and calves. To get slowmo, all the MDDs were set to 50% playback speed.
In order for the hair and skirt to follow the MDD-baked figure motion, the "fixed" portion of the hair and skirt were each parented to a null with a motion derived from points in the figure mesh (one from the scalp, and one from the hip, respectively), exported with SoftFX 'Make Path' edit tool. It was easier to apply dynamics to the hair mesh by separating it into 3 sections.
Simple Skin is the only skin node that I manage to get a decent moist skin look with. But there is a VERY troublesome render glitch when geometry is intersecting with the skin mesh- I kept getting little flickering red and black dots around the eyes.
Discussed here- forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?141737-Skin-artifacts-with-transparency Sigma2 seems to be the only SSS shader that does not have this problem, but I could not get as good looking skin. Any problem frames were re-rendered around the eyes, and the good frames were blended in comp (Fusion 7).
I also tried a different Daz hair mesh that contained too many polys for cloth to practically handle. I used Zbrush to "un-subdivide" it, but then LW can no longer read the surfaces/groups on the ZB exported mesh (a LW obj import bug, because Zbrush and Maya maintain the imported groups. If I apply multiple surfaces to any mesh in Modeler, export it as OBJ, then load it again, the groups/surfaces are gone). But the UV remains intact. So the hair mesh had to first be separated into five sections, each by surface. Each section is unsubdivided in Zbrush, then each surface can be re-applied in LW, and the sections are reassembled.
Many people complain about how dense the Daz meshes are, but when I attempt photorealism the meshes have to be very dense to minimize shadow smoothing errors. Discussed here- forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?86479-smoothing-not-working Shadow Offset only causes a different artifact with SSS shaders. The V4 mesh started with about 10k polys. Subpatch was set to 2, for about 42k polys for final.
The music is youtube.com/watch?v=fhgAVKc62Oo
Trying to iron out the process of exporting figures from Daz 4.6 to Lightwave 11.6, which is still messy. I was primarily curious how the long hair geometry might look with cloth dynamics. The figure motion was exported as MDD, and the body and hair meshes were each exported separately as OBJ. I made a simple skirt in LW.
Bullet cloth rarely works for me. Bullet only 'exploded' both the cloth meshes and the collision mesh on the first frame of calculation. Syflex weirdly refused to apply dynamics to either the skirt or hair mesh, and I could not figure out why- it seemed to not like something about the Daz-exported geometry that I did not pin down(?). ClothFX worked but was slow, but it would not allow a fixed weight falloff from the scalp so the hair is too rigid at top- for some reason, any weight values between say 1% to 100% only apply at 100%. The skirt is a little too bouncy. I threw on SoftFX for jiggle on the breasts and it is almost not noticeable on the thighs and calves. To get slowmo, all the MDDs were set to 50% playback speed.
In order for the hair and skirt to follow the MDD-baked figure motion, the "fixed" portion of the hair and skirt were each parented to a null with a motion derived from points in the figure mesh (one from the scalp, and one from the hip, respectively), exported with SoftFX 'Make Path' edit tool. It was easier to apply dynamics to the hair mesh by separating it into 3 sections.
Simple Skin is the only skin node that I manage to get a decent moist skin look with. But there is a VERY troublesome render glitch when geometry is intersecting with the skin mesh- I kept getting little flickering red and black dots around the eyes.
Discussed here- forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?141737-Skin-artifacts-with-transparency Sigma2 seems to be the only SSS shader that does not have this problem, but I could not get as good looking skin. Any problem frames were re-rendered around the eyes, and the good frames were blended in comp (Fusion 7).
I also tried a different Daz hair mesh that contained too many polys for cloth to practically handle. I used Zbrush to "un-subdivide" it, but then LW can no longer read the surfaces/groups on the ZB exported mesh (a LW obj import bug, because Zbrush and Maya maintain the imported groups. If I apply multiple surfaces to any mesh in Modeler, export it as OBJ, then load it again, the groups/surfaces are gone). But the UV remains intact. So the hair mesh had to first be separated into five sections, each by surface. Each section is unsubdivided in Zbrush, then each surface can be re-applied in LW, and the sections are reassembled.
Many people complain about how dense the Daz meshes are, but when I attempt photorealism the meshes have to be very dense to minimize shadow smoothing errors. Discussed here- forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?86479-smoothing-not-working Shadow Offset only causes a different artifact with SSS shaders. The V4 mesh started with about 10k polys. Subpatch was set to 2, for about 42k polys for final.
The music is youtube.com/watch?v=fhgAVKc62Oo
