I wanted to stick my wives face on a VAM character, I thought that would be a simple task. I searched the web on creating custom characters for VAM. Some people use FaceGen and others use a reference photo and use the slider morphs. This is just my opinion, but I wish there was a more simple way. Like, I take a gen2 base character, and use the face transfer tool, reimport it to VAM...done. And if not that simple, at least a workflow to get the new morph applied inside VAM from other 3d modeling software. Maybe I'm just dumb, but either way, I need a more user friendly pipeline.
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Make it easier to customize a specific look
- Thread starter mrmojo14
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Hi, FaceGen and DAZ FaceTransfer are roughly the same. You will get a face morph and some skin (face) textures. I don't use FaceTransfer (I think FaceGen is a bit better), so I don't know if you will get a Genesis 2 .dsf morph file, as this is what you will need. To use them in VaM, all you have to do is to copy it over to the appropriate folders. VaM/Custom/Atom/Person/Morphs or VaM/Custom/Atom/Person/Texture. To get a user friendly pipeline, just create yourself some folder links/shortcuts, and you are done in some seconds. Unfortunately you allways have to put some/much work in postprocessing, as real recognizable faces are one of the most difficult things to do in 3D design (people are able to see even smallest differences in faces, because they are learning this from early childhood on). But that is the same with VaM and DAZ3D.
IMHO VaM is and was doing great in utilizing the DAZ workflow. In all the many years I do this kind of stuff, I never found a (much) easier solution to create faces.
BUT if there are some fresh ideas to make it even more easy and user friendly, they are highly welcome. Maybe someone wants to create a cool AI plugin, or puts the old foto2vam tool into a much much more user friendly shape.
IMHO VaM is and was doing great in utilizing the DAZ workflow. In all the many years I do this kind of stuff, I never found a (much) easier solution to create faces.
BUT if there are some fresh ideas to make it even more easy and user friendly, they are highly welcome. Maybe someone wants to create a cool AI plugin, or puts the old foto2vam tool into a much much more user friendly shape.
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i have played with this face gen before. but i could not figure out what type of file to export as to put into vam or even if it was possible. but your saying i need to export as a .dsf file? or is that .dsf file for the program to touch the face up?
Ty for replying! CC3 has Headshot plugin that works awesome. I brought a gen2 model into CC3 and used Headshot, but its just an .OBJ file that I have yet to figure out how to get the morphs transfered over. I can use FBX too but same scenario. I been studying how to get it back to VAM and rigged with gen2 morphs. no luck yet but your advise helps me in my quest !
P.S. I did manage to get the face textures over to VAM with the new UVs, but they didn't line up. She looks like the guy in star wars that says, ITS A TRAP!
P.S. I did manage to get the face textures over to VAM with the new UVs, but they didn't line up. She looks like the guy in star wars that says, ITS A TRAP!
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Hi, you will need "FaceGen Artist Pro". The normal FaceGen has no support for DAZ3D export. If you have the Artist Pro version, go to the File tab, then to the Export tab and choose to export as "Genesis 2". There are some more parameters to play with, ask if you can't figure it out, but it is relatively easy.
There is a trick to export genitals, too. 1. Export the normal set of textures with the file selections pointing to the appropriate textures in the VAM\Custom\Atom\Person\Textures\FemaleBase folder, as you allways do. 2. Open the folder where FaceGen has created the new texture set (you will need this anyways), go to the Body texture, copy or rename it (so FaceGen can't overwrite it). 3. In FaceGen select the genitals texture for the body texture and click the button to do the creation process again.... ready.
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Hi, it is VERY complicated to get other shapes than DAZ Figures into VAM. Been there, done it. It is somewhat possible, but it is a LOT of work. You could find a walkthrough at the VAM NO OC Discord and you will need good experiences in 3D modeling. Once it is in DAZ as a working Genesis 2 morph, it is a simple task, so you could Google after "importing shapes to DAZ", or something like this. The DAZ Community is much bigger and older than VaM's, and you will more likely find an answer. But to say it again... it most probably will not be worth the effort and this is why FaceGen and DAZ FaceTransfer is so important to VaM.
...even if the results will be not that good as you would expect. There is a bottleneck in FaceGen to translate the created face to DAZ face morphs AND the created DAZ morphs will never look exactly the same in VaM due to some reasons... It is a lot of post-processing needed, but IMHO it is a good starting point, anyways.
Hi, where in VAM can I open these files?
I tried Person -> Morphs Preset ->LoadPreset
Here I can see about 10 Files to open but tons of Folders but in no folder i can see a file from VAM. "All Flattened" shows a number of 56 files. But in external file exploerer the folder "custom/atom7person/morphs/female" is filled with tons of .vmb .vmi and .dsf files as my own generated are also. But VAM don't show them to me to select.
Any idea what is wrong?
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Hi, if you sucessfully copied the FaceGen generated .dsf files to custom/atom/person/morphs/female , then those morphs are accessable through the normal "female morphs" tab, where you have all the sliders to dial-in the build-in morphs, too. If I remember it correctly, they are going to the morphs/Head/ folder. You can change the folder by editing the .dsf file with a text editor BEFORE VaM generates its additional files. After that, you could delete those VaM generated files, change the .dsf, and run VaM to generate the VaM files again. I have actually 350 FaceGen .dsf, so I generated a new folder "FaceGen". If you want to change it, it is around line 40 and reads "region" : "Head", ... simply change it to "FaceGen" (or something else) and the folder will be generated automatically in VaM.
If you can't open a .dsf file, then it is compressed. Simply uncompress it with a Zip-tool.
If you can't open a .dsf file, then it is compressed. Simply uncompress it with a Zip-tool.
Ahhh OK, thank you. Now I know why I had over 200 Morph-Sliders in the female Morph tab. To be honest, I don't like this system. From my point of view there should only be one set of morph sliders which allow to create all the possible looks. As its realized in Honey Select for example. This would allow a way better compatibility with all the characters, scenes, clothes etc. with each other.
But OK oin the other side this allows such things like facegen.
But OK oin the other side this allows such things like facegen.
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Hi, I know what you mean, and I like Honey Select, Koikatsu, etc, too. Very creative games and fun to use. But even in Koikatsu you have hundreds of morph sliders, too... they are only better arranged and therefore easier to use. But don't forget that VaM goes an other way... It is more or less a sandbox tool to create almost everything one can imagine. This means on the other hand that it is very complicated and has a mean learning curve. I am using VaM from the very early start and I used it a lot for years... and even I am sometimes overwhealmed by the huge ammount of options, from which I only use maybe one third, and many of the others are unknown to me. I can't imagine how this must be for new users!
Back to your answer... I have for instance more than 4000 morphs, because I like to do realistic look-alikes and sometimes you just need those one special shape of the nostrils, for instance, aso. This won't simply be possible for Honey Select or AI Shoujo, or any other app I know, keeping DAZ3D or Poser aside. And it is VR! I love it! ;-)
Back to your answer... I have for instance more than 4000 morphs, because I like to do realistic look-alikes and sometimes you just need those one special shape of the nostrils, for instance, aso. This won't simply be possible for Honey Select or AI Shoujo, or any other app I know, keeping DAZ3D or Poser aside. And it is VR! I love it! ;-)
I managed to bring a CC3 over to vam, but it wasnt exactly straight-forward. Basically I took the .obj export from CC3, imported it into blender. I increased the size by 5x (maybe not strictly necessary, but something I commonly do when I'm messing around in blender as changes are a bit more forgiving). I also import a gen2 base model that had been exported from daz and scaled it to match, and hide all the vertex groups but the face. I roughly align the figures and use the shrink wrap modifier. inevitably, i'll have to go into sculpt mode to fix some issues...but it does work. Once you're happy, you scale that imported gen2 model back and export it back out to go back into daz to create a morph from it. Obviously that was extremely high level...
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Hi, you can do something similar with ZBrush, too. There is a tutorial on the NoOC Discord. It is somewhat automated, as you can wrap one figure to the shape of another figure. You have to watch out, that you don't change the vertex count of the Gen2 model. One vertex more or less, and you can't import it to DAZ anymore. I did this for an anime figure from Koikatsu. But even while it was a success, it was so much hassle, that I definitely won't do that again for a while. Indeed, extremely high level...
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