Guides Vam to Blender to Vam

[Juno]

Yo Yo, blender now has multiple options for obj import and export. I have been using the legacy one, maybe thats what you need?

 

[VAMDeluxe]

I eventually got it working with Blender's Import/Export -> Wavefront (Legacy) option.

 

[Juno]

Interesting as I had been told the new obj import method had been fixed but hadn't swapped over myself since if it woks don't rock the boat!

 

[lol internet]

The Wavefront (Legacy) option doesn't exist anymore in Blender4.0 (also tried 4.1alpha).

Please Juno, edit this guide's description with an advice so people don't waste their time (like me lol), I've downloaded Blender3.6 and the legacy option works fine there.
But first try 4.0 for yourself, maybe you can make it work somehow? If not, the resource title should be "Vam to Blender3.6 (or older) to Vam"

 

[Juno]

The Wavefront (Legacy) option doesn't exist anymore in Blender4.0 (also tried 4.1alpha).

Please Juno, edit this guide's description with an advice so people don't waste their time (like me lol), I've downloaded Blender3.6 and the legacy option works fine there.
But first try 4.0 for yourself, maybe you can make it work somehow? If not, the resource title should be "Vam to Blender3.6 (or older) to Vam"

Heya, thanks for the heads up, il get a copy of 4.0 and do some testing and update as needed

 

[Nobis]

Thanks for the guide. Yup, as others mentioned, needs to be updated. Followed it step by step, but due new versions, buttons are no there.

 

[hankb]

@Juno is there a tutorial for gens, and more Male?

 

[Juno]

Heya Hank, As far as I'm aware swapping female for male in the process will work just fine for 99% of the work but you are right the gens are another matter altogether.

Gens are actually a separate model grafted on top of vams model. You need to grab the Michael6 anatomical elements which is only available in the michael6 mega bundle. for females its 3dfleetwolfs new gens plus for victoria 6 version 1(important not ver2)

 

[Wet-3D]

@Juno , first i would like to thank you for the guide.

second, is it possible to import a animated VaM scene into blender and render it there? ?

Heya, thanks for the heads up, il get a copy of 4.0 and do some testing and update as needed

have you followed up on this? curious what the status of current VaM/Blender import & export.

thank you

 

[Juno]

@Wet-3D as far as I'm aware there's no way to export vams animation. It's a long standing feature wish I have heard from many as it would make vam a very low cost mocap rig but noone has tackled it, or maybe they have and kept it to themselves due to the massive financial potential of such a thing.

As for blender 4 and morphs, I have had a play and unfortunately the issue is that the new obj import method does not have an option to preserve vertex order and that's essential for making morphs as they fundamentally rely on knowing the vertex order. I had a lead on a way to reinstall the older legacy option but it did not work for me perhaps it will work for you and restore the legacy import/export.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/181dd7o

As of now blender 3.6 is the last known working version for this kind of work.

 

[Saglinger]

EDIT II

Nevermind. I was an idiot and reading the wrong guide entirely.

 

[Chokaphi]

@Wet-3D as far as I'm aware there's no way to export vams animation. It's a long standing feature wish I have heard from many as it would make vam a very low cost mocap rig but noone has tackled it, or maybe they have and kept it to themselves due to the massive financial potential of such a thing.

As for blender 4 and morphs, I have had a play and unfortunately the issue is that the new obj import method does not have an option to preserve vertex order and that's essential for making morphs as they fundamentally rely on knowing the vertex order. I had a lead on a way to reinstall the older legacy option but it did not work for me perhaps it will work for you and restore the legacy import/export.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/181dd7o

As of now blender 3.6 is the last known working version for this kind of work.

Did they break the fucking obj importer again!. It's been a known damn issue on the github for 2 years and there is zero reasons any 3d program should arbitrarily change vertex order. Its just fucking insane.

 

[Juno]

Did they break the fucking obj importer again!. It's been a known damn issue on the github for 2 years and there is zero reasons any 3d program should arbitrarily change vertex order. Its just fucking insane.

They did indeed....and despite the complaints they have not seen fir to fix it yet. thank god you can still run older builds in parallel.

 

[Chokaphi]

They did indeed....and despite the complaints they have not seen fir to fix it yet. thank god you can still run older builds in parallel.

I have modified the old legacy obj import code to work in 4.0. I think I may just add dedicated import/export option to my Generations converter to avoid this situation.

 

[Juno]

I have modified the old legacy obj import code to work in 4.0. I think I may just add dedicated import/export option to my Generations converter to avoid this situation.

That would be mega useful and allow me to use that with the latest builds, I use Generations literally daily so I'd be well happy!

 

[qdaro]

To add the legacy Wavefront OBJ import/export UI to Blender 4.0+, I made this package:

https://workupload.com/file/BBtjfTt3Jvq

It has a README with instructions.

As of now it works for blender 4.0-4.2. It might break in the future as this is an old core 3.6 addon that is not being kept up to date with Blender's changing APIs.

 

[BStarG2]

Hey guys.

Been trying to use this guide for a while and I did manage to make it all work:

1) Export VAM model as .OBJ, done.
2) Import .OBJ to DAZ, done.
3) Export again from DAZ as .OBJ, done (with all the proper options selected, etc).
4) Import that .OBJ into Blender for editing, done.
5) Now here's the tricky part, how much of the model - exactly - can we 'edit'?

I'm asking this because I made a very small test which did work, I used the Sculpt editing like the guide suggested to change my model's butt crack a little bit. It was a minimal change just to see if it would work. It did work. I did manage to make that edit to the morph into a custom singular morph, in order to then use said new morph into VAM (after doing all the stuff for that into DAZ of course, just like the guide said).

So when it comes to following the guide itself, it's fine, I get what to do.

Now here's the problem I'm facing...

The actual amount of morph editing I really need to do is substantial. That means, editing the Sculpt for the majority of the Glutes, parts of the genitals, frontal part of the Belly, some underboob reshaping, and some side Hips edits (to match another character in the Blender scene as much as I can, with the exact same pose for both, etc).

When I do that sort of editing, however, and bring that morph back into DAZ, and proceed with the Morph Loader Pro steps (to bring in the edits I did) I'm then getting a " Warning: Geometry did not match, failed to load morph. " message.

Now that kinda defeats the purpose of... you know... editing a character's morphs. So yeah I'm wondering if maybe there's an alternative or a solution to avoid that and just "force" DAZ to accept the morph file? Or something maybe I could do in Blender (after I'm done with the edits, and before I export the .OBJ file) to "fix" the problem?

Let me know, thanks!

 

[Juno]

Hey guys.

Been trying to use this guide for a while and I did manage to make it all work:

1) Export VAM model as .OBJ, done.
2) Import .OBJ to DAZ, done.
3) Export again from DAZ as .OBJ, done (with all the proper options selected, etc).
4) Import that .OBJ into Blender for editing, done.
5) Now here's the tricky part, how much of the model - exactly - can we 'edit'?

I'm asking this because I made a very small test which did work, I used the Sculpt editing like the guide suggested to change my model's butt crack a little bit. It was a minimal change just to see if it would work. It did work. I did manage to make that edit to the morph into a custom singular morph, in order to then use said new morph into VAM (after doing all the stuff for that into DAZ of course, just like the guide said).

So when it comes to following the guide itself, it's fine, I get what to do.

Now here's the problem I'm facing...

The actual amount of morph editing I really need to do is substantial. That means, editing the Sculpt for the majority of the Glutes, parts of the genitals, frontal part of the Belly, some underboob reshaping, and some side Hips edits (to match another character in the Blender scene as much as I can, with the exact same pose for both, etc).

When I do that sort of editing, however, and bring that morph back into DAZ, and proceed with the Morph Loader Pro steps (to bring in the edits I did) I'm then getting a " Warning: Geometry did not match, failed to load morph. " message.

Now that kinda defeats the purpose of... you know... editing a character's morphs. So yeah I'm wondering if maybe there's an alternative or a solution to avoid that and just "force" DAZ to accept the morph file? Or something maybe I could do in Blender (after I'm done with the edits, and before I export the .OBJ file) to "fix" the problem?

Let me know, thanks!

Heya,

I suspect the issue will be with the sculpt tools used, you have to ensure that the models vert count is not changed at all. Any tool that adds or takes away mesh will result in the dreaded Warning: Geometry did not match, failed to load morph
I usually stick to the smooth, flatten, crease, inflate and elastic deform tools only as I know these dont mess with the mesh.

As for gens, you need to do these entirely differently. Daz models don't have gens, they are as anatomically impaired as a ken doll out of the box. The gens are a separate model grafted to the model.

The process for genital moprhs is more in depth, you need to aquire 3dFleetwolf new gens plus for Victoria6 Version 1 for females - there is a V2 but you need V1. For male models its anatomical elements which is part of the Michael6 Pro bundle. Get these and install to daz.

You can use Chokaphis Daz to Vam software to back port a vam morph created by morph merge and split to Daz which you can then add to dial in to new gens/anatomical elements which can then be exported as obj to blender for work. The usual stuff applies base resolution, poser scale in and out. but you will be workin on the gens mesh only not a full model.

 

[BStarG2]

Heya,

I suspect the issue will be with the sculpt tools used, you have to ensure that the models vert count is not changed at all. Any tool that adds or takes away mesh will result in the dreaded Warning: Geometry did not match, failed to load morph
I usually stick to the smooth, flatten, crease, inflate and elastic deform tools only as I know these dont mess with the mesh.

As for gens, you need to do these entirely differently. Daz models don't have gens, they are as anatomically impaired as a ken doll out of the box. The gens are a separate model grafted to the model.

The process for genital moprhs is more in depth, you need to aquire 3dFleetwolf new gens plus for Victoria6 Version 1 for females - there is a V2 but you need V1. For male models its anatomical elements which is part of the Michael6 Pro bundle. Get these and install to daz.

You can use Chokaphis Daz to Vam software to back port a vam morph created by morph merge and split to Daz which you can then add to dial in to new gens/anatomical elements which can then be exported as obj to blender for work. The usual stuff applies base resolution, poser scale in and out. but you will be workin on the gens mesh only not a full model.

Thanks for your reply.

I mostly used elastic deform and smoothing, but I also used Grab (with various radius settings on various parts of the body). I also realized after making my post, that some of the sculpt edits created "voids" (gaps) between polys (I.E. 'separated' vertices apart) in some places. I'm not 100% sure which one of the edit tools would have caused that, but yeah no wonder why DAZ was like... NOPE, lol.

I did, however, find an indirect way to sort of "cheat" the changes I wanted. So instead of trying to do everything in one big edit, I decided to go with 'baby step' edits, smaller and more localized changes, then export back into DAZ, and it works. So I repeated the process until I created myself a total of 5 custom edits which ended up making most of the changes I wanted. But I'm curious enough to try again with a bigger edit on various parts of the body, but sticking with the tools you've mentioned (and not using Grab, maybe that one is causing the vertices to separate on occasion).

And also ty for the info related to the Genitals. I knew the Genitals was a different mesh / model (separate from Genesis Female 2) but I did not know which exact names and versions to look for. So thank you for that. If I do have changes to make to the gens I'll do it that way (on those Gens models instead).

Thank you again for your time and your help.

 

[Juno]

Thanks for your reply.

I mostly used elastic deform and smoothing, but I also used Grab (with various radius settings on various parts of the body). I also realized after making my post, that some of the sculpt edits created "voids" (gaps) between polys (I.E. 'separated' vertices apart) in some places. I'm not 100% sure which one of the edit tools would have caused that, but yeah no wonder why DAZ was like... NOPE, lol.

I did, however, find an indirect way to sort of "cheat" the changes I wanted. So instead of trying to do everything in one big edit, I decided to go with 'baby step' edits, smaller and more localized changes, then export back into DAZ, and it works. So I repeated the process until I created myself a total of 5 custom edits which ended up making most of the changes I wanted. But I'm curious enough to try again with a bigger edit on various parts of the body, but sticking with the tools you've mentioned (and not using Grab, maybe that one is causing the vertices to separate on occasion).

And also ty for the info related to the Genitals. I knew the Genitals was a different mesh / model (separate from Genesis Female 2) but I did not know which exact names and versions to look for. So thank you for that. If I do have changes to make to the gens I'll do it that way (on those Gens models instead).

Thank you again for your time and your help.

Absolutely no worries, glad to help

Making a series of smaller morphs is definitely best practice if for no other reason than the sculpts you make never come out 1:1 in vam due to how the skinning and smoothing algorithms work (you can minimise this by working at 1 smooth passes) Its always good to have more morphs so you can dial in more or less to get the end result you were looking for and added bonus you build a library of new morphs for later use!

 

[BStarG2]

Small 'update' on this.

So I checked around for that 3dFleetwolf New Gens, for Victoria 6 (version 1). Now I did find the Victoria 6 model on DAZ3D (it's like $45). But I cannot for the life of me find anything about "Fleetwolf" anywhere I look, even Google doesn't seem to understand what I'm asking for. Is there any known official link for that or it's gone?

Thanks.

 

[Juno]

Small 'update' on this.

So I checked around for that 3dFleetwolf New Gens, for Victoria 6 (version 1). Now I did find the Victoria 6 model on DAZ3D (it's like $45). But I cannot for the life of me find anything about "Fleetwolf" anywhere I look, even Google doesn't seem to understand what I'm asking for. Is there any known official link for that or it's gone?

Thanks.

I believe its this one - https://www.renderotica.com/store/sku/68031_New-Gens-For-Victoria-6

 

[Faucheuze3D]

Thanks again for this great guide, I'm stuck from the start hahaha, when I click on "export obj" in VAM, nothing happens!I went to the Root folder "where Vam and Vam update are" but no trace of my .OBJ file!

So I don't know if the problem is with VAM or if the file has been exported elsewhere.

 

[Faucheuze3D]

Thanks again for this great guide, I'm stuck from the start hahaha, when I click on "export obj" in VAM, nothing happens!I went to the Root folder "where Vam and Vam update are" but no trace of my .OBJ file!

So I don't know if the problem is with VAM or if the file has been exported elsewhere.

I found the solution, the file was renamed "rentina" and it only appeared when I double-clicked on "vam_updater", I don't know why?! but in any case it works now.

Thanks for this great guide

 

[Juno]

I found the solution, the file was renamed "rentina" and it only appeared when I double-clicked on "vam_updater", I don't know why?! but in any case it works now.

Thanks for this great guide

Glad you got it sorted baddy, the objs are always named after the built in skin texture used on the model that is imported.