Working Vam-to-Blender workflow for sim hair

[northern.shikima]

Though I'd share something I am working on, I figured some other folks might find this interesting and see the potential.

Basically I have written a small utility that extracts hair strand data from sim hair. And then I wrote a small python script for Blender to port this data into Blender as curves. Then you can use an addon to convert the curves to Blender's particle based hair and viola!

Now you can take that sim hairstyle you spent hours designing in VAM and use it in other 3d programs.

For example, here is a comparison of Roac's "Arty Pontail Tucked" hair in VaM vs ported to Blender and rendered in Cycles.


Is it an exact 1:1 copy? No but it does a pretty good approximate!

This doesn't stop at Blender of course! Once you have the hair in Blender, you could export it as an Alembic groom and use it in Unreal Engine or a new Unity project using unity's experimental hair plugin. Why wait for Vam 2 to experience those glorious locks in HDRP?

I hope to post a free guide with the scripts and utility in the coming week, I just need to clean things up and test some more hair styles.

[Edit]
And we're live: https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/hairexporter-0-1-beta.26293/

 

[SPQR]

that looks great! nice work

 

[dorsdagr]

This is awesome, been trying to convert some of my models for printing and not having their hair is very sad! Thank you

 

[haremlife]

Any way to export the skin textures though?

 

[atani]

Any way to export the skin textures though?

Skin textures are images, just take them from the VAR.

 

[haremlife]

Skin textures are images, just take them from the VAR.

But move to where exactly? But, mainly, what if the textures are referencing other vars, or what if they have a complicated/unusual folder structure? It seems like this would demand a high amount of manual work for dozens of models?

 

[atani]

But move to where exactly? But, mainly, what if the textures are referencing other vars, or what if they have a complicated/unusual folder structure? It seems like this would demand a high amount of manual work for dozens of models?

You seem to be confusing things a bit.
Skin textures don't need to be exported because they're not compiled or locked away in some form, they remain as jpg/png images in the VAR. As a VAR is a zip file you can just open it with a compression tool like winrar, 7zip, etc, and take from it the images very easily.
References can come only from text based files, like the json file of a scene, the meta.json at the root of VARs, or preset vap files. Images are not text files, they cannot reference anything.

My answer was to your question: "Any way to export the skin textures though?"
I do not know what are your intentions with the textures, how can I understand what you mean with "But move to where exactly?" and follow up question. You'd need to explain further what you want to do.

 

[haremlife]

You seem to be confusing things a bit.
Skin textures don't need to be exported because they're not compiled or locked away in some form, they remain as jpg/png images in the VAR. As a VAR is a zip file you can just open it with a compression tool like winrar, 7zip, etc, and take from it the images very easily.
References can come only from text based files, like the json file of a scene, the meta.json at the root of VARs, or preset vap files. Images are not text files, they cannot reference anything.

My answer was to your question: "Any way to export the skin textures though?"
I do not know what are your intentions with the textures, how can I understand what you mean with "But move to where exactly?" and follow up question. You'd need to explain further what you want to do.

Ok, I mean: export the vam model WITH textures (placed appropriately so you open it in blender and the textures are there in the model)

 

[atani]

A all in one with base VaM options probably not.
I know that in base VaM you can export the model (Control & Physics 1) with that grey button. Then you can import it in Blender or Daz and assign to the body parts the suitable textures you get from the VAR. For one model this is only a few minutes, but if you want to do to a lot of them that's a whole different story.

 

[haremlife]

A all in one with base VaM options probably not.
I know that in base VaM you can export the model (Control & Physics 1) with that grey button. Then you can import it in Blender or Daz and assign to the body parts the suitable textures you get from the VAR. For one model this is only a few minutes, but if you want to do to a lot of them that's a whole different story.

Yes, that is a major drawback. It sounds like a "vam to bender workflow" would very much benefit from an integrated export script.

 

[haremlife]

You seem to be confusing things a bit.
Skin textures don't need to be exported because they're not compiled or locked away in some form, they remain as jpg/png images in the VAR. As a VAR is a zip file you can just open it with a compression tool like winrar, 7zip, etc, and take from it the images very easily.
References can come only from text based files, like the json file of a scene, the meta.json at the root of VARs, or preset vap files. Images are not text files, they cannot reference anything.

My answer was to your question: "Any way to export the skin textures though?"
I do not know what are your intentions with the textures, how can I understand what you mean with "But move to where exactly?" and follow up question. You'd need to explain further what you want to do.

Sorry, I don't understand how to import the var textures to blender. Blender does not have "body", "limp", "head", "gen" textures like vam. Blender demands textures for hands, heads, shoulders, etc, etc. How can vam textures be converted to or imported to blender?

 

[haremlife]

Also, vam export doesn`t export the rig.

 

[asianxsinocosmos]

How do I import blender hairstyle into VAM?I dont wanna use CUAM cuz its without physic effert and looks horrible.