Daz4 to Ogre Workflow... best practices?

[sockpuppet418]

I have commissioned some custom Daz4 models (based on Genesis) that have turned out great. Now I am exporting to OBJ and BVH to get into blender, and then converting to Ogre.

Of course there are some challenges. Am I on the right track? Is there a better Daz to Ogre conversion path?

Since Daz offers a commercial game license for their content, I can't justify having custom pieces for everything in my game. Daz can generate a ton of stuff. I just need to pull it into Ogre.

Daz cannot convert Genesis models into DAE yet, or I would use that. Daz support says they are working on it. Any other hints out there?

Thanks!

[sockpuppet418]

29 readers, but no responses so far... Does that mean this is an interesting topic, but no one knows the answer?

Let me share what I have found so far.

I can take a Daz/Genesis figure, export to OBJ, import to Blender, export to OgreXML, Convert to Ogre .mesh, and then I see the mesh and UV diffuse texture displayed correctly in my Ogre testbench.

So far, so good. That test model has 79,059 vertices and 75,488 faces (blender count) and the figure is running very fast on my i7/Nvida laptop. (Sorry no FPS on my testbench. Will have to add)

I took a clothed model through the same process and had lots of troubles. It looks like the skin under the clothes must be deleted, or Ogre will sometimes render clothes, sometimes render skin. I am looking for a way to automatically delete the faces hidden behind the clothes.

There is an open-source tool called MeshLab that does a good job of reducing the vertex and face count by 90% or more. However, the first tests came into Ogre looking like they had some kind of battle damage. Time to get back to research...

If any of you have advice or suggestions... please don't be shy!

Thanks.

[duststorm]

I'm experimenting with a similar content pipeline, but from Makehuman instead of DAZ.

75 000 faces is really a bit over the top for realtime usage. It will probably work with one character, but with a few characters on screen and some other objects in the scene it will bring your framerate to a crawl.

In MH we have the concept of proxy meshes that are polyreduced versions of the original mesh. That's what I use for exporting to Ogre.
At the moment I also have to delete faces under the clothes manually. But since it's really fast to do I haven't felt an immediate need to automate it. I have been thinking about a script to do it. Something like doing an occlusion test from a set of predefined camera angles, and removing all faces that are not seen from any of those viewpoints. It could be done as a blender script.

If you are interested and want more details, have a look on the makehuman blog and forums. There's some interesting stuff there.