Unified UI Beta (Patreon)

Edit 4 : Beta 8, one last beta because of new engine switch functions. UI seems solid from my tests and nobody reported bugs so far:

- model engine switch is now backwards compatible for all models and will do a bunch of stuff : mute the ambient occlusion map for cycles which also fixes black eyes, change the wet node ior to 1.33 (if node exists) to avoid black wet effect, change hair subsurface to 0 for cycles or .15 for eevee and unlink any node attached to the subsurface socket. I believe that should be all that's needed but let me know if you think of something else. 

- also minor fix for alternate eye textures count

Hey all,

I think the unified UI is in a tryable state if you want to give it a go.

It's a BETA so before you download, consider a few things :

1) There will be bugs, please consider reporting bugs you encounter, that would help me.

2) It only works 100% with most recent models for now, ancient models are selectable in the UI but some features will be hidden and some won't work (especially skin properties & makeup). I'll increase backwards compatibility gradually. Good news is IK/FK works great from my tests, even on really old models !

3) It's meant to be used with the new official version of the daz addon (1.6.2 - enclosed below). Remove my current addon and use this one instead. You might need to close and reopen Blender after uninstalling older version to be able to install the new version.

4) Custom object properties are gone for now (little cogwheels for some outfit items), I'll bring them back in a more dynamic way.

5) The "retarget mesh driver" button used for the library has been replaced by one called "Change armature". If you click on it a box will appear to ask if you want to retarget drivers. Tick the box.

Installation is done like any other addon, in preferences. Once installed, open a file with a model or append a model, then select the character from the drop down menu at the top of the UI. After that it's exactly like it used to be, except better :p.

Let me know your thoughts if you try it :)

PS : Just thought about it but I might be able to add backwards fixes for older models using the UI. For example, I could add a button to fix the IK loop that made IK so weird on older models.

Edit : script updated to Beta2. I've added support for older models (tested on Elizabeth) and solved a dirty workaround. However I lost a feature that automatically detected how many alternative textures a model or outfit has...not major as it only means you might get blank textures past a certain value but I'm not sure if I can bring the automatic limit back. Integers don't seem to support changing their max value in a clean way...as far as I know anyway.

Edit 2 : Beta 3, hotfix for Beta2 which broke some outfit&hair stuff + additional buttons to deploy some fixes for older models (see IK/FK section). We're nearly there I think.

Edit 3 : Beta 6 (4&5 were discarded), it will probably be the last version before going out of Beta state:

- UI speed is back to normal, Beta 3 was really slow.

- Improved support for various models (tested on Rey, 2B & Amelie)

- Since I can't cap alternative textures' sliders, I've put an info stating how many alt textures the UI detects. This way you'll know why it becomes blank if you go beyond what's available. Also body textures are now split between body and eyes.

- Custom properties (cogwheels) are back in a dynamic way. Displayed only if the model has some of course but it's possible to add some on the fly. One issue is booleans are displayed as a values and not checkboxes. It's not pretty but it works, maybe I'll find a fix in the future. Reason is because in original Mustard's code which my UI is based on, boolean custom properties were never really booleans in the first place but value nodes.  In the future, booleans will be actual booleans if I need some.

All in all that's about 600 new lines of code compared to the non unified UI for a total of 3100 lines. Original code from Mustard must be less than 5% now...never thought I'd be able to achieve this one day.