Export a character from DAZ to Blender

This document describes the process in the outdate version 1.0.

1. Export from DAZ Studio

In DAZ Studio, add a character and give her hair and some clothes. Also shape the character to the desired shape.

The pictures above shows our character with clothes before and after she has been shaped.

Save the character as a DSON User File (*.duf), which is DAZ Studio's internal format. We will call here Ana , so we choose the file name Ana.duf. It may also be a good idea to rename the character in DAZ Studio.

The .duf file contains information about the character shape in the form of morphs. However, I have not understood how DAZ Studio fits clothes, although it must be possible to do so. As a work-around we have to export the character, either as a Wavefront object file (*.obj), or as a Collada file (*.dae). It is usually sufficient to choose one of them, but the DAZ exporters are not perfect and sometimes one or both of them fail to export the proper information.

To export Ana as a Wavefront obj file, select File > Export and choose Wavefront object (*.obj). The file must be exported to the same directory as ana.duf was saved and have the same name. We therefore choose the filename ana.obj and press Save. A window with export options appear. Press Show Individual Settings and disable some checkboxes. It is important that Remove Unused Vertices is unchecked, otherwise the settings are not so important (I think). Unchecking options gives a smaller obj file and is preferred unless you want to use the obj file for other purposes as well.

To export Ana as a Collada file is completely analogous. Select File > Export and choose COLLADA (*.dae). Export the file to the same directory as ana.duf and call it ana.dae. Show Individual Settings and make sure that Remove unused vertices, Ignore invisible nodes, and Merge Skeletons are disabled, and that Bake scale is enabled.

2. Import into Blender

After the import-daz add-on has been enabled, we can import the duf file into Blender. There are two ways to invoke the DAZ importer; either press the Import File button at the top of the Setup menu in the DAZ Runtime tab, or go to File > Import > DAZ Native (.duf, .dsf). Since we almost always need to do further work on the character in the Setup panel after it has been imported, I prefer to use the button.

A file selector window appears. Navigate to the file ana.duf which we saved in DAZ Studio, select it and press Import File. But before importing, consider the settings to the left.

• Scale: Factor to scale locations in the DAZ file, default 0.1. DAZ uses centimeters, so the scale 0.1 corresponds to decimeters, which make a typical character fit nicely in the Blender viewport.
• Z Up: Convert from the DAZ convention (Y axis points up) to Blender's convention (Z axis points up). This is enabled by default.
• Rename: Rename objects based on the file name.
• Create Groups: Create a group named after the file name, and add all imported objects to it. This is primarily useful for file linking,.
• Clothes Fitting: Method used for fitting clothes to the character.
• None: No clothes fitting. All shaping of the character is ignored.
• Obj File: Fit the character and clothes using the Wavefront .obj file that was exported from DAZ Studio.
• Dae File: Fit the character and clothes using the Collada .dae file that was exported from DAZ Studio.
• Color Choice: The color assigned to different materials. This only affects materials where the diffuse color is controlled by a texture, so only the viewport appearance is changed, not rendered images.
• White: Use the colors defined in the DAZ file, almost always white.
• Random: Assign random colors to materials, to easily see which faces are assigned to which material.
• Guess: Guess a color depending on the material name. If the material describes skin (the material name contain words like arm, leg, face, torso or head) it is given the Skin Color defined below, otherwise it receives the Clothes Color.
• Guess, Random: Skin materials receive the Skin Color, whereas other materials are assigned a random color.
• Skin Color: The color assigned to skin materials.
• Clothes Color: The color assigned to other materials.
• Verbosity: Controls the amount of information printed in the terminal window. The default is 1, higher values may be useful for debugging.

Here are three versions of Ana, imported with different settings of Clothes Fitting and Color Choice. We notice that when there is not clothes fitting, Ana is shorter and less buxom, because the shaping we did in DAZ Studio has been ignored. Fitting the character to the exported .obj and .dae files work equally well in  this case.

We need to fix a number of problems before we can start to pose Ana.  This is done in the Setup panel below the Import File button. The Setup panel is arranged in chronological order. You don't have to carry out the tasks in exactly this order, but some steps are destructive and make it impossible to go back.

 Each piece of clothing is equipped with its own armature. Normally we want to join all armatures which control both the character and all clothes. There is a button for doing this, but some armatures require special attention.

We see the rigs in the outliner. The character rig is simply called Ana (the name was taken from the .duf file), and the clothes rig are parented under it. Select all the clothes rigs, except for the arm armor and the boots, and then shift-select Ana to make it active. Set Extra Bones to Ignore and press Merge Rigs.

The clothes rigs disappear and the clothes meshes are now parented directly under the character rig. The armature modifier have also been changed to the character rig moves the clothes as well.

The armor has an extra bone to move the cape. We want this bone to be added to the character rig. To this end, we change the value of Extra Bones to Merge and press Merge. Whereas the original character bones are located on armature layer 1, the new bone appears on layer 2, but this could be changed with the value of Extra Layer.

The boots with high heels pose new challenges. We see that the feet are not inside the boots, as they should. To fix this, select the boots and shift-select the character (the armatures, not the meshes), and press Copy Poses.

The feet are now inside the feet. With the character selected, press Apply Rest Poses to make this the new rest pose for the feet.

It sometimes happens that the feet mesh is inside high-heeled shoes but the foot bones are outside. In that case we can often use Copy Bones rather than copy poses. Copy Bones changes the bone locations in Edit mode, without moving the mesh.

The toe bones are not very useful when the feet are covered by shoes, and usually not when the feet are bare either. To replace the individual toe bones with a single bone, press Merge Toes.

Finally, the character and boots rigs match and can be joined. Select the boots and shift-select the character, press Merge Rigs with Extra Bones set to either Ignore or Merge.

We want to change the viewport color of the boots assigned by the importer. Select the boots mesh (the rig is gone since the previous step). In the Colors section, change New Color to something black and press Change Colors. The boots are now black in the viewport.

One can of course edit the material colors directly in the material context. However, DAZ meshes often have several materials, and changing the diffuse color many times is tedious. The button in the Setup panel changes all materials of a given mesh at once.

Let us try to give Ana some green lizard skin. Select Ana_Mesh , change New Color to bright green, and press Change Skin Colors.

Ana now turns green, but eyes, lips and eyelashes are not affected. Note that this action changed the diffuse colors of more than ten skin materials at once, something that would have been quite tedious to do directly in the material editor. If we had pressed the Change Colors button rather than Change Skin Colors, all of Ana would have turned green, including eyes and lips.

The diffuse color only affects the appearance in the viewport. When we render the colors are controlled by textures, which are not affected. Materials that do not have diffuse color textures are ignored by the Change (Skin) Color buttons, so the rendered image is never changed.

Well, we decide that Ana looks better with skin-colored skin, so undo the last few steps until the skin color is back to normal. The next step is to make a low-poly version of the character, which used to be called proxy mesh in MakeHuman. The low-poly mesh can have several uses, e.g. to speed up posing speed. The idea is to hide all the original meshes while posing for maximum speed, and then hide the low-poly mesh and unhide the original meshes when rendering.

The low-poly code uses Blender's decimation modifier, set to Unsubsurface. Iterations is the number of iterations in the modifier, and Layer is the layer on which the low-poly mesh is placed. By default Iterations is 2, which yields a mesh where the typical mesh spacing is twice as large. It general it is desirable to use an even number of iterations, because if Iterations is odd the faces will be rotated ninety degrees.

Press the button Make Low-poly Version. A low-poly mesh is created and placed on the specified layer. It has the same parent and armature modifier as the original mesh. It also uses the same materials, so it looks the same when rendered, with an important difference described below.

Here is a comparison of the original and low-poly meshes. Ideally the number of faces should be reduced by a factor four, but in practice this goal is not reached because some faces are triangulated. Increasing the number of iterations will reduce the face count further, but it will become increasingly less efficient because more and more quad faces are lost to triangles.

The making of low-poly meshes is not restricted to the character herself. Select all clothes meshes in the outliner and press Make Low-poly Version to create low-poly versions of these meshes. This time we set Iterations to four, because these clothes are quite densely meshed, and Layer to five.

The low-poly character with low-poly clothes looks like this. The names of the low-poly versions end with "_lodn", where n is the number of iterations.

We can now pose the low-poly version with high performance. When the pose is perfected, we switch to the layers where the original meshes are located, and render.

Here is a comparison between renders of the original and low-poly meshes. The low-poly versions could be usable as they are in real-time applications, were it not for an unfortunate misfeature in the decimation modifier: it does not respect UV boundaries. If we hide the clothes and only render the low-poly character, we see that skin looks ok except for some ugly white stripes. This happens when a seam in the original mesh crosses in the middle of some faces in the decimated mesh. Half of the face's corners then belongs to one UV island and the rest to another, and the face is stretched over random parts of the texture.

Let us hope that the Blender developers fix the decimation modifier so it respects UV seams. Until that happens, texturing the low-poly meshes must be done by hand.

The next step is to add some standard morphs, so we can pose the face. Select the rig or the character, and press Load Face Units, Load Expressions, and Load Visemes to automatically load the standard morphs provided by DAZ. Of course, you don't need to load all types of morphs; if know that your character will only display overall expressions, but she will never talk nor need to display finer emotions, only Load Expressions and ignore the other buttons.

Ana is a Genesis 3 character, where facial posing is done with a face rig, so what we referred to as "Morphs" are actually facial rig poses. In contrast, in Genesis and Genesis 2 characters, facial posing is implemented with real morphs, which translate into shapekeys in Blender. In that case it is important that all morphs are loaded before the character mesh is edited, e.g. by pressing the Merge Anatomy button below. Real morphing relies on vertex numbers, so they must note be changed before the shapekeys are created.

Three new panels now appear at the bottom of the DAZ Runtime tab when the rig is selected.  In the Face Units panel we can set the values of the individual face units. The Pin button to the right set the value of the morph to one and zeros all other face units morphs; morphs in other categories, such as expressions and visemes, are not affected. The Clear Units button zeros all face unit morphs.

The DAZ importer knows about the Automatic Keyframe Insert button (the red dot at the timeline). If this button is active, keyframes are automatically inserted when any property in this panel is changed.

The Expression panel works analogously. Genesis 3 only comes with a small set of basic expressions, but Genesis and Genesis 2 have much more.

Finally, the Visemes panel allows you to do lipsync. The Load Moho button imports a moho (.dat) file which contains a lip sync animation. A free tool that generates moho files is Papagayo, which can be downloaded from lostmarble.com.

If the rig is selected, the DAZ importer will automatically attempt to load morphs to the associated character mesh. However, we can load morphs to any mesh, provided that the vertex count matches the morph file. Select the arm armor and press the Import Morph(s) button.

In the file selector, navigate to the place where morphs for the arm armor is located (this should be in one of the DAZ libraries), select a .duf or .dsf file, and press Import Morph(s). The import options to the right are

• Load All: Load the morphs from all DAZ Studio files in the present directory. The "morph" is either a proper morph, corresponding to a shapekey in Blender, or a pose for the rig.
• Use Drivers: Drive the value of the morph with an object property of the parent rig. This property is displayed in the Custom Morphs panel when the rig is selected.
• Category: This is used to group related morphs together.

In this case, we disable Load All and enable Use Drivers, and set the category to Armor since it will affect the armor rather than Ana herself.

A new panel called Custom Morphs appears at the bottom of the DAZ Runtime tab when the armature is selected. It currently only contains the single category Armor with the single property JCMLSD. The illustration above shows the effect of setting this property to zero and one.

Press Import Morph(s) again with the arm armor selected, but this time enable Load All in the import options. All morphs in the given directory are loaded, and appear in the Custom Morphs panel.

Cleary the Custom Morphs panel can become quite cluttered with many morphs. Therefore we can hide entire categories by disable the corresponding checkboxes, which makes it easier to work with the unhidden morphs.

The morphs correspond to shapekeys in the mesh. If the Use Drivers option was enabled when the morphs were imported, as was the case here, the shapekey values are driven by rig properties. One advantage of this is that the morphs work with file linking; if the character is linked into another file and the rig is proxified, the morph values can be animated in the scene file.

If you have not already done so, now is the time to save the Blender file, because it must be saved before the next step.

So far all textures are located in their original locations in the DAZ libraries. If you intend to paint on the textures, or move the Blender file to a computer where DAZ Studio is not installed (or all used assets are not installed), you need local copies of the textures. Press Save Local Textures to do so. This command creates a folder called "textures" in the same directory as the blend file, and copies all used textures there. The absolute file links to the textures are also replaced by relative ones, so the textures will be found even if the blend file and the textures folder are moved elsewhere.

Here is the folder with the textures used by Ana.

Parts of the skin is covered by clothes, but the character mesh is still there right below. This may be a problem because the skin may poke through the clothes in some places. The simplest solution is simply to delete the hidden vertices. This is also the best option if you know that the character will always be dressed in the same way, because removing vertices will increase performance. However, if Ana will take off some of her clothes at some stage, it will look strange if no body is there.

Another solution is to use mask modifiers, and the DAZ importer provides some support to facilitate this. Select the mesh that will be covered by clothes, normally the character itself, and press Create Masks And Modifiers.

A mask modifier is created for each piece of clothing (for each child of the character's parent rig). The modifier uses a vertex group called "Mask_" + clothing name, and the corresponding empty vertex groups is also created.

A few DAZ assets are able to create the vertex groups automatically; this is the case if the corresponding .dsf file contains a "graft" structure. In particular, separate anatomy often has this property. If the vertex groups are already created during import, we could have pressed Create Mask Modifiers to create modifiers using the existing vertex groups.

So far the mask modifiers don't hide anything because the mask vertex groups are empty. In edit mode, select the vertices that should be hidden by the boots, and assign these vertices to the Mask_Boots vertex groups. When we toggle back into object mode, the skin under the boots is now invisible.

Repeat the procedure for the clothes that cover a significant part of the body, in this case the corset and the pants. Delete the superfluous mask modifiers and vertex groups. If we hide the clothes in object mode, we see the holes in Ana's body.

 Select the armature and press Add Visibility Drivers. Before doing this step, all low-poly meshes were deleted except for Ana_Lod2.

The Visibility panel appears at the bottom of the DAZ Runtime tab when the rig is selected. There is an entry for each mesh where its visibility can be toggled on and off. In the outliner you can see that the meshes' visibility in the viewport and in render are now driven, and the corresponding controls are purple. The mask modifiers are also controlled by these rig properties, so hiding a piece of clothing turns off the corresponding mask modifier.

Turn off the visibility of all meshes except for Ana_Lod2. We can now pose the character with moderate overhead. When it is time to render, the low-poly mesh can be switched off and all the high-poly meshes switched on. This procedure on works with file linking, because visibility is controlled by rig properties.