Export from DAZ Studio version 1.2

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 scene 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. Also rename the character in DAZ Studio. This is important because this name will appear in Blender, and we don't want all our characters to be called Genesis 3 Female.

The .duf file contains information about the character shape in the form of morphs, but I have not fully understood how this is implemented, and in particular not how clothes are fitted to morphed characters. Instead of trying to reproduce the final vertex and bone locations inside Blender, these basic data are exported by a custom script to a .json file, which is then used in Blender to recreate the final meshes.

First make sure that the DAZ Studio plug-in is installed, following the instructions here.


From the File menu, select Export Basic Data.


Export a .json file with the same name as the .duf file, and located in the same directory. Since Ana lives in the file ana.duf, the file name becomes ana.json.


After a little while we receive a message that the file has been saved. This concludes what we must do on the DAZ Studio side.

Exporting the basic data as a .json file is a new addition to the DAZ importer. In earlier versions the information was transferred using Wavefront (.obj) or Collada (.dae) files instead. However, these standard formats have some problems. In DAZ importer 1.2 it is still possible to fit meshes using .obj or .dae files, but their use is deprecated. For information about these pipelines, see the documentation for version 1.1.