Materials Section version 1.3


  • New Color. The new color used by the next two buttons.
  • Change Colors. For all selected meshes, change the color of all materials with textures.
  • Change Skin Colors. For all selected meshes, change the color of all materials representing skin, but keep the color of other meshes.
  • Merge Materials. For all selected meshes, merge materials that are deemed identical (same textures etc.)
  • Change Bump Strength. For all selected meshes, multiply the bump strength of all materials with bump textures.
  • Bump Factor. Multiplier for bump strength.
  • Change SSS Radius. For all selected meshes, multiply the SSS radius of all materials using subsurface scattering.
  • SSS Radius Factor. Multiplier for SSS radius.
  • Reset Material. Reset the bump and SSS radius factors to one.
 This section changes some material settings. Everything can of course be changed in the compositor (for Cycles materials) or in the material and texture contexts. However, meshes imported from DAZ Studio often have many materials - a Genesis 8 character has sixteen - and updating each of those manually would be tedious.

 Change Colors


Directly after import, all clothes meshes (including the hair) have the same reddish brown color, provided that the import option Viewport Color was set to Guess. To make Maria's appearence agree more with the rendered image, we select her bra and shorts, set New Color to pink, and press Change Colors. The selected clothes change color.


In the same way, we change the color of the stockings and shoes to light gray, and change the hair color to a slightly darker shade of brown. The agreement with the final render is better.

The change color button only affects materials with a texture in the diffuse channel and hence never changes renders.

Change Skin Colors


This button also changes viewport colors, but only for skin materials. If we turn New Color to green and press Change Skin Color, Maria's skin turns green but her eyes and lips stay the same.

Merge Materials


Sometimes meshes have several materials which are in fact identical; they use the same textures and have the same settings. To save resources, we press Merge Materials to combine identical materials. The sports bra had two materials, but after the merge it has only one.

Note that merging materials removes the possibility of edit the different materials separately.

Material tweaking

DAZ's Iray shader has many options which do not readily translate into Blender. This is particularly true if we had chosen to use Principled Shaders in the Cycles section of the import options. The bump strength in Genesis 8 is much larger than for Genesis 3, to compensate for effects introduced by translucency and subsurface scattering. Whereas these effects are reasonably covered by standard Cycles materials, the bump strength becomes far too strong if principled shaders are used.


The left image shows the result of importing Maria with Principled Shader turned on and both the Bump and SSS Radius Factors set to unity. The skin is horrible.

In the middle image, we have reduced the bump strength to 10% of the original (0.15 vs 1.5), by setting Bump Factor to 0.1 and pressing Change Bump Strength. Better.

Alternatively, we can reduce the bumps by increasing the SSS Radius. In the right image, we increased to radius by a factor 20 (from 1.2 mm to 2.4 cm). Although not physically correct, this also reduces the apparent bumps.

A combination of reducing the bump and increasing the SSS radius may produce the best results.

The last button resets the materials back to their original state after import.