The armatures imported from DAZ Studio are
straightforward forward-kinematics rigs, and are not so convenient for
manual animation. The DAZ importer allows you to automatically convert
the imported rigs to two more animator-friendly rigs: MHX and Rigify.
- Convert to MHX. Convert the active rig to MHX. The current rig is deleted.
- Convert to Rigify Convert the active rig to Rigify. The current rig is deleted.
- Delete Metarig. When converting to Rigify, an intermediate
metarig is created. This is deleted at the end of the process unless
this option is unchecked.
- Add IK goals
- Add Winder
- Group
- Add To Group
- Remove From Group
The MHX rig
The MHX (MakeHuman eXchange) rigs was developed by myself when I was working on the MakeHuman project.
Documentation about the MHX rig.
Eventually the documentation should be moved here, for an MHX-converted
DAZ character behave slightly differently from a MakeHuman one, but for
the time being the MakeHuman documentation will have to do.
After pressing Convert To MHX, Ana's rig is replaced by an MHX rig, recognizable by the bones' custom shapes.
Face
bones carry over to the new rig, so it is still possible to do facial
posing in the Face Units, Expressions and Visemes panels. Expressions
can be tweaked with the face bones on the Face layer (armature layer 9).
Three new panels appear when an
MHX rig is selected: MHX Layers, MHX FKIK Switch, and MHX Properties.
They are described in the
MHX documentation.
Rigify
DAZ characters can also be rerigged with the popular Rigify
add-on by Nathan Vegdahl. Links to documentation about Rigify in
general:
Official Rigify documentation
Blenderartist thread
First we must make sure that the Rigify add-on is enabled. It is bundled with Blender and is found in the Rigging category.
Here
is the rigified version of Ana. Runtime controls for Rigify are found
at the bottom of the "N-panel" to the right of the viewport. Facial
bones and rig properties are copied to the Rigify rig, so face units,
expressions
and visemes continue to work, including the extra layer of tweak bones.
The face bones can be found on armature layer 2 in the rigified
armature.
There were some problems with Rigify
conversion in version 1.0 of the DAZ Importer, but they have been ironed
out in version 1.1.
