Setup character after import version 1.1

 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. Buttons that logically belong together are grouped into boxes, which are described in the various sections of this document.

 Corrections

 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. The Merge Rigs button merges all selected rigs to the active one. Since the main character rig is usually active after import, the quick way to do this is to press A-key twice (to deselect and select everything) and then press Merge Rigs.

However, some armatures require special attention, due to additional bones and foot poses.

We see the rigs in the outliner. The character rig is simply called Ana (the same name as we gave her in Daz Studio), and the clothes rigs 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 modifiers have also been changed so the character rig moves the clothes as well.

The armor has an extra bone that moves 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, with the armor selected and Ana active. Whereas the original character bones are located on armature layer 1, the new bone appears on layer 2, but this can be changed with the value of Extra Layer. The selection order is important; if the rigs where selected in the opposite order, the cape bone would appear on layer 1, and those of Ana's bones that do not belong to the armor rig, such as the face and legs, would be on layer 2.

The boots with high heels pose new challenges. We see that the feet are not inside the boots, as they should. To fix this, first undo the strange foot pose by selecting all bones and press Alt-R.

Then select the boots and shift-select the character (the armatures, not the meshes), and press Copy Poses. The copies the pose from the last selected non-active rig to the active one.

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.

The two remaining buttons in this section become active when a mesh is selected. Let us load a new version of Ana, this time with the Mesh Fitting option set to Morphs. To distinguish her from the previous version, Clothes Color was set to blue.

There are now many shapekeys to the right. To apply all morphs to all selected meshes, press Apply morphs.

The shapekeys are now gone, but the clothes do not fit perfectly, in particular the corset. We can easily fix that if we can obtain a correct version of the mesh. Here it is easy because the mesh imported with obj or dae fitting works. In other cases one may be able to use Blender's obj or Collada importer. We elaborate on this is the problem fixing page.

Select the correct, brown corset and shift-select the faulty, blue corset to make it active, and press Fit Mesh To Other.

The blue corset now fits. This button has side effects on the mesh used for fitting, e.g. removing an armature modifier and object transforms, so make sure that you don't need the mesh afterwards. A copy can always be made first.

Materials

 

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 since they have different materials. 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.

A DAZ character has many materials, and sometimes several of them are identical. There is no reason to keep several copies of the same material. The button Merge Materials combine identical material into a single one. In this case, the Ears and Eyesocket materials turns out to be identical to the Face material, so these three materials are combined.

However, by combining materials you lose the option to modify them individually later. E.g., the Merge Material button sometimes combines the Lips and Face materials, which makes it impossible to later add makeup by changing the diffuse map of the lips only.

The DAZ Importer does not necessarily handle makeup very well, but it can be changed in Blender. Select the material that you want to change and press Load Makeup.

In the file selector, select an image file with the new makeup. The file names usually hints about which body part the texture applies to.

And here the Lips material has been changed by adding a new image texture in the diffuse channel.

Instead of using the Load Makeup button, in this case we could simply have replaced the image in the first, diffuse texture. However, makeup can also be things like tattoos and wounds, which may have specular and normal maps associated to them, and then it can be convenient to have a single button to press.

The DAZ Importer creates materials for the render engine that was active when the character was imported. However, what if you want to change the render engine later? One option is to import the character again, with a different setting for the render engine, but then you lose all work in Blender. Instead you can update the materials for the active render engine. The button is located at the bottom of the Materials group and is labelled Update for BLENDER_RENDER or Update for CYCLES, depending on which is the current render engine. Blender Game is treated like Blender Render

 Here is a comparison of renders in Blender Internal and Cycles. Ana was imported with Blender Internal as the active render engine, and the materials were later converted to Cycles.

Disclaimer: This button is of course not a general tool for converting between Blender Internal and Cycles materials. It only works for materials generated by the DAZ Importer. Some quality can be lost in translation, so it is generally a good idea to import the character using the render engine that you intend to use.

Morphs

The next group deals with morphs, in particular face morphs. The word morph should be understood in a generalized sense. In Genesis and Genesis 2 characters, face morphs are implemented as real morphs, which translate into shapekeys in Blender. In contrast, Genesis3 has a face rig and facial posing is done with bones instead.

When a Genesis 3 character is loaded, the individual face bones can be posed, but this possibility disappears when morphs are loaded, because those are implemented as properties that drive the face bones, and a driven bone can not be moved. To enable the possibility to tweak expressions on top of the basic expressions set by properties, we can add an extra layer of face bones which are parented to the driven bones.

To achieve this, press Add Extra Face Bones. The face bones disappear.

However, the bones are not gone, only moved to a different layer. On layer 2 we find the posable face bones. Layer 31 is populated by the original, driven bones. That layer is best hidden because the bones on it can not be posed anyway.

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.

In Genesis and Genesis 2 characters, where facial posing is implemented with shapekeys, 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. Note that negative values sometimes make sense. 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, and the Remove Units removes the face units drivers from this character.

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.
• Prefix: Only load files whose names start with a certain string, such as "PHM" (Partial Head Morph). In the illustration we could have set Prefix to "JCM" to only load the four morphs starting with that string.
• 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.
• First Word Category: Ignore the Category setting and deduce instead category from the first word in the file names. This is useful if you load all morphs in a directory and the first word in the file names is a body part, such as Eyes, Mouth, etc.

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.

The properties in individual categories can be hidden by toggling the corresponding checkbox off. The buttons Open All Categories and Close All Categories shows and hides all categories.

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.

Low-poly Versions

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.

• Iterations: The Daz Importer uses Blender's Decimate modifier, set to Unsubdivide, and this number of iterations. The default is 2. An even number of iterations generally works better.
• Apply Morphs: This is the same button as in the Corrections section. Low-poly versions can only be made of meshes without shapekeys, so this is convenient to quickly be able to apply all shapekeys.
• Add Low-Poly Versions: Add low-poly versions of all selected meshes. The low-poly mesh will be called mesh name + "_Lodn", where n is the number of iterations.
  
• Make All Selected Low-Poly: Replace all selected meshes by low-poly versions. The mesh names remains the same, and the original high-poly meshes are lost.
• Make All Low-Poly: Replace all meshes in the scene by low-poly versions.
• Add Push: Add a Push shapekey to the selected meshes. This shapekey move all vertices outwards 1 cm in the normal direction.

The low-poly code uses Blender's decimation modifier, set to Unsubsurface. Iterations is the number of iterations in the modifier. The default value 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 Add 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 Selected Low-poly to replace these meshes with low-poly versions. This time we set Iterations to four, because these clothes are quite densely meshed.

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 final button in this section is useful for fixing clothes that don't fit, especially if the character was imported with the Mesh Fitting setting set to Auto.

Here is such an example., where the corset is clearly too tight for Ana. To fix this, press the Add Push button. However, we should first apply the existing shapekeys with the Apply Morphs button. Pushing moves each vertex in the normal direction, and existing shapekeys are not taken into account.

The previous shapekeys are gone, and a Push shapekey appears instead. The value of this shapekey is the normal distance measured in centimeters.

Change the value of the Push shapekey until the corset is large enough. Adding a push to a mesh does not fix every fitting problem, but sometimes it can be a quick fix. You can of course also edit the meshes in edit mode.

Save Local Textures

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.

Merge Anatomy

In practice, this is almost exclusively done with genitalia. In order to merge anatomy to the human, the anatomy must of course first be exported from DAZ Studio. We therefore go back to DAZ Studio and save a new version of Ana. To the nude mesh with hair we add earrings and genitalia. We also add a top and shorts (hidden in the illustration below), primarily because I am unsure how Blogger reacts to nudity.

Save the character ana-night.duf and export the corresponding Collada file, ana-night.dae. Using the .obj format does not work with genitalia, because the Wavefront exporter mysteriously merges the genital and human meshes, which wrecks havoc for the DAZ importer.

Import the new .duf file into Blender and merge all rigs.

Load all morphs that you need, both for Ana herself and also for her genitals. This must be done before the anatomy has been merged, because merging meshes changes the vertex number. Select the genitals and import morphs.

Load all morphs belonging to the genitalia mesh. I should have changed the category from the default General to Genitalia, but forgot to do so. Unfortunately, this mistake is not so easy to correct afterwards.

Now select both the character and the genitals meshes, and press Merge Anatomy. The importer figures out which mesh is a character by looking at its fingerprint (the number of vertices, edges and faces), so selection order is not important.

The genitalia is now merged with the body mesh. The hidden crotch vertices in the original body mesh have been removed, and duplicates along the genitalia border have been removed, making the integration of the two meshes seamless.

The merged mesh keeps the genitalia materials and shapekeys. The shapekeys are controlled by rig properties in the Custom Morphs panel, under the category General (since I forgot to change that when the morphs were imported).

Visibility

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 there is no body beneath.

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.