1. Export from DAZ Studio
In this tutorial we will describe some
problems that can appear and how to get around them. It will also
illustrate the use of a few more buttons in the Setup panel.
We
will use the same Ana character as in the previous tutorial, but this
time her daytime work as a warrior is over and she is ready for more
nocturnal activities. To the nude mesh with hair we add earrings and
genitalia, which both will cause problems during Blender import. We also
add a top and shorts (hidden in the illustration below), primarily
because I am unsure how Blogger reacts to nudity.
Note
that the earrings are bone parented to the Head bone. Save the
character ana-night.duf and export the corresponding Wavefront and
Collada files, ana-night.obj and ana-night.dae.
2. Import into Blender
Import ana-night.duf into Blender as
described in the previous tutorial, settings the Clothes Fitting option
to either Obj File or Dae File. If Clothes Fitting were set to None,
both the earrings and the genitalia would be placed correctly, but then
all the shaping is lost.
Here
is the result of fitting to the Wavefront file. We notice that both the
earrings and the genitals are displaced vertically, but in different
directions. The top of the earrings are located above the ear, wheras
the genitals are hanging below the crotch.
Here is the result of Collada import. The genitals are located correctly, but the earrings are closed to the ground.
We
will use the first case, fitting to the obj file, despite the fact that
it did not succeed with neither the earrings nor the genitalia. Let us
first understand the origin of the problem. Ana has longer legs than the
default character, and therefore there is a vertical offset between the
original and final locations. In the earrings this vertical offset is
counted twice. First, the vertex locations in the obj file are offset,
and second, the Head bone has moved the same distance. Since the
earrings are parented to the Head bone, the origin of the earring mesh
has moved away from the origin.
This
problem is easily fixed. Snap Cursor to Center, select both earrings,
and snap Selection to Cursor. The earring objects are now centered at
the origin, and the earrings are correctly placed hanging in the
earlobes.
The
DAZ importer failed to find the genitalia object in ana-night.obj,
because DAZ Studio's Wavefront exporter does not export genitals as a
separate object, but merges it with the body mesh in some complicated
manner. Fortunately, we know that the Collada exporter does export the
genitals correctly, so we can use the vertex location from there. Move
to an unused layer and invoke the built-in Collada importer (File >
Import > Collada (Default) (*.dae)) and import ana-night.dae with the
default settings.
Two
things are very striking with the imported character: the earrings are
huge and not parented to the RootNode, and the character is very small.
No wonder the DAZ importer failed to fit the earrings correctly!
Delete
the useless earrings and select the RootNode object. The Collada
importer converts locations to meters, presumably because it is
maintained by the Second Life community which uses meters. Since the DAZ
importer uses decimeters by default, the RootNode object must be scaled
ten times. If you have imported a character using some other scale than
0.1, the scale factor must be changed accordingly.
Select
the Collada genitals and Clear Parent, while Keeping Transformation.
Because the other Collada objects are not needed anymore, invert the
selection on the Collada layer and delete the rest.
Enable
both the Collada layer and the layer used by DAZ importer. Select the
Collada genitalia, and then shift-select the other genitalia to make it
active. It is easy to distingish between the two genital meshes, because
the one imported by the DAZ importer belongs to a group and is green,
whereas the Collada genitalia does not and is orange.
Press the Fit Mesh To Other button. The green mesh now snaps to the orange one.
The
orange genitals have served their purpose and can now be deleted. The
mesh name should end with "-skinInstance", because that is the
convention used by of the Collada exporter.
It turns
out that the fitted genitalia no longer is a child of the Ana rig. This
appears to be a bug and should be fixed in future.
As
the the previous tutorial, we next select all armatures and press Merge
Rigs. There is no need for extra care about the feet, because Ana has
taken off her boots.
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).
