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.
From this point, we can add morphs to the genitals and merge them with the body as described in the
Setup tutorial section on Merging Anatomy.
3. Solving problems after import with Bones and Auto settings.
In Daz Studio
After Import with Mesh Fitting set to Auto. The character mesh is too small and does not fit the bones. The clothes meshes have the right size. It is not clear to me why this happens, but it can be fixed by giving the character a uniform scale. Unlock the corresponding Transform Lock (which was set by the Daz Importer) and scale the character a factor 1.031.
Now the character has the right scale, but the in particular the top does not fit the breasts. To try to fix this, we can select the top and undershirt meshes and press the Add Push button.
This adds a push shapekey to both meshes.The undershirt can be fixed by giving the Push shapekey a small value, but the top must be edited by hand.
In this case a better alternative would be to import the character with Mesh Fitting set to Obj File or Dae File.
Another problem which sometimes appears with Bones and Morphs fitting it the
ugly face syndrome. It arises in Genesis 3 characters which have a lot of facial bones, which for some reason can be moved around. However, not all Genesis 3 characters seem to be affected.
Here is a particularly ugly face. In this case the problem can be fixed by setting the value of the SkinBinding modifier (always the last shapekey) to zero, or by removing the shapekey altogether.
However, sometimes the SkinBinding shapekey is necessary. If we turn it off for the hair, top and shorts, these meshes fall down below the character.
