Daz Studio to Blender Workflow Diary

[someonesomewhere2]

Daz Studio to Blender Workflow Diary

[Updated 05/31/2024]

Background

So, I've been deep-diving into how to create VNs using some of the regular tools (Daz Studio for making characters and RenPy for making the game). Great workflow, for the most part. I've learned much about Daz, RenPy, and a few other tools as I've gotten deeper into it. One of the things I've learned, and this is news to no one, is that Daz kinda sucks for anything unrelated to making characters. The posing tools can be massively improved by using third-party plugins, but overall, it is great at one thing and one thing only: creating character models. The animation tools drive me insane. You can use it to make basic animations, but anything more than that, you're banging your head against the wall.

Idea

So, for any VN project that requires static assets (still images with words popping up to tell the story), Daz/RenPy is fine. I want to make more dynamic content for some of the larger projects I'm planning; for that, I need better tools. So, I've decided that I am going to spend some time trying to perfect the Daz to Blender (and maybe from Blender to Unity?) workflow. And rather than keeping everything I learn in my head, I'd like to use this thread to document what I am learning. Maybe it will help someone or be buried under all the threads in this forum. No clue. But honestly, a forum thread is more user-friendly than using Notion to keep all my notes.

Updates

I make no promises on the frequency or usefulness of updates. This is a background project, as I have a few smaller projects that I want to ship so I can get my skills up. I'll try to keep whatever is on my head in the thread.

I also make no promises about how informed some things I put in here might be. I am learning as I go. While I'm fairly technical, 3D and graphics are a deep well that people have spent their lives learning. So, TAKE ANYTHING SAID AND DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS HAPPENING. I'm happy to point someone in the direction, but you should walk your own path. Don't just adjust a setting and not understand what it does to fix something quickly.

 

[someonesomewhere2]

Update 12/31/2023

So here is the setup I've been using

• Daz Studio 4.22
• Blender 3.6.5

Getting from Daz to Blender

So, I tried a couple different things to get the character models from Daz to Blender.

First, I tried using the

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. Well..., the first thing I tried was using the

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bridge plugin. This almost worked. I got the character into Unity and started to animate with

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. But there is an issue as the animations would bend the legs back and look pretty terrible. I believe it's an issue with how Unity handles weights and how the animations in Mixamo are made. Or, more likely, I didn't set it up correctly.

Next was using the Daz to Blender bridge. I had little success with this. Two things tripped me up here: a misunderstanding of how all these tools work and a terrible habit of being impatient. See, after clicking the Daz to Blender bridge, a menu comes up like this:



Well, I must have clicked the "Show FBX Dialog" checkmark and not realized it, so after clicking "Accept," the FBX menu would pop up.



This was not in the YT video I was watching, so I was thrown. But the kicker is the Morphs section in the FBX menu. When I started using this, I was doing what I always do. Try something, and if it doesn't work immediately for the first time, get annoyed and move on. Anyway, the thing that was broken (in my mind at the time) was that for this to work, I had to manually go through and pick all the morphs I had used to make the character, get the names, and manually add them to the list. There are hundreds of these morphs, so I immediately got annoyed and started looking for an alternative.

What I did not realize is that it doesn't work like that at all. You can use those morph exporting tools to export specific morphs into another program to adjust the model, but the model looks the same as it does in Daz when exported out to another program. This is done by "baking" the 3D information. This is a big subject, but it just means saving 3D information for quicker reading the next time. You can also bake the morphs, but I won't get into that.

Quick note

FBX is a file format for 3D objects for anyone new to this world. I usually think of

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since they bought the company that created the format? Maybe. I have no idea. I know that animation software like

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uses this file format for assets.

Exporting to an FBX is another way to export a character into another 3D program. But when I returned to try it out, I was not getting the results I liked.



So shiny! Too shiny. The other issue was that just doing that led to the exported character rig (used for posing and animation) ending up looking like the one below.



Yikes. I could convert this to a

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rig (a blender add-on that makes easy-to-use rigs for posing and animation), but it would have been a huge lift for me at that stage.

Anyway, back to Daz to Blender Bridge. Going back, I gave it another quick try, and now that I am revisiting it, it seems like a good option. Below is a quick render using Daz to Blender Bridge and cycles to render.



It also does a decent job of creating a rig as well.



I'm used to rigify rigs, and using this very quickly was pretty cool. One thing I like about this solution is that, in addition to the process I am now using, there is little to no fixing of things I need to do after I import the model for this to be usable. Yet. It might be that in a month, I want to make an animation, but all the weights are screwed up, so I have to do some weight painting to correct it.

What I settled on

I eventually made my way to

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. A third-party tool that is fairly well-known in this community.

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was fairly simple but did not auto-install the Blender plugin like the Daz to Blender Bridge will do when you go to export. Below is the render in Blender with cycles. It was a little doll-like, but I think that was because of the two-second job I did on the lighting.



I want to do a bunch more tests, but this first part was something I had to experience to learn. I want to organize my thoughts, but I'll discuss fixing the textures when using Evee in Blende in the next post.

Another quick note: The character is not mine but is a character from the game Bound To College by PrideDrawing. I highly recommend it, especially for those more into guy-on-guy stuff.

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[someonesomewhere2]

Update 04/20/2024

I wanted to include this resource because I encountered this a lot when first trying out diffeomorphic.

Here is what happened

The docs for diffeomorphic are awesome and thoroughly detailed. The only issue is that for dumb people like myself who don't read docs, trying to import a character from Daz was a learning journey on its own. I followed some tuts online and ended up defaulting to using the easy Daz importer for Blender rather than the regular importer, which often required additional setup for your asset to be usable.



This caused some issues. One thing I had to dig through was how to correct the eyes, which always seemed to appear white or as mirrors.



It made no sense to me. After some mucking about, I determined I could fix this by selecting the eye moister texture imported from Daz and turning off the alpha setting.



This fixed the issue in my material preview view.



Do you want to know the fun part? All I needed to do was go into rendered view for a better look at the final outcome. The eyes were indeed showing up as I expected without needing to tweak anything—no mirrors.



Now that I am seeing this, though, there's an obvious film over the eyes that I expect to be the alpha channel for the eye moisture texture. Turning that down can get rid of that.



Cool. That film, I doubt, would show up like a film if I were lighting the scene correctly. This is only using the world light turned up, and the exposure boosted. But still a little better.

Please note that I am using Cycles for this as I don't know much about Eevee. The mirrors showed up when using Eevee, but not when using Cycles.

This was a good resource for helping me find that issue:

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[someonesomewhere2]

Update 04/20/2024

Another thing that drove me nuts was posing the imported asset in Blender.

I decided I liked the

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rig better than the Daz rig imported into Blender using diffeomorphic. So whenever I pull in a character, I convert the Daz rig to the Rigify rig.



Diffeomorphic can do all that for you, which is useful as hell. The only issue is this madness.



Now, why is his hand over there? I should expect all the rigging constraints to work. Well, that's A LOT to expect, given that each system uses its own built-in everything to determine a rig's physics. The fact that it works at all is a miracle. After some searching, I found this feature that seemed to clear up issues like this while using IK (inverse kinematics) to pose.

You can adjust the rig properties in the item tab while a node is selected in pose mode. I set the IK Stretch from 0 to 1, solving the weird stretching.






IK and FK are tools used in posing. The MOST BASIC difference is that with IK, children nodes will follow the selected node, and with FK, the children nodes will follow the root node.

This video gives a far better explanation than I can give:

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[someonesomewhere2]

Update 05/31/2024

OK, so one of the things I spent a lot of time on is figuring out how to make sexy time stuff when working with a Daz to Blender workflow. Diffeomorphic does think about this. Genital objects in Daz are geograft, add-ons that replace or add to a figure's mesh. You can bring these in and merge them to the mesh using diffeomorphic. I find merging them the easiest to work with, especially with materials.

Materials

When you merge the geografts, you can merge the materials for the body and the genitals. Generally, in Daz, you want to have the texture maps for the gens to match whatever textures you're using or make your own. Either way, you want it to match. Well, it comes up like this when you don't merge the textures. My boy's honkin' donger looks weird now.



So, if we merge the geografts.



Much better donger.

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makes this way easier to do.

 

[someonesomewhere2]

Update 05/31/2024

Oh, also, working with the rigs for all the bathing suit parts was something I had to wade through.

Doing an import using diffeomorphic does give you bones to work with the parts.



Now I prefer to use a

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, and diffeo lets you convert the rigs it imports into rigify rigs. Useful as hell.



You can also do this in the

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functionality.



However, when I started using the easy import to skip all the finishing steps, I noticed that the points for moving the donger around disappeared. That was until I realized they need to be enabled in the Item tab when posing. They count as "custom" properties.



And now we're back in business.

Morphs

An alternative I found was importing all the morphs I'm used to using from Daz into Blender using diffeomorphic. In the Daz importer, there's a panel for importing favorite morphs, morph presets, and custom morphs.



With this, I can navigate to the morphs I like using in Daz and import them into Blender. Finding them is pretty straightforward. You just go to the morphs in Daz and find out where Daz stores them in the Parameter Settings panel.





Then, click the Custom Morphs button, navigate to the desired morphs, and pick the ones you like. I now have all the morphs I want.



Daz is bad at plenty of things, but there is a vast morph library available from first and third parties. So, having those tools in Blender coming from Daz is useful.

This is especially useful for me with geografts like the

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. Now, I don't mess with lady parts all that often, so trying to square an add-on for Miss Angela was a lot. Look at all them rig points.



Like in real life, the lady parts are far more complicated than the dongers. So, being able to import specific morphs was a far easier lift for me than having to pose all those points for anything I might be making.