HD Meshes and Geografts, Revisited

We noted in a previous post that HD export does not work so well for characters with geografts, like genitals. The reason is that the export script exports the cached geometry, which is what DAZ Studio displays in viewports and renders. Normally all geografts have already been merged with their parent meshes when DAZ Studio displays them, so that is what is being exported to Blender.

However, frequent commenter engetudouiti pointed out that if we enable the geometry editor tool before exporting, the HD meshes are exported correctly. This works because the geometry editor keeps the graft item fit to actor, but at same time separates meshes, so the base and graft meshes keep their individual current subdivision resolution.

So here is the recipe for exporting HD meshes with geografts.

Enable the Geometry Editor in the Tools menu.

Select the base mesh in the outliner

and then select each grafted items. There is a flash in the viewport each time a mesh enters the geometry editor. The View SubD Level should be the same for the grafted items as for the base mesh.

And finally we Export HD To Blender and save the scene as a duf file.

Open Blender and import the scene. We notice that unlike last time, there is no warning that the lower subdivision levels cannot be rebuilt.

The base character mesh has a multiresolution modifier...

and so has the geograft.

We can now proceed to add morphs and merge the geograft to the character. The merging tool may have some problem to identify the correct vertices to merge, because even though merging is done at zero subdivision level, the exported mesh is still smoothed. As we have noted before, high resolution at zero subdivision is not the same as base resolution. However, in practice this does not seem to be a problem.