Diffeomorphic Add-ons Version 4.1.0 Released.

It is time for new stable releases. This time six separate add-ons are released at the same time, so you only need to download the add-ons that you actually need. As announced previously, the add-on version is now synced with Blender, so the latest version of Blender that these add-ons have been tested with is Blender 4.1.0. They have also briefly been tested in Blender 2.83, and there is a good chance that they will work with intermediate Blender versions too.


DAZ Importer
The DAZ Importer is a Blender add-on for importing native DAZ Studio files (.duf, .dsf) into Blender. It also contains some tools to make the assets more animation friendly.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/58f6obzmh063ae9d88ugg/import_daz_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=qnq6cu0fx4qki9rpxlu95o9h1
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Home


MHX Runtime System
The MHX Runtime System is a Blender add-on for posing the MHX rig, that can be generated by the DAZ Importer.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/869tqthaajnznk2vaka2f/mhx_rts_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=94tfjkaiofzmkwm5ff2gs0m8t
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/mhx_rts/wiki/Home


BVH and FBX Retargeter
The purpose of the BVH and FBX Retargeter is loading animations from BVH or FBX files to a given armature, and editing these animations in various useful ways.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ge0grf1x4fzr9ojgc76up/retarget_bvh_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=7tdo5tfppgay04h7g3wjvk2bb
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/retarget_bvh/wiki/Home


The next three add-ons were recently spawned from the DAZ Importer in order to keep down its size somewhat. They contain rather specialized tools that are probably not of interest to most users. They are also poorly documented.

Important: The DAZ Importer must be enabled first, before any of these three add-ons can be used.

DAZ Preset Exporter
This add-on contains some tools for creating pose presets and other assets that can be used in DAZ Studio.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nfqjioymya3sofq71pcv4/export_daz_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=4nujmfmir99dqf6sm7y0weyzi
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/export_daz/wiki/Home


DAZ Rigging
Some specialized tools for rigging certain types of figures, link chains and tails.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yxbgw81qefraag8kfmwbs/rig_daz_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=it2g7t7gka9i0jz5z52g1oxec
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/rig_daz/wiki/Home


Shell Editor
Contains some tools for manipulating shells imported from DAZ Studio.
Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zl1s34xasma4i9deo05j7/shell_edit_v4_1_0.zip?rlkey=7fr4izofl0a7srvacppgr0x8u
Documentation:
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/shell_edit/wiki/Home

New Version Numbers

It will soon be time for a new release of the DAZ Importer and MHX Runtime Systems. But recently a number of related add-ons were spawned from the importer add-on, cf the post on Add-on Split. There has also been some progress on the BVH Retargeter, which can now also deal with FBX files, see FBX Files and BVH Retargeter. The plan is to release all of them together in the near future.

Since the last release was version 1.7.3, the original plan was to call the new release 1.7.4. However, the BVH Retargeter is already at version 2.2 (version 2.0 was when the name changed from MakeWalk), so going back to 1.7.4 would be confusing. Therefore, I decided to change the version number of all add-ons to 4.1.0. 

Making such a jump in version number is unusual, but it is not that different from DAZ going from Genesis 3 to Genesis 8. And of course the new version number carries another piece of information: 4.1.0 is the most recent version of Blender that the add-ons have been tested with. Even if the Diffeo add-ons are by now quite mature and I don't expect to add much new functionality (but you never know), there will probably be updates since new Blender versions always tend to break something.

Blender Shells

A geometry shell or geoshell in DAZ Studio is a kind of virtual mesh. It is a clone of a base mesh which can modify materials and some other properties. When loading a figure with geoshells the DAZ Importer creates a special node group in every material affected by the shell (if the Shell Method setting is set to Material). GeneralProtectionFault recently suggested that we might want to use the shell tools to add other node groups created in Blender. 

This idea has now been implemented. Since the DAZ Importer has grown too large and unwieldy, it was recently split into several separate add-ons, see the post on Add-on Split. The new tool that makes Blender shells is located in the Shell Editor, which contains tools for manipulating shells and layered images from DAZ Importer. The idea is to take a given node group, and make it into a shell which behaves just as the shells imported from DAZ Studio.

GeneralProtectionFault made a script which creates a procedural dirt node group. The script can be downloaded from here. To create the node group, load the script into Blender's text editor and press the Run Script button.

A node group is created in Blender's database. We could also create the node group manually. The only requirement is that the first input and output sockets be the ingoing and outgoing shaders, respectively.

Select the mesh and Add Custom Shell.

In the dialog, select the node group at the top and select the materials . Here we pressed the Skin button to quickly select all skin materials.

At the end of each node tree, a shell node group is created. It has the same sockets as every other shell node. Notice that the Influence slider is purple, meaning that it is driven.

To create drivers the global setting Shell driver type must not be None. I prefer to use rig properties to drive the influence, because using mesh object properties doesn’t seem to work with file linking, but armature object properties do.

The shell node group is a wrapper that contains the original node group and mixes the output with the original shader according to Influence. The only requirement is that the first input and first output are the ingoing and outgoing shader. If you want to tweak the node parameters, we can do it here and all materials are changed. The UV and Displacement sockets could also be used.

We can control the influence of shells in the DAZ Runtime > Visibility > Shells panel.