FILATOON

With daz studio 4.23 comes Filatoon, a new shader to draw toon style figures. With blender 4.3 and the new 4.3 version of the importer we can now get filatoon figures in blender. Beweare this is a first release so not all the filatoon features are supported, but it is enough to import most toon figures available in the DAZ shop.

ref. https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/2235/

Note that filatoon can only be rendered with eevee, not with cycles, this is the same in daz studio where filatoon only works with filament and not with iray. The toon outline is rendered with freestyle.

However there's a difference in lighting between daz studio and blender, as toon figures in daz studio are not lit by the HDRI, while in blender they always are. Even with the new light linking in blender 4.3 there's no way to exclude the HDRI. Of course this is not a issue if we only use regular lights without HDRI.

Below there's an example where we import a scene with HDRI, we have the G8F figure with iray materials, and the G9F toon with filatoon materials. We can see that in daz studio iray can't correctly render the toon figure, while filament can't correctly render the G8 figure. In blender we can render with eevee and both the toon and G8 figures are rendered correctly, however both are affected by the HDRI.

We can adjust both the HDRI threshold and the toon light inside the "daz toon diffuse" and "daz toon light" groups, note that adjusting one group will affect the whole scene.

Strand-Based Hair and Hair Guides

In DAZ Studio we can give characters Strand-Based Hair (SBH), which corresponds to hair curves in Blender. Unfortunately, SBH often has a very high vertex count, which makes it rather unusable unless you have lots of patience. However, the DAZ Importer has an option to import hair guides in addition to the SBH itself, and the guides are much more lightweight and therefore better suited for Blender hair.

Here is Aiko equipped with a new hairdo made from SBH.

We can inspect the vertex counts with the mesh statistics tool. Aiko herself has some 16,500 verts, but the hair has a whopping 2,5 million verts, which will make it very heavy to animate.

Exporting a dbz file to Blender takes almost 70 seconds, compared to between 5 and 10 seconds for a typical transmapped hair. Waiting for the export script to conclude is quite painful, but there is nothing to do about this.

In Blender, turn on the "Import All Hair Versions" option. This will import the hair guides in addition to the hair itself.

Two polyline hair meshes are imported into Blender: the main hair with 2,5 million verts, and the hair guides with 200,000 verts. A difference of a factor around 12.

Now we delete the main hair and convert the hair guides to hair curves. 200,000 verts is still somewhat high for my taste, but the result with ten render children is quite good, so there would be nothing to gain by keeping the full hair mesh.