Custom Properties Cleanup

The DAZ Importer creates lots of custom properties when a character is imported. These properties contain information from the duf file which is necessary for the proper function of other tools.

The add-on does not only create lots of object properties, but custom properties for meshes, materials, bones and posebones as well.

However, spamming the area with lots of custom properties is considered impolite and is frown upon. Other add-ons such as Rigify or MMD tools create a single custom property which contains all the needed information in a complex data structure.

Rigify only creates one object property and one armature property.

 

In the last commit the custom properties have been redesigned, and now the DAZ Importer also adds a single custom property. This probably comes with a small performance penalty, because accessing the data of a complex property takes more time than accessing simple properties. However, this effect should be neglible.

Care has been taken to make this change backward compatible, so old files should still work without modification. However, it is not forward compatible, so figures imported with the latest version will not work propertly in older versions of the DAZ Importer.

The Utilities panel has a new subpanel, called DAZ Importer Properties, where the components of the custom properties can be inspected. This is mainly for debugging purposes. The listing also indicates whether objects use the modern, single, complex property, and the legacy multiple, simple properties.

However, there are some situations where simple properties are still needed. One is if the figure should work correctly even if the DAZ Importer add-on is disabled or not even installed. A typical situation is if we make an animation with Simple IK and FK-IK switching. The animation should still work properly if the file is sent to a render farm which has not installed the DAZ Importer. This will work because the Simple IK properties are simple properties.

The MHX rig does not work by default if the MHX runtime system is disabled. The reason is that MHX uses RNA properties rather than ID properties, for reasons explained here. To make it work at a render farm the file properties.py  in the runtime folder must be saved with the blend file, in the same way as the file morph_armature.py must be loaded to make morping armatures work without the DAZ Importer. This is inconvenient and I intend to replace MHX RNA properties by ID properties in the future.

Finally, there is an important type of custom properties that must be simple propertes: morphs. In Blender morphs are implemented as object and armature properties that drive bone rotations, shapekeys and other properties. Morph properties can not be part of a single, complex property. That would slow down the evaluation of morphs, which already can take excessive time if many morphs are loaded. Even more importantly, it wouldn't work at all, because the morphs might evaluated in the wrong order. 

Morph properties are connected with a complex web of drivers, and it is crucial that the morphs are evaluated in the right order. This is guaranteed if the morph properties are simple properties.. There would be no such guarantee if they were parts of a complex property, and in fact that is not always the case. Besides, the morphs should work if the DAZ Importer is not enabled, otherwise we would end up with ugly faces.

So unfortunately the add-on is still flooding the custom properties if a figure has many morphs. I don't see any way around that.