Materials Section

  • Save Local Textures: Save copies of all used textures in a local textures folder, and change all paths to relative.
  • Resize Textures.
  • New Color. The new color used by the next two buttons.
  • Change Colors. For all selected meshes, change the color of all materials with textures.
  • Change Skin Colors. For all selected meshes, change the color of all materials representing skin, but keep the color of other meshes.
  • Merge Materials. For all selected meshes, merge materials that are deemed identical (same textures etc.)
  • Load UV Set. Load an alternative UV set for the active mesh.
  • Update for render-engine.
  • Collapse UDims. Move all UV coordinates to lie between 0 and 1.
  • Restore UDims. Restore UV coordinates to their original values.
  • Change Bump Strength. For all selected meshes, multiply the bump strength of all materials with bump textures.
  • Change Bump Distance. For all selected meshes, multiply the bump distance of all materials with bump textures.
  • Bump Factor. Multiplier for bump strength and bump distance.
  • Change Translucency Strength. For all selected meshes, multiply the translucency strength of all materials with translucency textures
  • Translucency Factor. Multiplier for translucency strength.
  • Reset Material. Reset the bump to one.
 This section changes some material settings. Everything can of course be changed in the compositor (for Cycles materials) or in the material and texture contexts. However, meshes imported from DAZ Studio often have many materials - a Genesis 8 character has sixteen - and updating each of those manually would be tedious.

Save Local Textures

If you have not already done so, now is the time to save the Blender file, because it must be saved for this button to work.

So far all textures are located in their original locations in the DAZ libraries. If you intend to paint on the textures, or resize the textures (next button), or move the Blender file to a computer where DAZ Studio is not installed (or all used assets are not installed), you need local copies of the textures. Press Save Local Textures to do so. This command creates a folder called "textures" in the same directory as the blend file, and copies all used textures there. The absolute file links to the textures are also replaced by relative ones, so the textures will be found even if the blend file and the textures folder are moved elsewhere.


Here is the content of the textures subdirectory in the folder where maria.blend was saved.


Once the textures have been saved in a local directory, you need to save the blend file again, because file paths have been changed to local paths. You can now move the blend file and the textures directory to a different location, or even to a new computer where DAZ Studio is not installed, and you will still be able to open the file.

Resize Textures

DAZ characters usually have many large and beautiful textures. This can be a problem if you try to render a scene on an old computer with limited RAM memory, because once the memory is full Blender comes to a halt. However, for many purposes the texture resolution is unnecessarily high. Therefore, I have provided a utility program that downsizes all textures in a given directory, and a button in Blender that replaces the original textures with the downsized ones, see http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2019/04/downsizing-textures.html.

When the Resize Textures button is pressed, a pop-up menu appears and asks for the number of rescale steps; one step means that the texture is rescaled by 50% in each direction, two steps that the scale factor is 25%, etc.

The name of the rescaled texture is the original filename followed by the scale factor multiplied by 100. So if the original filename is foo.png, the rescaled textures are named as follows:
StepsScale factorFile name
150%foo-050.png
225%foo-025.png
312.5%foo-012.png
46.25%foo-006.png

This button only replaces the textures in the Blender materials; the rescaled textures must already exist in the same directory. If you have access to some other program that resizes image files, you can of course use that instead of the standalone script bundled with the DAZ Importer, as long as you follow the naming convention above.

If you know that you will never need the original, high-resolution image files, you can alternatively overwrite the original filenames with the scaled files and reload the blend file.

 Change Colors


Directly after import, all clothes meshes (including the hair) have the same reddish brown color, provided that the import option Viewport Color was set to Guess. To make Maria's appearence agree more with the rendered image, we select her bra and shorts, set New Color to pink, and press Change Colors. The selected clothes change color.


In the same way, we change the color of the stockings and shoes to light gray, and change the hair color to a slightly darker shade of brown. The agreement with the final render is better.

The change color button only affects materials with a texture in the diffuse channel and hence never changes renders.

Change Skin Colors


This button also changes viewport colors, but only for skin materials. If we turn New Color to green and press Change Skin Color, Maria's skin turns green but her eyes and lips stay the same.

Merge Materials


Sometimes meshes have several materials which are in fact identical; they use the same textures and have the same settings. To save resources, we press Merge Materials to combine identical materials. The sports bra had two materials, but after the merge it has only one.

Note that merging materials removes the possibility of edit the different materials separately.

Load UV Set

Some textures are not made for the default UV coordinates but for some alternative UV set. This is handled automatically by the Daz importer if the materials are set up already in Daz Studio. However, you may want to change the textures of an already imported character in Blender, and then you need to change the UV set as well. This button loads an alternative UV set to the active mesh.

Here is an example of different UV coordinates for the fingernails.


Update For <render-engine>

The Daz Importer creates materials suitable for the active render engine, Cycles, Blender Internal (for Blender 2.7x), or Eevee (for Blender 2.8x). If you for some reason change the render engine, the  materials will not work as intended.
The button labelled Update for CYCLES/BLENDER_RENDER/EEVEE (it changes name depending on the active render engine) attempts to convert all materials in the scene to the active engine. The picture below shows an example how Cycles materials are converted to Blender Internal.
Although an attempt is made to update the materials, something is always lost in translation. It is strongly recommended to import the character with the right render engine from the outset.

Collapse and Restore UDims


Modern Daz characters such as Genesis 8 have UV coordinates organized in tiles along the U axis; the UVs of the face material occupies the actual UV space, the torso material is shifted one unit along the U axis, etc.
This is normally not a problem if you stay within Blender, because textures are set to repeat along both the U and V axis by default. However, if you want to further export the character to some other program that do not support repeated textures, this becomes a problem.

The Collapse UDims button moves all UV coordinates to the 0 - 1 range. Restore UDims move them back to their original position.

Material tweaking

One major improvement compared to version 1.3 of the Daz Importer is the import of materials. In version 1.4 the translation between Iray materials in Daz Studio and Cycles materials in Blender Cycles is quite faithful with the default settings, thanks to Alessandro Padovani who has made many test and suggestions. For some progress, already a year old, see https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2018/06/material-progress.html.

However, there are still some cases where it is necessary to tweak materials in Blender. In Cycles, a bump node has three parameters, the strength, distance and height, but in Iray the distance is always assumed to equal 0.5 mm, which corresponds to 0.05 if the unit scale equals 1 (units = centimeters) or 0.0005 for the default unit scale = 0.01 (meters). The height socket is always connected to the bump map.
However, other Daz shaders such as 3Dlight have a notion of bump distance, which is lost if a 3Dlight material is saved in a file using Iray. One could edit the materials by hand in Blender, but this becomes tedious because a Daz mesh typically has many materials. Therefore, the Daz importer provide a means to change all materials at once, for all selected meshes.

The Change Bump Strength and Change Bump Distance buttons multiply the strength and distance values with the Bump Factor just below it. Analogously, the Change Translucency Strength multiplies the strength of all translucency nodes with the Translucency Factor. The Reset Material restores the bump strength and distance and the translucency strength to their original values.