DAZ Importer 1.6.0 Released

 This release consists of four separate parts:

• DAZ Importer, 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. 
• MHX Runtime System, a Blender add-on for posing the MHX rig.
  
• DAZ HD Morphs, a Blender add-on by Xin for importing HD meshes and morphs into Blender.
• Diffeo HD Exporter, a DAZ Studio plugin by Donald Dade to export HD scenes to Blender.

 

Download version 1.6.0 from:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/abda1ext7wbst97/import_daz_mhx_rts_v1_6_0.zip

 

Main documentation page: 

https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-16.html

 

This release is compatible with Blender 2.80 and later. The last version compatible with Blender 2.79 was version 1.5.1.

 

Major new features in this release:

• New morphing system using intermediate properties which correctly reproduce morphs in DAZ Studio. How to implement this was explained to me by Engetudouiti.
• New morphing system using simple expressions instead of slow python scripts, as suggested by Xin. This improves performance, in particular on GPUs. It also makes it possible to use expressions on systems where the DAZ Importer is not enabled, e.g. render farms, making the stripped runtime system of previous releases obsolete.
• Easy Import makes it possible to import a character and make it animation-ready in a single step, as suggested by Alessandro Padovani.
  
• Correct FK-IK snapping for the MHX rig, following suggestions by Engetudouiti.
• Tools for dealing with MHX animations, not just single poses.
• Improved user interface for the MHX rig.
  
• A tool for converting HD morphs to normal or displacement maps (the DAZ HD Morphs add-on by Xin), and tools for importing these maps into Blender and drive them with the morph strength.
• A tool for fast export of HD meshes from DAZ Studio (Diffeo HD Exporter by Donald Dade).
• Basic support for simulations.
  
• Many bug-fixes and minor improvements.

This release will probably be the final one when it comes to new features. Version 1.0 of the DAZ Importer was released in 2016, but I looked into importing native DAZ files as early as 2011, so the add-on is already ten years old. It has grown into a much more ambitious project than I ever expected, and is quite enough for my own needs. I will continue to fix bugs and adapt the code to new releases of Blender and DAZ Studio, though.

ERC Morphs and FACS

Enhanced Remote Control (ERC) consists of a number of methods for remotely controlling various channels in DAZ Studio. It can be viewed as generalized morphs, which in practice come in three types:

1. Shapekeys that change the mesh.
2. Bone translations, rotations and scale transformations that affect the meshes.
   
3. Changes to the bones' pivot point without affecting the meshes.

The first type corresponds to driven shapekeys in Blender, and the second to drivers for the bones' location, rotation and scale channels. However, the third type has no counterpart in Blender. It would correspond to morphs that modify the head and tail of bones in edit mode, but in Blender this is impossible. 

Old-fashioned morphs for Genesis 3 and 8 consist mainly of bone poses of the second type, accompanied by additional shapekeys, and they work well in Blender. (Even more old-fashioned morphs for Genesis 1 and 2 are pure shapekeys.) However, the FACS morphs for Genesis 8.1 mostly consist of shapekeys together with changes in the pivot points, i.e. a combination of type 1 and 3, although some morphs rotate bones where rotation is necessary (eyes, eyelids, jaw and tongue). This can lead to problems in some cases, in particular with tongue morphs.

To the left we have the FACS Tongue Out morph. A shapekey moves the tongue mesh out of the mouth, but the tongue bones do not follow. In DAZ Studio the bones are also moved without affecting the mesh further. That would correspond to the change in edit mode to the right. However, these changes are ignored by the plugin, since it is impossible to drive the rest pose location in Blender.

 

This problem does not affect the mesh as long as we only combine this morph with other morphs that also work with shapekeys. However, if we combine it with morphs that rotate the bones, we may have problems.

Here we have such a case, where Tongue Out is combined with Tongue Right and Tongue Tip Bend. The two latter morphs rotate the tongue, and their influence it too big because the pivot points remain too far back. Note that the FACS morphs have non-zero final values, to the right, even though the sliders are zero. This is because another morph drives the FACS morphs.

We can compensate by increasing the Tongue Tip Bend slider. That increases the final value of this morph (i.e. it decreases the magnitude of the final value), and the tongue no longer intersects the skin.