Version 1.7.0 Released

Finally, version 1.7.0 of the DAZ Importer and MHX Runtime system has been released. It can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpku2n8dhqmua37/import_daz_mhx_rts_v1_7_0.zip.

The plugins have been tested with Blender 2.83 and Blender 3.5 under Windows 7 and Windows 10, but should work with intermediate versions as well. 

The most signicant new features in this release are:

• Support for Genesis 9 characters. 
• Support for Blender 3.5, in particular the new mixing nodes.
  

There are also some other improvements and many bugfixes.

The documentation has moved to the Bitbucket wiki. It is not quite up-to-date, but I didn't want to postpone the release further. Here are links to the wikis:

• DAZ Importer
• MHX Runtime System

Finger IK and Tongue IK

The MHX rig can generate IK controls for the fingers and the tongue, but those controls were very difficult to work with and next to useless. Moreover, they caused dependency loops if the character has morphs that affect the fingers and tongue. Recently Alessandro suggested a better way to implement IK for the tongue, using stretch-to constraints, and then I implemented the same mechanism for the fingers. This is not strictly speaking IK since no IK constraints are involved, but it allows the user to place the joints precisely, and we will still refer to it as finger IK and tongue IK.

To generate the IK joints, we enable the Finger IK and Tongue IK options when the MHX rig is generated.

The IK influence is governed by the Tongue IK and (left and right) Finger IK sliders in the Properties panel.

As with IK for the arms and legs, finger IK is primarily useful when the character interacts with some other object, and we need to place the finger joints precisely relative to that object. E.g., assume that we want to grab a ball. We could proceed as follows:

1. Place the IK hand in position.
2. Pose the long finger bones so they grab the ball.
3. Snap the IK finger joints to the location of the finger bones.
4. Tweak the joints so the fingers grab the ball perfectly.
5. Optionally snap the FK finger bones, e.g. if we want to export a pose preset back to DAZ Studio.
   

First step: Move the hand into position.

Rotate the long finger bones so the fingers touch the ball.

Snap the left finger joints to the location of the finger bones.

The long finger bones are hidden and the finger joints are shown instead.

We now tweak the joints so the fingers touch the ball perfectly. Depending on your ambition, this may involve a lot of manual work.

We can now snap the finger bones to the location of the joints. This is not necessary if you only want to render the scene in Blender, but can be useful anyway.

Typically, the finger bones are not only rotated but also scaled.

Tongue IK works in a very similar fashion. Here we have posed Aiko's tongue using morphs.

Snap the tongue joints.

We can now pose the tongue with the joints. Note that the morphs are no longer necessary and can be cleared.

The snap fingers buttons are still present even if the MHX rig doesn't have finger IK, because they can also be used to move a pose from the long finger bones to the individual links. In the picture to the left above, we have posed the fingers with the long fingers. After snapping, the long fingers are cleared but the hand pose remains the same, because now the finger bones are rotated instead.

There are also buttons for snapping the spine and neck/head. Above they were posed with the back and neckhead bones, but after snapping the individual bones have rotations instead.

DAZ HD Morphs and Xin's Addon

The morphs that you can import with DAZ Importer are only half the story. Many morphs also have high-definition (HD) information, which is stored in a dhdm (DAZ High Definition Morph, perhaps) file. The information in a dhdm file is encoded in an undocumented binary format and can not be read by the DAZ Importer. However, Xin has developed an add-on for importing dhdm files, which is colloquially know as Xin's Add-on. This post describes how I use Xin's add-on to generate normal map or displacement map textures, and then assign them to a character.

Installing Xin's Add-on

The source is available in the following repository: https://gitlab.com/x190/daz-hd-morphs . There you can also find compilation details for the .dll under MinGW on windows x64, and documentation.

If you find this addon useful, consider supporting its development and maintenance here: https://xin888.gumroad.com/l/daz_hd_morphs.

The latest version (the main branch) includes documentation in the form of a .pdf in “./blender_addon/documentation/daz_hd_morphs_documentation.pdf”. It includes several step by step examples.

For up-to-date information see further https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1399/blender-addon-to-generate-rigged-hd-meshes.

Generating Textures

Once the HD morphs add-on has been enabled, a tab called HD Morphs appears. It consists of a number of panels. We must also import the mesh that we want to generate normal or displacement maps for.

 

First we enter the Main Settings.

• Working directory: All textures will be saved in a subdirectory under this.
• Unit scale: The scale factor connecting the DAZ scale to the Blender scale. Since DAZ uses centimeters internally, the default value 0.01 corresponds to meters.
• Base mesh: A drop-down list where we choose the mesh.

If we want to generate normal maps, we enter the Normals/Displacements panel and choose Normals (multires) as the type. There are also other settings that let us specify the generated texture in detail.

In the From morph files panel, press the plus sign to add DAZ HD morph files.

We want to generate normal map files for the standard DAZ expressions, so we navigate to the directory where they are located. We are only interested in the files where the actual shapekeys (at base resolution) are stored, which are .dsf files that being with "eJCM". So we type "ejcm" in the search field and select all files.

After a while the textures have been generated in a subdirectory of the working directory.

Note that separate normal map textures have been generated for seven tiles, 1001 - 1007. In this case this is unnecessary, since only the first tile, which contains the face, is of interest. We can limit the number of generated files if we enable Select UV tiles and only select those tiles that we are interested in.

Import the textures into Blender

Once all textures have been generated, we want ot import them into the Blender materials. However, first need to we import the morphs at base resolution.

 

With the mesh or rig selected, import the expressions as usual.

Next we open the Advanced Setup > HDMesh panel. It contains three buttons for importing textures generated by Xin's add-on: Load Normal Maps, Load Scalar Disp Maps, and Load Vector Disp Maps.

Navigate to the directory where the normal map textures are located and select those that we want to import. The options are:

• Use Drivers: Drive the strength of the normal maps with the morph strength.
  
• Smart Tiles: Only add the textures to materials if other textures have the same tile suffix. E.g., the Torso material typically has other textures ending with "_1002", and therefore only normal maps endin in "_1002" will be added to the Torso material.
• Compact Layout: Close the nodes used to connect the normal map textures, thus making the layout more readable.
• Prune Node Tree: Remove unused nodes once the new textures have been added.
• Add Maps To Materials: The affected materials.
  

In this case we know that the expression textures only affect the face, which is located on tile 1001. Hence we turn off Smart Tiles and set Tile = 1001. Moreover, we deselect all materials except the Face and Lips materials.

The textures are now imported. To the left of the Face-1 node tree we have new normal map textures that are stringed together with overlay nodes.

Note that the factors in the overlay nodes that connect the normal map textures are driven by the morph properties.

Here is the open face smile, without and with the normal map textures.

Xin's add-on can alternatively generate scalar and vector displacement maps. These are imported into Blender in a completely analogous fashion. Here is the options when we import scalar displacement maps.

Displacement maps are stringed together with add nodes (vector math nodes), and the result is directly connected to the material output displacement strength.

Stripping Categories

We can acquire packages of morphs from the DAZ store. Sometimes the vendor prefers to put the package name in front of all morphs in the package, as in the example below.

Import these morphs into Blender with Import Custom Morphs.

The morphs appear in the Custom Morphs panel, under the category that we specified when importing the morphs. Unfortunately, we have to make the UI panel very wide to see which morph is which, since most of the available space is taken up by the package name.

There is a way to fix this so we can view only the interesting parts of the morph names. First, we need to choose the name of the category to be the same as the common string that starts the morph names. In this case we have already chosen the category to be "Venus Smile". Second, enable the global option Strip Category.

The beginning of the morph name is now hidden for every morph that begins with the category name, and it is much easier to see what each morph does.