New User Interface

A recent request suggested that it should be possible to animate an imported DAZ character with the DAZ Importer disabled. Thus the add-on should only be necessary to generate the figure, not to animate it. Apparently Rigify and other popular rigs does this; once the rig is generated the add-on itself is not needed. There is still a user interface, but it stored inside the rig and Rigify itself is not needed.

This could perhaps be done for the DAZ Importer as well, but I don't know how and it would be a major job for little gain. But the latest commit does something towards that end. The user interface is split into a setup and a runtime tab, labelled DAZ Setup and DAZ Runtime, respectively, and the tab not used can be hidden.

The DAZ Setup tab looks like this:

The Setup panel has been removed, and its subpanels have been moved to the top level. Moreover, the Visibility and Hair panels have been moved from the Advanced Setup panel. The reason is that I use both Visibility and Hair frequently. On the other hand, the tools that are left in the Advanced Setup panel are those that I personally rarely use.

The DAZ Runtime tab contains the panels that are used for animation, especially the Morphs and Posing panels. If our character is equipped with Simple IK the Layers and Simple IK panels are put in this panel as well.

Both the Setup and Runtime tabs are visible by default, but we can hide them in the add-on preferences. In that way we don't have to clutter the user interface with unused tabs.

If we disable the runtime tab, only the setup tab is visible. Use this setting when setting up a character.

Once all character have been set up, we can disable the setup tab and enable the runtime tab for animation.