Sunday, August 11, 2024

Single DBZ Export Script and the HD Convention

The dedicated HD export script has been removed from the Diffeomorphic scripts in the development version. Instead the ordinary Export To Blender script can handle both plain and HD export. It is in fact more powerful than before because the user can now decide which figures should be exported as HD meshes.

In the Diffeomorphic folder, the Export HD To Blender script is gone (you have to remove it manually, but it is not part of the import_daz repo anymore).
We are going to export the Victoria 9 HD figure with some clothes and hair. As is often the case for HD figures made for DAZ Studio, the name of the main figure ends with "HD". The full figure consists of several subfigures, and we notice that none of them have names that end with "HD".

Now double-click on the Export Blender icon, or select Export Blender from the File menu if you have run the Setup Menus script. After confirming the file path of the dbz file, we are prompted with another popup dialog with three options:

  • Export HD. If disabled, no HD data is saved in the dbz file, and the other two options have no effect. This corresponds to the behaviour of the old "Export Blender" script.
  • HD Convention. If Export HD is enabled, HD data is only exported for figures whose names end with the letter "HD", otherwise it is exported for all figures.
  • Export HD UVs. Export the UV map for HD meshes. This is the same option as in the old dedicated HD exporter.

When we now import the file in Blender, all meshes are imported at base resolution. The Victoria 9 HD mesh is renamed to "Victoria 9 Mesh".
Let us now export the DBZ file again, but this time we turn on the Export HD option, while leaving the HD Convention option disabled. Now HD data is exported for all figures. This is what the old "Export HD to Blender" script did.
When we import the file into Blender, two collections are created. The Victoria 9 collection contains all the base meshes, and the Victoria 9 HD collection contains the HD objects. They base and HD objects are different, except for the line meshes that lack faces.
We can see the difference between the base and HD meshes in the modifier tab. The base mesh typically has a subsurf modifier, whereas the HD mesh has a multires modifier.
Finally let us export the file with both Export HD and HD Convention enabled. The HD convention is that HD data is only exported for figures that end with the letters "HD". Many modern DAZ figures that have interesting HD data are already named thus.
The only figure in our scene that ends with "HD" is Victoria 9 HD. When imported into Blender, this is the only mesh which has a multires modifier. All the other meshes are imported at base resolution with subsurf modifiers.
We can use the HD convention to select which meshes that we want to export HD data for, and thus which meshes will have a multires modifier in Blender. Simply add a "HD" to the end of the figure name. Here we added "HD" to the eyes, bikini and bra.
In Blender there are again two collections. The base collection contains the base versions of the bikin, bra and eyes, and the HD collection contains the HD versions of the same meshes.
And if we look in the modifier tab, the HD meshes have a multires modifier instead of a subsurf modifier.