This article assumes the reader is confident with linking and appending files to manage large projects in blender. The purpose is to show how we can eventually optimize resources with assets imported from daz studio. This is entirely optional as things work fine as they are.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/linked_libraries/link_append.html
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/linked_libraries/library_overrides.html
The way we usually go is to create blend files with all the resources localized. That is, we import a daz asset then create all the materials and the rig. This works fine for small projects or unique scenes, where we want all the assets in the same scene. This also does work for large projects where we rather link or append data from multiple files, but of course all the local resources are also duplicated this way.
example use case:
- in a new scene import a figure and save the blend file
- in a new scene import another figure and save the blend file
- in a new scene link the two figures above and make overrides
If we look at the local database in the outliner we see all the daz groups are duplicated, as well as the custom shapes and the local resources in general, because they reference the source files so "daz diffuse" in figure 1 is different from "daz diffuse" in figure 2.
A better approach would be to use a blend file to collect all the daz resources, as material groups or custom shapes for example, then we link the daz resources from there so when we import a daz asset it will use the daz resources. This way when we link assets in the scene the daz resources will not be duplicated.
To create material groups: setup > materials > debug > make shader groups
example use case:
- in a new scene create all the material groups and save as daz_resources.blend
- in a new scene link the daz resources and save as startup file
- in a new scene import a figure and save, this will use the linked daz resources
- in a new scene import another figure and save, this will also use the linked daz resources
- in a new scene link the two figures above and make overrides
Now there's no duplicates.
Note that daz resources can also be used to replace the standard diffeomorphic resources with custom ones. For example if we want to create a custom "daz diffuse" group we can edit it leaving the same name and channels, this way diffeomorphic will reference the custom group when importing daz assets.
This also has some drawbacks though, for example the daz groups could change among different diffeomorphic versions. This means, as a rule of thumb, never import daz assets when a old scene is already loaded, while we can always link assets from different versions of diffeomorphic and they will work fine.
