Materials Section

• Bake Normal/Disp Maps: Bake normal or displacement maps from multires modifier. Separate normal/displacement maps are baked for different UV tiles.
  
• Load Normal/Disp Maps: Load normal or displacement maps to the active mesh. Separate normal/displacement maps are loaded for different UV tiles.
• Add Normal Maps:
• Add Driven Value Nodes:
  
• Load UV Set: Load an alternative UV set for the active mesh.
• Prune UV Maps: Remove unused UV maps.
• Collapse UDims: Move all UV coordinates to lie between 0 and 1.
• Restore UDims: Restore UV coordinates to their original values.
• Remove Shells: Remove unused shell node groups from materials.
• Replace Shells: Replace shell node groups with other groups. 
• Make Decal: Add a decal to the active material.

 

Bake Normal/Disp Maps

Load Normal/Disp Maps

High-resolution meshes can be exported from DAZ Studio with the Export HD To Blender tool. In Blender, two versions of the meshes are imported: the mesh at base resolution and the HD mesh with a multires modifier. You may want to bake the high-frequency detail to normal or displacement maps, either for performance reasons, or because you want to export the mesh to other applications. 

Blender has built-in tools for baking multires modifiers, and you can find many tutorials on how to use them. However, doing this manually is quite tedious for DAZ characters, because they have several UV tiles which must be baked separately, and the normal or displacement maps must be loaded onto many materials. It can also be tricky to set up baking correctly. To facilitate baking, the Daz Importer has tools for baking and loading normal and displacement maps in a single step.

The process of baking and loading normal maps is descriped in a blog post on Baking normal maps.  Here we just briefly describe the updated user interface which covers displacement maps also.

With the HD meshes select, press Bake Normal/Disp Maps. The tool has two options:

• Image Size: The size of the image to bake to. Can be 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, or 4096x4096.
• Bake Type: Normals or Displacement
  

If we choose to bake to Normals, several normal maps are created, one for each UV tile.

And here are the displacement maps if we choose that alternative.

 

To use the baked maps, select the base resolution mesh and press Load Normal/Disp Maps. This tool has four options:

• Image Size: The size of the image to bake to. Can be 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, or 4096x4096.
• Bake Type: Normals or Displacement.
• Displacement Scale: Scale factor for displacement node.
  
• Prune Node Tree: Remove unused normal and displacement nodes that have been replaced.

The following posts also deal with various aspects of HD meshes:

High resolution meshes
HD meshes and geografts
Baking normal maps
HD meshes and geografts revisited

Add Normal Maps

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Add Driven Value Nodes

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Load UV Set

Some textures are not made for the default UV coordinates but for some alternative UV set. This is handled automatically by the Daz importer if the materials are set up already in Daz Studio. However, you may want to change the textures of an already imported character in Blender, and then you need to change the UV set as well. This button loads an alternative UV set to the active mesh.

Here is an example of different UV coordinates for the fingernails.

Prune UV Maps

Daz meshes sometimes have multiple UV maps. A typical example is some genitals, which both have an UV map which matches the underlying torso material, and another one where the genital covers most of UV space. After merging geografts to its main mesh, we may wind up with UV maps that are not used by any material. This button removes such unused UV maps.

Collapse UDims

Restore UDims

Modern Daz characters such as Genesis 8 have UV coordinates organized in tiles along the U axis; the UVs of the face material occupies the actual UV space, the torso material is shifted one unit along the U axis, etc.

This is normally not a problem if you stay within Blender, because textures are set to repeat along both the U and V axis by default. However, if you want to further export the character to some other program that do not support repeated textures, this becomes a problem.

The Collapse UDims button moves all UV coordinates to the 0 - 1 range. Restore UDims move them back to their original position.

Starting with Blender 2.82, there is now support for UDIM materials in Blender. Since the UV layout of Genesis 8 characters is eminently suited for UDIMs, the Daz Importer has some tools for this. However, these tools are located in the Finishing section, because geografts should be merged first.

Remove Shells

Replace Shells

A geometry shell in Daz Studio is a kind of virtual mesh. It is a clone of a base mesh, but unlike instances you can change its material settings and some other properties. The most common use is to add color to the base mesh. There is no corresponding data type in Blender. Since in many cases a geoshell is just a container for something that modifies the materials, the Daz Importer converts geoshells into node groups in the corresponding materials. This usually works well if we just add a single geoshell, but if the same character has several geoshells the Daz Importer can be confused.

The Remove Shells and Replace Shells are tools for manipulating shell node groups in Blender. The intended use is described in the blog post on Multiple geoshells.

Make Decal

Decals are a common way to add localized details to your textures. For humans, decals can be used to add e.g. tattoos, bruises and wounds, but decals can of course be equally well used on inanimate objects. Decals can be added in DAZ Studio, but it is much simpler to do it directly in Blender, in particular if you want to animate. For more information, see the blog post on Decals.