Finishing Section

• Set UDIM Tile: Move all UV coordinates of the active mesh to a specified UV tile.
• Merge Geografts: Merge grafted items, typically pieces of anatomy, with the active mesh.
• Make UDIM Materials: Combine materials of the selected mesh into a single UDIM material.
• Merge UV Layers: Merge active UV layer with the
• Make All Bones Posable: Add an extra layer to driven bones, thus making them freely posable.
  
• Optimize Pose For IK: Put the character in a pose which is a suitable rest pose for IK rigs (knees and elbows slightly bent in the main bending direction).
• Apply Rest Pose: Apply the current pose as the rest pose.
• Connect IK Chains: Connect bones to the parents and unlock the last bone in the chain. To make it possible to use Auto IK.
   

 UDIM Support

Blender now supports UDIMs, which is very useful for the Daz Importer, because the UV coordinates in Daz Studio are arranged in UDIM tiles, at least for the Genesis 3 and 8 characters. More information about UDIMs can be found in the blogpost about UDIM support. Here is the UV layout for Genesis 8 Female characters, like Aiko, and the names of the corresponding UV tiles.

UDIMs are a material property and therefore it would seem natural if the UDIM tools were located in the Materials section. However, we must merge any geografts before we convert materials to UDIM materials.

Before an UDIM material can be created, the blend file must be saved and the textures saved locally. The reason for this is that UDIM requires that textures follow a certain naming convention. Hence new textures with the appropriate names must be created, and you probably don't want to litter your Daz installation with these extra textures.

Geografts

A geograft is a high-density mesh which can replace a low-density region of another mesh. This is typically used to add pieces of anatomy to characters. It is most commonly used for genitalia, but can be used for other types of anatomy as well, such as horns or tails.

Let us add two geograft assets to Aiko in Daz Studio: Golden palace genitals and Realistic nipples. We also add geometry shells for each asset.

In Blender, the extra anatomy are separate meshes, and this causes problems because they are not seamlessly integrated with the body, and also because the underlying body vertices are still present.

Also note that the shells are absent. A geometry shell is a mesh with zero vertices which modifies the appearance in Daz Studio, but in Blender an empty mesh is never visible in renders. Instead, the shell becomes a node group in corresponding material.

Here is the last nodes of the nipples node tree. The Realistic Nipples Shell has become a node group.

If we open up the node group we see that it contains a quite complicated node tree in itself, which is mixed with the underlying torso material.

Set UDIM Tile

Before we can merge the geografts with the body mesh we must ensure that the geograft UV coordinates are located on the right UV tile. We see that the nipples UVs are correctly located on tile 1002, the same as the torso, but the genitals UVs are located on tile 1001.

With the genitals and nipples selected, press Set UDIM Tile, and the tile to 1002 before confirming the pop-up dialog. Be careful that the body mesh is not selected; we don't want to move all the body UVs to a single tile!

All geograft UVs are now located on tile 1002, just as the torso is.

If you don't intend to combine the body materials into a single UDIM material, there is no need to move the geograft UVs to a specific tile, since textures are set to repeat by default. On the other hand, moving the UVs to the right tile never hurts.

Merge Geografts

The idea is to remove the body vertices hidden by the piece of anatomy, and to merge common vertices at the boundary and create a single seamless mesh from the two original meshes. Note that merging anatomy changes vertex numbers. Hence will not be possible to import morphs afterwards, neither to the geograft nor to the body mesh. It is a good idea to save the blend file before merging geografts.

It is possible to merge multiple geografts, but only if all of them are merged at once. Select all geografts to merge, make the body the active mesh. Again, this is because merging relies on vertex numbers. If the body mesh has been changed in some way, either by merging other geografts or by some other kind of editing, vertex numbers have changed and the body vertices can no longer be identified.

Here the two geografts are selected, and the Aiko mesh is the active one. Press Merge Geografts.

The geografts disappear from the outliner, and the vertices are merged with the body. The body vertices beneath the geografts are deleted, and the common boundaries are glued together, making the body with geografts a seamless mesh. We see in edit mode that new high-density regions have been created.

And the geograft materials have been added to the materials of the body mesh.

Make UDIM Materials

Once all geografts have been merged with the mesh, we can now convert its materials to UDIM.

With Aiko selected, press Make UDIM Materials.

In the pop-up dialog, change the active material to Face-3 and add GP_Rectum-1 to the selection. By default the selection consists of what the add-on thinks are skin materials, based on the material names. This usually works out correctly for the basic body materials, but may fail for geograft materials.

After the script has been executed, all selected material have been removed except for the target material Face-3, and all polygons of the removed materials now use Face-3 instead.

The textures nodes have been changed like this. A "T_" has been added in front of the texture name, Extension is changed from Clip to Repeat, and Source is changed from Single Image to UDIM Tiles.

In the UV editor, we can now see the tiles of the tiled texture. Notice that the tile labels equal the old material names.

Merge UV Layers

In Genesis 8, the eyelashes are also implemented as a separate mesh. We can not use Merge Anatomy on these, because the eyelashes are not grafted items, but it is easy to join them to the main body using Blender's standard tools. With the eyelashes selected and the body mesh active, join the meshes without deleting any vertices (ctrl-J shortcut with Blender 2.79 keymap).

However, there is a problem. When two meshes are joined, the combined mesh has two separate UV sets, one for each original mesh. The UV coordinates for each eyelash vertex is (0,0) in the UV set that comes from the body, and the interesting UV coordinate only exist in the second UV set. So we need to merge the UV sets as well.We see that there are two UV Maps.

 

Press the Merge UV Layers button.

In the pop-up dialog we choose which UV layer to keep (the first Base Female layer which comes from the body) and which to merge (the second Base Female layer which comes from the eyelashes).

And afterwards there is only a single UV layer.

 

The UVs for the eye-lashes are merged with the other UVs. Any named UV set node in the material node trees is also updated to the merged UV layer.

Make All Bones Posable

This button works almost identically as Add Extra Face Bones in the Corrections section, but it adds freely posable bones to bones already driven by other bones. When a Genesis 3 or 8 character is imported, the pectoral and eyelid bones are driven, by the collar and eye bones, respectively. These driven bones can be found on layer 2.

The pectoral bone moves when the collarbone is posed, and the Rotation has turned purple, indicating that it is driven, in this case by the rotation of the lCollar bone.

If we want to pose the pectoral bone on top of the rotation induced by the collarbone, we need to make it freely posable by pressing the Make All Bones Posable button.

 

Now the pectoral bones on layer 2 is not driven, and the rotation channels are not purple anymore. The bone still moves with the collar bone, but we can add poses on top of that.

New "Drv" bones are created on layer 32. The "Drv" bones are driven by other bones, whereas the deform bones are parented to the corresponding "Drv" bones and thus freely posable.

In previous versions of the Daz Importer this button was located in the Corrections section. However, we should wait to make all bones posable until after all body morphs have been loaded, because body morphs also add drivers to bone and make them unposable. Here we have loaded a fist morph which drives the finger rotations, which has turned purple.

After invoking this tool, there are Drv bones for the fingers on layer 32, and the original finger bones can be rotated, at least as far as the limit rotation constraints allow.

 

Optimize Pose For IK

The MHX and Rigify rigs are advanced rigs which allow for IK (inverse kinematics). However, IK works best when the joints (elbows and knees) are slightly bent in the preferred bending direction. For Daz rigs this is usually not a problem for the elbows, but sometimes the legs are almost perfectly straight and the knees are hardly bent at all. In that case IK may not work as expected. To avoid this problem, press Optimize Pose For IK. 

There is an option to apply the optimized pose as rest pose. Alternatively, that can be done explicitly with the Apply Rest Pose button.

This picture shows how optimizing the rest pose affect Aiko. The thighs are rotated forward and the shins back, so the knee is bent in the preferred direction.

Apply Rest Pose

The optimized IK pose is just a pose; the rest pose is unchanged. To turn the current pose into a rest pose, press Apply Rest Pose. This differs from Blender's standard tool because the meshes are also changed to fit the new rest pose. Beware that when the rest pose is changed, poses are no longer imported correctly to the character.

Connect IK Chains

Blender's Auto IK tool allows us to pose a chain of bones by moving the last bone in the chain. This is reminiscent of inverse kinematics (IK), but involves the bones in the FK chain.

 

Auto IK is enabled in the Pose Options here. However, Auto IK does not work out of the box with Genesis characters, because 1) all bones in the chain must be connected and 2) it must be possible to move the hand, and those conditions are not met by the Genesis rigs.

If we look closely, we see that the child bones are not connected to their parents, but there is a small offset.

 

Also, the last bone in the chains (hands and feet), cannot be moved, because the location is locked. The Connect IK Chains tool addresses these problems. The options are:

 

• Chain Type: Which chains should be connected
• Arms Only:
• Legs Only:
• Arms And Legs: The default.
  
• Selected: Use this if you want to connect non-standard chains, such as a dog's tail.
• Location: Where are the bones connected.
• Child Head: This preserves the child bone's pivot point.
• Parent Tail: This preserves the orientation of the parent bone.
• Center: Half-way inbetween.
• Unlock Last Bone: Remove location locks for the last bone in the chain.

And now we can turn on Auto IK and pose Aiko's arm by only moving her hand