Import into Blender

After the import_daz add-on has been enabled, we can import the duf file into Blender. The simplest way to import the file is to press the Import DAZ File button at the top of the Setup menu in the DAZ tab, which is located in the UI shelf to the right of the viewport. This is where it is located in Blender 2.80 and beyond. In the Blender 2.7x series, the panel is found in the Tools shelf to the left of the viewport.

An alternative way is to go to File > Import > DAZ Native (.duf, .dsf). Since we almost always need to do further work on the character in the Setup panel after it has been imported, I prefer to use the button.
Either way, a file selector window appears. Navigate to the file aiko.duf which we saved in DAZ Studio, select it and press Import DAZ File. Alternatively, we can select the preview icon.

Before importing the scene, we must consider the import options to the left.

• Mesh Fitting: Method used for fitting meshes to morphs.
• Unmorphed Shared (Environments): No mesh fitting and meshes are shared between objects. All shaping is ignored.This is useful to save space e.g. for environments with bushes and trees sharing the same foliage, which can be realized as many instances of a single mesh.
• Unmorphed Unique (Environments): No mesh fitting and each objects has a unique instance of the mesh. All shaping is ignored. This is useful e.g. for a room with many posters and paintings which have the same underlying mesh but different textures.
• DBZ File (Characters): Fit characters and clothes using basic data in the .dbz file that was exported from DAZ Studio. This is the preferred method to fit character meshes and therefore the default option. It also works with .json files from earlier versions of the Daz importer.
• Viewport Color: The viewport colors assigned to materials. Since the viewport color never appears in renders, this only affects the viewport appearance, not rendered images.
• Skin: The viewport color assigned to skin materials.
• Clothes: The viewport color assigned to other materials.

There are many more options in the Global Settings panel which affect how the scene is imported. However, normally those settings rarely changed.

Press the Import DAZ File button, and after a short time Aiko and the camera are loaded into Blender. We see that the viewport color does not affect the rendered image.

Mesh Fitting

The Mesh Fitting options are better explained using another scene with two characters.

Here are two characters in DAZ Studio. The gorilla and the mafioso are both based on the original Genesis character, so the underlying mesh is the same. The result in Blender is very different depending on how meshes are fitted.

With the two Unmorphed options (Unmorphed Shared and Unmorphed Unique), the Genesis character is loaded without any modification. In the first case the characters also have the same gorilla texture because they share the same mesh, and in the second case the unique meshes have different textures. With DBZ File fitting, the result looks very similar to DAZ Studio.

 

Viewport Color

The two viewport colors determine the viewport color of the meshes. This is merely a visual aid during during posing, and does not affect the final renders (in Cycles and Eevee, the Blender Internal renderer, which was discontinued after Blender 2.79, uses the viewport color as the diffuse color, but in that case the importer does not change it).

Here is Aiko imported with different settings of the Skin and Clothes viewport colors.

Trouble-shooting

There are a few things that can go wrong during import.

This error it means that the .dbz file needed for fitting the mesh is missing. The world-space coordinates for vertices and bones are stored in a .dbz file with the same name as the .duf file that we import. Since we are importing the file aiko.duf, there must exist a file named aiko.dbz in the same directory. To create this file, export to Blender from DAZ Studio as described in the export documentation.

A .duf file saved in DAZ Studio does not contain the actual data in the way that Wavefront object or Collada files do. Instead it contains links to various asset files in the DAZ libraries, and these assets can link to other asset files as well. In order to find the assets, the DAZ importer needs to know where the DAZ libraries are located. To fix this problem, make sure that the DAZ root paths are set up correctly, as explained in the setup documentation.

If you are on a case-sensitive file system such as Mac or Linux, make sure that Case-Sensitive Paths option is turned on. It is found in the General section of the Settings panel. This option should automatically be set to the correct value for a given operating system, but if the importer complains about missing assets this may be the problem.

If the Verbosity setting (in the global settings dialog) is sufficiently high, the Daz Importer generates an error for missing assets.