Version 1.7.1 Released

Version 1.7.1 of the DAZ Importer and MHX Runtime system has been released. It can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/7mj32wh3bnn4rwe/import_daz_mhx_rts_v1_7_1.zip.

This is primarily a bugfix release. A number of serious bugs were discovered right after the 1.7.0 release. Those have now been eliminated, so I recommend everybody to update to the new version. Safely Installing a New Version.

There are also a few new features. The most obvious one is that the user interface has been rearranged. The DAZ Importer now takes up two tabs in the User Interface (N-panel), DAZ Setup and DAZ Runtime. One or both of these tabs can be hidden.

Support for making pose presets has been improved.

The internal working of the MHX rig has been changed. However, there is a conversion tool for old MHX rigs, so they can still be used with the latest release.

MHX Properties are now ID Properties

If you open an old MHX rig in the latest MHX version, all panels contain only a single button named "Update MHX Drivers". What is going on?

In Blender there are two types of custom properties, often called ID properties and RNA properties. RNA properties are defined by Blender or by add-ons for all instances of a certain datatype, whereas ID properties are created on the fly and only affects a single instance. 

 

MHX has been using RNA properties for its internal functioning, because it makes the UI more attractive. In particular, Boolean ID properties are displayed as integers rather than checkboxes. However, I recently realized that RNA properties have a major drawback: they are not defined if the MHX add-on is disabled. This could happen if we redistribute the blend file to somebody who does not have the MHX add-on installed, e.g. a render farm.

Here we have posed Aiko in version 1.7.0 of the DAZ Importer and MHX RTS add-ons. We are using IK for both arms and legs.

IK for the left and right arms are controlled by custom properties called MhaArmIk_L and MhaArmIk_R, respectively. We see in the Custom Properties list that IK is enabled and that they are RNA properties, because "API Defined" is written to the right of the properties.

The IK property drives the influence of a Copy Transforms constraint for the upper_arm.L bone, which is located on the hidden layer 15. The driver value is 1.0 which is the value of the RNA property MhaArmIk_L.

Save the file and disable the MHX RTS add-on. Then close and restart Blender, so the definition of the RNA properties disappear.

Now open the file that we just saved in the new Blender session. The IK pose is gone! The IK bones are posed as they were before, but the mesh no longer follows suit.

When we inspect the custom properties, we see that the custom properties have turned into ID properties. There is a cogwheel and an X to the right of the properties rather than the text "API Defined".

If we look at the driver for the Copy Transforms constraint, we see that the path has turned red and that the driver value is 0.0. The driver looks for an RNA property called MhaArmIk_L, but that does not exist because the MHX RTS add-on is disabled.

To fix the file, we have to enable the MHX add-on again. The mesh now jumps into place because the RNA properties are defined again, but this is not a permanent solution.

All panels in the MHX tab contain the single button "Update MHX Drivers", so we have to press that.

The path to the driving property has been changed. Instead of MhaArmIk_L which is the path to the RNA property, it becomes ["MhaArmIk_L"] refers to the corresponding ID property.

Now save the blend file, disable the MHX add-on, restart Blender and open the file. The IK pose is still there, even though the MHX tab is absent.

Hierarchical Pose Presets

For a while the DAZ Importer has been able to export pose presets back to DAZ Studio, see the post Save pose preset. However, this was limited to ordinary pose presets, which only work on a single figure in DAZ Studio. Following a request by Rakete, the functionality of this tool has now been expanded to also generate hierarchical pose presets,

Let us consider this character. In DAZ Studio, we added the Genesis 8.1 Female Face Controls from the Developer Kit. In Blender we merge the rigs together and loaded the FACS morphs. Finally we posed both the character and the face controls in order to make a facial expression.

Now let us export the pose as a pose preset. Press the Save Pose Preset button in the Posing panel. A file selector appears. Save the preset in a directory that can be accessed from DAZ Studio, leaving the Preset Type at the default value Pose.

In DAZ Studio, select the figure and load the pose preset. The body is posed but the face is not, because the pose is only loaded to the figure itself, not to its children, e.g. the Face Control figure.

Now do the same thing again, but set Preset Type to Hierarchical instead.

In DAZ Studio, the hierarchical preset is loaded to the entire node hierarchy, both the main figure and its subfigures.

Instead of using the Face Control bones, we could create an expression using the FACS sliders.

This time we set the Preset Type to Pose And Morph.

Note that this tool does not distinguish between shaping and posing morphs; in Blender, all morphs are treated in the same way.

In DAZ Studio, we need to zero the face control pose, because the new preset will only pose the main figure bones.

When we load the mixed pose-morph preset in DAZ Studio, both the bone pose and the morph values are loaded.

Hierarchical pose presets are quite sensitive to the bone hierarchy. Therefore it is not possible to use the MHX or Rigify rigs to generate hierarchical presets, because those rigs have a completely different bone hierarchy. However, it is possible to use the Simple IK rig.

Even if it is not possible to use the MHX or Rigify rigs directly, we can still use them to control the original DAZ rig. To do so, enable the Keep DAZ Rig option when the MHX rig is generated.

This gives us two separate rigs: the control rig Genesis 8.1 Female_MHX, which has the MHX controls, and the deform rig Genesis 8.1 Female.

Pose the control rig. We can create an ordinary pose presets directly from the mhx rig (so keeping the DAZ rig was unnecessary in this case).

The pose preset can be loaded in DAZ Studio, but the face expression is of course missing.

To create a hierarchical pose preset, select the deform rig and press Mute Control Rig. The deform rig is now detached from the control rig, and the pose is baked to the deform bones, including the face control bones.

Once we have exported the preset, the Unmute Control Rig button returns control to the control rig.

Since the active object is now a DAZ rig, we can save a hierarchical pose preset.

And this preset poses the entire hierarchy in DAZ Studio.

New User Interface

A recent request suggested that it should be possible to animate an imported DAZ character with the DAZ Importer disabled. Thus the add-on should only be necessary to generate the figure, not to animate it. Apparently Rigify and other popular rigs does this; once the rig is generated the add-on itself is not needed. There is still a user interface, but it stored inside the rig and Rigify itself is not needed.

This could perhaps be done for the DAZ Importer as well, but I don't know how and it would be a major job for little gain. But the latest commit does something towards that end. The user interface is split into a setup and a runtime tab, labelled DAZ Setup and DAZ Runtime, respectively, and the tab not used can be hidden.

The DAZ Setup tab looks like this:

The Setup panel has been removed, and its subpanels have been moved to the top level. Moreover, the Visibility and Hair panels have been moved from the Advanced Setup panel. The reason is that I use both Visibility and Hair frequently. On the other hand, the tools that are left in the Advanced Setup panel are those that I personally rarely use.

The DAZ Runtime tab contains the panels that are used for animation, especially the Morphs and Posing panels. If our character is equipped with Simple IK the Layers and Simple IK panels are put in this panel as well.

Both the Setup and Runtime tabs are visible by default, but we can hide them in the add-on preferences. In that way we don't have to clutter the user interface with unused tabs.

If we disable the runtime tab, only the setup tab is visible. Use this setting when setting up a character.

Once all character have been set up, we can disable the setup tab and enable the runtime tab for animation.

Version 1.7.0 Released

Finally, version 1.7.0 of the DAZ Importer and MHX Runtime system has been released. It can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpku2n8dhqmua37/import_daz_mhx_rts_v1_7_0.zip.

The plugins have been tested with Blender 2.83 and Blender 3.5 under Windows 7 and Windows 10, but should work with intermediate versions as well. 

The most signicant new features in this release are:

• Support for Genesis 9 characters. 
• Support for Blender 3.5, in particular the new mixing nodes.
  

There are also some other improvements and many bugfixes.

The documentation has moved to the Bitbucket wiki. It is not quite up-to-date, but I didn't want to postpone the release further. Here are links to the wikis:

• DAZ Importer
• MHX Runtime System

Finger IK and Tongue IK

The MHX rig can generate IK controls for the fingers and the tongue, but those controls were very difficult to work with and next to useless. Moreover, they caused dependency loops if the character has morphs that affect the fingers and tongue. Recently Alessandro suggested a better way to implement IK for the tongue, using stretch-to constraints, and then I implemented the same mechanism for the fingers. This is not strictly speaking IK since no IK constraints are involved, but it allows the user to place the joints precisely, and we will still refer to it as finger IK and tongue IK.

To generate the IK joints, we enable the Finger IK and Tongue IK options when the MHX rig is generated.

The IK influence is governed by the Tongue IK and (left and right) Finger IK sliders in the Properties panel.

As with IK for the arms and legs, finger IK is primarily useful when the character interacts with some other object, and we need to place the finger joints precisely relative to that object. E.g., assume that we want to grab a ball. We could proceed as follows:

1. Place the IK hand in position.
2. Pose the long finger bones so they grab the ball.
3. Snap the IK finger joints to the location of the finger bones.
4. Tweak the joints so the fingers grab the ball perfectly.
5. Optionally snap the FK finger bones, e.g. if we want to export a pose preset back to DAZ Studio.
   

First step: Move the hand into position.

Rotate the long finger bones so the fingers touch the ball.

Snap the left finger joints to the location of the finger bones.

The long finger bones are hidden and the finger joints are shown instead.

We now tweak the joints so the fingers touch the ball perfectly. Depending on your ambition, this may involve a lot of manual work.

We can now snap the finger bones to the location of the joints. This is not necessary if you only want to render the scene in Blender, but can be useful anyway.

Typically, the finger bones are not only rotated but also scaled.

Tongue IK works in a very similar fashion. Here we have posed Aiko's tongue using morphs.

Snap the tongue joints.

We can now pose the tongue with the joints. Note that the morphs are no longer necessary and can be cleared.

The snap fingers buttons are still present even if the MHX rig doesn't have finger IK, because they can also be used to move a pose from the long finger bones to the individual links. In the picture to the left above, we have posed the fingers with the long fingers. After snapping, the long fingers are cleared but the hand pose remains the same, because now the finger bones are rotated instead.

There are also buttons for snapping the spine and neck/head. Above they were posed with the back and neckhead bones, but after snapping the individual bones have rotations instead.

DAZ HD Morphs and Xin's Addon

The morphs that you can import with DAZ Importer are only half the story. Many morphs also have high-definition (HD) information, which is stored in a dhdm (DAZ High Definition Morph, perhaps) file. The information in a dhdm file is encoded in an undocumented binary format and can not be read by the DAZ Importer. However, Xin has developed an add-on for importing dhdm files, which is colloquially know as Xin's Add-on. This post describes how I use Xin's add-on to generate normal map or displacement map textures, and then assign them to a character.

Installing Xin's Add-on

The source is available in the following repository: https://gitlab.com/x190/daz-hd-morphs . There you can also find compilation details for the .dll under MinGW on windows x64, and documentation.

If you find this addon useful, consider supporting its development and maintenance here: https://xin888.gumroad.com/l/daz_hd_morphs.

The latest version (the main branch) includes documentation in the form of a .pdf in “./blender_addon/documentation/daz_hd_morphs_documentation.pdf”. It includes several step by step examples.

For up-to-date information see further https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1399/blender-addon-to-generate-rigged-hd-meshes.

Generating Textures

Once the HD morphs add-on has been enabled, a tab called HD Morphs appears. It consists of a number of panels. We must also import the mesh that we want to generate normal or displacement maps for.

 

First we enter the Main Settings.

• Working directory: All textures will be saved in a subdirectory under this.
• Unit scale: The scale factor connecting the DAZ scale to the Blender scale. Since DAZ uses centimeters internally, the default value 0.01 corresponds to meters.
• Base mesh: A drop-down list where we choose the mesh.

If we want to generate normal maps, we enter the Normals/Displacements panel and choose Normals (multires) as the type. There are also other settings that let us specify the generated texture in detail.

In the From morph files panel, press the plus sign to add DAZ HD morph files.

We want to generate normal map files for the standard DAZ expressions, so we navigate to the directory where they are located. We are only interested in the files where the actual shapekeys (at base resolution) are stored, which are .dsf files that being with "eJCM". So we type "ejcm" in the search field and select all files.

After a while the textures have been generated in a subdirectory of the working directory.

Note that separate normal map textures have been generated for seven tiles, 1001 - 1007. In this case this is unnecessary, since only the first tile, which contains the face, is of interest. We can limit the number of generated files if we enable Select UV tiles and only select those tiles that we are interested in.

Import the textures into Blender

Once all textures have been generated, we want ot import them into the Blender materials. However, first need to we import the morphs at base resolution.

 

With the mesh or rig selected, import the expressions as usual.

Next we open the Advanced Setup > HDMesh panel. It contains three buttons for importing textures generated by Xin's add-on: Load Normal Maps, Load Scalar Disp Maps, and Load Vector Disp Maps.

Navigate to the directory where the normal map textures are located and select those that we want to import. The options are:

• Use Drivers: Drive the strength of the normal maps with the morph strength.
  
• Smart Tiles: Only add the textures to materials if other textures have the same tile suffix. E.g., the Torso material typically has other textures ending with "_1002", and therefore only normal maps endin in "_1002" will be added to the Torso material.
• Compact Layout: Close the nodes used to connect the normal map textures, thus making the layout more readable.
• Prune Node Tree: Remove unused nodes once the new textures have been added.
• Add Maps To Materials: The affected materials.
  

In this case we know that the expression textures only affect the face, which is located on tile 1001. Hence we turn off Smart Tiles and set Tile = 1001. Moreover, we deselect all materials except the Face and Lips materials.

The textures are now imported. To the left of the Face-1 node tree we have new normal map textures that are stringed together with overlay nodes.

Note that the factors in the overlay nodes that connect the normal map textures are driven by the morph properties.

Here is the open face smile, without and with the normal map textures.

Xin's add-on can alternatively generate scalar and vector displacement maps. These are imported into Blender in a completely analogous fashion. Here is the options when we import scalar displacement maps.

Displacement maps are stringed together with add nodes (vector math nodes), and the result is directly connected to the material output displacement strength.