How to import a model from Blender with all the textures?
mokis262
Posts: 1
Hello everybody! First time posting here.
I was wondering, how do you properly import a model from a different program (Blender in this case) so that when you import it, it has all the materials still applied? I mean, how do the Daz store "proffesionals" do it who make interiors etc?
Would appreciate some guidance.
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Well, lets see. "Materials" may include several concepts. Not several, three: textures (images), region boundaries, and then info such as diffuse color, glossiness, ambient, etc. This last kind of info is better set directly inside Daz: gives you more freedom and is easier to check the final results. So what you want to keep from Blender is textures and surface regions. These options here do the trick for me...
(... kind of. I usually have to change something in Daz).
Surface regions should be kept. They can also be edited (or created from scratch, but that's usually hard work) from within Daz itself, with the Geometry Editor tool.
Textures are just images that fit in a certain UVmap. There's two kind of textures: those which affect to the color (ambient occlusion, color, layes of detail...) and those that affect to the geometry (normals, displacement, bump...). Materials in Blender usually have a stack of textures, like layers, one upon another. Normally you'll want to bake all your colour textures together into one single image, that you can use in Daz as a diffuse or base texture. Normals displacement, etc. can be used directly.
Anyway, if you're doing Blender for Daz, be sure to check SickleYield's amazing collection of tutorials on DeviantArt. She'll probalby explain it much better than me :P
First of all, thanks for the reply!
I thought I'd expand a bit on what I want to achieve so It's easier to understand.
1. I have this couch in Blender, which is modeled and has multiple textures (the fabric texture, and the wood texture, both have normal maps, bump maps etc in the node editor as well for each texture)
What I want is to get this exact couch, with all the maps from Blender and my work in It's node editor inside Daz Studio.
After following your instructions (and not changing anything when importing in daz) :
I got THIS as the result :
Note : I had to scale the couch to 10000% , but I guess that's least of my issues).
Anyway, it did not load in with either the fabric or the wood legs, although in the surface menus at least they are showing up as seperate and not as just "couch". After applying the Iray shader, this is the result.
So... how do I get it to load in with the texture maps? Is it not possible to do that and you have to manually load them in? What about all the proffesional artists in the daz3d stores who do this for a living? I doubt they manually apply every texture map they created in a different program and try to get it "just right" so that it looks somewhat similar to the original version, right?
Thanks again for replying.
If you have your textures baked into an image, you're nearly there. Just load them manually:
And your're good to go... Ha! Jocking. No way.
If you want your couch to appear in the content library, and load with the materials and textures applied and all, you'll need to save it as a support asset, a prop in the case of the couch (Save as / Support Asset / Figure or Prop). Save it in a folder such as "Studio / My Library / Props / mokis262 / Couch" to have it in that same folder under "My DAZ Studio Formats" in the Content Library tab. A dialog appears:
(Shit i typed "moquis" instead of "mokis" sorry). I'm not sure the difference between Product and Item tbh, I'd fill it like that. And press Accept.
Alright! Several files have been created, and you have you couch in the Content Library and it should load with textures. Are we there yet? Well it depends. If you're planning to redistribute (ie sell or offer as a freebie) your couch -- then no :( But that'd be some future post, if you need it. Go try if that works, first.
Hold on,
You need to bake that into a single texture. Gimme a sec.
I guess your familiar with baking textures, since you have normals and displacement maps. Those geometry-affecting maps anyway are good to go: save them as external files and load them on Daz.
Color textures (fabric and wood) need to be baked into a new image in Blender. Same as with normals or disp, just choose "Textures" from the rolling menu. This will draw the textures together if they were many-layered (as color, details, ambient occlusion, tattoos, whatever), and will fix some nice UV map margins. Save this new image externally, and if all is good you can pick back my previous post...
Checking some obvious points, apologies if this seems unnecessary:
Note that OBJ imports are finicky about where the image maps are and not having spaces in the path names. This is controlled by the .mtl file that you should get when you export from Blender. I'm not sure how much joy you will have with automatically importing maps for things like normals or displacement.
I don't think it's necessary to have the textures all baked on to one image if you prefer not to. As long as the UV islands (e.g. for fabric and wood) don't overlap, you can use different images for different surfaces. You are limited to one UV map per object in DS, unlike Blender. See attachments: one object, two meshes, one UV map, two different image maps in the diffuse channel. I didn't need to assign the images manually in DS, the importer handled them.