Exporting a rigged prop from Daz to Blender and back

scott_lozano

I am currently working on a prop that I have already rigged in Daz and I need to export it back to Blender to make some minor changes. I am using FBX atm and everything imports just fine, all the vertex groups, weight mapping, and surfaces come in exactly how I would expect them to, however, none of the bones have their proper orientation values and they are missing their rotation orders. Does that mean I exported the model wrong or am I missing something when I import the model into Blender? Any help would be appreciated! If I could export, edit what I need to, and reimport the model that would save me a lot of time fixing issues as they come up.

andya_b341b7c5f5

FBX seems to be a troublesome beast, perhaps because it is a proprietary format and so export/import routines sometimes find it hard to agree on their implementations. 

If you want to export the figure from Blender and import back into Daz Studio with the rig then I think this is where your workflow will fall down.  I do not know of any way to get a rigged model from Blender into DS with the rig intact.  If you need to change the rigging, do it in DS before you export to Blender.  (I suppose understandably Daz aren't very interested in making it possible to import rigged figures into DS as that is where their revenue comes from.)

As to exporting a model from DS to Blender, you may want to take a look at the Import Daz plugin by Thomas Larsson (http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-13.html).  This imports a scene and does a pretty good job of transferring the rigging and of migrating Iray materials to a reasonable first cut of Cycles materials.  I should also mention mCasual's script mcjTeleBlender as well but I have not used that recently and cannot recall if the rigging is transferred, or how well.

If your problems are with the geometry/surfaces only, then apart from the options above FBX or even OBJ may be a better bet.

scott_lozano

Thanks for taking the time! :)

I tried out the plugin that you linked but it kept giving me errors so Ill have to read some more and see what I was doing wrong. I was able to import the rigged model back into daz as an FBX, but it imported with a bunch of random translations that broke the model and of course all the orientations are broken. The bones are properly parented, and the weight mapping is correct, but something is literally just lost in translation. After reading around a bit it looks like I could use the transfer utility to save the rigging after editing what I need to. I guess the workflow would be, export model to blender as an obj, fix the whatever problems that I need to fix, import the fixed model to daz, rebuild/parent the bones in Daz, and then finally transfer the missing parts of the rigging with the transfer utility from the old model to the new one. Im gonna try that in the morning.

scott_lozano

I was able to save the rigging using the transfer utility so I guess that's the proper workflow if you need to edit the topology of a rigged model.

After making the changes that I needed to in Blender, I reimported the model to Daz as an OBJ using the figure setup tab. With both models on top of one another the transfer utility tool was able to transfer all the weight maps and the orientation values for the bones so everything is working now. The only thing missing at this point are the ERC Freezes that I have already built. There are only a few but it would be helpful if there is a way to transfer them as well.

Anyone know a way to transfer custom properties/erc freezes between models that are basically the same?

 

 

andya_b341b7c5f5

Glad you solved your problem.  I hadn't thought about using the Transfer Utility in that way.  I suspect that the Daz Studio FBX importer does not understand the way a mesh is 'bound' to the armature in Blender via tha armature modifier, which I guess can't be exported like the others can be.

scott_lozano

For minor changes to the model this seems to work well enough. All I needed to do was remove a few stray Ngons that I missed. Not sure if this would work well for more complicated changes or if there is an even easier way of updating a base model. It looks like the best you can do with an fbx is import the bones and their translations, but weight mapping and bone rotations/orientations are a no go.