Adding sliders to manipulate objects in Daz

PSIExperience

Hi all! Apologies if this is the wrong forum for this type of question. I'm new to daz and 3D modeling in-general. For the sake of this question, let's say I have a 3D model of a car, and I already have it textured and rigged in Blender so that the car doors open and close, the pedals move, and the steering wheel turns. I want to take this rigged model and put it into daz such that it has custom sliders for opening/closing doors and moving the controls. What is the workflow for accomplishing this? I've seen similar questions to this where the answers are sort of workarounds involving parenting a separate part to a primitive and just rotating that. What I'm trying to accomplish is something more professional, like what you might see on a completed asset on the daz store or renderosity.

Richard Haseltine

Importing rigged figures is chnacy at best, better to save as an OBJ from Blender and turn that into a figure in DS - use the Figure Setup pane, right-click in the Geoemtry List and import the new model (make sure you choose the right preset - trying to use File>Import first to figure that out is not a bad idea), then drag that into the Relationships area, drag the bones (created from any gorups in the OBJ) into the right hierarchy, adjst the rotation order by right-click (first axis is twist, last should be the oen most likely to hit 90 degrees), click Create. The bones will lie in their group's bounding box, aligned along the twist axis - you can use the Joint Editor tool to adjust their placement, and - via the Tool Settings pane - to set the bone's group as it's Selection Group. For somethng like a car it will, assuming the model was grouped and you assigned the groups as selection groups, probably be enough to select the Node Weightmap Brush tool, right-click, and select Weight Edting>Fill By Bone Selection groups... since you aren't likely to need fall off in the weights.

TheKD

https://www.daz3d.com/rigging-vehicles-and-mechs-in-daz-studio
https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-vehicle-rigging-techniques

If you like video tutorials, DeD makes some really good ones.

PSIExperience

Thanks for the replies folks!  I really appreciate the help!  When I get time to actually try this, I'll post some comments on how I'm doing things and questions I have.  Hopefully that can help somebody else with the same issues in the future.

PSIExperience

Okay so I'm running into some trouble.  I'm experimenting with the student version of 3ds max (Which I get free through my university).  I can export my model as an obj from 3dsmax with an associated mtl file, and I'm able to import it from 3dsmax into daz using the figure setup window, however it seems that the textures aren't loading even though I have read texture selected.  What am I missing here?  New to all of this.

Richard Haseltine

Is the model UV mapped?

Catherine3678ab

Save some hair, use the Surface Pane and apply the textures manually. Less trouble if those are first placed in your folder under Textures under Runtime under My Library.

 

PSIExperience

Richard Haseltine said:

Is the model UV mapped?

How would I check that?  It's not my model, it's one I'm playing with for learning purposes.

 

Catherine3678ab said:

Save some hair, use the Surface Pane and apply the textures manually. Less trouble if those are first placed in your folder under Textures under Runtime under My Library.

 

Hoping there's an easier way than this.  There are hundreds of individual components in this model.  Come to think of it, maybe that's my cue to delete some of those bits...

felis

PSIExperience said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Is the model UV mapped?

How would I check that?  It's not my model, it's one I'm playing with for learning purposes.

Select the model in the scene tab, and then the surfaces in the surface tab.

If you then change your viewport to show UV View, you can see the UV map of the selected surfaces. If you are getting some layout corresponding to the surfaces it is UV mapped.