Blender to Daz - Multiple objects to make one moveable prop

hondasi

I'm not sure my terminology is correct.

I have ready so many answers and tutorials, and can't seem to get this straight in my head. 

As an example, lets say I make a wall with a sliding door in blender.   The wall is made up of a few objects, and the door is an object.   If I put all of the objects for the wall in to one vertex group called WALL (not sure I'm even doing this part right, can multiple objects be one vertex group?), and the door in a vertex group called DOOR.   I import them as a figure, and follow the instructions for converting weighting, etc that is in most of the tutorials, then I can swivel the door.  That mostly makes sense to me.   How on earth though can I do a sliding door instead.  If I do them as two seperate imports/objects, I can slide the door once i position it by using the Y axis slider in parameters, but I would like this to be one single prop, and I can't seem to save two objects as one prop.

Hopefully I've explained this well enough to give someone an idea what I'm trying to do.   Basically I need the equivilent to a bone, except for sliding along axis instead of rotating.

If I follow the tutorial that everyone says to follow that allows me to rotate the door, it seems like it would work perfectly except when i parent the door and wall during the figure creation, it removes the translate along axis option. 

hondasi

Figured it out.  I was completely in the wrong direction. 

For future if anyone else is lost on similar.   In blender I made a version of my 'prop' with the door in the open position , exported it (wallopen.obj), then changed the door to closed, and explorted it with a smilar name (wallclosed.obj).  

In DAZ I imported the first file (wallopen.obj), then selected it in the scene.  I then went to EDIT->OBJECTS->Morphloader Pro.   One trick here is that you have to change the scale to custom, then show options button right below that, and change the scale number to the same as your original import scale.   If you use one of the options in the drop down on your original import (DAZ SCALE, etc) make sure you use the same in morphloader, otherwise it will think your morph is between the two sizes.   Then you select your morph file, accept, and BAM.  You now have a slider that slides your door open and closed in the parameters tab.   You can even do multiple doors by doing a blender export with door one closed, door two closed, door one open, door two open, etc.  Save them as different named obj files, and then select all in Morphloader. 

This was easy to find once I realized I was miles down the wrong track with figure import, so apologies if this is very common knowledge.  

Five13

You weren’t on the wrong track the first time around. If you’d figured out how to rig the door to swing open, you are practically there. Daz Studio by default hides the translate parameters on the bones, so you’d need to tick the ‘Show Hidden Properties’ under Preferences to reveal them. The X, Y or Z translate property will appear above the “Twist”, “Side-Side” and “Bend” ones. If you then tick ‘Edit Mode’ you could edit whichever you want to use via the little gear icon and change its hidden status to ‘’Unhide” it, so when show hidden properties is deactivated you can still use that property.   

onix

Maybe using morphs for a sliding door is OK but I think that is not a good solution in general because using it on a typical hinged door may give wrong results.

It would have been much easier if you imported the door as a separate geometry parent it to the object it is attached and then  just slide it using XYZ translations 

Of course, you can use rigging too but It is actually an overkill because it is harder to do for things like that.