Importing .OBJ files from 3rd Parties

bobby77

Hey Folks, over the years I've enjoyed TONS of assets purchased here from Daz.  But now I need a few items not available in the Daz store, so I'll be going to other sources such as CGTrader.  Has anyone had luck loading into DAZ assets acquired from other sources?   Is it pretty much "turnkey / plug-and-play,"?  Or are there common issues I need to be aware of?   THANKS!

frank0314

Depending what program it was designed in, it will in all probability need to be resized. Rigging is hit or miss and not reliable at all so I'd stick to props and landscapes unlesss you are comfortable with rigging. 

margrave

OBJ files cannot have animations or rigging; they are just for static, textured meshes. Those import absolutely fine, though you'll probably need to tweak the materials when you load them in.

As for rigged objects, it's just a nightmare and it never works right. Best get used to re-rigging it inside Daz Studio.

charles

It depends on the OBJ. First your just talking static obects with OBJ. But you can also get 3ds, FBX, stl and other formats. CGTrader and Turbosquid are great places for extra resources, BETTER resources in some cases. However to get the MOST out of other resources you will need to get the right tools and take some time to learn them. Otherwise you will quickly find yourself regretting making those purchases from CGTrader.  Blender is a great free resources for this and will be a must have when dealing with other sources to bring them into Daz, but it's not great for actual modeling and dealing with UV's and is a bit bloated. Picking up a strickly CAD piece of software such as Rhino or equivilant will be your best bet. Why? Well not all the OBJ's you get will import properly into Daz or not as you wanted them too or how the product image showed them. Here is some issues that have to be fixed in other software.

 

1. You want something like 3DS or CAE or STL, import it into something like Rhino and then export it as OBJ.

2. The object is invisible after importing into Daz. Check the corner tickers that highlight the boundaries of the item, scale till you see them (it might be HUGE or TINY). If you see the full bounding ticks and no item then switch to surfaces and check opacity, it's probalby at 0%.

3. Joined UV Mapping. Where when they exported the obj from most likely MAX all the UV's fused into a single layer, so when you bring it into Daz any shader you apply to it effects the whole model and not individual parts as you wanted. In Rhino or Blender you'll need to reassign the UV's with unique maps.

4. The UV's are just not there or are really bad. Like rotated wrong, stretched, scaled badly, just mapped in the wrong places. You'll need Rhino or blender again to UV Unwrap and rewrap them. Rhino is actually really really easy at this..most of the time.

5. Everything is joined together in a single OBJ. You downloaded say a doorway, and want to be able to show the door opened as well as closed, but the frame and door are all one piece. Use the other software to EXPLODE the object into parts, then export the doors frame and door, maybe even the handle into sepearte OBJS and import each in. That's not always so easy, sometimes you explode the entire thing into every single polygon, then you have to use layers to mask out parts for one section and rejoin them and then for the next. You can also just cut parts out that you don't want and make direct modifications.

6. You really need to make some modifications to the item, break a sword in half or put a hole in something, like #5 you can modify it in Blender through Vert Editing and Sculpting (my fav) or in a CAD program.

7. The OBJ is not subdivided and looks too edgy and too low poly. You'll need to use 3rd party software like Rhino or Blender to subdivide it and apply smoothing. Toilets for some reason seem to be the worst with this for some reason :b

8. The object imports with parts all over the place and not together. This is usually from a FBX but can happen in OBJ and other formats too. The vertex angle or measurements are off, you'll need a good CAD program like Rhino to fix this (Blender maybe but will be harder.)

9. You got a an object created froma point cloud, photogametry scan and the mesh is a mess. It might be millions or even billions of polygons and way too large, you will need a CAD program like Rhino that can handle reducing the mesh or even better perform a QuadRemesh to normalize and reduce it.

You can have mutliple of all these things and more going on with any 3rd party OBJ. Knowing how to correct it saves you from kicking yourself for wasting money on the purchases. Getting started in those other tools is a learning curve and no kidding have to put time into learning them. But if you do, the sky is the limit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

alan bard newcomer

another reason (beside cut out) in visibility is items coming in with luminance set to other than Black. 
and with a lot you have to set the glossy to black to get the surface to be unwashed out.