Importing rigging from Blender / Precise rigging inDaz

AndrewJJP

I posted this here on the basis that the answer to my question may lie in Daz or Blender and people here will know about both.

I want to make a robot in Blender, import to Daz and then make it available as a Daz asset so others can use it. I've plenty of experience creating unrigged hard surface objects but this is my first attempt to do anything with rigging. My problem is that I want the rigging to be very precise. I've made a very simple example to illustrate the problem with an image attached.

On the left you see my simple rigged object (let's say the robot's arm) in Blender and on the right, in Daz.

It was trivial to do this in Blender. I selected the vertices in each shape, snapped the 3D cursor to the selection, the snapped the apropriate end of the bone to the 3D cursor. If I could export that into Daz, job done in a matter of minutes. But I can't get the export to work, and according to the reports I read everywhere, it sounds like it doesn't work and I must rig it in Daz, and that's fine of course, I have no preference for where the riggint is done.

The problem with Daz, is that I can't find any way to rig it with any kind of precision. I can't move my bones to the precise centres of the objects. So how did I do it for the picture on the right? I snapped the 3D cursor in Blender to the position I wanted to place the bone in Daz, the cut and pasted the coordinates into Daz, remembering to transpose Y and Z. It took long enough that I didn't bother with the second bone.

Is there a better way to do this, either by importing the rigging from Blender or by rigging accurately in Daz?

Thanks very much, and sorry if this isn't the right place. It's hard to know that wifhout knowing the answer.

Richard Haseltine

It sounds as if you have already found the numeric fields in Tool Settings. I think it would, in principle, be possible to script this - to have the selected bone's centre point snap to a selected vertex to to a position relative to the bone's bounding box (which would require that it have a selection group assigned). There is a sample script that will align to the bounding box http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/nodes/node_origin_center/start.

wolf359

Contact the PA "DZfire" He does Daz robots

AndrewJJP

Richard Haseltine said:

It sounds as if you have already found the numeric fields in Tool Settings. I think it would, in principle, be possible to script this - to have the selected bone's centre point snap to a selected vertex to to a position relative to the bone's bounding box (which would require that it have a selection group assigned). There is a sample script that will align to the bounding box http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/nodes/node_origin_center/start.

Thanks very much, an excellent opportunity to try some scripting, something I've been meaning to do for a while now. I wonder if it might be possible to centre to the selected vertices in the geometry editor, that would be ideal, as it would give me exactly what I'd do in Blender.

AndrewJJP

wolf359 said:

Contact the PA "DZfire" He does Daz robots

Thanks, that's an extremely good idea, I'll do that.