Creating clothing in blender to bring into Daz3d?

l-marie

Hello everyone, I'm a visual effects student and new to Daz3d but have experience with Blender which I will be using as my main software. I am about to start working on my final capstone project for my degree which is a 1 minute video, and I need a character. However I recognise that character creation and rigging is not strong in my skillset at the moment. Ive been researching Daz3d and how it can be used with Blender, and I was hoping for some advice to see if my plan makes sense for how I want to utiliste Daz to speed up my workflow for my character creation. One of my lecturerers suggest I try Daz3d but doesn't actually have experience with it themselves so Ive been doing research this week into how it works.

My understanding is that I can purchase morphs for characters (I was planning on using the genesis8 female base mesh), clothing, poses etc. I have been searching through the daz store and renderhub, and have found a female character Id like to use and customise further. However the character I'm imagining is a fantasy elf/sprite/fairy type character and has more forest appropriate clothing than what I am finding available to buy so was thinking i'll probably have to make my own clothes for my character (Ive made clothing before but entirely in blender for a sculpted character). I have found some info on the diffeo addon for getting materials into blender that I'm going to try, along with the DaztoBlender Bridge to get the rigged character into Blender. I guess where I'm stuck is if its feasible to get my genesis character into Blender - sculpt and materialise the clothes there then export it all back into Daz and how to get my clothes working on my character with the rig etc? Is that where Daz's dforce physics simulation comes into play? Is it possible to get clothing made in blender working on a genesis rig - to rexport as a complete character than can be posed in blender?

I found a workflow someone used where they got their character into blender and used blenders rigify tool to rig the character and clothing they made there which would be my plan B, but my weightpainting is terrible and I'd rather keep that plan as a backup to my first idea is not possible. Before I purchase any assets, I was going do a trial run - export a free character, sculpt clothing and try get it back into daz to test that its feasible before commiting money.

Id appreciate any advice or tips, if there are any artists out there who use both Daz and Blender together in this way or if you have a better workflow for something like what I have in mind here!

Thanks for you time :)

felis

You have, as I read it, a number of questions.

But if sticking to your title 'creating clothing in blender and bring them into Das Studio'.

Then the answer is yes, I have done it mahy times.

When you have modelled your clothing and imported into DS, you can run Transfer Utility to make it fitted to that character.

I always model towards the base character shape. But if you just want to use it on a particular character, you can model towards that, but then you must tick 'reverse deformation' when runnnig transfer utility.

dForce can best handle regular quads, and all mesh must be welded, if it shall take part in the simulation. Default collision distance in dForce is 2 mm, so your quads shold in average be somewhat larger. I tend to strife for 10 mm, with some areas smaller when needed.

I would suggest to model something simple to get acquainted with the process.

Edited to add: materials must generally be applyed inside Daz Studio.

benniewoodell

I don't know about bringing it back into Daz, felis looks to have a good grasp on how to do that if that's the route you really want to take so definetely try that first, but you can bring the character into Blender fully rigged as well through Diffeo and life can be simplified instead of trying to get that to combine with the Daz to Blender bridge. With diffeo, I would recommend using easy import and check all the boxes that you want, and when you get to the rig part, turn it onto rigify or MHX there. I personally prefer MHX, I'm animating two projects right now with that rig and it's great. You'll have to download the MHX plug-in for Blender on the diffeo site to use it, totally worth it. 

 

wolf359

I agree with @benniewoodell.

model your clothing in Blender to fit the base G8 male or female and import it to DS and use the transfer utilitie.

Then use Diffeo  to import fully rigged/dressed Characters back to Blender

where you will have multiple options for animation and mocap retargeting