Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
That looks very promising. Thanks for posting.
There is another tutorial:
I have tried it. FWIW my observations, using it with Blender 2.80 to transfer base G8F, are as follows.
For me personally, not $15 well spent.
Excellent summary, thank you.
I went over to the Blender Artists page and asked the developer a couple of questions, firstly about geografts and secondly about the possibility of including G3 figures. He replied that he is working on the first and thinking about the second. I had no idea, from watching the promo video, that materials were not transferred or converted. That is a major show-stopper for me because I am terrified of the Blender node system.
I did try the Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer and the problem I saw with the geograft was that it seemed to sit on top of (and intersect with) the original mesh. I thought that geografts were supposed to replace mesh, not add to it? Someone in another thread suggested there is a merge option but I need to go back and find that post.
EDIT: I just checked back on the Blender Artists page and noticed that someone else has asked about the problem with materials/textures, quote:
DAZ to Blender 8
It seems to me that there is a serious gap between expectaions and reality when it comes to bridge utilities between DAZ Studio and Blender. In my mind, I have long been hoping for a simple procedure to pack a scene and send it to Blender where I could load it and render it. Clearly that is not a realistic expectation and will probably never happen. There are some commendable attempts but all fall short of that expectation by a long way. When it comes to textures and materials, I'm reminded of the days before I bought a PC and started using IRay. I used to work on my iMac which could not use the GPU for IRay so I preferred going the Luxrender route which was also slow but the rendering load could be shared across my home network with a Linux box also running Luxrender. The point is that I had to spend hours tweaking the materials in the Reality plugin before I could start the render. The Reality developer tried to provide an easier method than the node spaghetti common to other platforms but it didn't make things much easier and still consumed too much time.
So the conclusion I am beginning to realise is that, in answer to the OP question: no, there is no working compatibility with other software. Either I stick with IRay and throw money at new hardware because of the IRay tendency to overshoot the VRAM limit making the expensive GPU less useful than a slice of toast, or I start from scratch with Blender or some other platform and do everything that I presently do in DAZ Studio (I'm not even sure that is possible either). From what I have read, even the (also) expensive OTOY Octane plugin, which seems to be more efficient when it comes to VRAM management, requires something like the Reality/Luxrender effort when it comes to getting the materials to look right.
Below there's the same scene rendered first in iray then in cycles. I imported it with the diffeomorphic plugin in just one click. No adjustements made of any kind. The only thing I did was to convert all the meterials to iray inside daz studio before exporting, since G1F to G3F use 3delight materials, again this is done in a copuple of clicks inside daz studio.
So personally I find the diffeomorphic plugin very effective and easy to use.
All I can say is that I can't imagine what you are doing differently. My exports so far look nothing like the originals rendered in IRay. Those have been G8 characters and clothing which are all set up with IRay materials.
Please Wolf, spare me the arrogant RTFM criticism which is so predictable. You are completely missing the point I was making - that some might have the impression that there are convenient and effective bridge utilities already between DAZ Studio and Blender. I don't believe there are. I think that, as you say, there is the necessity to learn the materials and lighting etc, within Blender. If so, that's fine. It is exactly what I did with Luxrender/Reality and it sometimes required hours of tweaking the materials and lighting - but I did it until I could get a PC with a decent GPU.
Of course I need to learn a lot more about Blender, there's no escaping that.
I've recently tried Diffeomorphic again. Like Padone said, it could not have been easier, and worked almost flawlessly, scene materials and all. The MICK Banquet Hall looks stunning in Blender, and I love the "merge armatures" option. The only two problems that I had were:
1) Fibermesh eyelashes did not transfer.
2) The JCMs do not appear to work, but this is probably user error. I haven't researched it at all, yet.
I think Diffeomorphic's importer is the closet thing we have.
Just by way of comparison, I did do two renders. One using IRay and one Cycles after exporting using Diffeomorphic. You can be the judge but even this was not one-click. I suspect that you and @Padone have some settings already configured that apply automatically and which I have not yet discovered. I had to add an Area Light because the exported Ghost Light was not recognised. The eyes look all wrong to me and the fine detail is missing - on the dress, for example. The hair on the woman looks wrong too. On previous attempts I had problems with geografts but they are not visible in these renders.
Just discovered that the JCMs were not working because you have to go into Edit/Preferences/Save & Load and check Auto Run Python Scripts. Once that's done, go back to the DAZ Runtime n-tab, and under Morphs, click Load Correctives. The JCMs look perfect and automatically apply in pose mode, LIKE I ALWAYS NEW THEY COULD :)
It turns out that the Fibermesh lashes did import, but they are possitioned way above the character's head for some reason. They move with the head like they're supposed to, but the z-offset is way off.
And the script imports at base resolution, so I have the same problem I was having with Alembic: the SubD makes the character look slightly different. Different enough to drive me crazy, though.
Version 1.4 is so close I can taste it :)
Marble, I feel your pain. First off, I think your samples is way too low. And the lack of fine detail I am 100% sure is because of the lighting. I am not sure that you can expect a different material system and a different renderer to look exactly the same; neither is wrong, they are both approximations of reality, but play with the lighting first and I'm sure you arrive at something that looks very satisfying, if not exactly like the I-Ray render.
The pictures you posted don't seem that bad to me. Some difference in skin tones may be expected especially if the skin uses translucency together with sss that is difficult to get exactly the same in blender. Don't forget that iray and cycles are two completely different engines. I find it odd the difference in the dress color though. Also I always use the last development version of the plugin, not the stable version. As for my settings I do the following.
1) Convert all materials to iray inside daz studio before exporting.
2) Set cycles as rendering engine in blender, then import using the plugin auto material option, with bsdf for opaque materials and guess for refractive materials.
3) In the blender color management set the filmic view transform with medium high contrast.
The iray tone mapping is not imported so if you use settings other than the default then you'll get a different tone mapping in cycles and you have to play yourself with the color management options. As for lights they are imported quite fine, including hdri and emissive geometry.
I have to go out now but I'm not sure that the render engine was set to Cycles when I imported the scene. It might have been set to Eevee. TBH, the Cycles render looks awful to me but then that's personal subjectivity. I do make sure all materials are IRay before exporting though. As for the lights - have you tried a Ghost Light? Mine was not casting any light.
Thank you for sharing your settings, that's useful information to a Blender novice like me.
I am trying out your suggestions and I did find that I had the render engine set to Eevee on import so I have changed that to Cycles. Unfortunately, that came with its own issues and I immediately started getting errors and a failure to import. I checked on the Diffeomorphic blog (and the Blender Artists page dealing with this plugin) and found that others too have had the same errors.
I don't know the cause as I can't find a response from Thomas but replacing the stable version with the latest development version seems to have fixed it.
I'm starting to think that there is enough interest in exporting to Blender (and importing from Blender) that there should be a dedicated thread in the Technical sub-forum. Hopefully, people with experience and good knowledge of the process and the tools could share that knowledge in a single, comprehensive thread. I'm talking specifically about DAZ Studio <-> Blender interaction, not about using Blender in general. This might include the creation of morphs and animations. I, for one, am not clear whether experienced Blender users prefer to export scenes to blender and animate there or to animate in DAZ Studio and render in Blender.
OK, back to my testing. Here's a Cycles render produced following the settings recommended by @Padone. I should mention that I had to do a little postwork because of some immodest poke-throuch on the dress which doesn't happen with IRay in DAZ Studio. I note that the eyes are still merely black holes and, of course, the most obvious problem is her shiny black "mask". I suspect that this is the exporter not dealing correctly with DAZ LIE which was used to apply makeup to this character. Interesting that this did not occur with my first render before I changed the engine to Cycles before importing the .json file.
My guess is the reason you did not suffer the black face LIE problem in the original render was because you still had Daz Studio open. The minute that was closed (or another DS opened) the temp files are zapped, and no longer available to other apps.
That is one thing Carrara, another program compatible to DAZ studio at least copes with, it loads the duf as a layers list if you use LIE, but again it needs offsite commercial solutions to enable the use of Genesis 3, there is freebies for Genesis 8 but some issues with the toes on G8F.
FBX embeds the LIE texture too, I have never had issues with iClone and LIE
I believe (but I'll have to check) that I "baked" the LIE textures because I normally run my scenes through Scene Optimizer which, as I understand it, does bake them. Of course, I might be wrong about that but I'll check.
EDIT - I did check and it turns out that I had not used Scene Optimizer on the female character. I've done that now and the black mask has gone. Still have black eyes and I still consider the Cycles render poor compared to the IRay one but then I have a lot more experience rendering in IRay than I do with Cycles.
Marble, did you try the "Update for..." and choose Cycles in the Materials tab in the importer?
Scene Optimizer will only bake the textures if you reduce the resolution (eg from 4K maps to 2K maps)
Sorry, I don't see that option. There are two sections of the importer panel with the Materials heading but I can't see "Update for ..." in either.
Yep, that's what I use it for.
You're right, it's gone with 1.4 version.
That never happened to me with the guess option for refractive materials, that's specific for thin glass and eyes. Which character is that ? Can you reproduce the issue with a standard/free G8 character ? Are you sure you converted the eyes materials to iray before exporting ?
Also you need to enable reflective and refractive caustics in cycles to correctly render G1-G8 eyes, since they are built in refractive layers. And you need at least 4 or more transmission bounces. Just use a high quality integrator preset and it should work fine.
As for cycles vs iray, I don't know what you mean by "poor", but as a fact cycles has a much better denoiser that preserves details even with few iterations, while the iray denoiser tends to blur out details. Technically that's because cycles uses the albedo and displacement buffers for the denoiser while iray doesn't. To me a good denoiser is the most important feature because it allows to render fast. So cycles wins by far.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/316206
The male is a G3 character called Dale. He comes with IRay materials so no need to convert - I only use IRay materials. I have checked that I didn't use 3Delight by mistake (I didn't). Getting late here now so I'll try a standard G8 or G3 tomorrow.
When I said "poor" I only meant that my attempted Cycles render was poor compared to my IRay version. Clealy I don't know Cycles a fraction as well as you do so I have a lot to learn yet. I don't doubt that better results are possible but what I am not sure about yet is whether the payoff for the time spent getting to know Cycles well enough will be significant in terms of time saved.