I think starting small and moving the monsters and the less desirable guys to the shame zone folder and see if you like the speed once you decide..then you can be meaner and either just remove all their data and leave skins and such behind or banish them all to the shame zone.

That's actually what I just did. I left the front files -- presets -- alone, and just went into the data directory and pushed things out. I put everything into a backup folder, so if something complains about not being able to be found, it's easy enough to copy back into place.

I had a weird fit of buying aliens, for some reason. No idea why. I think it was maybe during a holiday sale, or else they were freebies or something. Or else I had a plan for something that didn't happen when I bought them, and then completely forgot what it was.

Anyway, just doing that cut loading time for base G8M about in half, which isn't bad. For some reason, it doesn't seem to make a huge difference for clearing the scene and deleting objects, but it makes a big difference in loading time.

And this was just in time to add two more guys! Maybe what I'll need to do is to try to maintain some sort of stasis -- for every guy/morph set bought, someone gets voted off the island.

I tried it but it's not an issue related to the scales of the nodes, it seems to have more to do with how the bones of the rig get mangled by the erc freeze of the morph.

Okay so I followed through with my threat today- I removed everything but the morphs for Owen and Boyd. I could tell which ones I had to add back by loading the character, and adding only the ones it claimed were missing.

Weirdly, it kept asking for FW Quinton. I have not added FW stuff to Etiher OWen or Boyd, and yet, it kept asking it.

So a friend suggested I run the Ultimate Zero product. It would show which figure had it. And apparently, Boyd has FW Quinton dialed in, and he doesn't have it showing in his morphs or hiddden morphs. I just don't understand how that could be! If I remove it, Boyd is shorter by a few inches. For the hidden morphs are affecting him somehow.

That sounds like Quinton's morph may have a non-zero number as its default. It wouldn't show up as used or hidden because it's still at default. Quinton actually has an update listed:

2017-08-30 - Updated character preset to correctly apply to existing figures.

What that means, I don't know, although the "existing figures" part may be a clue. Maybe try reinstalling Quinton to see if that fixes whatever is going on?

Okay I highly recommend purging your morphs folder. The change is unbelievable. It had gotten so bad, just moving figures, and applying poses took forever. Now with such a lean runtime, I can pose my figures with ease, my viewport is even faster.

Yeah, I'll have to deal with setting up those other characters in my second rauntime. But... That can wait.

I wish I could, but the way I work with things, I'm not sure I can. But I suppose I'll need to do something soon. Even with a computer with a decent amoung of power, loading takes ages, and a few characters are weirdly unresponsive.

There has been lots of progress since version 1.5.0 of the DAZ Importer was released half a year ago, and it is time for a new stable release. Among the highlights of the new release we mention:

• Hair improvements, both for fibermesh hair, strand-based hair, and old-fashioned mesh hair.
• Geometry shell improvements.
• Faster transfer of morphs between meshes.
• Improvements to the MHX rig.
• Improvements to the Rigify interface.
• Support for FACS introduced in DAZ Studio 4.15.
• Many bug fixes.

Stable version 1.5.1b can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/d087603vz5hmau0/import_daz-v1.5.1b-20210302.zip.

As before, the development version can be downloaded from: https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/

This is the last version that is compatible with Blender 2.79. Future versions of the DAZ Importer, from version 1.6.0 and forward, will only work with Blender 2.80 and later. Maintaining compatibility with Blender 2.79 has become a major nuisance, and since I suspect that very few people use it these days anyway, this means a lot of work for very little gain. Critical bugfixes can still be done in the version_1_5_1 branch, which can be downloaded from https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/?tab=branches.

Acknowledgements:

Although the code has been written by myself, this add-on has benefitted greatly from bug reports and suggestions by many people. In particular, I want to thank

Alessandro Padovani, for his expertise in materials. The translation from Iray to Cycles and Eevee is essentially Alessandro's achievement.

engetudouiti, for his suggestions in many areas, especially rigging. 

Xin, for his lucid explanations on coding and the Blender API.

Original post:

The Daz Importer has evolved a lot in the last few months, and the old stable version 1.4.2 is obsolete. The new stable version 1.5.0 is now available.

Daz Importer v 1.5.0: https://www.dropbox.com/s/scoe4umsrnh8z5x/import_daz-v1.5.0-20200918.zip

This version supports Blender 2.90.0, Blender 2.83.3 LTS and Blender 2.79b. 

The add-on has mostly been tested on Windows 7. It has previously also been tested on Windows 10 and Linux, but not the most recent changes.

I had hoped that the documentation would be complete before the release, but unfortunately it is somewhat outdated due to the additions of new features and UI changes recently. Writing documentation takes a lot of time and effort and I don't want to postpone the release any longer.

thanks DD

some wacky mummy wrap modeling I started around six months ago then forgot about it till today.. so had a wacky go to finish it off for Genesis

modeled in Carrara then fine adjustments in Blender ( cause I wanted to use it  ) and then used DS to transfer the rigging stuff to it..

Shape morph not saved on Windows. It's okay on Mac. As of 4.12.1, there is an only way to save morph is to save Shaping Presets. I wish this bug was known to tech team.

Stonemason sets.

Its not just that they look fantastic - which they do, But they don't get nearly enough praise for how resource efficient they are. Most of them take barely over 1gb memory on my gpu which is straight up witchcraft.

 

Aprilysh Hair

 

Again I'm going to praise some hidden engineering. Have you ever noticed how Aprilysh hair magically doesn't ever get distorted? If you take one of their hairs with pigtails or braids and then put it on a super stylized character a lot of hairs of similar styles not by them will get giant distortions but aprilysh hairs magically don't? - Its not magic. Actually Aprilysh hairs tend to come with multiple rigidity groups which fix morph distortion. also their hair is always fully rigged with bones for movement which is less prone to distortion than movement supplied via morph. 

 

Mada and Lady Littlefox for clothing (also LLF's hair is great too)

Again I'm going to praise the engineering. Their stuff has great topology and has had great topology going back to the pre-genesis days. There's lots of stuff that looks great but has messy and/or dense topology - now messy/dense topology can work especially if the creator added jcms - the problem is a soon as you transfer the clothing to another generation those jcms stop working. good clean topology is just so much easier to work with especially if you're trying to make it do something it wasnt directly designed for. also both of them have had super clean topology for generations - I've converet some of LLF's content for Aiko 3 wand it holds up incredibly well, bends well without setting the smoothing super high, takes subdivision even thogh it was created before there was subdivision in studio.

 

Linday and AS

Their sci-fi stuff just looks so cool - I always considered myself more of a fantasy/historical person, but their sci-fi stuff just looks super cool and I have bought way too much of it. (they also have pretty good topology fwiw but a bit denser than Mada and LLF's stuff tends to be so it can take a bit more effort transferring across figures)

 

Arryn and Onnel

Their jewelry alone is worth the price of the entire outfit as far as I'm concerned. They're so pretty. If they ever want to release a jewelry bundle I will jump on that so fast. Also the normal maps on their clothes are magical. They are just ridiculously good at making flat dforce meshes look solid 

 

 

 

And down the artist rabbit hole I go. thanks...thanks a LOT! (hehe) (Edit: I've pretty much ran out my welcome on 3DCollective, i13, Z, Stonemason, Mousso...need to check out the rest though.)

Stonemason sets.

Its not just that they look fantastic - which they do, But they don't get nearly enough praise for how resource efficient they are. Most of them take barely over 1gb memory on my gpu which is straight up witchcraft.

Aprilysh Hair

Again I'm going to praise some hidden engineering. Have you ever noticed how Aprilysh hair magically doesn't ever get distorted? If you take one of their hairs with pigtails or braids and then put it on a super stylized character a lot of hairs of similar styles not by them will get giant distortions but aprilysh hairs magically don't? - Its not magic. Actually Aprilysh hairs tend to come with multiple rigidity groups which fix morph distortion. also their hair is always fully rigged with bones for movement which is less prone to distortion than movement supplied via morph. 

Mada and Lady Littlefox for clothing (also LLF's hair is great too)

Again I'm going to praise the engineering. Their stuff has great topology and has had great topology going back to the pre-genesis days. There's lots of stuff that looks great but has messy and/or dense topology - now messy/dense topology can work especially if the creator added jcms - the problem is a soon as you transfer the clothing to another generation those jcms stop working. good clean topology is just so much easier to work with especially if you're trying to make it do something it wasnt directly designed for. also both of them have had super clean topology for generations - I've converet some of LLF's content for Aiko 3 wand it holds up incredibly well, bends well without setting the smoothing super high, takes subdivision even thogh it was created before there was subdivision in studio.

Linday and AS

Their sci-fi stuff just looks so cool - I always considered myself more of a fantasy/historical person, but their sci-fi stuff just looks super cool and I have bought way too much of it. (they also have pretty good topology fwiw but a bit denser than Mada and LLF's stuff tends to be so it can take a bit more effort transferring across figures)

Arryn and Onnel

Their jewelry alone is worth the price of the entire outfit as far as I'm concerned. They're so pretty. If they ever want to release a jewelry bundle I will jump on that so fast. Also the normal maps on their clothes are magical. They are just ridiculously good at making flat dforce meshes look solid 

Thanks guys :)

Zelara right out of the box. Didn't remove any maps.

Thanks for the comparison. It looks like it doesn't add much visually if you already have the HD morph, but looks to be worthwhile if you don't.

Favorites saving were not working 2 versions before, that was also a problem as rendered favorittes nearly useless. One version ago they were fixed, and was possible to do something in animation. Now the current version breaks a basic animation feature, save morphs.No sure a new key editor should have been added when breaks a core feature that makes impossible many types of animation, specially when the version before was working  fine. Feels rather a downgrade.

I have spend several hours tryign to figure out why was not saving the morphs . At least I know now.

I feel you.  I spent a lot of time trying to see why it wasn't saving the morph animations and ended up giving up.  it wasn't anything wrong from what I was doing, it was the recent daz version that has a bug of not saving custom morph animations.  Which for now makes it impossible for me to use it for character animation.  I have to downgrade to older version which is fine in that regard.  oh well.. we will just wait.  : )       

Any recent builds with fix for morph not saving available yet? (I'm not checking every new build)

There are a number of reasons why the number of vertices in a mesh must remain constant in Daz Studio.

Daz Studio has an overarching concept called "geometry modifier". Every morph is one, so is Mesh Grabber, and the D-Formers and push and smoothing modifiers built into Daz Studio are too. What they have in common is that they can displace vertices (move them around in 3D space), but they cannot add or remove vertices. There is some machinery inside Daz Studio for subdivision and HD meshes which interpolates between the vertices of a mesh, but it does not add or remove vertices from the original (the "base") mesh, which is always there.

The other reason (and this is the part I'm less familiar with) is rigging, i.e. the bones of a Daz Studio figure. The rigging also references the vertices of a mesh, and since much of the Daz ecosystem is based on the Genesis figures, all of that would break if the mesh is changed. (Which it did when Daz moved from one Genesis generation to the next, and they needed to add features to Daz Studio to convert assets between them.)

With geometry that is not rigged, like your scenery, this is less of an issue so Daz could theoretically add more modeling features to Daz Studio, but then Blender and other modelers can do all that already so the incentive for Daz to do that is just not there I guess.

@marth_e I believe not. You have to load the HD morphs you need in daz studio then export to blender. That is, you cannot use HD morphs the same as regular morphs in blender.

-It's a pitty that as far as I know the multiresolution modifier in Blender can't support shape keys. There is no way to create shape keys on the higher resolution levels unless you apply the modifier first.
-If the multires modifier could support shape keys then it would be possible to load HD morphs in Blender by:

    -Importing the HD geometry with the HD morph loaded in Blender
    -Creating the shape key on the multires modifier with the "join as shape key" option
-Having the possibility to have shape keys with a multiresolution modifier could open a whole new world of possibilities. Like creating driven HD morphs directly in Blender for expressions (wrinkles) or complex muscle movements. It would be very similar to what DAZ Studio does right now by allowing PAs, by using a propertary addon, to load morphs on different subdivision levels and not only on the base level like everyone else.

-On the other hand it would be very similar to what Zbrush do, by allowing the creation of layers on different subdivision levels. Having this funcionality on Blender can also open the possibility to sculpt on layers on different subdivisions levels. I just hope Pablo Dobarro could include this option too in the near future.
-Here is a petition to add this funcionality on Blender but, as far as I understand, this has not been implemented yet. If someone can create an addon for this it would be super useful.
https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/Hdbbbc/

My first attempt at using lickalicious with Sobek...
uhm, yeah, gonna need some work cause this definitely does not work out of the box. 
Off the top of my head I suspect this is some weird glitch due to how the Sobek HD morph crushes and distorts the base tongue rig. 
Any suggestions on a quick fix? I suspect if there was just some easy way to tell DAZ Studio, "hey, when dialing in the sobek hd morph, leave the tongue alone" that would be most of the way to fixing it. 

I've made two freebies and based on the downloads from those the answer is overwhelmingly pretty women.

1) One freebie was a scene that requires the use to have some DAZ products purchased plus download and install freebies from two other people that made freebies so it's a bit of money and work to pull what you need to use the scene together. The scene is of an opening cartoon credits of a 60s television show. In 3 years it has 783 views, 141 downloads, 6 comments, and oddly only 5 ratings, one less than number of comments.

2) The other freebie is much less work as it is just a FaceGen Artist Pro morph the user unzips & places in their DAZ Content Library & restart DAZ & it's ready to go. It's a face morph, geometry only, approximating a famous female pop band singer from the late 70s through mid 80s. She is still well known and very pretty. In 2 days that freebie has 336 views, 66 downloads, 1 rating, and no comments.

So if you can model gorgeous realistic woman I think you would make a lot of money.

I guess to be fair and negate the often stated claim in the forum that if one don't offer male 3D model products how can you state that they wouldn't sell as good as they aren't given equal opportunity to sell as the female 3D models?

Anyone have suggestions on what male celebrity I should use? Should it be someone that's mascilinely handsome? Someone that's generally well known to be behaviorally a heroically known man? Should it be some unknown male I use the random function to generate in FaceGen Artist Pro until one gets generated that 'strikes me as uniquely interesting'?

Should I do the same with randomly generating a uniquely interesting female in FaceGen Artist Pro as a freebie as that's more in line with the expectations for new female characters in the DAZ 3D Store?

You can probably assume because I am not a modeler or a prolific maker of freebies and have no followers any downloads got then would be on the desirability of the morphs and for no other reason. A PA in the DAZ Store would by weight of passing the DAZ 3D QA process would immediately carry more wait regarding general product desirability, but at a monetary price. 

If you noticed and did the math for the ratio of views to downloads for both the "Bewitched" scene and the "Deborah Harry" morph it's about 1 in 5 or 20% (18% and 19% respectively).

Then I will post the results here.

=====

OK, the female freebie I uploaded is a likeness of Deborah Harry. I just made a likeness of Elvis Presley with FaceGen Artist Pro and seeing as Elvis Presley is arguably the most famous man in western history his downloads relative to Deborah Harry's would be a gage as to what will sell in the DAZ Store.

As luck would have it the Genesis 8 Male Essentials that come free with DAZ Studio's G8M skin materials and Armani hair is ballpark range for Elvis' hair and complexion were in real life (although I never realized they wore so much makeup on TV, stage, & movies back then!). They are easy enough to find if you search shareCG.com but unless you actually want them you shouldn't get them or view them as the ideal is the random shareCG.com user's interests indicating what sells but us forum goers. Big collectors there are likely big collectors in the DAZ Store.

And look at the female character ratio to male characters in the DAZ Store & at shareCG. Its lopsided.

For pretty female characters Mousso, Rarestone, and Bluejunte are already excellent so it'd be pretty hard to compete and even if someone gets that good so many great characters are already here. There's actually way more room for more environments. There are so many potential cities that just haven't been done here yet 

As for male celebrities Yeonjun, Cole Sprouse, James Charles, Jungkook, Chris Hemsworth, and Henry Golding are worth looking at for inspiration 

So I'm breaking down what I got so far as an experiment

I like to use sliders to mix different characters 

 

But beautiful female character models are beautiful no matter which PA makes the character, including the PAs you list there. If the OP really is motivated and enjoys making female characters then that's what they should do. I'm planning on buying the Marvelous Designer Perpetual License before they go to subscriber licensing only and if I do make model products it apt to be traditional clothing.

....but, personally, I'm not a PA and am not trying to specifically become one either. It's a hobby and what comes from it comes from it. I have no plan. If I did make models or code that I though were worth selling or other might want I'd do so although I'm apt to thoroughly investigate the Unity Asset Store and the UE4 Asset store as avenues for sales in addition to the DAZ 3D Store.

That's weird as I thought I had zeroed any morphs not related to the products listed above. Doubly weird in that the Llama and Unicorn morphs should load if you have both Lovable Llamas and SF Unicorn for DAZ Horse 2 in your library. I'll try to correct the error and fix the issue. Apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for making me aware of it.

I should probably have mentioned that I don't own those, but thought I'd see how they looked anyway.

Thanks for clarifying. I thought I really messed something up. How did the morphs turn out without those products, BTW?

Awesome! Thanks so much!

+1!

Thank you! Mind if I ask which combinations of fur/textures you used in your renders?

For the goat, I used the Llama's white material for the body; Tane the Old Deer's body, head, neck, and tail fibermesh fur with an off-white diffuse color; and hoof materials from HD Dark Knight for DAZ Horse 2. For the Big Horn, I used Tane the Old Deer's textures and fur, and applied DestinysGarden's DG Iray Fur, Flocking, Scales Shader Presets to a geoshell set to 50% opacity for additional fuzz (with an opacity map created in GIMP for the head to make fur around the muzzle shorter). The horns are from Michael 4 Creature Creator Add Ons.

If I owned Gnu for DAZ Horse 2 by AM, I definitely would have utilized either it's LAMH of dForce fur for my renders. If I ever get the GNU, I'd love to try morph/ kit-bashing Mouflon and Marco Polo sheep.

I've made two freebies and based on the downloads from those the answer is overwhelmingly pretty women.

1) One freebie was a scene that requires the use to have some DAZ products purchased plus download and install freebies from two other people that made freebies so it's a bit of money and work to pull what you need to use the scene together. The scene is of an opening cartoon credits of a 60s television show. In 3 years it has 783 views, 141 downloads, 6 comments, and oddly only 5 ratings, one less than number of comments.

2) The other freebie is much less work as it is just a FaceGen Artist Pro morph the user unzips & places in their DAZ Content Library & restart DAZ & it's ready to go. It's a face morph, geometry only, approximating a famous female pop band singer from the late 70s through mid 80s. She is still well known and very pretty. In 2 days that freebie has 336 views, 66 downloads, 1 rating, and no comments.

So if you can model gorgeous realistic woman I think you would make a lot of money.

I guess to be fair and negate the often stated claim in the forum that if one don't offer male 3D model products how can you state that they wouldn't sell as good as they aren't given equal opportunity to sell as the female 3D models?

Anyone have suggestions on what male celebrity I should use? Should it be someone that's mascilinely handsome? Someone that's generally well known to be behaviorally a heroically known man? Should it be some unknown male I use the random function to generate in FaceGen Artist Pro until one gets generated that 'strikes me as uniquely interesting'?

Should I do the same with randomly generating a uniquely interesting female in FaceGen Artist Pro as a freebie as that's more in line with the expectations for new female characters in the DAZ 3D Store?

You can probably assume because I am not a modeler or a prolific maker of freebies and have no followers any downloads got then would be on the desirability of the morphs and for no other reason. A PA in the DAZ Store would by weight of passing the DAZ 3D QA process would immediately carry more wait regarding general product desirability, but at a monetary price. 

If you noticed and did the math for the ratio of views to downloads for both the "Bewitched" scene and the "Deborah Harry" morph it's about 1 in 5 or 20% (18% and 19% respectively).

Then I will post the results here.

=====

OK, the female freebie I uploaded is a likeness of Deborah Harry. I just made a likeness of Elvis Presley with FaceGen Artist Pro and seeing as Elvis Presley is arguably the most famous man in western history his downloads relative to Deborah Harry's would be a gage as to what will sell in the DAZ Store.

As luck would have it the Genesis 8 Male Essentials that come free with DAZ Studio's G8M skin materials and Armani hair is ballpark range for Elvis' hair and complexion were in real life (although I never realized they wore so much makeup on TV, stage, & movies back then!). They are easy enough to find if you search shareCG.com but unless you actually want them you shouldn't get them or view them as the ideal is the random shareCG.com user's interests indicating what sells but us forum goers. Big collectors there are likely big collectors in the DAZ Store.

And look at the female character ratio to male characters in the DAZ Store & at shareCG. Its lopsided.

For pretty female characters Mousso, Rarestone, and Bluejunte are already excellent so it'd be pretty hard to compete and even if someone gets that good so many great characters are already here. There's actually way more room for more environments. There are so many potential cities that just haven't been done here yet 

As for male celebrities Yeonjun, Cole Sprouse, James Charles, Jungkook, Chris Hemsworth, and Henry Golding are worth looking at for inspiration 

So I'm breaking down what I got so far as an experiment

I like to use sliders to mix different characters 

Any weight-mapped figure can be set as the Source in Edit>Figure>Transfer Utility

So you I need all those morphs for Daz Horse 2 in order to use your presets?

Yes, it is recommended you have these items to achieve the goat and big horn morphs. I have no skills at creating scratch morphs myself, so I used the creatures available at Daz3D to "morph-bash" creatures I need for my book project. I apologize for having such a big list of recommended items and hope a professional content creator will create these animals sometime in the near future.

Your list of required products is incomplete. Here is the error message I get when loading the presets:

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/linday/dark knight/dark knight hd details.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/midnight_stories/llama/llama-ears-back.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/midnight_stories/llama/llama.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/rawart/raw_toypony/raw_toypony.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/sickleyield/dh2unicorn/fbmunicorn01.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/sickleyield/dh2unicorn/fbmunicorn02.dsf

edit: off-topic, but why does the horse have a "Roman nose" morph?

That's weird as I thought I had zeroed any morphs not related to the products listed above. Doubly weird in that the Llama and Unicorn morphs should load if you have both Lovable Llamas and SF Unicorn for DAZ Horse 2 in your library. I'll try to correct the error and fix the issue. Apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for making me aware of it.

This is heartwarming and very imaginative in how the problem was solved...lol

Awwww, we need Cat 8, or whatever.

This video should inspire those who like to make poses or simply want a new idea for a render. Sofie has a youtube channel so you can see more of what she does at this link.

https://www.youtube.com/user/SofieDossi/videos

Also Sophie is adorable, probably make a good character morph.

This was my first introduction to Sophie and since this video is 16 minutes long, might be best to wait for lunch break to watch it.

The video below is a small bio, just the right size for a coffee break.

Bloody hell, she's amazing, but is a tough watch, due to being bloody scary.

Your list of required products is incomplete. Here is the error message I get when loading the presets:

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/linday/dark knight/dark knight hd details.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/midnight_stories/llama/llama-ears-back.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/midnight_stories/llama/llama.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/rawart/raw_toypony/raw_toypony.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/sickleyield/dh2unicorn/fbmunicorn01.dsf

data/daz 3d/daz horse 2/base/morphs/sickleyield/dh2unicorn/fbmunicorn02.dsf

edit: off-topic, but why does the horse have a "Roman nose" morph?