UDIM's my friend.  Look up some info on UDIM's.  The textures are separated to provide more detail.  If they were all packed onto one uv island, you would only have one texture map.  If that map was a 4k map, the texture quality would not be great.  To increase quality, you would have to make a giant 16k or 32k map that would not load well, if at all.  That is why they are separated into multiple maps, so we can load multiple 4k maps to maintian detail in our renders.

To copy materials from one character to another in Blender, you can use the 'material utilities' plug in.  Once you make one set of materials, you can just import that character and copy those materials to a newly imported character.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/materials/material_utils.html

Using node groups to make global adjustments is also a good idea. You can place your color correction, spec/roughness adjustment, etc. all in a node group and make global changes to your characters face, head, torso, arms, and legs all at once.

watchdog79 said:

DoctorJellybean said:

robertswww said:

@

watchdog79 If the product says the product will work it Daz Studio, it may just need some tweaks to the Zip file structure, ot it could just mean that you can import the .obj prop(s). If you want to share a screenshot of what the contents of the unzipped (i.e. extracted) zip folder looks like, that might help. Basically, you want CONTENT at the top-level of the folder, and below that your Data, People, Props, Runtime, Vehicles, etc. You could try to format a copy of the extracted zip file that way, and then re-zip it and import it into CW.

Also, your screenshot show that the 3rd zip file you added to Content Wizard was the Templates folder. Templates are not for smart content, so never add them.  Remove all 3 of your current zip files using the (-) button. Click Save and exit CW (or at the least write down or grab a screenshot of the exact Product Name, Product ID, etc. that you used). Restart CW and import in the newly re-formatted zip file.

You should also replace the default product thumbnail image, with a thumbnail from the actual product, click "Change Product Icon" and browse to a thumbnail on your hard drive for a suitable image.

The problem here is that there are no DAZ Studio format files in that product. It contains a single .cr2 file and some Poser light and camera files.

Create a folder e.g. Prod Creation somewhere on your hard drive and create directories inside that folder with the following structure:

Vehicles/Skycruiser Albatross

and map the root folder e.g. Prod Creation in Studio. Load the item in Studio. With the item selected, click Save As - Support Asset - Figure/Prop Assets. Select the Skycruiser Albatross folder you have just created, give it a name and enter the details. You can uncheck the Metadata options since Content Wizard will create the metadata. Click Accept.

Now add the created Data and Vehicles folders to the original zip (which should be properly structered as robertswww said. Now CW should work with the updated zip.

Sorry, I was sick and I had no energy to deal with this.

I have the directories structure ready, but I struggle with the step to create a .DUF file. I do not seem to be able to load any .OBJ or .CR2 file manually. Daz Studio allows me to Open or Merge only DAZ format files. Edit: Alright, I managed to create a DUF file from the CR2 file by importing it.

Could you, please, explain to me what do you mean by "Prod Creation" and how do I "map the root folder e.g. Prod Creation in Studio"? 

You see, I have only been using Smart Content until now and I have no idea how to use any other, advanced methods of content management. Renderosity store may contain some very nice products, but getting them to work is a nightmare for a clueless hobby artist like me.

I am glad you figured it out.  It takes awhile to figure out everything in Daz Studio... there are a LOT of features.  I am a PA and I probably know only half of DS.  I lean on the help of other PAs and the forums a lot 

Catherine3678ab said:

I put together a .pdf tutorial of how I made some pJCMs.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7332281/#Comment_7332281

Hello,
I followed the tutorial well (and even translated all the text except thanks to Google translation: a text edit would have been welcome.)
So I applied what I could understand.
it still wasn't working.
And then rereading the text and this forum I saw two things.
1/ that it was necessary to put new clothing on the character to erase the settings.
2/ that we had to intervene on the general denomination during the import with "Morph Loader Pro".
here is what I did (but I admit that I don't know exactly what I did!):

And I must say: it works!
So thank you to those who helped me, I don't know if it's the right method.. But I think that the film pJCM Pose deserves to have a PDF complement or a specific additional tutorial.
I got lost in forums and youtube tutorials but you gave me a solution...Is it the right one? Anyway, this one works for me and I'm happy!

Merci Catherine3678ab et merci Richard

Patrick

This seems to be a recent issue as it worked fine the last time I did this.

I'd like to adjust the position of a piece of clothing.

I export the figure from Daz as an OBJ. Then export the clothing as an OBJ.
I import them into Blender and all is fine, I make adjustments to the clothing, the export as an OBJ.

When I import the clothing back in Daz Studio, the axis of the clothing has centered in the geometry and does not drop into original position?
I don't touch the axis or selection while I'm in Blender. This procedure worked fine before, just wonder what I'm doing wrong? 
Daz Studio 4.16.0.3
Blender 2.90.1

So one of the big things I was looking forward to when moving all my figures into blender was the idea that I could make all of their skins procedurally from scratch using blender nodes, aswell as making their use very modular by using node groups. Essentially I can just drop a custom made "Skin BSDF" into the shader editor and pick the base skin tone of the figure. And so far that has been successful! But I have run into a bit of a roadblock in this process. 

When you import a daz figure into Blender, the UVs are already unwrapped decently enough, but the issue is the placement of the UV islands.

They are all placed in such a way that only the face UVs are actually where they need to be. The rest are just scattered off to the side. Now, of course the simple solution is to select all the verts and hit "Pack Islands", but then you create a new problem where now everything is mooshed into 1 island and nothing lines up anymore.

The way the UVs are originally placed seems to suggest that I should be able to have more than one island square visible at a time. That is, the face verts all perfectly line up, so if I were to be able to bring the torso image to the right of the face image, and the leg image to the right of that, etc etc, everything would be perfectly aligned. But in all my googling I have not been able to figure out how to do that, or if such a thing is even possible. If not that, then it seems the solution is to pack the UVs and bake the entire thing into 1 single texture. But then that would mean I would have to redo that for every individual figure I imported because as far as I can tell, you can't import/export the UV layout. You can import/export an image file of the UV layout, but not the actual vert placement data.

So essentially the problem is that it seems like within blender there is no way to accurately texture the figure without just packing 1 huge UV island and manually painting it in an image editor, and then importing that image back in. Which breaks the existing format of the textures as they come in. I feel like I am missing something extremely obvious but it's a really difficult thing to explain, let alone do google searches for.

Since the last update, I have had a lot of problems with Product files.   Many of my Products now have missing files.   Sometimes one,  sometimes more.  Re-installing the metadata doesn't change anything.   Re-installing the product doesn't always help.   There are missing files that don't even show up as orphans.  

Hi NorthOf45,

Good news! Installed a new 8TB SSD and copied the all my DAZ products to a new directory and renamed the old directory (to backup just in case) so the DAZ application couldn't find it. See pictures of DIM and DAZ Studio path settings.

1) Did the Notepad++ thing, ran the DAZ Studio DB Reset and DB Import.

2) Restarted DIM and everything shows installed.

3) Restarted DAZ Studio, and all the Smart Contents shows installed (Color icons and no install icon) and grouped by products and files (see screen capture).

4) Deleted all the old direcories to make sure none of the DAZ apps were finding them. Everything still works.

One thing I can't explain is what made my content directory drop down to 150 GB (which adds up). I randomlly loaded different products and all the contents loaded. 

I started with 700 GB and now I'm down to 150 GB. There must have been a bunch of duplication of files somewhere.

Do you see any problems with my path settings (even so it looks like everything is fixed).  The new "My Daz Connect Library" directory now only has a directory "Data", with a "Cloud" inside it which is empty. The directory "My_Daz_Private_Library" is where I put products not from DAZ that are manually installed. Did you indicate there was a software tool or process that would enable me to install products that don't have installers, so I could get them organized?

Thanks again.  Bruce

Haruchai said:

I think they have, at least some of the figures, in FBX format which DAZ can import but I have never got a figure to import as FBX with a rig intact. I'm not sure if that's something to do with how they are rigged or DAZ's implementation of FBX though.

Back in 2016, I purchased several stand-alone character figures of iconic cartoon caracters from the turbo squid site -- They came in 3ds (native format), fbx, lwo, max8 and obj formats -- I was able to import most of the various formats into DAZ Studio but the rigging was not intact within any of them -- The products were advertised as being DAZ Studio compatible -- I asked the content creator for a format that would work in DAZ Studio and they sent me a duf format -- The duf format version did NOT have its rigging intact, either -- I attempted to learn rigging in DAZ Studio, but found it to be too much of grunt work for my taste -- I still have all of the various models in the various formats, and if anyone who is enthusiatic about rigging in DAZ Studio wants them, I would be happy to provide them with any or all of the models

@astroyelemagicien Here G3F works fine, I can import jcms expressions etc.

@SadRobot You can compare with the daz rig and see the difference. I mean jcms should work fine with mhx. From your picture I'm not sure I notice anything.

I think they have, at least some of the figures, in FBX format which DAZ can import but I have never got a figure to import as FBX with a rig intact. I'm not sure if that's something to do with how they are rigged or DAZ's implementation of FBX though.

Hello, I'm trying to import morph.

I get the No morphs selected error, when i use the Import Standard Morphs button. When i look into each type of morphs none is available. I would think this is because I have not setup correctly my content library but I'm pretty sure I added all of them, and texture / meshes import just fine.

Edit: Nvm it's just the model I was using : genesis 3, that didn't work. So I assume Genesis 3 model can't get to work morph with this addon? Just to know if it's something on my part or not.

Ok Richard, so I must to subdivide it with edge loops? Or cut new loop edges? Thanks for the pic Squishy. Only thing is that I dunno, I can't get the gradient red/blue of the weight, it's always all red, like all soft, then, if I move one bone, the other moving as well but rigid. I think there something about rigging/weight that I need to know. May someody write the first important steps from after modelling up to weight? I mean, when import the mesh in Daz for rigging and Geograft. I know how to but some inportant step make me confused. Thanks.

benniewoodell said:

Rakete said:

I've had the same problem in the past and would love to know if there is a workaround for that behaviour. So far I've either kind of corrected that jumping manually after the fact, or just completely avoided aniblocks. In fact my workaround currently is to do as much as possible in blender, and then only import the animation and keep it as studio keyframes.

Do you use diffeo to bring the keys back into Daz or another method? Right now I'm animating in Maya since I have access through my class and the daz to Maya bridge has a way to export keys back into Daz but once class is over I've gotta figure out another method. 

I've been using Diffeo yes, it works but is not perfect. In particular that split between Bend and Twist bones in daz can cause headaches, because when you animate in blender and use something like the MHX rig and retargeting, you end up with twist on the bend bones. I've been hacking the Diffeo code so when you export the animation it moves the twist component from the bend bone to the twist bones.

IClone 8 and Character Creator 4 are both big steps up from the previous versions. Lots of long overdue features have been added. Downsides are, they are expensive and their tutorials tend to be scattered in terms of which features are covered in them and how.

it is in need of a comprehensive straight fwd third party master course. 

it does work very very well for animations. As stated though it does not use corrective morphs or Atleast does not import them. Causing there to be less than realistic deformations in animation. But most users feel the advanced animation tools and lip synching abilities make up for it. Also it can bridge directly into the data agnostic Omniverse for rendering. AND they have been teasing a direct data link into Blender to be able to animate in iClone and have the animations update in a linked copy of blender. They have something similar already for Unreal. 
 

I googled for a while but all threads I've found are pretty outdated or never finished. Daz3D can export FBX, but this way it's like throwing all advantages of Daz out of the window. Ideally, there should be a way to import Daz3D's model/rig/JCMs as Houdini KineFX rig + Blend Shapes SOP, so we can basically have a "Genesis 8 in Houdini".
Does such a tool exist?

Philemo_Carrara said:

I've decided to enter this challenge.

Whenever I do, I always try something new and take the opportunity to learn something.

This time, as there is a possibility to submit an animation, my take was to try to build a workflow to import animations from Mixamo. My first tests were disappointing as FBX importer/exporter in Carrara are really out of date. Therefore, I had to use a third party software. It happens I have a nice plugin for Carrara called Daz Studio.

Great to see you entering.  Yay.  Thanks for the workflow.  I have tried my silly Carrra-rigged models in Mixamo.  They load and I can watch them in Mixamo, but as you point out, I can't get the exported animation to work correctly in Carrara.  Carrara gives an error when trying the default FBX Mixamo export.  I can get the model back using the FBX 6.1 export from Mixamo, but no animation keyframes.  Trying collada DAE Mixamo export did not align the exported skeleton with the mesh, and no keyframes.  

I bet I could rig them in Studio and follow your workflow.

I am looking forward to how you integrate a Mixamo-exported animation.  Definitely something that I had been looking into.

(1) My Clown Model Dancing in Mixamo.

(2) Error loading default Mixamo FBX export

(3) Mesh load Mixamo FBX 6.1 export, but no animation keyframes for skeleton

(4) Mesh and skeleton do not align using Mixamo Collada DAE export

I've decided to enter this challenge.

Whenever I do, I always try something new and take the opportunity to learn something.

This time, as there is a possibility to submit an animation, my take was to try to build a workflow to import animations from Mixamo. My first tests were disappointing as FBX importer/exporter in Carrara are really out of date. Therefore, I had to use a third party software. It happens I have a nice plugin for Carrara called Daz Studio.

It works up to Genesis 2. G7 and G8 have double articulations for thigh and shoulder and Mixamo has trouble with that.

So, this is how it goes.

• From the latest version of studio, export your base figure (in my case Genesis) as FBX using the latest version of the exporter.
• In Mixamo, upload a new character using this export.
• Apply the animation you want. Tune it the way you want. In Genesis, you can fiddle with the Arm space slider.
• Export it still using the latest version of FBX.
• Back in studio, import the resulting FBX and save it as a scene subset.
• Now, in Carrara, create a new scene and add the scene subset from your content.
• select the figure
• In the NLA tab of this figure, click on "create master clip"
• Drag the resulting clip in the clip tab of the browser
• You're done with this scene, you may close it.
• in your project, drag this saved clip to the clip tab of the project
• drag it from there to the NLA line of your figure in the time line. It's done.

Carrara expects translation to be on the model or on the hip. Mixamo export translation on the figure. So, if you're looping an animation, you have to use the override master clip option. The offset from previous clip part doesn't work.

DoctorJellybean said:

robertswww said:

@

watchdog79 If the product says the product will work it Daz Studio, it may just need some tweaks to the Zip file structure, ot it could just mean that you can import the .obj prop(s). If you want to share a screenshot of what the contents of the unzipped (i.e. extracted) zip folder looks like, that might help. Basically, you want CONTENT at the top-level of the folder, and below that your Data, People, Props, Runtime, Vehicles, etc. You could try to format a copy of the extracted zip file that way, and then re-zip it and import it into CW.

Also, your screenshot show that the 3rd zip file you added to Content Wizard was the Templates folder. Templates are not for smart content, so never add them.  Remove all 3 of your current zip files using the (-) button. Click Save and exit CW (or at the least write down or grab a screenshot of the exact Product Name, Product ID, etc. that you used). Restart CW and import in the newly re-formatted zip file.

You should also replace the default product thumbnail image, with a thumbnail from the actual product, click "Change Product Icon" and browse to a thumbnail on your hard drive for a suitable image.

The problem here is that there are no DAZ Studio format files in that product. It contains a single .cr2 file and some Poser light and camera files.

Create a folder e.g. Prod Creation somewhere on your hard drive and create directories inside that folder with the following structure:

Vehicles/Skycruiser Albatross

and map the root folder e.g. Prod Creation in Studio. Load the item in Studio. With the item selected, click Save As - Support Asset - Figure/Prop Assets. Select the Skycruiser Albatross folder you have just created, give it a name and enter the details. You can uncheck the Metadata options since Content Wizard will create the metadata. Click Accept.

Now add the created Data and Vehicles folders to the original zip (which should be properly structered as robertswww said. Now CW should work with the updated zip.

Sorry, I was sick and I had no energy to deal with this.

I have the directories structure ready, but I struggle with the step to create a .DUF file. I do not seem to be able to load any .OBJ or .CR2 file manually. Daz Studio allows me to Open or Merge only DAZ format files. Edit: Alright, I managed to create a DUF file from the CR2 file by importing it.

Could you, please, explain to me what do you mean by "Prod Creation" and how do I "map the root folder e.g. Prod Creation in Studio"? 

You see, I have only been using Smart Content until now and I have no idea how to use any other, advanced methods of content management. Renderosity store may contain some very nice products, but getting them to work is a nightmare for a clueless hobby artist like me.

Squishy said:

imo if you can figure out how to get Blender to export FBX with your polygon selections for selecting parts and posing then you'd probably have better luck.

Oh no. I just now tried to transfer my car model from Blender to Daz using the FBX format as you suggested, but it won't let me use that format. It seems to only accept OBJ format.

What I mean here is that the special way of imprting in Daz that one must do to for rigging a model does not accept FBX. It is the import dialog box that is part of the "Figure Setup" process tab/window.

marble said:

FSMCDesigns said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

FSMCDesigns said:

marble said:

Apparently CC4 and iClone 8 have been released.

Has anyone bought these new versions or had a chance to evaluate them? Anything worth knowing for DAZ Studio users? Such as how easy is the export/import between the two applications? What are the limitations (geografts/geoshells, etc.)? Do they compliment DAZ Studio or are they an alternative?

They are mainly for game/avatar design and mostly for exporting from DS, so not sure what use most DS users would have for them.  it's funny how reallusion reaps all the benefits of being able to rip off DAZ content, yet Daz/ Daz Studio users get the shaft, LOL

well you could say that about Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, 3Dstudio Max, Maya which all have DAZ bridges and to some extent Carrara and Poser 

the only difference is DAZ never made an iClone bridge

I do say that about those since most are one way as well, LOL  he did specify how are they for Daz Studio users, so I assume he was wanting to know about the import to DS options which really are non existant.

Well, that would have been interesting but since it is not available that's the end of discussion for iClone to DAZ Studio.

Back to the other direction, though, I am interested in what can be done with DAZ Studio characters exported to iClone8 or CC4 (I'm still not sure why there are two applications or how they work together though). As you know there is a VR application called VAM (Virt-A-Mate) which allows for import of Genesis 3 characters into a kind of VR game engine and then applies physics and provides animation capabilities which are way beyond what can be done in DAZ Studio. My Oculus is gathering dust in a corner because I didn't take to the wearing of the headset and couldn't get used to focusing my eyes but the software is impressive for a Patreon funded one-man enterprise.

So coming back to iClone, I would have thought that similar features (soft-body physics, more advanced and faster animation capabilities) would be available in a non-VR environment, especially with such big company resources. So my question was really to find out whether iClone8/CC4 is worth a look because DAZ does not seem interested in providing such features in DAZ Studio for the foreseeable future. VAM works with G3 figures and the certain geografts that are available. I believe that the new version, which will import G8 figures, is still some way off but that's what you get with a development team of one. DAZ, however, is even slower with much better resources so go figure.

VAM uses G2 figures with G8 support coming in version 2 and you can use it in desktop mode as well.

Basically what you are seeing is the difference between a game engine like Unity and just a regular 3D app that has specific features coded into it's programing, like DS.  All IClone is, is a full featured, real time animation app. Think of it this way, CC4 is similar to the DS app, where you can use premade figures and morph them, clothe them, pose them, even render them. Think of iClone as a non scripted version of VAM or Unity with good animation tools. The features are there, real time lighting, physics, etc, but to have your figure do anything other than what you animate, you need a game engine to program it all together..

Honestly, if you are just looking for another app that has features you think should be in DS, then any game engine or high end modeling app like Maya would have that, BUT you will loose lots of the DS only tech that makes hair, clothing, etc work so well with Daz figures in DS. What really needs to happen is DAZ needs to make it easier and feasable to import more features and formats, that will increase their user base more than having bridges and such..