Importing .OBJ model
thefett
Posts: 18
Hi,
I have a 3d model I'd like to import. It's a .OBJ file with colour but whenever I try to import it to DAZ, the colour is lost. I've tried converting to .DAE, and the colour remains intact, but then is lost on import to DAZ. Is there a program to convert OBJ files to a DAZ compatible format that retains the surface face/vertex colours when it's imported?
DAZ studio 4.12.1.117 on a mac w. Mojave
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Hi,
The materials from the obj are not going to be satisfying in Daz Studio, anyway. Why not retexture it with nice, native IRay materials? The obj will at least have faithfully preserved the UV mapping.
no maps just vertex colours?
A lot of objects exported to .obj have .mtl (material) settings that DS cant read. Or have surface maps meant to be applied to particular parts of the object, but it imports to DS as a single object without UV mapping so the textures provided are useless.
This is a very common problem with .obj files imported into DS. A smarter person than me might know how to work-around the issue.
OBJ alone isn't enough... you need the MTL (and a proper reference to it in the OBJ)
sometimes objects lose their UV mapping because DAZ studio imports it as one mesh welding it
they need to be imported into another software like Blender with split checked
RE: Why not retexture it with nice, native IRay materials?
It's a single surface with multiple colours - it'd be painstaking to recreate pixel by pixel.
RE: no maps just vertex colours? & RE: A lot of objects exported to .obj have .mtl (material) settings that DS cant read. & RE: OBJ alone isn't enough... you need the MTL (and a proper reference to it in the OBJ)
Right - it's just one OBJ file with vertex locations, and vertex colours. I've tried it as a version that had an MTL file as well and it does the same thing. The material file doesn't link to a map though so is largely useless in this case (the colours are still in the main OBJ file).
RE: sometimes objects lose their UV mapping because DAZ studio imports it as one mesh welding it. they need to be imported into another software like Blender with split checked
This starts as a one mesh file. I've tried pulling the file through Blender and various other CAD converters without luck. Some, like Blender, turn it colourless. A few keep the colour. All lose the colour as soon as I import to DAZ.
So, you are saying it comes into blender without color.
How is the file originally colored?
if it has vertex colours Meshlab can bake a texture map it it is UV'd
if not it can transfer the texture to an identical UV mapped model using vertex attributes
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1265761945
Zbrush can create a UV and bake it too, the massive Mandlebubler3D exports I do I map in Zbrush
a whopping 4 million poly Mandelbulber3D Mistletoe fractal export I zprojected the vertex colours from to a cleaner mesh
and pretended was broccoli with FLUIDOS cheese sauce
Sweet! That looks like just what I need. Now I get to see if I can match the steps. Thanks!!
It's not that the .mtl settings can't be read; the .obj file format is ancient, old enough that many 3D programs can create an .obj/.mtl pair with slightly different ways of specifying the location of linked files. D|S is a bit fussy in the format it accepts; IIRC we had the same problem with old Poser freebies dating back to pre-D|S days made by people who didn't really understand the Poser file format.
The most common failure is that all file paths are either absolute or using another 3D program's standards, so the moment the model is copied to another computer with a different folder structure, the .obj file can't find the .mtl file even if they're in the same folder, and the .mtl file isn't pointing to the texture files any more. In all my years of working with D|S I've come across about half a dozen combinations of ways other programs can export an .obj in such a way that D|S imports it with some kind of material problems.
Fortunately the two files are in plaintext, so a simple whack upside the back of the head with a text editor is all that's needed to fix the glitches. I've got into the habit of always looking at both files before I try to import.