Diffeomorphic clarification, please: Poses vs Morphs
Most of the content I want to get from Daz into Blender are props with pose controls: a handle or lever can move, a door can open or close, a wheel can turn. Usually in Daz, there are custom pose controls that are essentially renamed Transform controls that may or may not drive multiple transform dials, like the clamp on a vise that rotates while it moves in and out.
No matter how many times I've favorited those controls in Daz and then tried to find them in Blender after importing using every "Import pose" or "import morph" button available in Diffeomorphic, I can't ever find them. However, If the geometry has imported correctly, I can go into Pose Mode in Blender, drill down into the Outliner tree to find the Bone name that matches the Bone name in Daz, select the Bone properties in the Properties Editor, and manipulate the transform controls there. If the Daz PA has put constraints on the Daz custom dials, then I can find those same constraints in the Constraints Property for the selected Bone. But I can’t find any drivers or shape key sliders for those Bones..
Am I missing anything here? Are custom pose dials in Daz only ever available as transform properties in Blender? Or are there sliders that will carry over and I just need to find out how to get them into Blender?
Thanks!
Comments
Yes it is complicated, because daz morphs are unfortunately very complicated and don't fit to the way blender works. So it depends how the morph is done. In general however, we only export to blender the morphs we need for animation, if you can go with bone controls instead of morphs then there's no need to export the morphs.
Usually you just set the morphs you want in daz favorites, then import with daz favorites and the morphs are listed in the control panel. If this doesn't work then it means either that the morph is very complicated, or that blender can't find it for some reason. As another way you can import by hand as custom morphs, where you locate the morph file yourself, this usually always work if you select the correct morphs. Another case is presets, where the daz dial drives a group of morphs with different values, in this case daz favorites tend to break and for custom morphs to work you have to be sure to select all the needed morphs.
Ultimately, if nothing works, you can always save the figure/prop as obj and import as a shapekey in blender. I do this for some very complicated daz morphs where I don't want to import a gazillion ERCs in blender.
Thank you, Padone. That is a brilliant explanation.