Unable to import Daz figure with modified rig

[Jake Vaughn]

Hey everybody, I’ve modified the Genesis 8.1 rig from within Daz by following this video so that the figure now has several new bones. There are 3 new bones for each breast, 2 for each glute, and one for the stomach. I’ve also removed the original lPectoral and rPectoral bones.

Here’s how the figure looks in Daz (Note: In this test example there are only 3 new bones that I’ve added, in the left breast):

The new bones work perfectly inside Daz, as does the rest of the rig. However, when I import the figure into Blender using my normal Diffeo import settings, an issue occurs. All of the arm bones below lCollar and rCollar have been removed, though the new bones are present and working:

I am no Diffeo expert by any means, but if I were to venture a guess, it would be that Diffeo is not expecting the modified bone structure and thus thinks the collar bones have no children when they actually do. I wouldn’t know where to begin with trying to fix it though. I marked this issue as “minor” because it’s extremely niche and I suspect the vast majority of people are not modifying the Genesis rig. However, in my case it would be extremely helpful for my Daz > Blender > UE workflow.

‌

If anyone has a solution or pointers I’d appreciate it!

[jeroen b]

Not sure if Diffeo could handle such mods, but you could try to export from DAZ into Blender from within DAZ (file export menu; collada or FBX), import it into your blendfile and then set the armature modifier to the newly imported armature.

[Thomas Larsson]

Could you please upload the duf file. I’m not confortable with the daz tools - that’s the reason why I wanted to get daz content into Blender in the first place - and I don’t know how to edit a skeleton in DS. Plus I have to be sure that I test with exactly the same extra bones as you.

[Jake Vaughn]

Thanks for the suggestion Jereon, unfortunately using the built-in FBX exporter results in even stranger results when attempting to import into Blender (character mesh is mangled and bones are all facing upward). I will keep experimenting with this though because it seems to me something like this should work in theory

And Thomas, here’s a link to my modified 8.1 rig .duf file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q2fp4jj24sSHMMfN3iD3YLPLDzQCsI28/view

I agree that adding bones inside Blender is much, much easier, that’s how I was doing it previously. I wanted to add them inside Daz directly so that when I design a new character, the bones and weightmapping are already present when I import them into Blender and thus don’t need to be created fresh each time (or transferred from a previous character).

Thanks for taking the time to look into my unique problem

[Jake Vaughn]

Update: Importing using the Daz to Blender bridge (the Daz one, not diffeo) allows me to correctly import the skeleton, then I can change the armature modifier to that one. I will consider this issue now solved, since I was successfully able to import the modified rig. Feel free to experiment with or use the modified file that I provided though.

[Thomas Larsson]

Fixed in last commit. The problem was that collar bones had been locally edited, and didn’t refer to the original collar bones in the usual way (the connection to the original bone was made with a “source” link instead of an “url” link). This seems to work for bones now, but there may still be problems for other types of locally edited assets.

[Jake Vaughn]

Thanks Thomas, I just cloned the repository and the rig is imported correctly now, you are a legend

[Jake Vaughn]

Resolved in commit 7007254

[Alessandro Padovani]

note. This probably happens because the figure is not saved as support asset in daz studio. This basically means that every daz scene using the figure will “append“ instead of “linking“, that’s a bad practice. I’d advise @Jake to save custom figures as support assets, thus generating the required url links.