Digimi Game Developer Kit tips

Digimi Game Developer Kit for DAZ Studio — some tips for iClone users unfamiliar with DAZ Studio…

You may not be prompted to register new plugins at start-up. This is how to get to the place to enter your serial numbers. You may then need to restart DAZ for the plugins to show as registered (i.e: when registered they simply show up as no longer needing serial numbers).

Decimator should then show up here. With a figure selected (see the tutorial video), this is where you activate Decimator.

The Texture Atlas gets hidden away over here. Note that DAZ also has a native ability to export a set of texture tiles from a model, and place them in a Windows folder — having these can be useful if you’re exporting a static prop as an .obj, and you then find that the textures don’t load up in your target application.

A number of new FBX export options are added, but you want the plain vanilla one.

Going by BigBoss’s tutorial settings for FBX export, these are the export setting you want…

Incidentally, this is what you want it it’s just a plain OBJ you’re after…

It seems you loose some or all morphs on FBX export/import (settings video tutorial here). So heavily morphed characters (such as the 356,060,577 variants of Victoria) are probably best avoided? Loss of these morphs seems to be inevitable (FBX theoretically supports them, but 3DXchange doesn’t). BigBoss says there are ways of retaining morphs on DAZ faces, by going through 3DS Max. But for most users the easier and cheaper option seems to be editing the mesh with Argile, once it’s in iClone? (Argile with iClone video)

Also, in DAZ I found it is possible to exclude parts of a figure, which you can’t do once it’s in 3DXchange — in DAZ you just have to turn the opacity for that part to zero, before FBX export. That way I was easily able to remove the “eyes look-at” plate and the eyes from this toon mouse, so that new rotatable ones can be added in iClone. Whether or not you need bits removed like this, probably depends on how well your DAZ animations play back on a morphless figure in iClone.

Keep in mind that animations created with DAZ’s aniMATE Lite helper tool are not allowed to be exported into the FBX. You first need to get these to “Bake to Studio Keyframes”, a feature which is only available if you have either: i) the $150 DAZ Studio Advanced version, OR the $99 aniMATE Plus plugin. When you have either of these, you right-click just above the special aniMATE timeline, select “Bake to Studio Keyframes”, and your animation gets transferred over into the regular DAZ Studio timeline.