Ok, after reading that over a few times I think I know what you mean. I’m really fresh to the Daz scene, so the word morph might be throwing me a bit. What I used was the Genesis 8.1 male body, made some edits to the body under parameters and then sent it over to zbrush where I personalized the face and hands a bit. then i brought it back in to Daz. everything seemed to work, with reverse deformations set to yes. I think what youre saying is that Victoria is a morph of the Genesis character, so that would be an additional morph and i would have to have that slider turned up if that were the case, or maybe have reverse deformations set to no when i brought it back in. I will definitely experiment with this in the future.

the only differences im seeing in Daz to zbrush is that its alot smoother, I imagine that Daz is displaying the mesh under a high level of subdivisions, and when i sculpted in zbrush I had Dynamic subdiv on pretty low so it wouldnt slow down my machine, but still register the shapes i was looking for.

I appreciate the recap here buddy, thanks, this Daz/Zbrush workflow is getting me jazzed.
~Brendan

Hello Brenden!

Thanks for the comment. I’m glad after reading my tutorial you feel more confident with ZBrush. I agree, the learning curve of 3D software can be quite daunting. ZBrush is such a powerful tool I think a person could use it regularly for 5 years and still not know all the features it has to offer.

Let me try and explain what reverse deformations does. Lets say you export out a Daz character with a morph applied, let’s say it’s the Victoria 8.1 full body morph. You then start sculpting away on it in ZBrush and then want to bring it back into Daz Studio. If you reverse the Victoria 8.1 deformations out, and create a morph of the end result, what you get is a morph with only the changes that you sculpted in ZBrush. The changes the Victoria 8.1 morph made would not be included. If you then want the character to look the same way in Daz Sudio as it did in ZBrush when you were done sculpting you would need to turn on both your custom morph and the Victoria 8.1 morph. Does that make sense? Sometimes it’s hard for me to explain these types of things.

Now this was very promising because this workflow seems to chop away some of the really irritating and time consuming parts of working in 3d that for me just hampers creativity and flow. i.e. doing retopology, posing and rigging manually, and the thought of having to resculpt armpits and so forth.. bah… I could go on and on about this, but ill cut to the chase. The video i linked above showed it was possible to use Daz in this way, but left out the GoZ export back to Daz (probably intentionally so they can sell a more detailed video) and there are not alot of other videos out there on this workflow. if you dont know what boxes to tick, you end up losing the ability to repose the character after customizing in zbrush. Your blog just allowed me to successfully do this workflow as a test, and im much more confident that i can sculpt a posed character now, thanks to you. I dont really understand what youre saying about reverse deformation or why its needed. In the current build of Daz, that was automatically set to Yes. I’ve tried to look up what reverse deformation means but i don’t understand what i read. maybe its not necessary that I do understand that. but it still bothers me that i dont know what that is. At any rate, Thanks, you really know your shit.

Hi, thanks!

That should work. Just make sure it’s exported at the base resolution. Then should be able to follow this to create the morph within Daz Studio: https://www.laylo3d.com/creating-characters-and-morphs-for-daz-3d-figures-import-obj-with-morph-loader-pro/

I have hired an excellent Zbrush sculptor to make a couple of facial morphs for the Genesis 8 Female for me. They are not familiar with and do not use Daz studio, so I was thinking I would export the G8F model out as OBJ for them, and then they could sculpt the morph (preserving the number of vertices of course) and then send the altered OBJ back to me.
How would I then load that morph into my Daz G8F?

Thanks very much and I appreciate any and all assistance!

Hi Leon,
1) When you say, make “a character from scratch,” do you mean make a morph for a Daz character? If you actually mean make a character from scratch then the character probably needs to have UVs mapped and such. Unfortunately, unwrapping UVs for a truly custom character and have them fit an existing set of Daz textures is beyond my expertise. 🙁
2) Creating what Daz 3D refers to as HD morphs or characters, using a Daz 3D sub-divided mesh requires a plug-in that Daz hasn’t released to the general public. They only allow their published artists (PA) access to it. Therefore, it can only be done inside Daz Studio if you’re a PA. You could probably achieve those desired results in a different software package, but I acknowledge that’s not really helpful if you’re trying to render inside Daz Studio.
Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
Best regards,
Landon

What they mean is you can’t add to, or remove vertices from the mesh. Subdividing would add vertices. You can move the existing vertices around as much as you want. I can’t remember right now if you can sculpt at higher subD levels and then lower it back down to the base resolution and be okay. It’s been a minute since I’ve done any sculpting 🙁 and can’t remember off the top of my head. I would suggest testing a couple methods one at a time before you sculpt for a couple hours just to find out it doesn’t work. The clay buildup and dam standard brushes should be fine as long as the new adaptive resolution mode (I forget what exactly it’s called and can’t remember if it tessellates will all the brushes or only certain ones) isn’t on.

If you’re using Genesis 8 make to sure to delete the eyelashes or hide them before exporting the base resolution figure mesh.

Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, but hope this helps.

Hi!

Sorry for the delayed response, the CPU in my computer went out and getting it back together had me distracted.

How do you usually go about getting the mesh into ZBrush, GoZ or import? If using GoZ you can try clearing the GoZ cache, look for the command under Preferences > GoZ, and then starting over from Daz Studio and using GoZ again. I would also double check to make sure that Draw Polyframe is indeed on, so you can see your groups clearly.

What happens when you use the group commands? Can you “Group Visible” first and then “Auto Groups,” that seems to work for me?

You’re welcome for the tutorial, hope this helps, let me know if you’re still having problems.