Setup_Rigging - Diffeomorphic/import_daz GitHub Wiki

rigpanel.png

NOTES by Alessandro.

We are often asked in the daz forum which rig is better. There's not "better" rig it depends what you need. Hopefully the notes below will help.

RIGIFY. Rigify is a professional full featured ik rig for original animation in blender. Unfortunately it is not so good to import daz poses and animations because there are some strong differences with the daz rig. The best way to load and save daz poses with rigify is to use the "keep daz rig" and "ik poles" options, which are included in the "daz export" preset, also it is mandatory to disable all locks and limits. However, rigify will have issues loading daz poses and the user is expected to fix them by hand. On the other side exporting pose presets for daz studio works fine, because of the ik features in rigify the user will have to unlock the figure in daz studio to import the preset.

Known limitations to load a daz pose (not going to be fixed):

  • Hip offset. There's an offset on the hip compared to the daz pose, so the figure doesn't place correctly on the scene, or relative to other figures.
  • Head offset. There's an offset on the head rotation, depending on the pose.
  • Elbows and knees offset. There's an offset on the elbow and knees rotation, depending on the pose, this can be fixed by moving the forearm rotation to the hand, same for the feet.

ref. https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/2578/

MHX. MHX is more intended as a compromise for people who wants to animate in blender but retain a good compatibility with daz poses and animations. So you can mix blender original animation and daz. As for blender animation MHX is less featured than Rigify.

MHX RUNTIME. Please note that MHX requires a runtime to be installed, so the runtime has to match the diffeomorphic version. If you update diffeomorphic you also have to update MHX. There may be issues if we try to use old figures with a new mhx runtime, in general it is better to use the figure with the mhx version it was created with. Or we can keep a backup of the figure with the daz rig, then generate the mhx rig for a new version.

by Thomas. "The mhx update tool has only been tested with the stable versions, and not very extensively with those either. It might a good idea to stick with the version that the mhx rig was created with. Or save a file with the original genesis rig and generate mhx again with the new version."

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1694/

SIMPLE IK. Then even the MHX rig is not perfect with daz poses, though it's quite good. That's why the Simple IK rig is provided that uses exactly the daz rig as base so the match is 100%. This is mainly useful to animate in blender then export to daz with "save pose preset", thus using blender as animation tool for daz studio. The Simple IK rig is also better to export to game engines. But it is more limited in features than MHX or Rigify.

Keep DAZ Rig. In 1.7.1 there's a new feature to keep the daz rig, this way Rigify or MHX are used to drive the original daz rig. This is not required for Simple IK since it already uses the original daz rig.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1528/

IK FIX. You will find various options to fix IK, they are provided because in general IK requires prebended limbs to work fine and the daz rest pose not always good for it. So we have "optimize pose for ik" that is necessary for rigify to work fine with genesis figures. Then we have "improve ik" that is necessary for mhx and simple ik to work fine with genesis figures. These are provided as options because you may import a figure that is already prebended, in this case the IK fixes are not necessary.

note. From version 4.5 the old IK options are renamed "ik pose" and "ik hint", plus there's a new option "ik poles" which will fix the poles and works fine in most cases with the daz rest pose, if you notice some instability "ik pose" is the safe way to go.

SAVING ANIMATIONS BACK TO DAZ. When we want to animate in blender to save the animation back to daz, then we have to consider the daz limits, as daz studio animations are FK. The following steps will allow to animate a figure with geografts and save the animation back to daz studio.

steps:

  • easy import a figure with geografts, with "merge rigs" and "merge geografts"
  • convert to MHX, with “keep daz rig“ and without ik options
  • make some animation
  • mute the control rig
  • save pose preset as "hierarchy"
  • in daz studio disable locks and limits then load the pose preset

Please note that in the ik options we can't use anything which "stretches" the ik bones, as this would not work fine with the daz FK animations. So we disable "stretchy limbs" and "tweak bones" and only keep the basic IK features.

mhx.jpg