TUT #27: Genesis Assets! (Patreon)

Hey everyone! As some of you might know, for a long time clothes have been the absolute bane of my existence - I want to put clothes in all of my animations, but they're so time consuming to make, and sometimes even worse to animate! daz studio genesis models benefit from an enormous content library of clothes in the daz store - but of course, they're part of this weird closed ecosystem with proprietary formats and strange conventions, so it's been impractical for a lot of artists. No longer, I say!

Ultimately, genesis assets are just models, so if we can get them out of daz relatively in-tact, with some effort we can edit and re-fit them to our own needs! This is a similar process to how the genesis 8 base meshes that basically every lewd 3d artist uses for head hacks were originally extracted, and I imagine how nextgen was made!  All I'm doing here is making it quick, general and repeatable.

The first step is to get the models out of DAZ studio - this can be done with the DAZ to Blender script, which thankfully is a lot more feature-rich and sane these days. Here are my daz to blender export settings:

What this does is actually create a temporary blend file with the assets in, and then the blender plugin component of the bridge appends that data into your current file - it also messes with a bunch of settings and creates a load of junk objects and data. I use a separate file for importing so all that mess stays contained. 

Materials are.. kind of weird in this process. Often models come with bizzare and elaborate procedural texture sets and a variety of alternate patterns, etc... These are annoying to transfer to blender and often the materials come in mis-tuned, not to mention that the material node tree that the bridge script creates are pretty bad. In a lot of cases though, it's kinda useable!

Another problem is that genesis models are in A-pose, and my models are in T-pose, so some conversion is neccessary. In my conversion file I have a copy of the genesis 8 female armature posed in a t-pose, I've also posed the legs so they match the straighter pose of the legs on my model, as you can see here with a couple of outfits, this works as a kind of one-click reposing tool:

just changing the armature modifier on the imported clothes to that armature will repose them correctly, although as you can see on the sides of that image I had to add some bones for the kimono, it had some weird stuff going on. Just apply the armature modifier, and then the clothes mesh is permanently in t-pose!

Now that we're in the correct base pose, we don't need the genesis 8 armature any more. Since my models use the naming conventions from rigify for deformation, the genesis 8 vertex groups will need to be renamed. That's an absolute pain in the ass but thankfully it really only needs to be done once! with a little python script it can be repeated, here's the code!

If you intend to use this code yourself, I highly recommend you read it and understand how it's meant to work, and not just expect it to work out of the box! It's basically just one long list of vertex group names and then a lil for loop that actually applies them. I've also got a little merge operation in there to account for the mismatch in spine bones between genesis and rigify. It's far from complete, it regularly produces slightly wierd results and at the moment it can't do hands or feet, but it's a start.

Then to reshape the clothes to the mesh, I've got a couple of little tricks: what I've got is a mesh with all the characters I've done applied as shape keys, where the basis key is the default genesis 8 shape, but of course with my topology.

Then what I can do is bind the clothes to that mesh with the surface deform modifier, so then no matter which character shape I choose, the clothes will come along for the ride! As you can see there are a few issues but the general shape transfers just fine:

you can see how with this process pretty much all of the shape detail of the clothing is preserved, even all the ruffles and lace and things

with a combination of corrective smooth and shrinkwrap, we can clean up a lot of those issues. now, applying those modifiers is a little bit of a thing, if we apply them one by one it won't work becuase the corrective smooth uses the original coords. now, we could use a bind instead for the corrective smooth, that works in this situation, but a more general case if that isn't working, we could go to object -> convert -> to mesh, and that will brute force a snapshot of where the verts all are! However sometimes even that work work. In those cases I duplicate the mesh, then use join as shapes to apply it as a shape key, then delete the modifiers and apply that shape key. That's a good way of applying modifiers even when you have shape keys and blender says you can't

The final touch is to fix up any areas of the clothing where the mesh is poking through, and we can just do that real quick in sculpt mode, I usually use the grab and inflate brushes, with a little bit of smooth where neccssary. The smooth brush is especially useful where major poke-through happens, because the shrinkwrap modifier will kind of freak out and mangle the mesh a bit.

I always leave the nipples poking out because we should then pose the breasts appropriately to reflect the support and squish of the clothing, so the nipples will be pushed back and squished in pose mode so they aren't poking through anymore.

After that, you can just create new armature deform, shrinkwrap and corrective smooth modifiers - or whatever other rigging techniques and tools you need to use, that's a whole other topic - and the clothing is basically good to go!

With this method, and a fair amount of additional problem solving when weird additional issues come up - assets from the various genesis figure stores are all completely different, and some are much better than others - it can be quite easy and even fun to convert, refit and organise clothing libraries for characters with pretty arbitrary shapes and sizes!