DAZ Studios: How to make morphs in Blender (for skinsuits!)

 

Introduction

As I progress in my creative profession, learning to create morphs is crucial to push my capabilities for making unique stories. Learning to do it fast was the other part. Today, I share with you how I learned to do things quicker.

Bear in mind that these are methods for DAZ Studios (DS) and will be geared towards DS users. I know in the past, many Blender users have expressed their interests in how to do the same in Blender. Sorry, can’t really help you guys.

Methods

Below are the methods that I am aware for creating skinsuit effects.

1. Cloth based simulation
   1. DAZ Studios - dForce simulation
      1. You can use the built in simulation for quick simulations. Beware of cloth explosions.
   2. Marvelous Designer
   1. This is the ideal cloth simulator since MD allows you to drag parts of the clothing object for adjustments.
   3. Blender - Cloth Simulation
2. Sculpting (Creating morphs or shape keys)
   1. Blender
      1. While you can use Mesh Grabber in DS, I do not recommend it because the amount of control we need will be best if sculpted in Blender. Blender has many sculpting tools that will be helpful for many situations. Play with each brush to get the effect you are aiming for. Some of the exciting brushes are cloth brushes where they apply controlled cloth simulations on the brush.

These are the 2 methods I learned over the years. Sometimes one method works better over the other. In most cases, sculpting a morph in Blender will give you the best result since it gives you the most control. This is where you should take the time to learn how to hone you sculpting skills. One thing I do regret is sharing my past skinsuit tutorials, because I felt like that made it where everyone that learned from me applied the same skinsuit effect. Which I think made it a bit lazy or easy, un-creative…

The process all varies depending on what pipeline you want to go through. But I highly recommend learning how to sculpt because that will make your work more unique as it has you touch added into the mix. This is where you can separate your work from others. I hope that inspiring creators will take the basics and create something amazing. Use your imagination and apply it in 3D.

“Skinsuit” Wearable

The “skinsuit” wearable item that I created worked decently as a skinsuit. However, it did have issues. Using genitals would be a problem as geografts wouldn’t be able to be added to the skinsuit since it wasn’t a figure. This would be the tricky part of the skinsuit aspect.

I propose an advance method! The creative method works best, but will require far more work. You will make a morph for every skinsuit scene. Sculpt it in Blender.

How to make morphs (quickly?)

Sadly, there’s really no way to do this quickly…

But I can share you the things that made it worthwhile. The main things that slowed me down were the export/import phases for both DAZ Studios and Blender. Create similar keybinds to eliminate repetitive tasks and have to click through nested options. Keep the keybinds the same in both DAZ Studios and Blender so you don’t have to remember different keybinds. And the other component is not knowing how the morph will look since we can only do it in base resolution. Once I figured these things out, it made creating sculpts more fun since I can see how it will look. Turning frustration into fun since I can focus on being creative.

Chances of you being a gamer would be high. I like to keep my keybinds on one hand if possible. You can look up how to setup the keybinds as I won’t go through that. But like any gamer playing a game, use the keybinds that you are most comfortable with.

For both DS and Blender:

1. Import - (Shift + Q)
2. Export - (Shift + E)

DAZ Studios Only

1. Morph Loader Pro - (Shift + F)

DAZ Studios: Export Settings.

This is my OBJ export settings. Save this as your own preset. I exclusively use this for exporting to Blender and Marvelous Designer. No need to keep switching between mindless scaling.

There was a time when I was just like you, where I didn’t know what each settings did what. 6-7 years in my professional NSFW adult career, I can proudly say I still don’t know what these settings are! But please use the same settings as mine since they work. The main difference in my method compared to others is having “Write Separate Objects” and “Filtered Objects” checked on. This allows for a single OBJ export into Blender that can then separate the OBJs. This means we don’t have to hide the OBJs in DAZ Studios like the old method.

EXPORT IN BASE RESOLUTION FOR MORPHS.

Blender: Import Settings

When importing into Blender, it is important to use the correct version as certain older builds do not have the import option to bring it in separated. I use Blender version 4.3.2 with the default import OBJ settings. (From my understanding, “keep vertex order” was turned on by default. Which is why you don’t see this option if you used older builds.)

We don’t need to change the scaling since we already have the correct export scaling applied during the export phase for DAZ Studios.

Blender: Sculpt Morphs

A video demonstrating this would be helpful. Sadly I do not have time for that. Learn what you can from youtube tutorials and on the internet.

Use the various brush tools to get what you are looking for. Grab brush is the commonly used brush for me. Inflate helps too. Experiment with the cloth brush tool as well since that’s really fun.

This is a good question where you ask me that sculpting is hard because of the base resolution! That’s where you apply the SubD modifier in Blender to see how it will look in DAZ Studios! It’s pretty close to how it will look like in DS.

    Side Note: Now if you really need the extra polygons for the advance scenes, then you can apply a multi-res modifier or export the OBJ in SubD from DS so you have more geometry to play with. Keep in mind that this method won’t be making morphs and you will be creating a static OBJ instead. You can still copy the materials, but geograft stuff will be tricky to solve.

Blender: Export OBJs

It is time to export your selected OBJ once you crafted you amazing sculpt in Blender. Make sure the OBJ you want to export is the only thing selected.

Below is my export setting.

DAZ Studios: Morph Loader Pro

Now we import the OBJ as a morph via Morph Loader Pro.

Use my settings for creating morphs. The only thing to keep in mind is the “Overwrite Existing” option. This will overwrite any existing morphs with the same name, so if you are worried, I suggest changing it back to “Make Unique”. The reason why I set it to “Deltas Only” is because sometimes I need to make adjustments in Blender and export the OBJ again and MLP it to the figure. It’ll overwrite the morph that I loaded in.

Don’t worry, if you don’t save these morphs, they won’t appear on the next figure you load. They are only temporarily saved on the scene files for that specific figure/obj.

That’s all there is to making morphs quick and easy!

    Side Note: If you sculpted an OBJ with more polygons, all you need to do is import OBJ with DS with the scale at 10,000%. Save the materials on the original OBJ and apply the materials to the imported OBJ.

Conclusion

That’s really all there is in the process for making morphs with Blender. Making morphs is crucial for good looking skinsuit effects. It’ll give more creative control over simulated morphs. Both simulated and sculpting has their uses, so use the one that’ll give you the look you are going for. Or use both.

Goodluck! I look forward to your future skinsuit content! :)

 - - - - - -

If you found this guide helpful, please consider supporting my work:
https://envytsf.carrd.co/