Sync Studio for Daz and Blender

I have a problem, I always wanted to make games, but then when I try to make games I think: "I know what to do, I am going to make this tool to make it easier to make games, and then I am going to make my game." 

So then I end up with a lot of tools and no games.

One of those tools is Sync Studio, which I have already released about 2 weeks ago and which today received a major update to v1.1.0, which brings a new follower panel and more importantly fixes an important issue that prevented the previous version from working in Daz versions <4.24.

I have created this addon to aid people making animations for Daz figures, I wanted something that makes it easy to iterate on making poses and animations in Blender, while still using Daz for managing assets and rendering. For this I have built a UI and a system for automatically exchanging scenes, assets and poses around the popular Diffeomorphic addon. 

The result is an addon with which you can import your Daz scenes into Blender and work on them in both Blender and Daz at the same time with ease. Sync Studio will setup an IK rig for you, import morphs and manage clothing, hair etc. You can concentrate on animating your figure and quickly test the animation in Daz while working on it.

• Import anything (Figures, Environments, Cameras, Lights, etc.) from Daz into Blender with a click of a single button
• You can control exactly what is imported to keep things simple and fast, you can have a complex environment in Daz and only sync one figure into Blender for animating it
• You can easily add new things and import them without having to re-import the entire scene, only the new stuff.
• Easily create an IK rig for figures and their followers which can be used to pose and animate all of the bones of the figure and its followers with one combined rig
• Pull poses from Daz into Blender from your Daz asset library to get started on your animation, it will automatically import morphs you have used.
• Work on your animation in Blender and then Push poses and animations from Blender back to Daz to render them in Iray or use the Iray preview for individual frames while working on your animation.
• Rendered images from Blender and Daz should line up very closely so that they can easily be combined in Photoshop.
  

See this video for how to install the addon and a short tutorial how to get started:

Update to v1.1.0

After initially launching Sync Studio I received some feedback that it wouldn't work correctly in Daz version 4.23. And indeed it turns out that when encrypting Daz scripts, only the Daz version you used for encrypting it and later versions are able to use the script. And since I used Daz 4.24 to encrypt it only that one worked.

So I had to make another release soon to fix that issue and I decided to also add the first feature update to that release: a better follower panel that makes it easier to manage followers (like clothes, hair, etc.) in Blender.

The main changes in v1.1.0 are:

• Fixed an issue with the encrypted script files, they could only run in Daz Version 4.24, I tested Daz Versions 4.16, 4.21, 4.23, 4.24 and they should all work now.
• Improved the follower panel so that it is interactive, you can now hide/unhide followers, delete specific followers, enable/disable follower modifiers or include/exclude followers from loading morphs/transfer shapes/pull.

• Improved speed of pulling poses by skipping over automatic transfer shapes by default. You can now either manually transfer shapes for specific followers through the new follower panel, or keep transfering them automatically but then it will slow down operations everytime there are new morphs that need to be transferred.

Next Steps

I will continue working on this and plan to make another release within 1-2 weeks. Or even earlier if I find some bugs in the current release that can be addressed quickly.

For the next bigger update I am planning on improving the automatic loading of morphs when pulling. Currently scanning the morph database is neccessary for loading some of the morphs that have a name different then their filename, as I've actually learned quite recently. I think I can make some changes to Sync Studio to automatically send along all morph filenames and the corresponding names, so that it won't be neccessary anymore to scan the morph database.