Exporting character animations from DAZ Studio for use in Marvelous Designer is a trifle complicated. In this article I will explain what works for me.

I’m using an animation created in DAZ Studio 4.7 using Michael 6, a Genesis 2 character. I will then create some clothing in Marvelous Designer 4.5, drape and animate it, and eventually export it back to DAZ Studio for rendering.

Here’s how to do it in principle:

* bake aniMate blocks into DAZ Studio timeline

* export OBJ file of your first animation frame

* export the whole animation as MDD cache

* import OBJ into Marvelous Designer

* import MDD cache in Marvelous Designer

* drape and animate cloth

I’ve explained the whole process step by step in this video:

Exporting from DAZ Studio

Although there are several export options at our disposal, the only one that works reliably and without any nasty surprises is an MDD Cache Sequence. This functionality is provided by the aniMate plugin, however the full version is required for the export to work. You can purchase aniMate here:

* http://www.daz3d.com/animate2

Make sure you have a keyframe animation to export. If you’ve created an animation from aniBlocks (using aniMate), make sure to bake them to the DAZ Studio timeline first. You can do this by right-clicking somewhere inside the empty space in the aniMate timeline and choose “Bake to Studio Keyframes”.

When you’re ready to export your animation, head over to File – Export and select MDD by aniMate2 from the file types menu.

MDD itself does not contain any geometry. It only describes how the vertices of an existing 3D object move from one frame to the next. For another app to make use of the MDD data, we also need an OBJ file that describes the geometry.

Move to the first frame of your animation, then select File – Export again. This time choose WaveFront Object (OBJ) from the list of file types. Make sure it has the same name as the MDD file.

An export dialogue will open. Accept the defaults, choosing the DAZ Studio preset at the top (equivalent to Scale = 100%).

 

Exporting from DAZ Studio via FBX and Collada

Alternatively you can export the animation as FBX file. The problem with this approach is that none of the smoothing modifiers are exported which are applied to each pose of the Genesis and Genesis 2 characters. It means that the geometry looks slightly different in the FBX file than it does when DAZ Studio displays it.

You can see the effect by moving the timeline to a different position. Just before you lift that finger off the mouse (or trackpad), you’ll see the Genesis figure change slightly. These rather important changes will be part of the MDD sequence, but are sadly not contained in the FBX sequence – at least not according to my observations.

The garment animation will therefore not line up perfectly when we bring it back from Marvelous Designer, leading to nasty poke-through effects. Not pretty!

Collada is another option to export, but I’ve had no luck importing it into Marvelous Designer 4.5. Marcus Wilm had good success with Marvelous Designer 2 – he describes his process in this forum thread.

The most recent version of Marvelous Designer (or DAZ Studio) appears to have bug and leads to an error message upon import. It’s something to try again in the future perhaps. Therefore I cannot comment on the geometry behaviour of the Collada export.

 

Importing into Marvelous Designer