Question Using DAZ Studio Morphs with VAM (again…)

[Zenra]

New to VAM here and am truly impressed after working with it and playing with some of the awesome collection of community developed content, both free and paid. I understand from many posts here and on Reddit that VAM uses DAZ Gen2 characters and I have DAZ and am comfortable using it, but I must be missing something really obvious / basic because I have not found a way to use morphs I have in DAZ to work with VAM looks. I would like to do either of the following:

1. Pull a VAM character (Look?) into DAZ and apply morphs, then re-save for use in VAM

or

2. Export a Gen 2 morph from DAZ that I can use in VAM to create and edit characters

Any advice on which is the better approach?

Also, is there a clear guide on how to use a character developed in DAZ (Gen 2, of course) in VAM? When I download Looks and put them into my VAM added packages folder they are usually *.var files. How can I export characters I built earlier in DAZ for use VAM?

 

[TToby]

Hi Zenra,

DAZ to VaM:
you can use Genesis 2 DAZ morphs in VaM out-of-the-box.
You can copy the dsf DAZ morph file to:
Vamfolder/custom/atom/person/morphs/female (or male or genital)
You can create your own sub-folder if you like.
VaM will automatically convert it into it's own file format.
If you open the DAZ morph file with a text editor (maybe it is zip packed), you can change the category where the morph will be displayed.

VaM to DAZ:
So VaM is using it's own morph file format, you first need to convert it. There is a tool around to do this.
Here it is:

Other - Vam To Daz 2

Introducing VAM To Daz 2 This is a utility I made to bring my VAM characters back into Daz Studio. Once it is in Daz you can then send the model out to Maya, Blender, Zbrush, etc... for further refinement. With a simple drag and drop operation...

hub.virtamate.com

VaM look to DAZ:
To re-create a VaM look in DAZ (you cant simply pull it there),
you first need an all-in-one full body morph.
Do this with the famous Morph Merger plugin.
Now convert the merged morph with the VaM-to-DAZ tool.
It is only the morph, no texture, no hair...
And maybe it looks a bit off, because of different max values and because VaM-to-DAZ can't convert bone-morphs (those morphs with the little gear wheel symbol).

There are some tutorials on how to edit those looks or create new ones in DAZ, and how to save your own custom morphs correctly to use them in VaM. It is a bit complicated and too much to explain for this text.

 

[TToby]

Here is a tool to even use DAZ .duf files (Genesis 2 looks) in VaM.

Other - Daz To Var 2

VAM Only supports Daz Genesis 2 Figures and this tool will only work properly with Genesis 2 figures. Version 2 no longer requires the user to have .NET 6 installed. All needed files are packaged into the Daz to VAR 2.exe This makes the exe much...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[Zenra]

Wow - @TToby thank you for the detailed and complete answer. I have learned so much from your many posts helping others on this forum and elsewhere. I greatly appreciate your efforts!