Everything you do in Daz is asset-library prep — done once per character, never per shot. Daz owns the front of the pipeline: sourcing a figure and finishing it into a clean, reusable, bridge-ready character. Posing, prop-snapping, lighting, cameras and rendering all happen downstream. If a task would be repeated every shot, it does not belong here. For the full map of where these two steps sit, see the Story-to-Screen Production Pipeline.
Assemble a Genesis figure into a fully clothed, groomed character that you can save and reuse. Only the character & wardrobe track of Phase 1 lives in Daz — props, environments and megascans are sourced in other tools (Blender, Fab / Megascans, the UE Marketplace) and meet the character later, in Unreal.
Drop a Genesis 8/9 base from the Content Library as the foundation. This is the mesh + skeleton everything else conforms to — pick the generation you'll standardize on, because it decides the canonical skeleton downstream.
Dial character identity with shaping morphs and full-body/head presets — proportions, face, body type. Save the shaped result so the same person is reproducible, not re-dialed by hand each time.
Add wardrobe and hair and let Daz auto-fit / conform them to the figure so they follow its shape and pose. Fitted clothing inherits the body morphs; hair parents to the head. This is the wardrobe half of Phase 1's "outfits → fit / conform to the figure."
Where skin punches through clothing, fix it — smoothing modifiers & collision, adjustment morphs, or hiding the occluded body surfaces. A clean silhouette here saves cleanup after the bridge, where fixing it means editing mesh in Blender.
Save the finished figure + wardrobe as a Scene (and/or a character/wearables preset) so it's a stable, named library asset — the unit that Phase 2 finalizes and bridges. Reuse is the whole point: source once, spend everywhere.
| Phase 1 track | Where it's done | Meets the character… |
|---|---|---|
| Characters — base figure + morphs | Daz Studio (this page) | is the character |
| Outfits & hair — fit / conform | Daz Studio (this page) | fitted on the figure in Daz |
| Props — model or acquire | Blender · Fab / Megascans | snapped to a hand socket in Unreal |
| Locations — environment kits | UE Marketplace · Blender | placed around the character in Unreal |
Take the sourced character and finish it for export: one assembled figure + fitted outfit + hair, with surfaces set the way you want, then bridge out of Daz. This is the last stop before the character becomes a Blender scene or an Unreal Skeletal Mesh.
Confirm the character is complete and consistent in one scene — the same reusable asset from Step 1, verified as a single unit before it leaves Daz.
Tune Iray surfaces where it matters — the parts of look-dev that are cheapest to get right in Daz. Note what carries: the Daz-to-Unreal bridge converts materials automatically, while a Diffeomorphic import gives Blender shaders you'll often finish in that DCC.
Two exits, same character:
.dbz generated in Daz alongside the scene, for correct clothing/geograft fit on the morphed figure.Diffeomorphic's export_to_blender script writes the .dbz next to the scene file. If the Daz scene is untitled — e.g. you opened a character preset from the library and merged wardrobe onto it but never did File → Save As → Scene — the scene path is empty and the export dumps a mis-named .dbz at the library root (e.g. …\My DAZ 3D Library\.dbz) instead of beside your character. Blender then can't find it and the DBZ fit silently falls back.
Fix: File → Save As → Scene the assembled character before running the export. A valid .dbz is gzip JSON starting {"application":"export_highdef_to_blender"…}. Cost hours once — do the Save As up front.
Finalize each character one time and everything downstream reuses it: the bridge produces a Skeletal Mesh on one canonical skeleton, and in UE you add hand sockets and an IK Rig once so poses, mocap and marketplace animations retarget onto it forever. Redoing Daz work per shot is the anti-pattern this whole pipeline is built to avoid.
Once the character bridges out, Daz's part is done. The rest of Phase 2 happens outside it: