Export object with groups

kaotkbliss

So I found an object on a free site which is all 1 single piece. So I sent it to Hex and broke it up into multiple pieces so I could send it back to Daz and create bones for movement.

However, it seems that no matter what I try, I either get just the single object or 4 separate objects in Daz.

What I did was select an area of the model and do a cut/paste so that it was separate from the other piece.

I've tried leaving each piece separate and send to Daz (this creates 4 separate objects in Daz)
I've tried grouping all the pieces together and sending to Daz (This also creates 4 separate objects)
I've tried exporting as an .obj with and without merging groups (this creates a single object with no sub-components)

So how do I get this object into Daz with it's sub-components so I can give it a skeleton?

Roygee

The rigging you want to do in Studio - Tri-Ax or legacy?

If Tri-Ax, you leave it as one piece and do the grouping for the bones in Studio, export it and add it into the Figure Setup tools - not through the import menu .

kaotkbliss

I've done it with weight mapping (Tri-Ax) but I wanted to try legacy to see if the output was any better as posing the way I did is a real pain.
It seems I can "cut things apart" easier, quicker abd cleaner in Hex than I can weightmap every poly in daz.

Roygee

I can assure you that legacy rigging is way more difficult to get a good outcome than Tri-Ax !

Which is why Daz changed to unimesh. It seems to me that they lost a great opportunity to break away from that Poser style of grouping to rig instead of changing to the more conventional method of drawing bones in the mesh. With both legacy and Tri-Ax, you don't get to see your figure until you've done all the work and create it - only to find a mistake right at the end of the process.

The easiest way to cut up an object in Hex is to give each group that will be attached to a bone a shading domain - that way you can easily see whether any polys have been unallocated. Then select each domain and do an "extract". Far more efficient that copy/paste/delete!

What does puzzle me is that you say that the object imports into Studio sometimes as one and sometimes as more than one. Studio always imports a single object as one piece, regardless of how many groups or separate meshes you have cut it up into.

Perhaps if you told us what the object is - maybe a pic- and what you want to do with it; how you want it to animate, we can give more specific advice.