HOW Do I move between DAZ Studio AND Cinema 4D?

Moving between programs can be confusing, and I tend to stick to these four food groups: Cinema 4D, Zbrush, DAZ Studio, and Marvelous Designer, to keep from going insane. Every program has its quirks and I seem to run into them all.

In Issue 213 (November 2016) I wrote about how I primarily work in Cinema 4D, but how I often move my characters in and out of DAZ Studio to take advantage of the many clothing options and features, especially the vast posing options. Many people have asked me how I move back and forth between the two programs whilst keeping the exact same character position, scale, and world coordinates/settings.

Unfortunately, the native .obj import option in Cinema 4D does some strange things when you try to use the default settings to open a file exported from DAZ Studio. The most notable is that your model comes in as a mirror image, completely flipped on the X axis. It may also change the scale of your model if you don’t pay close attention to and adjust the scale on the .obj import panel.

Over the years, I have had great success using the Riptide Pro Wavefront .obj file Import/export plugin for Cinema 4D. I don’t currently own a copy of the plugin, so I was forced to tinker with the built-in Import and Export options until I found settings that worked. Like most things, I am sure that there are several different ways to move between Cinema 4D and DAZ Studio, but in all my research on the topic, I haven’t found a simpler method than the one I used to make my image Blue Jay.

For this image, I used DAZ Studio to pose my character and add the hair. The character was originally modelled in Cinema 4D and imported into DAZ Studio. Cinema 4D was also used to model the wings, harness, and the origami cranes (the dress and underwear are made with Marvelous Designer). I found myself moving back-and-forth between Cinema 4D and DAZ Studio a lot as I tried to model just the right pose for the wings.

The four-step process I present is the result of countless hours of trial-and-error.