open DAZ Studio and head over to Scripts – Bridges – Blender – Daz to Blender.

It’s far from easy, but it’s as good as it gets for any Blender bridge you use: In a nutshell, here’s how it’s (supposed to) work, both installation and workflow.

When you install the bridge, the necessary files end up in a location that may not actually exist on your system. Other DAZ bridges have the option to define a path to such applications so that bridge files can be installed in the correct location – except for the (current) Blender Bridge. Software trying to be helpful is usually not working out too well. It’s trying to be helpful by making the assumption that you have Blender installed in the “official installer location”.

However, the DAZ Install Manager (or DAZ Central) doesn’t know that. It also means I can have multiple versions of Blender installed in parallel, each with their own set of preference files. The advantage of a custom location is that Admin Permissions are not necessary to amend files here, which makes working with Blender that much smoother. If something works, I’d like for it to stay that way without “hip-and-trendy software decisions” breaking stuff by introducing features I haven’t asked for. Hence I’ve installed a top level location called Blender in my C drive, in which I install various builds of Blender. Unless Blender is started with Admin Privileges, that location ain’t gonna make y’all happy. That’s a good location for applications in principle, but Windows being the difficult beast that it is imposes some restriction on files changed in that location. Why you ask? Because the “installer” location doesn’t work very well for Blender (by default in Program Files/Blender Foundation). I’m trying my luck with Blender 2.92, which is installed in a custom location. The DAZ to Blender bridge doesn’t work like any of the other bridges in DAZ Studio 4.15. Please forgive my attitude, it’s been a long and trying day, and it’s late. These are those notes, valid for that time in late June 2021 and bound to be totally out of date (like every piece of documentation eventually will be). I’ve just found out how to do that and thought some notes for the inevitable future must be made (I’m prone to forget and all). The first hurdle was of course to install this thing.

But, a lot of time has passed and several updates have been released, so I thought perhaps I should try again with version 2.3.9. I have to be brutally honest with you: last time I’ve tried the official DAZ to Blender bridge I didn’t have a great time.

Daz to blender bridge tutorial