Realistic Feet with Blender & Daz 3D

Trying to find tutorials, guides, or general posts about creating realisitc humanoid models is strange. There are a lot of cookie-cutter basic skin tutorials, generic rigging tutorials, you might even find character sculpting guides, but I’ve yet to find any guides focused on specific body parts.

So, here we are. In this article I’m going to share with you the long road of trial and error I’ve taken to create, what I consider, pretty nice looking and realistic feet.

What is this article?

First, an important note. This is not a magic all-in-one read here for instant feet guide. We will be looking at the journey I took to get to the point where I’m happy with the results. There is no simple answer, but I’m hopeful that this will be at least somewhat helpful. I also have bad news in that it will likely not be free. Free resources for this are exceptionally rare. I would love to make my own and even share free ones, but I do not have that skill.

The Base Model

Like all of my models I prefer to use Daz 3D models as a base. Specifically their Genesis 8 model, which we will refer to a G8 from this point on. Why G8 instead of Genesis 9? That probably needs its own article but for now let’s say I prefer how G8 looks, even though G9 does have an advantage in terms of better base geometry.

This is where following along could be tricky depending on your chosen base. I use a lot of Daz morphs and assets, mainly for time and a skill gap. If you have the skills then you can still follow along, you’ll just need to source certain things in a different ways. I will always try to mention the alternatives when I can.

Foot Shaping

If you are using a Genesis model as your base like me then one of that biggest issues is that the default feet are pretty generic and featureless. You have several options here, free ones are almost non-existent. These are all for Genesis 8, but there are some excellent ones for Genesis 9.

Paid Morphs

1. MP Realistic Feet - This is probably my favorite set of morphs. They have good variety, are of good quality and I think look quite realistic.
2. Real Feet 2 - A good set of morphs. Good quality and work well.
3. Golden Core - Very cheap but I didn’t have a great experience with this set.
4. Sweet Feet - I haven’t tried this one as I was happy with MP Realistic Feet, but I’ve heard good things.

There may be more, but these are the ones I have heard about or used myself.

Free Morphs

1. TritiumCG Morph - Designed to work along with NecDaz’s foot morphs but should be usable standalone.

That’s it… That’s all I could find.

Free Alternatives

Sadly the only free alternative I am aware of is to sculpt your own morph. I can’t go over the full process here as it is quite a complex workflow of its own, but if you plan to use the model in Blender alone I would skip creating a morph for Daz and do the sculpt directly in Blender. It just comes with the caveat that you may need to make a general ‘shape’ sculpt then, if you want more detail, use a multi-resolution pass to sculpt in details and bake out as a displacement map.

Exporting to Blender

I am skipping over the rest of creating your model in Daz, that process is too broad to go over in a post only about feet. However once you have created your character and you have applied the foot morphs you’d like to use it is time to export to Blender. For this process there are a few options.

OBJ Export

Just export an OBJ. I don’t advise this unless you have a reason. You lose weight painting, rigging, etc.

Daz to Blender bridge

The Official Daz to Blender bridge. I have not used this since it released but it did not work well at all back then. I would not have recommended it in the state it was. It may be better now but I can’t speak to if that is true. It also does not appear to support Genesis 9, unless their product page is out of date.

Diffeomorphic

Probably the best Daz to Blender importer available. Download the zip and install it as an add-on in Blender. Releases usually lag a little behind Blender’s official release. Either use the version available with it’s matching Blender version or wait until a release matching the current major version of Blender is posted.

I personally use Diffeomorphic, I am again not going to go through the entire process here as it can be quite a long one. Check out the Diffeomorphic blog linked on their Github repo for some articles about it, or look out for a post I plan to do soon. It is just a difficult article to write because there are so many options that you may want to use. For now the process is generally:

In Daz

Open character, apply all morphs and any default clothing. Save both the scene file and export the DBZ file for Diffeomorphic.

In Blender

Choose Import -> Daz. Select the additional morph types like JCMs you’d like to have, if any, and import.

The process can be that simple, but it can also be a lot more complicated.