Blender is the middle of character finalization — the cleanup bay between Daz and Unreal. Daz assembles figure + outfit + hair and bridges it out; Blender is where that raw import becomes a clean, shaded, rig-ready character on one canonical skeleton; Unreal receives it as a Skeletal Mesh. You do this once per character, then reuse it forever. The upstream half lives on the Daz Studio steps page.
The Daz figure lands in Blender as real geometry + armature + shaders. Your job is to make it clean, correct, and export-ready without breaking the skeleton downstream tools will retarget against.
Import via the Diffeomorphic add-on (accurate .dbz fit) or the Daz-to-Unreal path. The figure arrives with Principled-BSDF shaders already wired — Blender is where you finish them.
Fix non-manifold spots, tidy imported geometry, and — where the character will deform a lot — consider light retopology for animation-friendly topology. This is exactly the pokethrough/cleanup that's cheaper to finish here than to fight later.
Refine or rebuild skin, eyes, and outfit shaders in the Shader Editor. A Diffeomorphic import gives you Blender-native materials to polish; the Daz-to-Unreal path converts materials automatically instead.
Verify the armature and weights, and keep a single canonical skeleton for every character. Don't rename the bones Unreal's IK Retargeter expects — consistent skeletons are what let poses and mocap move between characters.
Export FBX on the canonical skeleton with transforms applied and consistent orientation/scale. In UE it becomes a Skeletal Mesh; there you add hand sockets once and build an IK Rig — see the pipeline, Phase 2.
A Genesis 9 figure bridged into Blender arrives not as one object but as a small hierarchy you finalize together — for example:
Kat for Genesis 9 Mesh — body mesh (the surface you clean & shade)Kat for Genesis 9 — the ARMATURE / canonical skeleton (keep its bone names)Genesis 9 Eyelashes Mesh, Genesis 9 Tear Mesh — separate surfaces that need their own shader pass…plus dozens of materials (a typical figure imports ~30–35) to refine before export. That fan-out of meshes + one armature + many materials is the finalization workload.
Retargeting downstream reads bone transforms and bone names, not your Blender rig conveniences. Rename bones, add non-standard bones to the deform hierarchy, or export a different skeleton per character and Unreal's IK Retargeter has nothing consistent to map onto.
Fix: one canonical skeleton for all your characters, names preserved, transforms applied (Ctrl A) before the FBX export.
Everything on this page happens a single time. The finished Skeletal Mesh + canonical skeleton + UE sockets/IK Rig then serve every shot, pose, and animation the character ever appears in — which is exactly why it's worth finalizing carefully here.