Blender Blender Help.

[TheHardHardHent]

Hello people of the internet, I come with a question about blender. You see I love two things; porn and games, especially when they are together. And while its great to be a consumer of all good projects of these categories I find myself wanting to make something of my own. So I thought that I'd try and make a model of an OC I've been thinking of making in blender, figured a few youtube tutorials and trial and error would slowly help me along into making this model. One problem though, I don't know blender in the slightest. I don't know how to make anything really, let alone a model with some good boobs. I did try a bit but it was late at night and I didn't know how to pan the camera, making the block in the middle slowly inch out of the camera's view.

That's why I'm asking my fellow degenerates(and wholesome internet neighbors), do you all know of any good tutorials on blender that can ease me into it? Maybe make a few cups, learn a few textures and maybe work my way up to a character model? From there I will give some updates on my progress, maybe give you all some fridge-art of a cactus that look like a lion if you squint at it. But know this, I'll keep working on this off and on until I have results! These ideas are so good to me that I've made an entire game premise, character backstories and half a finished map of this project of mine.

If you have any answers about blender or are curious about my "project" just let me know. Have a good rest of your next two days!

 

[K3NJ1]

Hello people of the internet, I come with a question about blender. You see I love two things; porn and games, especially when they are together. And while its great to be a consumer of all good projects of these categories I find myself wanting to make something of my own. So I thought that I'd try and make a model of an OC I've been thinking of making in blender, figured a few youtube tutorials and trial and error would slowly help me along into making this model. One problem though, I don't know blender in the slightest. I don't know how to make anything really, let alone a model with some good boobs. I did try a bit but it was late at night and I didn't know how to pan the camera, making the block in the middle slowly inch out of the camera's view.

That's why I'm asking my fellow degenerates(and wholesome internet neighbors), do you all know of any good tutorials on blender that can ease me into it? Maybe make a few cups, learn a few textures and maybe work my way up to a character model? From there I will give some updates on my progress, maybe give you all some fridge-art of a cactus that look like a lion if you squint at it. But know this, I'll keep working on this off and on until I have results! These ideas are so good to me that I've made an entire game premise, character backstories and half a finished map of this project of mine.

If you have any answers about blender or are curious about my "project" just let me know. Have a good rest of your next two days!

The famous Donut Series...
You can't say you worked with Blender if you haven't finished Blender Guru's Donut Tutorial series XD
In my opinion, that's probably the best way to start to get a hang of the fundamentals

 

[TheHardHardHent]

P.S. I'm sorry for the essay structure of the question. I get a bit flashy/flamboyant when I'm feeling passionate.

 

[TheHardHardHent]

The famous Donut Series...
You can't say you worked with Blender if you haven't finished Blender Guru's Donut Tutorial series XD
In my opinion, that's probably the best way to start to get a hang of the fundamentals

You sir/madam...one with the ass in profile, are a godsend! I'll give it a watch and try to apply the lessons in bursts. Thank you K3NJ1!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

New vs old tutorials

One thing to pay attention to is if the blender version is 2.8 or above. Version 2.8 was major in the blender community because it was the first big updates in years (this was the initial resurrection of the blender project), and it completly overhauled the user interface, and people argued it should be called version 3.0 because of how vastly different it operated. It certainly is a painful struggle to start something new and not be able to do simple things, such as panning the camera. I point out looking at newer tutorials simply because lots of tutorials existed before 2.8 and the controls are all different. I believe the donut series was around the 2.8 era so you should be fine.

when I started, it was version 2.72, and as a result a lot of my hotkeys and mouse and mouse controls are based on the old system. You may have noticed when installing blender it will ask about how you want the inputs configured. Blender is nice enough to import my settings from previous versions, so I've never learned the new controls. So it bugs be I can't answer a simple question like this.

 

[OsamiWorks]

Donut tutorial then specialize

You must be registered to see the links

This will get you into characters, he doesn't do everything you still need to learn rig and animation on top of having a good enough eye to setup your scenes if you're really determined to use blender. 3D generalist is the hardest path

You must be registered to see the links

IMO the 3d generalist order you should be learning in is hard surface modeling -> sculpting -> retopo -> animation -> rigging -> texturing (blender is possible but substance or marmoset if you have the money) -> retopo again, then you have a bonus of geo nodes, shaders, and procedural textures if youre not dead by the end of that.

I place lower value on stuff like camera work , lighting, and environment art, and so on. They are definitely skills you should learn but they are significantly easier

 

[TheHardHardHent]

New vs old tutorials

One thing to pay attention to is if the blender version is 2.8 or above. Version 2.8 was major in the blender community because it was the first big updates in years (this was the initial resurrection of the blender project), and it completly overhauled the user interface, and people argued it should be called version 3.0 because of how vastly different it operated. It certainly is a painful struggle to start something new and not be able to do simple things, such as panning the camera. I point out looking at newer tutorials simply because lots of tutorials existed before 2.8 and the controls are all different. I believe the donut series was around the 2.8 era so you should be fine.

when I started, it was version 2.72, and as a result a lot of my hotkeys and mouse and mouse controls are based on the old system. You may have noticed when installing blender it will ask about how you want the inputs configured. Blender is nice enough to import my settings from previous versions, so I've never learned the new controls. So it bugs be I can't answer a simple question like this.

I did notice it was a different version but some of the stuff is matching so far. If it goes off the rails I'll just have to treat it like a trial by fire I suppose. Thank you for the concern though!

 

[TheHardHardHent]

Donut tutorial then specialize

You must be registered to see the links

This will get you into characters, he doesn't do everything you still need to learn rig and animation on top of having a good enough eye to setup your scenes if you're really determined to use blender. 3D generalist is the hardest path

You must be registered to see the links

IMO the 3d generalist order you should be learning in is hard surface modeling -> sculpting -> retopo -> animation -> rigging -> texturing (blender is possible but substance or marmoset if you have the money) -> retopo again, then you have a bonus of geo nodes, shaders, and procedural textures if youre not dead by the end of that.

I place lower value on stuff like camera work , lighting, and environment art, and so on. They are definitely skills you should learn but they are significantly easier

You sound like you're speaking from experience OsamiWorks(Or have your shit really together). My main goal is to get good enough at making models so that I can make my characters and have them saved somewhere for later down the line. Of course I'll also continue to learn animation and rigging a bit later down the line as I mainly want to focus on my models for now. If that makes any sense.

Either way, I'm going to keep breathing life into these characters so that one day in the future, a game will come out with them as playable characters. If all goes well(their designs on point, personalities likable and story good if not better) maybe rule 34 for come out of these characters! After all its my philosophy that a character(Design or otherwise) isn't good unless people want to make porn of it!

 

[OsamiWorks]

You sound like you're speaking from experience OsamiWorks(Or have your shit really together). My main goal is to get good enough at making models so that I can make my characters and have them saved somewhere for later down the line. Of course I'll also continue to learn animation and rigging a bit later down the line as I mainly want to focus on my models for now. If that makes any sense.

Either way, I'm going to keep breathing life into these characters so that one day in the future, a game will come out with them as playable characters. If all goes well(their designs on point, personalities likable and story good if not better) maybe rule 34 for come out of these characters! After all its my philosophy that a character(Design or otherwise) isn't good unless people want to make porn of it!

lol, I do everything but Im only 6 months into art and overall a year total into serious game dev, I can only sculpt and retopo. Ive just started animation and Im hoping to open up commissions in a month or two so I can keep skating by. Youre on a difficult path btw and have my sympathies

 

[Tompte]

There's also Blender's own fundamentals tutorial series. It was introduced with 2.8, which is kind of dated by now, but it's still good. Things may have moved around since then but not really in any significant degree for a beginner. The basics are still the basics. It's really good for giving you a general idea of all the different parts of Blender and how to use them.

You must be registered to see the links

I recommend watching this first. It will make other tutorials easier to follow.

It took me a full year to learn Blender back in the day. You guys have no idea how easy you have it now. It's gotten so much better and easier to use since then ;-;

Finally, a word of advice. By following tutorials, you can learn how to use Blender relatively easily. But Blender is just a tool. The creative part, the 3D modeling itself, is freaking hard! Don't get discouraged if you don't get the results you want right away. Just because you've learned how to pick up a paintbrush doesn't make you suddenly able to paint beautiful pictures. Just as with everything else, it take practice and you get better at it the more you do it.

 

[HighNSleepy]

i know it's been like 2 years but for anyone wants to get started with blender :
before starting, always learn how to do something for an object first and when you master it, do it for a character.
1- posing, lighting and camera angle for objects and characters, there are tons of tutorials but my favourite is

You must be registered to see the links

or you can watch the famous

You must be registered to see the links

now
you'rel able to do basic navigation etc.
for step 2 you'll need some already made characters and scenes which can be downloaded free from a website like

You must be registered to see the links

.
2- you can take this course which focuses on the animating process and rigging( rigging is putting a skeleton to move a character which you won't need now )
3- this step would be making your own 3d simple models which will need textures , there is a tutorial which covers both called : CGFastTrack - Blender Fundamentals Vol. 1-3 (Blender 4.0) (2024), it is available as torrent but i don't know if it is allowable to share them here,
4- modeling which is the hardest and final step, i don't have a good tutorial for tbh.

 

[n00bi]

i know it's been like 2 years but for anyone wants to get started with blender :
before starting, always learn how to do something for an object first and when you master it, do it for a character.
1- posing, lighting and camera angle for objects and characters, there are tons of tutorials but my favourite is

You must be registered to see the links

or you can watch the famous

You must be registered to see the links

now
you'rel able to do basic navigation etc.
for step 2 you'll need some already made characters and scenes which can be downloaded free from a website like

You must be registered to see the links

.
2- you can take this course which focuses on the animating process and rigging( rigging is putting a skeleton to move a character which you won't need now )
3- this step would be making your own 3d simple models which will need textures , there is a tutorial which covers both called : CGFastTrack - Blender Fundamentals Vol. 1-3 (Blender 4.0) (2024), it is available as torrent but i don't know if it is allowable to share them here,
4- modeling which is the hardest and final step, i don't have a good tutorial for tbh.

Your steps are in wrong order for someone new to 3D "IMO".
Learning 3D modeling should be separated into 3 category. 4 if you include animation.

1. Modeling.
You should learn how to use primitives, make your own polygons, understand mesh topology.
know terms used as, polygons, points, edges, vertices etc.
Learn the tools needed to modify meshes. how to cut out section. boole out stuff, merge two objects and so forth.

2. Materials,Texturing & UVW mapping.
Once you can master basic stuff for modeling, you can move on to texturing.
Texturing is an art by itself.
Once you get into more complex modeling you need to learn UVW mapping.
well at least UV mapping as the W is used in shaders and is way out of this scope.

3. Lighting & Cameras.
Once you know how to model and texture you can move on to lighting.
Learn about misc light types, their properties, what type of light to use where etc.
And learn basic camera setting like fov, depth etc.

4. Rigging and Animating.
This is the last thing to learn and is a hole topic by itself.


These are the steps. However having that said.
You might not be a good modeller. "Step1" but be a good Animator "Step4"
But you should still know the basics even if your skill set shines when doing animation.
Same for a people doing textures. there are people who are amazing at texturing stuff but suck at modeling.

Anyway..
Also i would like to see some tutorials for people who knows 3D but want to switch to Blender from other 3D Softwares.

 

[osanaiko]

warning: I don't actively use Blender for game dev, all these statements are distillations of the various conversations I've read in these forums over the years...

Seems like if we are talking about 3d porno games, one thing that has changed in the past 2 years is a big improvement in the Daz-Blender bridge. Now it is *relatively* (compared to how terrible is used to be) to import Daz figures and clothing into blender.

Plenty of tweaks are required to get it looking good (materials transfer between render platforms i.e. Iray to Cycles / Eevee is still a poorly-solved problem).

And then you need to add / fix the rigging. Some autorig scripts appear to do a pretty good job with figures these days.

A big missing piece of the puzzle is the lack of "morph" product imports. So you need to have all that sorted out before importing to blender. Similarly, facial expressions etc will need to be hand-tuned as those sort of morph slider adjustment tools are not automatically present like in the Daz env.

But once that is complete you can dive into the far-better-than-Daz animation tools that Blender provides. And all the other cool stuff like much better geometry editing tools, physical simulations (liquid sim ), jiggle bones etc etc.

 

[n00bi]

warning: I don't actively use Blender for ...

It doesn't matter if you use Blender for X or Y or Z.
If you/he/she/whoever really wants to understand the process of 3D you need to go though the steps, ofc you can combine some. ie step1 & 2.
otherwise you will just be someone who toss in assets made by someone else and don't really understand how it all is put together.

It takes about 20 years to become a seasoned programmer, but most people stop learning after two.
I guess the same could be said for 3D "Art"

 

[HighNSleepy]

Your steps are in wrong order for someone new to 3D "IMO".
Learning 3D modeling should be separated into 3 category. 4 if you include animation.

1. Modeling.
You should learn how to use primitives, make your own polygons, understand mesh topology.
know terms used as, polygons, points, edges, vertices etc.
Learn the tools needed to modify meshes. how to cut out section. boole out stuff, merge two objects and so forth.

2. Materials,Texturing & UVW mapping.
Once you can master basic stuff for modeling, you can move on to texturing.
Texturing is an art by itself.
Once you get into more complex modeling you need to learn UVW mapping.
well at least UV mapping as the W is used in shaders and is way out of this scope.

3. Lighting & Cameras.
Once you know how to model and texture you can move on to lighting.
Learn about misc light types, their properties, what type of light to use where etc.
And learn basic camera setting like fov, depth etc.

4. Rigging and Animating.
This is the last thing to learn and is a hole topic by itself.


These are the steps. However having that said.
You might not be a good modeller. "Step1" but be a good Animator "Step4"
But you should still know the basics even if your skill set shines when doing animation.
Same for a people doing textures. there are people who are amazing at texturing stuff but suck at modeling.

Anyway..
Also i would like to see some tutorials for people who knows 3D but want to switch to Blender from other 3D Softwares.

the first course I put actually covers the primitives and the tools needed to modify the meshes.
that said, I think your steps makes more sense for someone who want to fully make their own game.
Also for those who wonder, you can take the course i mentioned in step 4 first, it also covers the primitives and the very simple modeling basics.

 

[OsamiWorks]

Your steps are in wrong order for someone new to 3D "IMO".
Learning 3D modeling should be separated into 3 category. 4 if you include animation.

1. Modeling.
You should learn how to use primitives, make your own polygons, understand mesh topology.
know terms used as, polygons, points, edges, vertices etc.
Learn the tools needed to modify meshes. how to cut out section. boole out stuff, merge two objects and so forth.

2. Materials,Texturing & UVW mapping.
Once you can master basic stuff for modeling, you can move on to texturing.
Texturing is an art by itself.
Once you get into more complex modeling you need to learn UVW mapping.
well at least UV mapping as the W is used in shaders and is way out of this scope.

3. Lighting & Cameras.
Once you know how to model and texture you can move on to lighting.
Learn about misc light types, their properties, what type of light to use where etc.
And learn basic camera setting like fov, depth etc.

4. Rigging and Animating.
This is the last thing to learn and is a hole topic by itself.


These are the steps. However having that said.
You might not be a good modeller. "Step1" but be a good Animator "Step4"
But you should still know the basics even if your skill set shines when doing animation.
Same for a people doing textures. there are people who are amazing at texturing stuff but suck at modeling.

Anyway..
Also i would like to see some tutorials for people who knows 3D but want to switch to Blender from other 3D Softwares.

I disagree with this list after working on this stuff for a while. It looks like bullshit from a new artist or someone that doesnt actually do 3d work. I randomly got notified for this thread. My opinion on things have changed now that ive been doing this for a while.

Do the donut tutorial, then pick what you enjoy and work on learning that. While you can try to be like me and learn each skill in order to make characters, if you want to take comms you should get good at one skill, then learn the rest later. I do see people get stuck but its better to be making money and trying to find your way into other skills than to be making nothing at all.

im a probably a bit more bitter sounding. Ive sacrificed a lot of my personal life to just work towards making a game and I've helped a lot of people with blender over the last 2 years. I just feel I need to work on my own stuff and Im too disconnected from new blender users at this point.


Some generic things newbies get stuck on.
-Retopo isnt a real skill, its a mix of your other skills
-Modeling and Sculpting are separate skills
-Your renders are important for presenting your work. You should learn to color grade and fluff them up in the compositor and/or in post if you want to find comms. Do not buy marmoset, Ive never seen anyone use it functionally and only ever seen it for portfolios
-You wont have time for 3D art and your game unless you accept that it will take years starting from no skills whatsoever. The people I know who make their living from nsfw 3d work are animators who either worked in industry, or had been around for 6+ years before they got popular. (or from a poor country but thats not something you can control)
-Blendshapes, morph targets, shapekeys are all the same thing, there are a few terms like this and you just have to use your brain. You only realize it when you start watching tutorials on other software to learn concepts and methods that apply to your own art
-Quit early if you dont enjoy it, Ive seen a lot of people that burn out and its better to focus on making a fun game than to waste time on a skill you dont enjoy
-You should not start with rigging, its a small part of tech art. Learn to animate then learn to rig. If you rig without animating youre making controls without the experience of using them. Its significantly easier to learn how to animate, then how youre rig is supposed to be used by building your controls
-There are a lot of different ways to achieve an effect, unfortunately all the people that will give you good advice are working on their own projects, and youre stuck with a lot of bad advice. Dont trust everything, dont listen to vague ambiguous answers that will take you months to work through, unless you actually skipped fundamentals and someone is telling you to learn those. You want to have concise comprehensive questions and look for responses that give clear and actionable feedback. The technical parts of art arent intuitive and a lot of people pretend they are, a lot of things are easier than you think but you often still need to build up skills before you can do them
-When it comes to texturing, Substance Painter gets reccomended but it hasnt been updated much since adobe acquired it. Mari seems like the better option in many way and it has a free version to learn on. Otherwise you dont need 3rd party software, you can texture in blender, and if you want to use an addon for layers instead of making them in the shader you can download Ucupaint for free
-Dont buy blender addons until you know how to do a skill without them, the big pitfall for this is people purchasing arp, and then second is people purchasing hardops/boxcutter

i know it's been like 2 years but for anyone wants to get started with blender :
before starting, always learn how to do something for an object first and when you master it, do it for a character.
1- posing, lighting and camera angle for objects and characters, there are tons of tutorials but my favourite is

You must be registered to see the links

or you can watch the famous

You must be registered to see the links

now
you'rel able to do basic navigation etc.
for step 2 you'll need some already made characters and scenes which can be downloaded free from a website like

You must be registered to see the links

.
2- you can take this course which focuses on the animating process and rigging( rigging is putting a skeleton to move a character which you won't need now )
3- this step would be making your own 3d simple models which will need textures , there is a tutorial which covers both called : CGFastTrack - Blender Fundamentals Vol. 1-3 (Blender 4.0) (2024), it is available as torrent but i don't know if it is allowable to share them here,
4- modeling which is the hardest and final step, i don't have a good tutorial for tbh.

Donut tutorial is good, Alive is good but he doesnt rig in it. Alive is extremely boring and I dont think ive met anyone thats finished it. I made it up and through the squirrel section twice. Modeling isnt that hard. Personally I think anything that involves hard arts skills you need to practice regularly to maintain are the most difficult. Sculpting is the most direct example of this, you have to practice regularly or you lose your skills and need to take some time to work back up to proficient, but texturing, concept work, animation, and many other skills all can get in the weeds as hard art skills when you get better.

If you want to learn to make characters, this tutorial touches everything what ive learned at a really basic level and I honestly think its something you should do early if you want to make them from scratch:

You must be registered to see the links

Doing this keeps you from freezing up trying to be proficient at one skill, it gets you making stuff you can animate right away, and it looks like shit so people can look at it and feel like they can do it. It does legitimately make the whole process more accessible tho even if it doesnt go in depth, you can learn that later. I still reccomend the youtube speedchar course I reccomended earlier for sculpting and retopo to be done after this one

Otherwise you can make custom characters with DAZ and export to blender with diffeo. Then you sculpt and edit in blender to better fit your preferences, there are a lot of tutorials on this

 

[Synx]

Got to agree with OsamiWorks here, a lot of bad advice in this topic for beginners. I have worked with Blender for 5+ years now and honestly learning most of the stuff advised here is a massive waste of time (I know since i did try to learn most of it), and if your goal is just to make porn knowing the very basics of most topics is enough.

This is is my recommendation of what a beginner should do if their goal is to make porn, and is mostly aimed to see if it's something they want to put most of their free time in or not.

1. Be absolutely 100% sure you need/want to use Blender for porn instead of DAZ. There is in my opinion only four reasons why you maybe should pick Blender over DAZ; you cant/don't want to use Iray (for example you got an AMD card), you want to go for uberrealism (or just more realistic than DAZ characters), DAZ store has very little assets you want to use, or you want to animate a lot. Outside of those 4 reasons I can almost gaurentee you are better of with DAZ than Blender.

2. Do the Donut tutorial. It learns you pretty much all the basic things you need to get started.

3. Learn how to use the Diffeomorphic addon, and what all the settings do. You could spend a year+ learning how to create a character from scratch, just to get a character that's almost gaurenteed to be worse than a base DAZ character with worse topology and UVs. Just save yourself a shit ton of time, and use DAZ chracters (or find some other premade models from somewhere).

4. If your using Diffeomorphic watch some tutorials on how to fix the materials, how to convert the Rig DAZ characters come with to a riggify Rig (this one isn't mandatory ai just prefer it), how to import morphs, etc. This is a stupidly frustrating part since while Diffeomorphic is a very nice tool compared to the base DAZ to Blender exporter, it's far from perfect and can have a ton of issues.

5. Last step for now is learning how to do some simple posing (using Riggify if you converted it), and how to set-up basic lightning for your scene. At this point just using HDRI or 3-point lightning is fine.

With these 5 points you should be able to generate a basic posed character and get a good feeling if this is something you want to do more of or not.

After that you can dive deeper into different topics to see what you find useful/interesting or not. In general I will say that it's almost never worth to create something yourself from scratch, but way more useful to learn how to find the right assets and how to modify them to your liking.

For me personally I focused on these parts;

- Learning basic sculpting. My goal wasn't to be able to create a chracter from scratch, but know enough to be able to make slight modifications to imported DAZ characters to make unique looking ones.

- Learned more advanced modelling, and more complex modifiers (like array following a curve and stuff). Same thing as above; aim wasnt to be able to make complex models from scratch, but have enough knowledge to be able to change them into more what I wanted.

- Deep diving into texturing. This is my strongest point and what I spend most of my time on. I focused on adding more details and realism to DAZ skin textures using a combination of procedural nodes and mixing in other skin textures. As well as how to add extra details, mix in other materials like mud or dirt into existing textures, or add like prints to clothing etc. Again goal wasn't to know how to make textures from scratch but more know how to improve or alter existing textures.

- Hair, curve system, and basic geometry nodes. Focused on how to convert hair cards into the newish Geonodes hair system, and how to use different geonodes modifiers to make changes to existing hair product.

- Lightning, composter, and other render settings/tricks. Most of this isn't that complex, and honestly if you got a good and well textured models and scene set-up just an HDRI with maybe a couple supporting lights is enough for vast majority of the scenes. Always felt a lot of people go way to complex on this kind of things.

- Animation and physics. Main thing I'm focusing on at the moment. Learning how to animate and use physics to create more natural movement.

Have barely looked into Rigging or UV mapping. Rigify works fine for me, and since I mostly use seamless textures just basic smart UV option works 99/100 times just fine.

And haven't touched a lot of stuff Blender has to offer since I doubt I will use it much like the whole geonodes system.

I cannot recommend specific tutorials outside of the Donut tutorial, since everything after the initial set-up highly depends on what you want. I can recommend the NSFW Blender discord though, if your just looking for general tutorials on a lot of topics. And Blenderkit addon (comes with Blender by default but it's turned off) for thousands and thousands of free seamless materials.

 

[no_more_name]

materials transfer between render platforms i.e. Iray to Cycles / Eevee is still a poorly-solved problem

It's not that it is a poorly-solved problem, as it's not a "problem" per se (it's working as intended). It's that the volume distribution functions (behavior of light within an object) in Iray/Uber work in a complete different manner than the one your Cycles/BDSF volume distribution use (hence a fundamental mismatch). Either you try to mimic Iray/Uber's VDF (as Diffeo tries to do with Cycles with more or less success) or pivot to use your engine's intented VDF (and probably create/rebake/edit some maps). Imho, former (Diffeo) is fine for random renders, but the later more suitable if the goal is to make a VN within Blender (and cheap Daz skins) in the long run.

 

[osanaiko]

Damn, dude, you sound like you know what you are talking about.

I'm not in the market for Diffeo in the first place, but my understanding based on viewing of sample images empirically agrees with what you said: diffeo at least somewhat works, but if you are going to move your output pipeline to Blender, it's worth spending the effort to re-texture your figures with Cycles materials. Possibly/probably leaning on the bitmaps from the daz materials.

 

[Synx]

I'm not in the market for Diffeo in the first place, but my understanding based on viewing of sample images empirically agrees with what you said: diffeo at least somewhat works, but if you are going to move your output pipeline to Blender, it's worth spending the effort to re-texture your figures with Cycles materials. Possibly/probably leaning on the bitmaps from the daz materials.

Honestly just plugging the textures from Genesis 8.1 or 9.0 (8.0 ones doesn't work as well) into the right sockets on the Principle BDSF instead of whatever Diffeo is doing, and play a with subsurvace scattering + specular values works fine enough for a starting point. The maps themselves from DAZ are pretty industry standard.

Mix in some procedural micro details with the normal/displacement maps and some with the diffuse maps and you can create pretty good results with minimal effort.

Next step would be replacing them with better textures but thats a pain in the ass if the new ones are not based on the UV layout of genesis Models. I spend like a week or two trying to get scanned skin textures from texturingXYZ on a character using all kinds of methods, and it just sucks. Takes a lot of time, and some areas are almost impossible to get right. It defenintly looked better, but for the time spend its not worth it.

There does seem to be more and more Blender addons with custom shaders using the UV of DAZ characters coming out though, like

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(for G9 only) or

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(G8 and G9). While I dont think they can completely replace the skin on all your DAZ chars (there is just not enough varity) Mixing some of their maps into the DAZ maps does wonders.