After much experimentation and researching, it seems that neither Rigify or automatic weightmapping works with Daz figures imported as .obj.
I guess I’ll have to do all the weightmapping manually, so the question is what process to follow - all the tuts assume some weightmapping, then fine-tuning manually.
I imagine that doing it manually would involve defining vertex groups and assigning/parenting bones?
Any tuts on skinning stubborn figures? 
You need to export the figure from Daz as a Collada file (.dae) to get the weight map data. If you use Obj. it comes in as a bunch of separate objects and is a terrible mess.
You might try getting around that separate object problem by joining all the objects and removing doubles. Rigify might have an easier time figuring out what’s what if it’s looking at a single mesh. Using rigify on several objects drives it, what’s that technical word?, oh, yeah, bonkers. Daz figures are so poly heavy, though, that you might be better off just doing a re-topo on the imported obj.
I can’t see any point to using .obj at all, in doing this. You end up with a broken mesh, none of the metadata, none of the morphs, etc. It’s just the wrong format to use I think.
I have not found any acceptable way to use a Daz or Poser figure in Blender. You could use a mesh cage and rig that with rigify and use a mesh deform modifier on the obj. I had success doing that. The issue is, you still have a figure with no morphs, high poly count, tris, doubles and other errors.
I gave up trying to reuse those figures in blender a long time ago. Now, I only import them into blender to use as a mannequin for retopology. Blenders snapping and retopology tools makes creating your own models a quick process. (And you can do this while using some modern technology like subsurf!)
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I do not regret my decision to move away from those programs. I find Blenders animation and rigging tools to be far superior to Daz or Poser.
Good luck!
Hi guys - thanks for all the replies 
Just to clarify - I’m not a great user of Daz dollies - or any realistic human forms. I prefer making my own cartoon style characters. I’m trying to use this figure to prove a point regarding the superiority of Blender’s cloth sim over Carrara and for this I needed a Daz dollie animated wearing clothing.
Daz Studio has three dae export options - Custom, generic and Unity - they all give the result shown in the attached pic.
To overcome the separate objects problem with Rigify, I open the base .obj in Hexagon (not exported from Daz Studio) with groups merged. This gives me a unimesh, which I export at a scale suited to Blender. In Blender I remove duplicates - just in case.
So, to return to the rigging question - would it be feasible to manually rig, or should I just give up on this idea?
Like I said, to get the mesh and (most of the rigging) and the weight painting and materials out of Daz, use the collada export (.dae). To get the morphs out, use the FBX export. The rig will have a few bones that are wrong, but it only takes a few minutes to replace them. You then need to reassign the materials to the mesh, but the UV map is there, you just need to tell it whcih material fits which map. Then copy the morphs across to the collada figure, and you’re done. OBJ is like totally the wrong format to use. Completely useless.
Also I can’t speak for the other figures but Genesis has neither tris nor doubles.
Thanks jaxtraw - when I first deleted the bones, it looked like everything had expladed, so thought this wasn’t going to work - but that was the figure scaling up to a huge size. I scaled down to a usable size and will give the rigging another go tomorrow - bedtime
jaxtraw, your advice is great - successfully rigged with Rigify 
Weight mapping needs some adjustment, but baby steps.
Something odd - the rig for the arms is below the actual arms, although as can be seen from the pic, the metarig is correctly placed. The arms do move, but they need very large movements of the mouse to move a small distance - I’m assuming that is because the rig is relatively for from the arms?
The figure, rig and metarig are all scaled at 1.00 in all axes.
Any further advice, please?
That certainly looks like a scaling problem from here. Try deleting the rigify rig and running rigify again. Is it possible the scale was fixed after the rig was created?
Yes, my first though was that it must be a scaling issue, except that the thigh, etc. bones are correctly placed and I definitely fixed the scaling before parenting the armature. Possibly where it went wrong is that I followed a tut which showed the metarig scaled up to the figure size. Saw another tut which warned against that, so I started afresh and scaled the figure to match the rig.
This time everything is where it is supposed to be, but Oh dear, the automatic weighting failed
Anyway, I now know it does work with this particular figure, so will eventually get it right!
In the meantime, I’ll just go with a manual rig, see how that works. I don’t need anything very fancy for the tests I want to make.
Thanks for the response
I’ve tested the G2 female exported (Collada format) from the latest version of Daz|Studio recently, and it comes into Blender quite nicely. A few of the weights would need adjusting, but everything else looks good. The existing rig is totally usable and you can add IK/FK, bone shapes, etc. without too much effort. If you want to render with cycles, you’ll have to manually do that, but all the texture maps are loaded in, so it’s just a little time consuming to get everything converted. One other thing – before you export the G2F set the subdivision level all the way down and you’ll get fewer polygons that you have to deal with. I think the model comes it at around 42,000 quads, so it’s still a little heavy but manageable.
I’ve never used the rigify rig myself; the one I’m using is a somewhat modified version of the one that comes in with the figure. One thing I’ve also done is rather than “broken bones” in the arms, using a segmented bone with twist controlled from the wrist, which seems to work rather well. The bones then all match nicely to the weight painting it already has.
Thank you, Safetyman and jaxtraw
The couple of experiments I’ve done this evening worked great, with clothing and animation
Glad to be of help
Can I ask what settings are you using on both exporter in DS?
