You are asking for a lot here, especially if you don't have a lot of experience with the UE since both are complex systems in their own way.
But it's not impossible to get a system set-up where you can skip the heavy lifting once you have the base done.
The very first thing i suggest to anyone is reducing the material setup of DAZ characters, this will not only help with the general house-keeping later but also with performance.
The regular DAZ character comes with something of around 16 material "layers" (Surface Groups (SG) called in DAZ) and even tho it's not uncommon for game characters to have that many material layers in case of DAZ there are a lot who are unnecessary. So merge them down. Fingernails to Arms, Toenails to Legs, Ears - EyeSocket - Lips to Face and Gens can be merged most of the time into the Body group. Straight and unprocessed imports of DAZ characters are insane when it comes to drawcalls, so if you want to keep your performance in check this step is vital.
Usually i discourage people from using the texture maps that ship with DAZ characters since they often times lack essential maps like normal or roughness maps. The render pipelines are different after all so you're often times better off with building your own skin shader inside unreal. The free examples provided by Epic have everything you need to get you started on how to build one yourself. But you certainly have to create all necessary maps yourself first. This is one of the reasons why i preach to go from DAZ to Blender and then to Unreal. The
You must be registered to see the links
for Blender is a power-house for everything related to "From DAZ to Blender".
On the topic of rigging and animating. Going from DAZ to Unreal is certainly possible but will create issues later down the line (No root notion, weird bending etc.), so again a detour through Blender with the Diffeomorphic addon will save you from a lot of headaches later. Your main goal at first is to get the DAZ rig into Unreal with a proper bone hierarchy, correct twist bones and preferably no quaternion, although Unreal is able to handle that now it may be hard to work with.
One thing to remember is that every DAZ item, be it hair, gens or clothing has its own rig attached to it, if you try to import a complete character with hair, clothing and whatnot Unreal will complain upon import, so import the naked character first so that you have the rig available and after that import all the other parts without the rig (there's a checkbox for that during import iirc.)
Once you got the proper rig imported you can start to setup the underlying system, animation blueprints, control rig (which is amazing) and so forth. Once that is done you can pretty much import any DAZ character into the Engine and reuse your main rig, needless to say that male and female need their own rigs.
So yea, as you can see the process is quite complex and i properly forgot a lot of things here and there but if you manage to get it set up you have two incredible powerful tools at hand (control rig and the sequencer) for storytelling in a realtime environment.
But as i said before you can ease the pain by using Diffeomorphic. Utilize the
You must be registered to see the links
and the read the
You must be registered to see the links
and don't waste your time with the DAZ docs, they are useless. Use DAZ as a means to shape your character (no disrespect) and do everything else in Blender and Unreal.
You are asking for a lot here, especially if you don't have a lot of experience with the UE since both are complex systems in their own way.
But it's not impossible to get a system set-up where you can skip the heavy lifting once you have the base done.
The very first thing i suggest to anyone is reducing the material setup of DAZ characters, this will not only help with the general house-keeping later but also with performance.
The regular DAZ character comes with something of around 16 material "layers" (Surface Groups (SG) called in DAZ) and even tho it's not uncommon for game characters to have that many material layers in case of DAZ there are a lot who are unnecessary. So merge them down. Fingernails to Arms, Toenails to Legs, Ears - EyeSocket - Lips to Face and Gens can be merged most of the time into the Body group. Straight and unprocessed imports of DAZ characters are insane when it comes to drawcalls, so if you want to keep your performance in check this step is vital.
Usually i discourage people from using the texture maps that ship with DAZ characters since they often times lack essential maps like normal or roughness maps. The render pipelines are different after all so you're often times better off with building your own skin shader inside unreal. The free examples provided by Epic have everything you need to get you started on how to build one yourself. But you certainly have to create all necessary maps yourself first. This is one of the reasons why i preach to go from DAZ to Blender and then to Unreal. The
You must be registered to see the links
for Blender is a power-house for everything related to "From DAZ to Blender".
On the topic of rigging and animating. Going from DAZ to Unreal is certainly possible but will create issues later down the line (No root notion, weird bending etc.), so again a detour through Blender with the Diffeomorphic addon will save you from a lot of headaches later. Your main goal at first is to get the DAZ rig into Unreal with a proper bone hierarchy, correct twist bones and preferably no quaternion, although Unreal is able to handle that now it may be hard to work with.
One thing to remember is that every DAZ item, be it hair, gens or clothing has its own rig attached to it, if you try to import a complete character with hair, clothing and whatnot Unreal will complain upon import, so import the naked character first so that you have the rig available and after that import all the other parts without the rig (there's a checkbox for that during import iirc.)
Once you got the proper rig imported you can start to setup the underlying system, animation blueprints, control rig (which is amazing) and so forth. Once that is done you can pretty much import any DAZ character into the Engine and reuse your main rig, needless to say that male and female need their own rigs.
So yea, as you can see the process is quite complex and i properly forgot a lot of things here and there but if you manage to get it set up you have two incredible powerful tools at hand (control rig and the sequencer) for storytelling in a realtime environment.
But as i said before you can ease the pain by using Diffeomorphic. Utilize the
You must be registered to see the links
and the read the
You must be registered to see the links
and don't waste your time with the DAZ docs, they are useless. Use DAZ as a means to shape your character (no disrespect) and do everything else in Blender and Unreal.
Oh last but not least, base resolution for DAZ characters is more than enough, especially with proper normal maps and check the topology on clothing. There are a lot of clothing parts out there who have horrible topology.
Good luck with everything that lies ahead.
Don't bother if you expect to take genitals into unreal with this. Broken fucking product.
Oh last but not least, base resolution for DAZ characters is more than enough, especially with proper normal maps and check the topology on clothing. There are a lot of clothing parts out there who have horrible topology.
Good luck with everything that lies ahead.
