Daz character to Unreal? Actual working workflow?

[jaynixxo]

I am trying to make a game in UE4 and using daz characters.
What I tried so far:
1. the official daztounreal bridge from daz3d
which works great, replacing the mannequin to the daz mesh and the default mannequin animations seem to work great with it.
problem is with the official daztounureal bridge that it doesnt import the genitalia correctly which results in floating genitalia infront of the character and missing textures like so:

alright I thought lets try something else.

2. I read on here and other places to use diffeomorphics tool instead of the bridge.
that again works great to import the character from daz to blender and then merge the genitalia into the mesh. problem with that is once you export it to unreal the character looks fine and great but then you can't really use that character for animations because of the different rigging.
last two days im looking into turning the daz characters rig in blender to a rigify rig and then maybe try to export that to unreal. that for now seems like a bigger headache than anything else though with the lack of information on how to do that with daz models. tools I tried are mannequinstools which doesnt really work for custom meshes like daz as far as I can tell.

what i am trying to ask here. how the fuck do I get a daz character to work properly in unreal? blender would be nice to use as well for later adding hair and clothings and stuff. is there no actual guide or tutorial? what tools should I use? should I bother with using diffeomorphic? rigify? uefy2? should I just try to get the official bridge to work?
like does anyone here has an actual working workflow for daz to unreal or preferable daz to blender to unreal?

 

[JMHenriques]

Actually this something I started messing with and I believe diffeomorphic is the easier.

You just need to merge the geocrafts in blender so its everything in one unique mesh and also manually import the geocrafts morphs you want.

Now im still sarching on the best way to export from Blender to Unreal. There was an official addon from Epic but the links from the official site are broken.

 

[mrkhing]

I can't get the diffeomorphic -> blender to work properly. There is always some problem with the textures or the hair. The official bridge works fine for basic models but it doesn't support non-official genitals and other grafts.

 

[JMHenriques]

My current workflow:

1. Daz to blender using diffeomorphic since its the only way I can get to merge correctly the anatomic parts with the character mesh maintaining.

2. export to unreal using the blender to Unreal official addon from Epic.

3. Manually assign textures (diffuse and NM and change some of them to transparent / masked)

This is ok and I basically already have a fully rigged character with anatomy parts with shapekeys working in Unreal.

The problem: If I modify the rig to rigify them I lose the bone mapping and I still cannot find a correct way to retarget the bones of rigify in Unreal... so I'm using the normal rig that is not that great to animate in blender...

Now Im using UE to rigify and trying to correctly map the bones from Daz to Unreal using the template function but its a mess...

 

[Chaotic Dreams]

Dunno about merging the meshes and stuff since a freelance artist did that. But when it comes to animations and how I handled the mesh this is what I did:

export fbx/obj from blender or Daz into UE.
use the skeletal retargeting system.

You must be registered to see the links

that's what I am using... might be some better targets but I think that is good enough.

import from Renderotica animations without mesh and just use the skeleton..or retarget the animations from UE that you want with the setup in the video. might get issues with UE animations where it might need that you reimport at times in case you add more bones or whatever (just a warning. But reimporting and retargeting usually fixes the issues)...

haven't had many issues really. Just shader work on skin and eyes that took a while...

 

[JMHenriques]

Hum... many thanks for the help Chaotic!

In my case I want to do my own animations in Blender (with rigify) and the problem is that when I do this the bones change a lot compared to the names of the normal Daz skeleton... I can of course create a new template in the UE to Rigify and map bone by bone but this will take me several really hours of trial and error

 

[Dark Erotic 3D]

This is all great stuff guys and I've had similar results so far. Although I usually manually import the FBX to UE4 after the Diffeomorphic work. I'm looking into the Blender to UE4 plugin now. Thanks for the tip! Also, has anyone else had troubles with creating the Physics Asset for imported characters? I'd love to simulate breast and glute physics but the physics asset keeps flying apart when simulated. It may have something to do with the unit scaling conversion along the way but it sucks. Anyone troubleshooting on that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ReigningSun]

My current workflow:

1. Daz to blender using diffeomorphic since its the only way I can get to merge correctly the anatomic parts with the character mesh maintaining.

2. export to unreal using the blender to Unreal official addon from Epic.

3. Manually assign textures (diffuse and NM and change some of them to transparent / masked)

This is ok and I basically already have a fully rigged character with anatomy parts with shapekeys working in Unreal.

The problem: If I modify the rig to rigify them I lose the bone mapping and I still cannot find a correct way to retarget the bones of rigify in Unreal... so I'm using the normal rig that is not that great to animate in blender...

Now Im using UE to rigify and trying to correctly map the bones from Daz to Unreal using the template function but its a mess...

When you do the "Send to Unreal" part, are your materials working correctly? When I try to do this, the textures are all wrong. Like none of the images get brought over to Unreal.

 

[JMHenriques]

for my case most of them are yes. But it will depend if somethings like for example if the genitals have there own texture or not.

And of course I need to change the settings of the textures when needed (to masked and so on), but the textures are moved to unreal yes (or they were... not using it for some months now...)