Just ranting
I see a lot of comments about how awful the 3D models is. After scrutinizing the models both in game and in the original blender, for me at least, there's nothing wrong with the models. There are, however, what I consider flaws when importing the models & animations from blender to UE.
There are 3 factors which can make or break a good 3D graphics:
- the base 3D models
- shaders
- lighting
If any one of those factors sucks, everything will suck, regardless how great each individual factors really is.
As I said, I found nothing wrong with the models, apart from a few clothing items which has it vertices screwed up in what I'm guessing in the blender to UE import process. What I do find lacking is in the shader & lighting department. These 2 is tightly interlinked. One can use a movie grade shader, but screw the light, the end result will look like sh*t.
@Vinfamy, I'd suggest before you're thinking about swapping the existing 3d models with anything else, take a long hard look at the shaders & lighting first. I'd suggest simplifying the existing shaders. The skin, and especially hair, shaders are behaving counter intuitively. I dunno how the shaders are implemented in the game, but do try with simple shaders first, if only it took only a texture map and a color multiplier. In my experience with DAZ models, I can get away with just that if tuned properly. Using advanced features like normal & specular maps, SSS, etc, doesn't necessarily improve things if not used properly.
For lights, I see you're lighting the scene flatly. There are little to no shadows in the scene. This kind of lighting, in my experience, will make any shader, no matter how good it is, looks like sh*t. The only thing that can help with this type of lighting scheme is Ambient Occlusion, or SSAO for the realtime version. This is just another type of shadows, and it uses tons of CPU/GPU resource. IMO it's better to re-setup the lights before resorting in AO.