Animation from Daz to Unreal Engine
Robinson
Posts: 751
I've been playing around with importing character from Daz to Unreal Engine and retargetting the mannequin animation. I've had some pretty hilarious results. If you've ever seen John Carpenter's The Thing, you'll easily be able to visualise... anyway, I was wondering if anyone knows of good tutorials about doing this. Right now I'm round-tripping through Maya (I bought LayLo3d's Genesis 3 to Maya script). I saw Character Animation in the Unreal Engine in the store. I'm not sure how up to date it is. Does anyone have any experience with this? What I want to do is basically characterise in Daz, export to Maya, fix up the materials there, export to Unreal Engine (and fix up the materials there once again, argh!). I'd like to then send animations from Daz or Maya into Unreal.
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there is weirdness as I recently learnt using the SKAmotion walk cycles with the bounce morphs and it seems everyone uses those
until I tried them too I hadn't seen this odd mesh mess up in FBX on any animation
Including morphs with the animation complicates things, so I won't be doing that right away. I haven't yet had the time to work out how to create blend shapes on existing rigs in Maya (it took me a couple of weeks to learn how to use Hypershade to get the materials the way I want them). I think I have to add the shape to the base mesh but I'm not sure. Anyway ultimately I'm hoping I can get any "bounce" or similar effects using in-engine physics as I see there are plugins available to do this kind of thing.
I suppose the easiest way to do this is not to retarget the skeleton at all, i.e. to export fbx and use the resulting anim with the daz skeleton. Seems to work OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtg0IIUFYiw&list=WL&index=11&
this video can help you it is on RUssian i think but you don't need to worry about "translation", just watch what he is doing most of his steps can be easy copied by just watching without need to understand what he is saying and at some point of the video he will put in the video a "skeleton retarget map" for all the bones, then just pause on that point and follow that map to proper retarget the bones another trick you would need is to "add to your library a "A-pose for unreal", in daz, then export the character with that pose it will make things much more easy.,
you can also try this one it's a bones mapping program.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/animation/32105-fbx-joint-renamer-anyone-interested
this is a automated system which will rename all the character bones to the "proper unreal names" making most of the process of mapping the bones automatic, you still need to work on the base pose and change the animations type(as showed in the video tutorial)but don't need to map the bones it will be make automatic when you select the rig.
you will need a github account to acess the download link.
it's looks like more and more peoples are starting to use unreal or others engines to play with daz stuffs outside daz, it's really cool maybe it can make daz start to look more for this side.
The "A-pose for ureal" is interesting... Can I get such a thing? But I think the export from Daz zeroes the figure, doesn't it? So it needs you to rotate the actual bones of the bind pose... correct me if I'm wrong.
the ideal would be you export it with the unreal A-pose, you can use the zero t-pose but in this case you would need to change the unreal manekin to that pose which would be too troublesome and all the animations you get for unreal use the unreal mannekin pose as base then it would be too troublesome, then looks much more easy you go for the opposite and put daz character in unreal pose because with this you can use basically any animation from unreal on it, a good way to it is export unreal manekin to fbx then import to daz then use the manekin to put a daz g8 male or female character in the same pose, using the manekin as a guide, this is what i did to get a proper "A-pose" for unreal for daz them saved it,(i did it for all the generations), then i can export now any daz character to unreal with the proper pose.
and to be fair is much more easy to set the pose inside daz than do that inside unreal.
the A-pose is only if you are using "unreal animations" or animations compatible with the unreal mannekin, if you are going to use DAZ animations then you don't need it and can use the zero pose without any issue, but if you want to use any unreal then you have to choose between change the daz character to unreal pose or change unreal mannekin to daz pose.
I managed to get it all working correctly by retargetting the animations to the figure skeleton, with some adjustments to mannequin bind pose. I tried just raw export with FBX to Unreal without going through Maya but it isn't very good as you don't get the JCM bindings; some poses, twists especially, leave arms looking like they've been walked over by the band of the Grenadier Guards.
Otherwise the base content Unreal Engine animations aren't really suitable for Daz figures. Well, perhaps they are if you've modelled a great lummox of a character. I am currently doing my anims in Daz and/or Maya and exporting those. They match the exported figure's skeleton so no retargetting required, except some scaling on characters which is easily done by setting the anim skeleton nodes to Animation Scaled.
I think the other issue you may be running into is that bone rolls don't get figured correctly. If you try to bend the shin bone backwards 155 degrees notice where Daz Studio places the foot and look where it is in Maya and Unreal Engine. My guess is that it is way out to the side. The same thing happens in Blender. There is a new Daz Rig Bone Utility Add On for the http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/daz-importer-version-14.html that will calculate bone roll to match Daz studio as much as possible. There are a few bones that get there axis shifted 90 degrees but all in all it is an improvement.