Porting game models to Daz?
Nerevarine
Posts: 175
Forgive me if this is the wrong place to post. I have Googled, and potentially asked here before, but I'm officially wanting to make some personal art and I'd love to use some in-game models to make it (specifically, the character I 'main' from Dead By Daylight). People offer porting services for cash, which is fine, but I'd rather learn to do it myself.
Has anyone successfully been able to port characters into Daz, as Genesis 8 models? It is definitely possible, as someone I follow on Twitter posted a photo today of my main wearing the Phaenom Lingerie set. Any tips? Tutorials? I'm not looking to make commercial art with the models, just personal fanart. Thank you!
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Is there any kind of exporter for the game of your choice?
Bethesda games and Mount&Blade have exporters. You can unpack models and export them as .obj files.
Once you have mesh and textures you can import it into Daz, but it's going to be unrigged and then you have to weigth&rig it manually.
Also, game models come in triangles. For static props it's not a problem. For anything you want to deform the mesh needs to be turned into quads first before importing. It needs to be done in 3d modeling software.
Thanks for your help! There isn't an 'official' exporter, but there is one, getting the models out of the game isn't too much of an issue. What I'm really interested in is how people are using the models, but on G8 bodies (with some of them maintaining their original textures for tattoos, but mainly, it's only the face that stays, some clothing is from the game etc).
Well, exporting from the game gives you raw mesh. Game assets always come triangulated. So if you want to deform it or subdivide in daz, it needs to be turned into quads. Which is going to be made by hand in a 3d modeling app. Then you might want to reshape it a little around the imported G8 mesh so the zero pose matches with the figure. Then you import it into Daz and rig as any other new model.
It's barely less work than building anything from the scratch unless the outfit is very simple.
That's about it for the outfits.
Thanks again! Very helpful :) I have the files loaded into XPS, but, I'm stuck at step 1 on this guide here. I guess I'll have to keep fiddling, thank you so much!
https://www.deviantart.com/niklos65/journal/XPS-to-Rigged-Daz-Studio-Figure-467739368
I tend to just pose them how I want in XPS and then export the OBJ and then import into Daz Studio. It's much quicker and simpler than trying to rig it all again
Thank you! This would be great if I didn't need to use all my Daz assets. :( I'm mainly looking to keep the heads only, so I can do a full group of me and my friends' mains (some of them have masks).
I've just started doing this over the last few weeks and the best way I know is also really expensive. It's the way many, if not all the conversions you see on the internet are done. That way is with Wrap3 and it isn't cheap. I was inspired by the work of FleetAdmiral in the Star Trek thread, followed a tutorial by Kelvin Jin (Shinteo on DA) on YT and it worked really well, including converting textures between UVs. There's quite a bit of setup to do before you can get going, but once you have it down, you can save templates to reuse each time. With Wrap 3, you can do just the face, the head or the full body and I tend to stick to the head. Something like Blender is also needed, which I find the easiest as it has all the importers and tools needed either with it, or for free. Other modelling software might work too.
For a possible cheaper option, there is a Blender plugin called Soft Wrap, which I think is on Gumroad (or similar). Never used it and don't need it but it might work and costs considerably less.
The only other way I can think of is scaling the model to Genesis, then sculpting it to match the game model. Longwinded but it doesn't deal with the textures.
Hope that helps you in some way.
This is cool - thanks. I'd heard of Wrap3 but didn't know what it could do. It sounds pretty powerful and I wonder if I'd get more use out of it then say a MD subscription. I'll check it out.
Edit: Wow - you weren't kidding about the yearly license for indie/hobbyists.
I have used Zprojection in Zbrush to copy shapes over, I am not very good at it though, is easier on things that are just heads like M4 & V4 can be because they use separate body parts for morphs.
you can transfer textures too at the same time as vertex colours if you subdivide the mesh and convert them to polypaint, also V4 etc have a lot more polygons than genesis + so give good results.
Yep, porting characters is a different can of worms than merely porting props or clothes. You need some way of shrinkwrapping or reshaping Genesis mesh to match the shape exported from the game AND some way of projecting or rebaking the original textures into Genesis UVs.
Thank goodness Skyrim or Bannerlord roll with character designs realistic enough to just eyeball the likeness in Daz and call it a day.
Skyrim honestly it's easier to do front and side renders in Nifskope and then use Facegen or something
the clothing too, just render a nice big front and back image and texture something with that.
I am sure other game models could be rendered elsewhere a similar way for textures and Facegen, Face transfer, Headshop etc
Ah yes, I knew there was a method I'd used but was forgetting. Rendering or taking a snapshot of the front (and sides if needed), then using Face Transfer, FaceGen or Headshop to create the head morph. That could definitely work for the OP, as long as they don't need great accuracy.
I just eyeball my character designs from games like SWTOR and GW2.
I haven't tried recently, but on the occasions when I did try to import game assets, anything that involved game engine animated skeletons did not import in a useable state...
...Basically, I could only use static props/objects with any success - a robot mech I tried could only be scaled and rotated using the default pose, could not pose it despite having a game skeleton.
Oh, I've been trying over and over again to import an Asari (trilogy variety, not from Andromeda, there's something different about those that doesn't look right to me), but it just won't work. It's really only the headfolds and the basic (browless) skintextures I'd really need, since I could manage to do the tattoos and such markings myself, and the whole idea would be to be able to use regular morphs for the face and body. The closest I managed to get was some unrigged headpiece object split into four pieces, which was a pain to position, and started clipping as soon as I added any expression to the characters' face. And the textures were still a problem, so I just gave up on the whole idea.