Daz Export to UE4: Skeleton
RyujinTech
Posts: 1
I've been having issues where I'm trying to export Daz3d characters to UE4 and the skeleton for the fingers is always broken. it's the only body part I cannot get to work properly. If you pay attention to the thumbs and the fingers, you'll see the orientation is off. The thumbs are as if they are folded backwards, and the last joint on the fingers is bent. This is an animation for UE4 skeleton. I shouldn't have to do any adjustments from what I understand; however, new UE4 projects and new default Daz3d models don't make any difference. Any input or guidance would be helpful.
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This is because the Daz armature contains carpal bones for the fingers that do not exist in the UE mannequin. In general the bones and weightmapping for the UE mannequin are just different from Daz characters and can occasionally give undesired results.
There are a few ways you could go about fixing this. One would be to setup the Daz character to more appropriately match the UE mannequin skeleton in a program like Blender; this video will show you how to do that.
The other way would be to go in manually and adjust the fingers after the animation has been retargeted. This is probably the simplest way to fix it, since it can be done inside UE without the need for 3rd party programs. This process is explained here. For fingers I reccomend turning rotation snapping off entirely. You'll want to put the animation at frame 0, correct all the fingers, then add a new keyframe using any of the fingers and it will automatically keyframe in all the changes you made. Often just adding a single keyframe at the beginning is enough for the entire animation.
Ok Thank you. I guess that makes sense. Seems like something that would be handled with the Daz3d to UE4 bridge... I'll have to play with fixing one skeleton, then finding a way to automate it to fix the rest so I don't have to manually adjust the fingers every single time. Thanks again! Guess I'm happy to know I wasn't going insane.
Implementing that sort of functionality in the Bridge would be complicated, as it involves the removal of certain bones, renaming of others, merging of weightmaps, and posing the character to be more aligned with the Mannequin. This would undoubtedly break a ton of stuff with Genesis, and then there's the question of morphs, most of which wouldn't work at all if the base character pose was changed to match the UE mannequin. The Daz to Unreal bridge also sets you up with a post process animation blueprint for JCMs, which is very nice to have, and would be completely broken if the armature was changed. Basically, I wouldnt count on it. There is however a script you can run inside Daz that will at least rename the bones (and remove others) to match the UE skeleton, I believe it also merges weightmaps. That should at least make retargeting simpler and may fix the fingers a bit, but again it will break JCMs and you may lose some Genesis functionality.
Greetings
DAZ to Unreal workflow.
From my personal experience I can say that the best workflow and cinematic quality is to export from Daz to Blender Genesis 2,3,8 character in FBX format and then add "mdd" animation made in DAZ. Only in this way you it can avoid body sprains and a thousand other problems and headaches.
Subsequently export alembic to unreal.In Unreal you have to create all materials including those for the eyes, there is no need to replace them.Just create the right material and they become really beautiful.The alembic format is indispensable for complex and extreme poses and animations . Of course I tried exporting FBX animations from blender with use of diffeomorphic but the results are not so good. There are too many warping and other problems. I think, but I would not be mistaken that currently there is no plugin or better way that can equal workflow described above.
I am attaching some pictures of my work.
Of course I have to do right lighting. This I use only for demonstration purpose.
Best regards