Support for exporting all "options" (ie clothes, skins, textures) a character has.
aweswan
Posts: 77
How awesome would it be to have daz characters with interchangeable clothes, makeup, hair, etc in Unity games?
As a Unity dev, I'd like to export all the options a character has, ie different clothes, materials, etc like this asset does
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/character-studio-project-229588#description
In the asset there is a really really long process of exporting each item, setting up each material etc.
I love some export option to export all materials to Unity material, mass export sets of clothes associated with a character etc as
Here are the tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyXmd0zJdTQ&list=PLw3n0FyyJYnAtGqE-QjFFTWTUzxuSjEmJ&index=2
Exporting meta data as json file is a great idea.
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Comments
Did you ever use the MCS or Morph3d as it was? You can still buy it and it is quite usable even now (all Genesis 2 and three clothing)... was given up far too easily as that code is better than what's in the bridges imho (there are still people supporting it on Unity forums and well worth a pickup on sale )
https://www.daz3d.com/mcs-mega-bundle
I'd just be happy if it would do the basics correctly first.....
It's all half hearted (ever since MCS went open source, they can see Unreal will offer them much more in future), especailly with Unity, I don't blame them but it's a very broken tool
I recently thought it would be quick to bring over some asteroids https://www.daz3d.com/aeridian-heavenly-bodies-planets-and-asteroids
It's marked as compatible wih bridge but you have to do it item by item... Messes up the prefab with materials with no textures even though they have the materials brought through on the fbx although only albedo and normal even come though item has other maps... and transparency is missed.
All easy things to bring over, maybe it's just Unity 2022 but it's worse than ever for me.
I used the free mcs with UMA2 a good while ago, and made a very basic character creator. Didn't know there a MCS package here on DAZ though. Still, a concentrated effort between reallusion, daz, unreal and Unity could produce an amazing character solution for games.
Does Daz have a plugin system ? Maybe I could write an exporter myself?
The code for the bidges is on github
https://github.com/daz3d/DazToUnity
https://github.com/daz3d
What is great about the MCS code is that it streams morph data programatically and also allows attaching the clothes on the fly (with the morphs).
No reason with a bit of effort if couldn't adapted to G8 or G9 imho as the code is in the files to create the steam data from an fbx.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-morph-character-system-mcs-male-and-female.355675/page-79
https://github.com/mcs-sdk/mcs
It couldn't ever be that easy, for instance by far the best cloth simulation in Unity is a third party asset that some may and some may not have, it is Magica Cloth, Daz can't export for that to start with to target a third party asset not everyone may have.On everything it will never be a 1 export process or anywhere near it to get the most of the the Daz to Unity /. Unreal pipeline. Everyone now days has a kind of ChatGPT will do all the work for them attitude, sure it could but it would be really simplistic.
Cloth simulation would be another step above just having interchangeable clothes. One day I'd like to see the entire daz library on Unity, already exported with LOD's and the best material and shaders.
My project already supports the in game customization with different clothing usable for all the Daz G8 characters. Diffeomorphic1.7 can import clothing for any character into Blender and then use the merge rigs option for the clothing to use the same skeleton as the character, then transfer shapekeys from the body to the clothing. I'm using UE5 and the cloth simulation is built in feature of the engine, but I'm not advising to switch to Unreal as it doesn't offer the freedom of custom choices supported by Unity, except that someone can dig deep into the source code of Unreal and make custom builds of the engine
@catmaster Nice! I've had a bit of a play with diffeomorphic - looks like a nice tool. There is a way to export clothes by themselves with the bones and blendshapes straight from daz, it just takes a lot of time to export and setup. I'm currently doing the lazy approach of adding all the cothes on the character and hiding the clothes in game that aren't being used, as for me there's not that many clothes changes.
I tried exporting daz to cc to get the cool shaders and eyes. But it loses morphs, so I tried adding the morphs back in blender using Diffeomorphic, but I couldn't get it to transfer the morphs. As a quick fix, When the characters need morphs, I simply swap to same character, but daz exported instead - I try to "age" the characters a bit as well to make up for difference in visuals. Unity has a few cloth simulation options, but I have found some make the fps dive, so I try to avoid for now except maybe in cutscenes.
Generally I stick to Unity because it's considerably better on all mobile and web, and also comparably as good on PC if you know what your doing, even in URP. C++ doesn't support reflection, and all the macros you need to add are a bit janky. Also not a fan of Epics strong ties with the C ( P. But apart from that it's a nice engine too. I plan on releasing some parts of game as web page mini games for marketing, so it had to be Unity. Not sure how good meta is, but I get comparable results from CC and DAZ.
It's clever to swap between Daz and CC4 versions of the same character and take advantage of both versions, and it's possible to recreate the Daz morphs on CC4 characters using Blender but that'd take months and I have lots of other tasks for the game.
If Unity has been open sourced I might have switched to it as I learned C# before and I'm still not used to Unreal C++ as its syntax is too context based and hard to use. My project uses blueprints extensively and whenever it needs C++ logic for features not exposed to blueprint nodes, I'd make them C++ plugins to be used by the blueprint based game project. I've seen so many Unity developers jumped to Unreal in the Unreal discord servers, the main reason they say is the integrated features Unreal offers out of the box, most important features include the open world support with level streaming or world partition, the animation retargeting nodes and advanced locomotion system support etc. The engine rendering settings seem to be less customizable as it's integrated to UE5 and have to change the source code or ini files to make the desired visual quality.
I agree it'd take a long time to add the morphs back in :(. I'm hoping my character flips might be ok and not too noticeable.. I hope my players will see it as a "wow he's aging the characters and making tons of subtle changes", and not as "they've messed up the chacracters and wtf happened to their eye shader".
I'm somewhat surprised your not using meta? Are there issues with it?
The other thing I like to do in Unity is run a scene, and change the variables and animate stuff with my mouse to see what I need to do in code to make something happen - ie Like animating using IK varibales, (as a Side note IK is cool!) I couldn't find how to change vars and make scene changes while unreal was running. Is that something that is possible in unreal.
I think I lot of Unity devs are going for character creator solely for the skin shader and Eyes and might not realise what Daz has to offer. .I know this is arbitary, but I think a lot of daz characters have a lot more "character" to them as well. It'd be nice if they made DAZ or CC editors a part of Unity.