Creating and Transferring Expression Morphs for Daz to Unreal

great now that we have an animation Insight on real engine maybe we can we're going to want something like well we need to fix a little bit of pork through here on her top I guess but we also may want her face to pull something like an r as she kicks so let's see how I can transfer Expressions over from that studio to Unreal Engine and then how to trigger them in the character during the animation let's see how to do that so first of all Expressions they're a little bit tricky to describe and I might have to tell you more than you actually want to know but that is uh so that you understand why this happens the way it happens so Expressions can happen in two ways inside their Studio One is something that's controlled by facial bones in the upper face rig and the other one via a morph Target and the facial bones in the upper rig you can actually see them if you switch over to the Joint editor tool up here and then you can see all these little bones that you can now technically move so all these little tiny guys here those are the things that when moved they'll move the vertices in the face the other ones behave pretty much like a custom character so they literally just shape the vertices with the morph slider and not via bones and it's the latter that are easier and more accurate to bring into Unreal Engine so Unreal Engine works with morph targets natively and it doesn't always understand every Nuance of every every facial bone that you sent over so for that reason I recommend that you transfer them over into morph dials rather than use Expressions that are generated from Facebook you can try face bones but they may not look absolutely accurately as they do look in that studio so if you go to Power Pause you can actually go and see what they do if you head over to the face and then you head over to the actual face rig then you see each of these blue little dots that pulls a muscle so if you go and bring that over then you can see that this bone adjusts that eyebrow for example and this bone adjusts the no so you can play with those but as I said they might not accurately come into Unreal Engine you might also not be able to tell what is a facial expression generated with this versus a morph slider there used to be more morph Expressions back in the day with Genesis and Genesis 2 but since Genesis 3 we have that upper face rig and this is what create has now used mostly but not exclusively so let me go and dial something in that might work maybe something from the Jinx CDI pirate poses that kind of looks interesting does it look angry enough does it look like her and that could that could work or maybe something like this like you know her that is kind of nice this is a good example so this is a little bit too strong so I think what I would do here is I would use um Puppeteer and just put a dot on here then you go and dial this in put that here over to preview and say maybe we're going to have that somewhere in the middle so maybe like this and you can go and refine the pole so you know this this is this is a good enough facial expression for me so this is what I'd like to transfer into Unreal Engine so the easiest and safest way to do this is to export my character out as an obj and import that in as a new expression morph so to say so let's go and do that with my top character here selected let's go file export and then I'll just pop it on the desktop here and I'll call it like Fair angry obj so I'm going to use a one percent scale that's the modal scale just because you know it's dialed up most importantly over here under filter objects I'm going to enable that and make sure it says selected roots and that is what I'll choose hit accept and then that's exported in obj I'll hit Ctrl shift F to bring my character back into the a pause that takes a little second and also to have a without the expression and now I'm going to go and import this as a single morph slider with more Photo Pro so under edit object more floater Pro under preset I'll pick none choose the more file so this is going to be on my desktop the Thea angry and that should be almost everything except for reverse deformations that needs to be set to yes because I'm using a custom character otherwise it's going to look terrible and also the scale needs to be the same so now that's happened under parameters under morphs I've got Fair angry there we go now I can dial this up as a morph and this is important because this is now not using the upper face rig anymore this is now just a morph Target and this is also the morph that I want to bring into Unreal Engine so you can usually see these if you open up the skeletal mesh here you can use our preview anime Asian asset again here up here you have a tab that's called morph targets and I currently don't have anything because I haven't sent that over with my skeletal mesh so let's go and make that happen on my character let's head over to file sent to dash to Unreal and then here we have a tick box that says export morphs so I'm going to go and call the character the same thing so there whoops 81 just like my previous character was called it's also a skeletal mesh that's exactly what I want and then under morphs I'll enable that and then here I'll go and choose the morphs so this is a bit of a scary window this list on the left hand side shows me everything that's available if I select the top character then I see this whole list of every single morph that's in there so most of these are not Expressions they're just you know other things like adjustment morphs usually and corrective morphs so if in the filter box if I search for angry then I should find well there's one that's called angry but there's also they are angry and that's the one that I've just brought over since there's another one angry I might just go and select both of them and then hit add for export and then they both appear on the right hand side uh Signature Smile that one I'm gonna go and remove that there we go so these are the two that are now going to appear inside Unreal Engine so I'll hit accept and now I'll go and hit accept again and that'll send this character over and re-import her again in in Unreal Engine but now with the expression morphs okay she's re-arrived I'll go and open up sadly her materials have been replaced I'll go and pick my face forward pause again there we go and now I can also see that I've got the two more sliders that I can now go and play with inside Unreal Engine and there we have it the sliders behave exactly like they did in Dash Studio so perfect exactly what we had expected also work negatively so make sure you don't use that and then we have the angry expression this is the one I didn't actually do that but we can also combine them with one another much like we can do in their studio so if you had multiple morphs you can fire them off all at the same time now the thing is here in this thing is called Persona here this when you open a skeletal mesh up this is where they are accessible but that is no good because the moment you go back into here you will not find them here if you go and select the character there's no morph sliders here on the front facing thing in the viewport so for that you have to go and actually animate them with your animation sequence and we're going to have a look at that in another video

Channel: The WP Guru

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Id: YmNLnYqH2gU

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023