DazToUnreal - Daz Studio Retargeting [OUTDATED]

hello and welcome if you liked today's tutorial please like and subscribe it really does help today i want to explore das to unreal again now the unreal engine 5 has been released and that a newer version of the daz plugin is available from the developer i have been struggling to get back into the tutorials a little bit because i have actually been enjoying being outside for a change rather than sat in front of a computer and also i'm finding myself using dash studio less and less as each day passes the only reason i use it is because i have a large daz asset library but the software itself it tends to slow me down maybe there is an update or something that i haven't downloaded yet um because i am quite using quite a older version of that so if there's something that i'm missing in the newer versions let me know with all that talking out of the way let's proceed i am going to start today by opening a blank project yep i'll go with a blank project today so open you ue5 click on games click on blank i am going to include the start content it will make your project larger in size so you can uncheck that and there's no point me using ray tracing today so name your project i'm going to call this dazz or unreal and then click create i will close that studio for now and i will be back with you when unreal engine 5 opens inside unreal engine 5 let's come up to edit and open plugins and let's enable our daz to unreal plugin here it is i am running version five zero zero seven zero again there will be a link in the description of where to download this now with the das plugin enabled come to edit and go to project settings and scroll down on this side until you come to plugins and find daz to unreal settings click on that and click on show fbx import dialog this is more advanced but it will give us more control when we import our daz characters [Music] i think what we need to do is explore the new desktop unreal plugin so content come to content and come up here to settings and make sure that show engine content and show plugin content is checked and what this will do is give you all the plugin content and all the engine content as it says so from here then we can type das and if you look under plugins there is das to unreal content if we select that this is all the content that comes with the plugin so this post process uh i've foot control ik uh simple control rig etc and then there's this new folder retarget and what we have is a genesis a ik rig genesis eight one fix rock zero root ik no idea what that is uh a control rig g8 basic foot ik now i'm not going to open any of these yet because one thing that the plug-in does not come with is a daz studio genesis a skeletal mesh it's probably a licensing that prevents that from happening but what that means is there is no default skeletal mesh which means that if i were to open this retargeter now which i don't want to do because it may break it is with no character in there it it will pass it said it will it will break so maybe that is something that the people at daz 3d need to think about that distributing just a basic genesis 8 character with their plugin would really help i've been asked to provide people with ik rigs and ik retargeters and they would pay me on patreon and i cannot do it for them because i cannot distribute a genesis 8 character is just against the licensing terms anyway that's enough rambling with that let's move over to dash studio leave ue5 running in the background right inside dash studio we have our character john now what i've done with john is i have either click here or tools geometry editor or alt shift g and what i have done is with the geometry tool selected i have right clicked gone to selection mode choose lasso mode selection mode and i have simply drawn around like this with the body selected all the way around like this all the parts that i cannot see and then i have right clicked geometry visibility hide selected polygons now it might look to you like nothing's happened but if we hide the jacket as you can see it's removed or hidden the body underneath the clothes so we can turn off the pants like so okay and that will just prevent poke through in the engine obviously if you have a reason for keeping the clothes and the body maybe you want to take the clothes off in the engine or something then you will have to do it a different way but this is the simplest way for you to get the results you need okay with that what i want to do is send our character john to the engine so i'm going to click file send to das to unreal and i'm going to call this john version 2 because i'm pretty sure i have another version of john select make sure skeletal mesh is selected enable morphs choose morphs and click on down here arms legs torso arc it because i'm not sure if this is a 8.1 character or an a and then we'll just do face effects as well and then hit accept and then you need to choose a folder or your character we've selected the folder and then i want to come down to show fbx dialog and make sure that is checked hit accept the dialog box will pop up and just make sure morphs is checked and that's it everything else seems fine except now we need to go back across to ue5 and wait for this to be sent there back over in unreal engine 5 the character is now importing into the engine i still have that studio in the background but it has now sent it to the engine once this process is complete i am going to close that studio in fact i may as well just do that now as long as there's no dialog boxes or anything it might ask you to save the project just click yes so you don't lose your character right back inside unreal engine 5 because we enabled it in the project settings we have this dialog box now this is more advanced but basically you don't have to use the skeleton that comes with the plug-in and you would do that by selecting none here or maybe you already have a skeleton set up that you want to use you would choose that here we i believe we've got a daz studio crash fantastic right so in skeleton uh i'm gonna come to here to genesis 8 bass skeleton okay and choose that there and then from the advanced properties i want to make sure that use to as reference pose is unchecked and morph targets is checked okay then i'm going to hit import and now this will take a while right with our character now imported we can go to content does to unreal and find our character john version two and open up john version two and here he is beard's weird dude okay so let me just see if we can quickly fix the beard so let me scroll down and what we would do is find the material and you can hit isolate to make sure you're working with the correct one i think there's two to this look two different types let's just try the bottom one first what i want to do is turn down the glossiness so well robert adjust it upwards until it's just not quite shiny and there is another one isn't that yep there we go and i'm gonna adjust the glossy roughness on this it's just not quite shiny and i think for the purpose of the tutorial you know the gray beard is fine but that's what you would do you would adjust the materials also i tend to find that uh the materials that come with dars to unreal the bridge are often too shiny so that's something you might want to bear in mind also if you look here the zipper is poking through the shirt and i'm going to ignore that for now but i mean we can let me show you how to say you've got something like this it's not that important for you to see it you can come down to uh here to lodge zero and sections if you've got more than one level of detail you'll need to do this in all of them but for lot zero let's just find that so if you if you select it like this and then you scroll down until you find which one of these is is has highlight checked so let's scroll down there's lots of them look there see if i click off it it removes the highlight but if you click there it shows your highlight and now what we can actually do with this is right click on this section in this case section 35 and disable and it will take a moment to do it and you'll get this dialog and as you can see the zipper has now disappeared okay so other than the beard i'm reasonably happy you could actually remove the beard in the same way if you found it here but i'm gonna leave it okay so i think the next thing to do is to try and figure out how the new ik rig stuff works you've also noticed that this is not in the correct pose i'm sure there's documentation that tell you how to do it but that is going to create some problems further down the line i think so but we'll proceed anyway right so what we're going to do is there is let's go and explore again the daz to unreal plugins folder so again typed as makes it easier and find it scroll down to engine data plugins that's to unreal content and i'm interested in these control rigs here so i'm going to select genesis a simple control rig and the foot ik control rig and i'm going to drag those across and copy here this is just later on if you want to do more advanced things you've got copies of these and then let's go to the retarget folder and i may leave these for a moment but what we can do is while we're here is open up this and we need to go here to preview scene and it's going to ask for a preview mesh and we're going to choose john version 2. i see this was my worry it's all screwed up let me disable the post blueprint one moment while i try and sort this out okay so if it's all screwed up just hit reset up here like so now david has done a fantastic job with this um so i'm happy that we now have an ik rig and we don't have to make you sit through a 40 minute tutorial so thanks to david and it may be wise for more advanced users to copy this ik rig to your your project folder uh so if you do make any changes you're not breaking the one that comes with a plugin so you always have a reference we don't need to worry about that but what we do need to worry about is this foot ik in the daz to unreal content retarget folder uh so this will not come with a skeletal mesh which is important so what i'm going to do is drag this across to john version 2 and copy here so if we go into there and i'm going to drag that into my rigs folder copy here and if you don't have the rigs folder just create it and if we open this up the preview scene is blank and as you can see it's highlighted red here meaning those bones do not exist in your preview mesh now this this is more for intermediate and advanced users who require foot ik if you're going to use the daz character in a third person template for example so what i'm going to do here is in the preview scene settings tab i'm going to scroll down to my preview mesh and i'm going to select john there he is and hit compile and save now if we go here as you can see this is still in red so we can come over to our rig hierarchy go to root and refresh and from here choose john let me click on there and john and for some reason still so let me hit compile again so let me click on that and type okay and just find out it's just name slightly different that's strange there you go oh okay well it seems to be capitalized so this time we need ik foot r and so let's go to everywhere where it's showing red and just rename that okay what's left and okay that is a strange one okay and then look up here there's more so ever to everywhere you see a red bone name you're just going to have to change it ik foot r and okay foot l and hit compile and that's it you now have a foot ik control rig again if you're a novice you you don't have to do this but if you are going to use it in in in as a third person character you're daz character then you do need to do this that this will become important okay so that's fixed what i would do want to do though is rename that to uh it's still going to be called basic for ik but it's going to be cr and we'll call this john version two so now it's cr john version 2 basic foot ik okay next inside here i want to i need to create a retargeter because the one that comes with the plugin is blank and i it's just easier to set up your own but all we have at the minute is a daz character and i would like some animations and things in the mannequin so how we get the mannequin is we hit add go to add feature or content pack and select third person and add project and if we close all these dialogues and we just go to the content drawer we now have a characters folder which well we have a few folders that we have a third person folder a level prototyping uh but if we click on the characters and we'll go to mannequins first and we're clicking mannequins and meshes we have the brand new mannequin or mannequins because there's varish versions there's a queen as well and i love these things um and then there is simplified versions of those meshes and of course it's skeleton and also there's the old ue4 mannequin as well just in case you need it and with these characters they come with their own rigs look like uh there so what we can actually do while we're in here is i don't want to damage this original let me open it up for you and show you this is the one that comes with unreal engine 5. i don't want to damage that so what i'm going to do is duplicate it and i'm going to call this the same but i'm going to put oh daz okay rtg mannequin to daz and if i open that up and from the target ik asset i choose g8 ik rig if for some reason you've done it different to this tutorial the setup of the daz character and you cannot see that ga ik rig click here and show engine content and show plugin content and then it will appear for you okay so let's select that if for some reason your character is not showing you can come here to target preview mesh and we can find john and it will select john i haven't got any more genesis a characters at the moment so i can't show you but you can switch between the different characters here as you can see the pose is is not correct and we can fix that by hitting new pose and typing money to daz like so okay and then we edit the pose like so if the bone controls are too big you can come over here to bone draw size make that small and make them smaller like that until you're comfortable and you you're happy you can pose the bones and then all we can all we have to do is just you can move like so the various bones what i want to do though is come up here and i'm going to set this to 5 degrees this snap in here this is the rotation snapping and as far as we can tell these legs look like they need to be done so let me just pull those in okay i might need to come up to the five degrees and set it to 2.812 and yeah that's probably a little bit better and just move them in slightly like so and then set that back to 5 degrees it just makes your life a lot easier the snapping and i think we're going to go to the top view first let's just zoom out do look slightly out down there so let me just bring those down by five degrees and let's go to the top like so and let's bend these four arms by about 15 degrees like so and the hands look like they need to be bent by 15 degrees again just do this by eye i don't do this often enough to know i always make sure that i have the correct pose coming into the engine and i do that in blender i don't know if there's a different way to do it oops one moment ah this is a real pain i wish there was a way to import a pose asset and it is my understanding that that will be a thing in the future and they are working on it so you will be able to import a pose asset here which is fantastic because the daz plug-in does come with a pose asset so hopefully you'll be able to use that in future right so i mean i'm fairly happy with that if we go back into perspective mode yeah it's not fantastic is it but there you go now i'm worried now about touching the fingers uh because it does create a crash sometimes so [Music] let me just look at these hands i mean you get the general idea you would just pose your character until it matches this it is a bit of a pain and it will take a while but when you finish just click off edit pose and hit save as i said i'm not going to touch the fingers because it's my understanding that it does lead to a crash sometimes but you can give that a go and if you're watching this in the future and they've fixed that inside the engine then proceed and pose the fingers to match next i want to come over to chain mapping and here it where it says root select root and set this to globally scaled okay then i want to scroll all the way down to these ik bones at the bottom and set these two absolute experiment with this because with different characters you may have different results this is just the way that i'm doing it today but if you do have problems with your ik bones not retargeting or no root motion just have a play around with these values in details translation mode absolute like so right i'm happy with that and then what i'm going to do is just go through and just make sure all these chains the target chain and the source chain will have the net the correct names and they're lined up yep very good very good and hit save now what we can do is come over to asset browser and if we type say idle and we choose the mail idle there there we go [Music] and to export this animation you would click here export selected animations and go to daz to unreal and set a create note folder if it doesn't exist already called animations and click ok and there we have it we have a retargeted animation for our character john so obviously the next question is going to be what happens if you want to do it the other the other way what if you have daz studio animations that you want to retarget to the mannequin let's do that but first we're obviously going to need a daz studio animation so let's go back to dash studio and do that back here inside daz studio we now have our john character and what i've done is simply added a animation at this point i will assume you know how to use dev studio and add an animation to your timeline what we need to do now obviously is export this to the engine so i'm going to go to file and dance to unreal with john selected that's to unreal and this time i want to call this john idle like so and from the asset type choose animation just remove enable morphs and show fbx dialog now i need to do this because there is a bug in my version of the plugin that i have with dash studio that means the animations don't export but i think it's now been fixed if i am correcting newer versions of the dash plugin but i'll show you that in a moment so show fbx dialog hit accept make sure we're in the correct folder by the way and hit accept yeah you see look my animations are not selected here this bug has been fixed i've seen it in the code so i think it's made its way to dash studio by now so make sure animation's just checked and hit accept once that's converted it will send it to ue5 so let's move over to unreal engine 5. okay once it arrives at the engine you will be presented with this dialog box again because again we enabled it in the project settings and this time i again want to choose our genesis 8 base skeleton and i think let me just check all these settings yep that's all great so let me just have a look down here yep that's all good so just once you've chosen the skeleton just hit import and obviously he will import there we go and so i'm going to close all these dialogues again ignore the minor warnings you'll be fine and in my desktop unreal folder let's create an animation folder that is frustrating i thought it was named animations so let me just drag the animation we created a little while ago into animation move here brilliant and let me get rid of that extra animation folder there we go so here is john idol that we sorry about the confusion there john idol that we've just sent from dash studio let's open that up there we go so it's a dash studio idle animation and there is a strange bug in ue5 where if we get to this last frame or is it the first fret yeah it's the first frame uh so there's a bug i found in ue5 that happens on some animations where the end frame becomes this first frame which is just it's like the reference pose but it's at the end so if you experience that try and remove the end frame in this case what we're going to do is i'm going to remove uh these first frames from this so if i click to next like that and then i right click and remove frame zero to frame one so if you have a base pose like a t-pose like i just did on your first frame then you can just remove that first frame and then we should now have a perfectly looping animation let's make sure there you go loops perfectly hit save i'm going to save all as well it's important to do that quite often and now what we can do is in our character folder john go into the rigs folder and right click animation and choose ik retargeter like so and it's going to ask you to pick an ik rig to copy the animation from choose our genesis a ik rig ga ik rig oops forgive me and we need to rename this we'll call this john version 2 ikr it's probably better to name it if i i will do it here so i don't get people shouting at me in the comments section i k r capitalize that i k r john version two okay and now what this has given us is a retargeter with the source as our daz character and then we can choose any target from here so we can either choose a ue4 mannequin [Music] or the newer ue5 mannequin here and if we come to j mapping come to roo again and make sure that's set to globally scaled so we have root motion and then we will fix some of these but let's go down to the ik bones first and make sure that they're all set correctly and they match and for each one of these set these to absolute again you may need to change this from absolute to something that works better for you but through my experimentation and for the animations that i use these need to be set to absolute [Music] like so oops okay now obviously the new ue5 mannequin has a lot more bones so what we need to do is come to all these twist bones here and set all the twist and metacarpal bones to none so i'm going to go through and do that now and speed up the video and that's it again i'll repeat i set all the these twist bones to none and the metacarpal bones to none and with that done i'm going to hit save and now what we can do is come back to our asset browser and here is our john idle the one from daz studio if we click on that we do have a problem here look with one of the fingers so it is our left our left metacarpal left index metacarpal maybe there we go look i haven't set that one to none there and fixed and now as you can see this is a dash studio animation on a ue5 mannequin and the process is no different for a ue4 mannequin you just need to make sure these chains are set correctly uh oh the twist bones are set to none etc and it will retarget to that too if i i'll show you that right now before we export um oh i hadn't done that i've got to go back for all these bones now but you get the general idea so if we would it will retarget uh obviously that looks a little strange because i haven't set these twist bones to know like so [Music] and none and none and so on and to export we simply click exported selected animations and characters in this case mannequins animations and okay and there we go we have a daz studio idol animation i probably should have shown something a little bit more interesting but there we go and now that's been retargeted to the ue5 mannequin okay so it's time to do something a little bit more advanced but i want this to be as complete as possible uh because i don't intend on doing any more does to unreal tutorials for a little while so in our content folder go to the third person folder come to third person maps and click on the third person map and that gives us this okay the third person template if i hit play and so we're going to replace this mannequin with our daz studio character okay to do that we need to come to third person blueprints open up the third person character blueprint and go to viewport select mesh and from mesh skeletal mesh select our character john there he is and if the capsule isn't quite big enough select the capsule like so and then we're just going to i'm going to increase this for example 45 and then upwards we'll make that 110 probably slightly too big but it will do for now okay right now obviously we're going to need to retarget uh the animation assets for the third person character so hit compile and save and close this and go to content characters mannequins animations and here is quinn i'm going to choose quinn because quinn is a child of manny so anything i do with quinn is going to affect everything else so select quinn right click and re-target animation assets duplicate and retarget animation blueprint like so and from here choose the rtg mannequin to dazz ik retargeter we created a while ago and you will get this view in prefix i want to actually type john version 2 underscore and this will just add a prefix to the file names and then change the animations folder to das to unreal go into animation but right click i'm going to create a new folder and call this tps the third person okay hit okay and now retarget well sorry make sure that remap reference assets is checked here we target and there we have it we have all the third person idle and run forward etc all retargeted and ready to go next we need to go back to content third person blueprints third person character open it up and i'll click on viewport so we can see our character select mesh and come over here to animation mode make sure it's set to use animation blueprint anim class needs to be set to if we type john and i'm going to choose john version 2 abp manny and as you can see instantly [Music] our animation is now there hit compile save we need to do one more step and that is to fix the foot ik so come to your anim class click the folder icon and it will open up our john version 2 abp money open that up now what we need to do is click on anim graph here come to this control rig select it scroll down until you find control rig control rig class and from here we need to choose the foot ik control rig that we created earlier in the tutorial so cr or sorry modified earlier on in the tutorial cr john version 2 basic foot ik and hit compile and now all the warnings should be gone and it should compile fine we can now close all these hit play and here is john and when john goes on the ramp it's not perfect i'm using the foot ik that came with the plug-in you may need to alter the foot ik control rig so it's slightly higher but you get the general idea and [Music] there we go so we've come over to this little ramp it should do the same look at the feet it should as we go up the incline the feet should be there there's some weird problems with collision as you can see this some weird problems um again that could be to do with either retargeting or whatever but it's beyond the scope of this i i don't have the time to try and fix that so if anybody knows how to fix that let me know in the comments section that would be really helpful and we'll share it with everybody but that's it that is how you retarget inside unreal engine 5 release okay that's the end of the tutorial today i hope it was helpful i know i've done these kind of tutorials in the past but i thought i would give you an update with the ik rigs and things that are available to you now this is certainly a lot easier than creating an ik rig yourself you may want to go and study the ik rig that comes with the das to unreal plugin as it may help you with other characters for now though that is it if you do have any questions please leave a comment below and if you would like me to do any more dance tutorials something very specific that doesn't exist already i will be more than happy to do that if as i say it hasn't been done before and that's it for now so more tutorials are on the way please like and subscribe it really does help thanks for watching you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 6,193

Keywords: UnrealEngine, Character Creator, Actorcore, Iclone, Daz Studio, Metahuman, Mixamo, Quixel, retargeting, Blender, Unreal Engine, UE, tutorial, howto, how to

Id: xDzAnslXwMY

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022