[UE5] [DazToUnreal] (part 1) Use DazStudio Animations in UnrealEngine 5 (IK Retargeter)

hello and welcome if you find anything useful today please like and subscribe it really helps this is the first part of a set of tutorials which will be more relaxed more informal and we'll just simply show you my workflow between dance studio and unreal engine 5. [Music] okay here we are in unreal engine five i've created a basic third person template uh i've done this so we've got the mannequin to work with and some animations just to get us started first thing is first we need to go to plugins and ensure that our dash to unreal plugin is enabled which is in this case and i am running here 4.2.0 uh this is my version from my github but uh david has now updated his so it should work with unreal engine 5 moving forward which is great right and then next we need to go to our project settings here like so and um go down to plugins and find dash to unreal settings now in these settings we're going to show import dialog so it'll show a dialog box when we import a daz character by default the plugin just imports and it appears in your content browser we don't want that we want to be able to control which skeleton is used and maybe some other things so i always have this checked here um as for everything else we can leave it for now and we might change things later okay what we're going to do now is now that it's set up we'll save all in case we have a crash and we're going to switch over to dash studio okay so here we are inside dash studio i've created a basic project and in this basic project i've got all the genesis characters so i've got genesis one uh two three and eight i've done this because we're going to import all these into unreal engine so then when we transfer animations and such we've got all the skeletons there in unreal we don't have to do anything else okay we're now going to export this to unreal engine first you want to name it okay i am going to prefix this with genesis 1 g1 and i'm going to call this tutorial because i already have one in my project and i don't want it to clash with that so g1 tutorial skeletal mesh and we'll not bother with enable morphs or subdivisions advanced settings we need show fbx dialog and then remember where you are storing these files that might be important later so we accept and i will click most there it's just a habit really and accept and now that will go over to unreal engine so once we open up on real engine you'll see that dash studio has sent our character over to unreal and this dialog box has popped up now as i mentioned before this dialogues box does not appear by default with the plugin we enabled that in the project settings and i've done that so here we can either choose a skeleton i've got quite a few in here or we leave it to none and it create a skeleton for our character and that is what we want for genesis one because the daz plugin does not come with a genesis one skeleton so we just click we double check all the settings yep that's all fine and then we click import remember to leave that to none for now and it should import our character ignore these warnings it won't affect the function of our character sometimes uh if you i did forget in the dialog box you can uncheck animations and it won't create this file we don't need the animation let's get rid of it it's just blank anyway right so what it's done is important our genesis one character here we go and a skeleton with a skeleton tree and a physics object [Music] and and that is how you would import the genesis character now i'm going to actually delete that that we just brought in don't you don't you don't have to do this but as you can see in the background i already have been imported all my characters there is no difference for genesis one two three or eight you just import it the exact same way like that um each time i would suggest you create a skeleton and you for example in my g1 folder it's the g1 skeleton if we go to g3 it's a g3 skeleton i don't use the one that comes with das because i want that intact inside the plug-in i don't want to damage it if i make changes to the skeleton i add bones or anything i don't want that to affect the plug-in so i always create my own skeleton right so we hope we have now in this folder the various characters here we have it right so next what my the next stage of what i would do i would create a ik retargeting folder and inside that i have two folders i separate ik retargeter and ik rigs let's go into the ik rigs first in this folder i've created various ik rigs in advance so we have a metahuman ik rig there with all the chains already created we have a genesis 2 character there we go of all the chains genesis 3 with all the chains uh genesis 8 [Music] and a genesis ik rig for our genesis character that we've just imported now i'm going to recreate this one so let's just we will just create a new one so if i go to animation okay rig we want our g1 skeleton and we will call this g1 ik rake okay so if i click on that we have our genesis one character there and we are going to create the change of bones required for retargeting first thing is we click on the hip as with all dash studio characters and set retarget route then with this what particular one we want to click on the left thigh shin foot toe and we will stop there and new retarget chain from selected bones and we want leg [Music] l as the name you can name these whatever you want but what i will suggest is from ik rig to ik rig you keep the naming convention so exit for example i would if i'm building one for a metahuman i will keep the name leg l for a meta human and i do i it's just the names that i've personally chosen but please keep them the same so then when it comes to retargeting all the chains match up so anyway leg l um then we need a leg right and we set new retarget chain from selected bones leg ah oops my mouse batteries are running out right and then we want a spine which is abdomen abdomen to chest and neck i knew we target shame from selected bones spine and while we're here the head new retarget chain from selected bounds head then we need to do the arms and arm left and then let's do the other arm so color shoulder forearm and hand and we then do arm oops i have messed this up over and i have done the right okay so just call that arm for now and rename arm left so i'm right there we go and then arm left sorry i'm very tired today right so so far we have left leg right leg spine head arm right arm left and that's all fine right and then you need to go on and we need to do the fingers i'm not going to do that now it will take too long but basically you would select the the right thumb one two and three and then you would create a chain for the thumb please go back to my previous videos and and learn the process of creating these ik rigs so you can just quickly shoot through it create your fingers and we can move on okay as i said i already have an ik rig created so i'm going to delete the one we've just created here's my genesis ik rig look i don't know how useful the old genesis character is going to be for you but i'm going to show you why it's useful for me today okay so we've got an ik rig the next step is to go back into our retargeting folder and we click on the ik retargets folder and here i have various retargeters i have there's one for a miximo the mannequin genesis and g2 g3 yeah and so to create this animation ik retargeter and then you would choose your ik rig that you'd created from here so our genesis one is here for example you would click on that and it would create a new ik retargeter again i've already created one so we'll get rid of that for now and we will open up the genesis retargeter that i created earlier and here we have it now from this window obviously you can choose your target and at the moment it says mannequin but we can set it to a meta human or a genesis 2 character genesis 3 genesis 8 a miximo character so which ever characters you've created ik rigs for they will show up here and you can use them for retargeting so what we will do is perhaps choose a genesis 3 character no in fact we will go with a mannequin so the mannequin is in the wrong pose so what we need to do is create new pose and we will call this g1 meaning genesis one genesis to manikin like so and that will create a new pose and then we want to edit this pose by clicking here uh the bone controls are slightly large so we come over here to bone draw size and we scale those down until we can see what we are doing there we go and then we are going to click on the various bones and then set the poses for this do it by i uh with practice it may get better i'm not perfect yet but i am getting quite good results just by doing it by eye i wish there was a better way but at the moment there isn't anyway we'll just do that and let's have a look there we go no oh this is frustrating right there we go right okay i want to locate it from the top and the arms seem slightly more bent there and this one another props five degrees yeah the shoulders look to be further back so if we click on the shoulder and pull that forward and this shoulder and pull that forward and then back to perspective and the legs are slightly off but i don't think we're going to pull them in enough maybe they might end up too close together though so yeah so we'll put those back for now it's not perfect but it just yeah let me just move them apart i think that will do for the purposes of this okay so once you pose your character and it now matches this character i will say about the hands that from genesis character to the different genesis characters they have different hand poses and so you would have to pose the fingers as well i'm not going to do that because it will take me a very long time um maybe they could be bent a little bit more like this but anyway that'll do it for now and we click on edit pose and that's it you've created a pose now so i already have a genesis animation here just for testing purposes so we'll click on that and as you can see it will retarget genesis animation onto the unreal mannequin and as i said before you can for example have a meta human the metahuman is already in kind of a depot so let's have a look and press play there you go from old genesis animation to brand new metahuman animation and again onto a genesis 2 character there you go again the fingers are not moving in this i don't know why that is or we could have a genesis 3 character press play again there you go oh we could have the mixed mold character as well right so what we're going to do now is import a genesis animation an old genesis animation so let me go back into dash studio okay well here we are back in dash studio we've selected our genesis 8 character if we go over to the animate light tab tab there um there are these uh i don't think they work with the original i think the genesis ii those ones anyway what i have here is some old and a mean very old genesis animations for the original genesis character we have various ones that i found on a hard drive and as you can see there's idle animations and such there we go there's quite a few in this particular folder um yeah so what we're going to do is we're going to choose one i don't know what that is at the moment let's have a look um yes we'll choose this one and i want to drag that into anime light to where it says genesis here and that's it it's in there now what i want to do now is right click here and bake to studio keyframes so we baked studio keyframes this will take a moment right that's it and then we click on timeline and now as you can see we have keyframes and our animation okay so i've explained that more than i wanted to if you're here i'm hoping you already know how to animate in data studio so we're going to move on now and we're going to export this animation to unreal engine now ensure genesis is selected our genesis character and we're going to send to das to unreal and we will call this g1 we'll prefix it with that so we know which character it belongs to and we'll call it walk and turn in asset type we need to do animation again leave those unchecked show fbx dialog um again remember where your folder is it's always important to know where that folder is in case anything goes wrong in the process click accept and this box opens again now for some reason i don't know why is with the desk maybe it's just me but i have to tick animations in this dialog box the plugin doesn't seem to do it itself now as i said it's probably something that i'm doing wrong but anyway make sure animations is checked we don't want morphs or anything like that and hit accept and i will go through and it will hopefully transfer to unreal engine there we go okay okay it's exported now to unreal engine so let's switch back over to unreal engine okay back in unreal engine and this box has popped up along with importing g1 walk and turn what we need to do now is go to the skeleton and choose our g1 skeleton our genesis skeleton and now click import okay that's imported now there it is one moment yep there you go perfect it's now imported for our genesis character and if we go over to one moment i've got too many windows open right we go back to our retargeter where is our retargeter there and we click on our genesis retargeter we don't want the mixed mode character we will go for say the mannequin again and make sure that we have i select a pose it hasn't saved the pose that is really frustrating anyway okay so we will just pause our character again i guess we'll quickly do it this time okay i hope they work that bug out because that one is frustrating anyway that'll do for now there we go and then so if we click on our walk and turn there we go and as you can see it's retargeted obviously the arms are not bent the same that's because i haven't sorted out the pose let me just just for the sake of it i must do that right so to go to the top click there and straighten that go to there and straighten that and the hand is there one e there we go yeah and then we should is that better not really okay it's a simpler matter of making sure the pose is correct which obviously i haven't done but there you go if we go to a genesis 2 character and we click on the same walk turn there you go genesis 2 and genesis 3 there we go [Music] this before was a real pain in the bum trying to do this inside dash studio like uh transferring animations between a genesis 2 character and a genesis 8 character for example the worst was scripts and i believe once there was a plug-in but i never had any look at all so most of these animations just ended up on a hard drive uh just stuffed in a cupboard and i never touched them again but now they are useful again let's go back over to the dash studio so we have all these characters genesis 2 genesis 8 and so on so now you know that it doesn't matter what animation for which character you have as long as you have all your ik rigs and retargets are set up inside unreal engine you can retarget all of your old desk animations now onto whatever you want whether that's other daz characters or mannequin or metahumans and so on and so on i'll give you an example now of uh old genesis animation retargeted onto a metahuman okay here we are and i've opened up a map and here we have our metahuman daisy from our previous tutorial and daisy has a live link on her so let me just take that to auto activate and here we have a genesis animation retargeted onto a modern meta human and considering how old the genesis animation is now that's pretty amazing to me okay so that is daz studio animations to unreal engine five i hope you found that useful if you did please like and subscribe it really helps [Music] you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 10,780

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

Id: tG98Vn8UKbE

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022