[UE5] [DazToUnreal] (part 2) DazStudio Characters in UnrealEngine 5

[Music] hello and welcome if you find anything useful in the tutorial today please like and subscribe it really helps we're going to be continuing with our dast unreal tutorials by giving you this part too today we're going to be dealing with geo shells materials and basic setup in today's tutorial we're going to be using this dance studio character system 50 for genesis 3 females i chose this particular character because i liked the look of it i thought it would be a good base for us to work with this character also uses geo shells which are notoriously difficult to you work with inside of unreal engine and that's what i want to work on today okay here we are inside daz studio now this is the character we're going to be using today what you are looking at is an ira render it took around five minutes so i want to stress you are not going to get this quality inside unreal engine with a daz character it's it's just i'm not going to say it's impossible but i just haven't seen it yet but we will try and get the best we possibly can from it anyway let's proceed okay so here we have our system 50 character i have given it a custom skin for the actual skin material and then i have chosen from the various material presets uh a suit colour which in this case is gonna be white i may change that as we move forward i don't know yet now what is special about this particular character which makes it very hard for us to deal with inside unreal engine is that this suit is in fact let me just hide the lights for a moment a giraffe geometry shell suit now there are two ways of dealing with this inside unreal engine one is to export it from unreal engine into blender and then weight paint or transfer the weights into the geometry suit so it moves inside unreal engine because if you've ever tried to do a geometry shell suit inside unreal you will know it does not move with the skeleton or the armature whatever you want to call it it it doesn't work so it is a difficult thing to do so what i think i'm going to do today i've i've already recorded this tutorial and it took me four hours and i did it the blend away where i transferred the weights onto the geometry suit and so it would move along with the body but then i thought to myself the easiest way to do it is going to be to work with materials in unreal engine so having said that the first thing we must do before we even proceed is find out what textures this geometry suit is work he's using so if we hide our actual character this suit is what we need the textures for so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on the services tab and i'm just basically going to click uh let's say torso and expand it go to base and here in base color is an image if we click that image and we go to browse it will show you on your in your daz library where all the textures are for this suit and so what we're going to do is copy this folder system 50 in this case and i'm going to copy all these textures so i can use them inside unreal so i will do that now okay here on my desktop i've created a folder tutorial 2 and there are two folders here one is for the suit i've just been discussing uh there are some extra files in here let's just get rid of those to avoid confusion they're from something i was working on earlier i'll get rid of those now yeah there we go and so all we have here now are the textures down here at the bottom i used [ __ ] to edit some of the textures because when we bring them into unreal uh this is a youtube video and i need to try and avoid nudity if possible so i hope that happens because we need this to stay family friendly right so we have those textures in there um there we will go through later i'm kind of learning this process to go along so you're gonna have to bear with me on this one and then also in that same folder is here is textures from the character that i'm using for the skin so we've got all those textures as well in a folder in case we need those in fact i'm pretty sure we're going to need those anyway let's proceed so we click on system 50 and i reckon this may be one of those nudity moments so there may be some [Music] blanking on the screen uh what we want to do is actually delete the geometry suit or we can unpair an asp so on parent and then hide it and here we have a blank genesis 3 character and we're going to actually export this to unreal engine now so export sorry send to dash to unreal system 50 we select asset type of skeletal mesh um enable morphs and then we choose morphs and all i've done is click arms legs and torso and it's done this i don't think there may be um is there a blink for this no eyes closed yep i want eyes closed as well in there add and this is how i can make it blink mouth open and that'll do for now and click accept here we have the intermediate folder always know where your intermediate folder is so if if you need to access it directly you can find it very quickly for example if only real engine crashes during the transfer you can open unreal engine and if you know where this folder is this one here you can then import your character from the files in that folder right next we show fbx dialog and we hit accept and we make sure enable morphs is checked and then exit and then it should now go to unreal engine so let's move over to unreal engine and now it is important for the skeleton my last tutorial i already have a genesis 3 skeleton here and that is what i want to use this is genesis 3 character after all so i found the genesis 3 character skeleton sorry and that's what we want to use and then we click import ignore these warnings it's absolutely fine and so if we now click on this i'm probably going to have to do some sort of blanking again and there we have it we have our blank character okay so what we're quickly going to do is where is our torso okay so what we're going to need to do if we go back to das and actually show our suit as you can see some of the body is showing and then the rest is all this suit so it's like a midsection and the face let me turn this around have a look and the back look there and that is what's showing of skin and so we're gonna have to somehow with materials and opacity or blending we're going to have to recreate this geosuit material somehow so here we have the skin and this is where we'll start right so what for now let's just turn off and let's just get rid of our character for a while okay so i have here automotive materials it's an old pack from the epic games marketplace it's free or at least was free um i absolutely love this i still use it quite regularly uh for most things i i if i need like a shiny metallic surface or something i always come to this it's it's a great pack it really is so in here we love um for example car paints and they've got like a pearlescent quality to them uh you can have fingerprints it's just it's just pretty good look so we've got charcoal i don't think he's going to show up on a youtube video but there is imperfections in this terry red is just just look at that amazing anyway that's enough drooling what we need to do is uh go to depending on what material is using we need to go to the main material i don't want to create one because i really really want to use these with our character so in this case there is a master material called car paint and all the other materials you've just seen the car paints this is its master material so it looks scary if you've never done this before but where we need to concentrate on is on the out final output here so basically this is where your main color ends up your roughness specular [Music] and these things are important because now we can use those to create our geosuit over a skin but what i want to do first i've already started to prepare one so we'll open that and i have called it cyberpaint master and if we open that what i have is so this was the original [Music] color coming in and it would go to base color so originally it was like this look and these were not connected basically so what we have now is let's get rid of that and what we've got is the skin texture set as a parameter so um i'll show you how to do that in a moment then we've got a cut at cut out texture which will be our geosuit it comes with a cut out texture and it will control where the skin is and where the colour coming in is i will show you that in a moment right so for now let's restart this particular one there we go right so originally it was set up like this it's a base color and it created this metallic looking color here okay so what we want to do is create a texture parameter all this means is that inside a material instance you can set it if you used unreal you know this but you can set the textures we will use inside inside this texture parameter and that's what we want so next we need to create another one parameter and for now i will stick with this there is a third because this particular geoso has rivets that go on the suit and i would also have to do that here but for the purposes of this tutorial i'm going to try and keep it simple as possible because it's already quite complex and i'm struggling with it so anyway so we click on the first parameter we created and we will call this color it's about the british way there we go and then uh no see in fact we will call that skin so it's not confusing skin yeah and then on this second parameter we created we'll call this cut out and then what we'll do is remove the original color from base color [Music] don't forgive me i'm getting ahead of myself let's move those up there we need to create alert linear interpolate i can't say the word so there we go linear interpolate and basically what this does is it has an a and a b and it will mix a and a b depending on what the input of an alpha is and so what we can do with this is take [Music] our base color and place that into b then we can take our skin and place that into a i may have to switch these around and then we go to the cutout and we take the r and we place that into alpha and then from the lerp we go to our base color and save perfect now we've created a master material and so we will close that for a moment and we will go back to our system 50 character we'll go into materials and i want to create a new folder inside materials and we'll call this you tutorial right inside the tutorial folder i want to create a anime sorry a material instance there we go and we'll call this cis 50 torso we open that up and it's just a blank material instance in the parent we want to search for the material the master material just created m cyberpaint master and as you can see this is what we have now now this is why i'm using the automotive materials pack it has this function use chameleon so like you get those cars with chameleon paint and depending on where you're looking at it it kind of changes color so that is one of the reason i absolutely love this so we enable that and the community we will set the base color first now i want to pull up our reference image let me go and do that right now okay here she is so i want to try and create this i really do like it choose the base color and i would choose that by clicking here and she had like a red red color to her so we'll we'll go for a dark red for now and then in a chameleon color maybe over in the blue over there and that should be okay chameleon color it'll be more apparent in a while but right if we go down here to global texture parameter values you see that our texture parameters we created cut out which we enable and skin now what we need to do here we're going to be placing the textures for our skin here which is from our the base of our character and this will be our cut out for our geosuit right but first we need to import all the geosuit files which i stored on my desktop if you remember so let's go to our system 50 folder we'll go into textures and i'm going to create a new folder in here called geo suit and what i need to do now is go to my desktop and go to the system 50 folder and now we need to import all of these into unreal engine so i select them all right and we import all those into unreal engine now it's importing them brilliant right first we need a cut out oh a cut out texture so we are working with the torso at the minute that's what i'm creating so we will i want this to here for different types with and without vents so i'm going to use this torso opacity here and i'm going to drag it into our cut out and there you go you see instantly changed color and i mean we can kind of see it here look it it's cut out some places and left others now it's the others we need to deal with so i'm going to go back to textures where our skins are now i hope i've edited this so we don't get anywhere to take and we're looking for the diffused texture and i'm just going to drag that into there and hit save and now we have this and you can kind of see it already this skin there and then there's the suit so we'll save that and close now if we go back to our character system 15 who's currently naked we scroll down to torso here is this and then we go to our materials tutorial and we drag in to torso our torso material there we have it we instantly have what was in unreal and uh sorry it does studio just obviously in a red color so i'm very happy with that now what we need to do is we have legs here that we need to give them the geosuit material as well because if you look in this it covers all the bottom half so we need to do that so let me go into here and we will start work on the legs now the easiest way to do this is the one we created for the material instant sorry we created for our torso we duplicate and we name it cis 50 legs and what we will do is open that up now obviously at the moment it has the torso cut out etc so we need to go and replace that so we will go to dash to unreal and system 58 textures and geosuit and we are looking for legs so what we need to do first is i want to drag in legs into there there we go and that's the black and white legs and then for the cut out we need to find some sort of leg cut out do we have that let's have a look hmm no no we don't right well in that case we just remove this cut out and the whole thing should be legs let me go back and we go to the legs and we drag that material in tutorial and legs and as you can see they are white i did not expect that let me try again and open that up right hopefully i'm starting to find out a way to overcome this so what i've done is after the lerp i've had a static switch with a static bull parameter called bypass i'm going to start assigning these a group so i'm going to call these joe buzz so we know the mine and we'll do that we'll set the group for each of these in groups and here as well okay uh yep that's all good okay so now hopefully if i save and we go to yeah now this is a group look called joe butsu with our cut out and skin in there now if i hit bypass and i go yep it completely bypasses that uh the skin texture and cut out texture and then hopefully we'll have red legs there we go um i don't know how to get the texture onto them yet i will try that later i hope but if we zoom out there we go that's what we have so far um i really like it so far so next we need to do the arms so we go back to our materials folder tutorial and we will duplicate this again and this time we will call it cis 50 arms and we'll open that up bypass and enable bypass save and if we go back to our character hit save um we need to go to the arms which are here right at the bottom and then get the material we meet material instance we just created and drag arms into there and then there you go we have arms now i'm going to repeat the process for the other pieces like the nails here i believe the toenails need doing as well yep and then i will get back to you there's something missing at the back of the head here which i need to figure out how to do as well okay so i've got a little play around i've done all the nails etc and also i'm trying with the face so as you can see i've made it incredibly glossy and it's maybe too glossy but i will leave it like that for now um i've shaded the ears red i've done nothing so far with the lips if you see i am moving away from our reference our reference is is shy is really shiny and then softer on the skin part whereas i am really glossy at the moment um i need to figure out a way to do it on the torso okay maybe i'll have to create some sort of material function but i'm trying not usually i would work with material functions if i need something doing i would create a function and i would put that inside materials but i don't want to take us down a rabbit hole of creating functions and spending too long let's make sure our morph still work mouth open the shaders compile here we go so we've got a mouth open and eyes closed so she can blink and of course because this is not a geosuit we can go to the skeleton and say choose the shoulder and we can bend the arm like so which is pretty cool you can't do that with a geosuit obviously it doesn't work right so looking at this and looking at this if you look carefully there is a lot of bump on this and obviously in unreal engine 5 we can't do that so i may have to skip that for today we are going to be moving on shortly and creating a blueprint for this mesh and assigning the animations and so on and so on so i don't want to get too bogged down i would prefer to find a way to put all these indentations in and put the rivets back and but that may take a long time okay anyway it's time to move on after a good couple of hours um i had a short break and then i went back to my character and i've done some work on the materials so this is where we are now [Music] i didn't include this in the tutorial because it's beyond the scope but if we take things like the eyes it's quite simple i took a car pain from our car paint collection here which i showed you earlier and all i did is took the charcoal one i didn't want to go with the black but i changed the color of the irises which were blue before and i think it works really well then for the face i figured out with the material that i could control the roughness here i still can't figure it out how to do it for the torso right and you will notice that i have added to my master material and what i have added is ability to bypass the cut out i have added a normal a way to control the normal amount a roughness map which as you can see you can see it here uh we added the specular before i think that's about it and that's what i did so now when you zoom in there is a normal map as you can see and then a roughness map so it's not shiny everywhere basically it's just shiny in certain places and there's no real logic behind it i just kept working away on that master material which i will bring up now just to show you so if we look at like the torso look it's i've added uh this normal and and it's like a texture as you can see that is now in the roughness map anyway let's go to our master material it's a little bit messy um up here we have scratch and grime i didn't actually get to that i didn't have time so originally we had skin cut out uh i've replaced this i've inserted a couple of static switches so that static switch there and now we've got a rough roughness map um um over here specula and somewhere we have the normal oh yeah the normal here and then just a few lerps the roughness map is inverted with a one minus so it this is beyond the scope of this tutorial but as you can see i haven't made that much change to this so but it has made a dramatic difference to our character just by adding these few nodes inside our master material in a previous tutorial i already imported some animations let me just move that out of the way and so i just want to see what this looks like before we go any further with an animation so uh where's that idol oh yeah look so this is uh an idol animation retargeted for our genesis 3 character i really like that um i think this is actually a mixamo idle animation that i retargeted using the uh mixamo retargeter and i retargeted it to genesis 3. please check my previous video for how i did that anyway we're gonna move on and we're gonna create a scene now to put our character in okay i've opened up a map again this is just a metahuman cinematic lighting preset which is freely available on the epic marketplace go and check it out and all i've done is added a floor and then i've changed the color of the background to match our reference image which i showed you from the dance store this contains various lights we have an ambient light a background light two key lights and a top light what i want to do first is i don't want to drag our mesh directly into unreal engine what i want to do is first create an actor blueprint so right click in your folder where your character is and select blueprint class actor and we will name this sis fifth day bp for blueprint open that up and it'll take a moment okay what we're going to do is drag in our system 50 genesis 3 character compile and as you can see that is now in our blueprint okay the first thing i want to do is rename the mesh here to body so we know where it is and compile and then i want to add some components so first i want to add lod sync and with this selected we're going to go to here number of lords sorry one and four slot zero then in components to sync hit this plus and expand and here type body [Music] that's it now hit compile save we need to make sure it auto activates as well so go down here to auto activate and select that compile and save right we need to ensure that in your plugins so go to edit plugins ensure that live link is enabled which is already for me and that is important because we're going to add a live link component not because we're using live link but there is a component in it with a live link plugin that allows you to preview animation inside of the editor without simulating or pressing play and that's what we want so live there is live link skeletal animation and we do that and we select it and we all have to do is go down here to auto activate select that and compile and now we're done so now we need to exit and what i want to do now is go to the blueprint i just created and drag that into my scene like so and we need to ensure that it's bang in the center zero zero zero there we go and create sorry save all now in this i've already created a cinematic camera uh it's a wide shot so i've got these settings at the moment with 36 15 uh minimum focal length for 1000 minimum f-stop not there maximum there diaphragm blade count i've got focus set to manual my focal length is 85 millimeters current aperture is 1.4 if we type in exposure oops yep i've got my exposure set to manual and current compensation is set to five shutter speed is set to 48 because i'm going to be working at 24 frames per second so i i require 48 if you're using a different frame rate say third take that would be 60 there that's it for the camera so what we're going to do is go into cinematic mode by clicking here and then we're going to click on the cinematic camera to view and in the editor i'm going to click g to go into game mode so this is what we have so far now if we click on our character and we go down to body and from here we use animation asset and then we go and find our idle retargets our animation and as you can see because we have this live link in our list and inside our blueprint sorry we can view our animation inside the editor okay so this part has gone on for over 30 minutes i think we will leave it here in the next part we will be dealing with cinematic and anime if you found anything useful today please like and subscribe it really helps see you in the next one you

Channel: Jobutsu

Views: 8,403

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

Id: 9eZZZUdOU4c

Length: 39min 53sec (2393 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022