[Distribution] Community Project - Open Source Third Person Template for Daz3D assets

GutoCrafts

Hello guys,

I'm working on a forever free Third Person Template for Daz3D assets while I learn how to use Unreal myself.

The goal of this project is not to create a full game, but to showcase how to use Daz3d assets within an Unreal Engine project and offer some basic features for a quick start. 

You can download the project here: https://github.com/guto88/Daz3dThirdPersonTemplate/
I also made a video highlighting some of the features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz6_rt3d5b0

If you want to use the meta-human eye shader on your Unreal Project, you can download the geograft I made that replaces the genesis 8/8.1 eyes with an epic's eye shader compatible geometry: https://github.com/guto88/Epic-Eyes-Geometry-for-Genesis-8.1

 

Current Features:

• Daz To Unreal Bridge configured for the project
• Custom Meta-Human Skin and Eye Shader
• Custom Paragon Hair Shader
• Control-rig setup for Genesis 8.1 Male and Female
• Retargeting configuration and poses for Mixamo, Mannequin, and Genesis 8.1 skeletons.
• Foot IK Solution 
• Inventory System (Equip/Unequip/Drop items, Stack Items, Item highlighting) 
• Dynamic Material System (Change mesh opacity masks based on the equipped items to help prevent poke thru.
• Simple Death and Restart Level
• 8-Way Locomotion System, with standing in place animations
• Run
• Jump
• Crouch
• Basic Debugs Keys (Slow Motion, Disable DSLL and Display FPS)
• Volumetric Clouds, Sky Atmosmosferic Fog and Lighting Set.
• Postprocess Material
• First and Third Person Modes

​Controls:

• Mouse - Move Camera
• AWSD - Locomotion
• Left Shift - Run
• Left Ctrl - Crouch
• Space - Jump
• V - Change Perspective
• I - Toggle Inventory (Left Click the item icon to Equip/Unequip/Drop Items)
• 1 - Slow Motion
• 2 - Display FPS Counter (Right Side)
• 3 - Toggle DLSS

 

Control-Rig Controls

To use the control-rig, you can grab the control-rig file and drop it on the viewport. This will create a sequence for the control-rig you've selected. For your convenience, enable the option to only allow the selection of control-rig controls on the left panel. This prevents unwanted selections.

The yellow controls allow translation and rotation with IK behaviour. The blue, green and red controls only allow rotation. The purple square controls where the head is looking at and the sphere inside it controls where the eyes are staring at.  

 

Future Goals:

• Improve the control-rig setup
• Improve the inventory system
• Create a system that allows the use of Daz morphs to customize the character in-game
• Create a Hand Ik Solution.
• Create a ragdoll physics for the genesis 8 mesh.
• Create a Save system
• Add a simple example on how to blend combat animations with the locomotion system
• Create masks for makeup and brows to fill the slots available at the skin shader. For now, there are masks only for the lips and nails. I recommend the use of the skin builder product to fill those slots while there is no free texture available.
• Make the actor components blueprints more modular and plug and play.
• Create documentation to help people migrate the functionalities of this project to their own projects.

PS: I'm doing this project to learn Unreal and to try to find solutions to better use my Daz assets on the engine. Most of the tutorials available on the internet are for the epic's skeleton so when I decide to move to Unreal I had some trouble getting started with my Daz assets. I'm sharing this project because I think it can be useful to other people. I'm using content from Genesis 8 Starter Essentials just for demonstration purposes. Daz3d can contact me any time and I will remove the project from github or make it private if needed.  


Other projects:

Epic's Eye Geograft For Genesis 8/8.1 Male and Female: https://github.com/guto88/Epic-Eyes-Geometry-for-Genesis-8.1
Description: Use this to replace the default eyes with an epic eye shader compatible geometry. 

Control-Rig For Genesis 8/8.1 Base Male and Female: https://github.com/guto88/ControlRigForDaz3D
Description: Use this to create poses or animations within Unreal.

Unreal Shaders for Genesis 8.1 Male and Female: https://github.com/guto88/ShadersForDaz3dAssets
Description: custom meta-human skin shader, custom paragon hair shader and epics eye shader to use with Genesis 8.1 Male and Female and Daz Hairs.

SnowSultan

This sounds REALLY good so far, thank you very much for sharing it. I look forward to trying it when I have a little more free time. It's great to actually have some settings and presets that we can examine and learn from rather than trying to guess how to implement them based on tutorials designed for other figures. I tried to get others to share high-quality render settings in another thread as we learned together, but no one appears to be interested. Best of luck with this and thanks again for doing something to help Studio users looking to expand into Unreal.

zaarka11

This looks great! A bunch of things I've struggled with, seem to have been fixed.

How do I go about using it though? I've just put it in \UE_4.26\Templates\ but that doesn't seem to work.

GutoCrafts

Hello, you can put the project anywhere and just open the CommunityProject.uproject file.

The next release will have a character creator. I hope you find this useful.

zaarka11

GutoCrafts said:

Hello, you can put the project anywhere and just open the CommunityProject.uproject file.

 I ended up just converting it to a template, and it seems to work so far. Gonna spend the day testing it out :)

Cenobite

Could be a handy learning tool just to see what you have done to get things to work, i find some things puzzeling since i have never used Unreal editor and have little experence with DAZ3D editor. I can move assets into Unreal but having them configured the right way is another thing, Whats the deal with FBX smoothing it's asking me to enable this feature in the FBX exporter plugin how do i do this or do i need to do this? 

David Vodhanel

I think the smoothing is just information that's missing from the Daz FBX Exporter.  I don't think it's necessary, as it's never been available.

Ellessarr

David Vodhanel said:

I think the smoothing is just information that's missing from the Daz FBX Exporter.  I don't think it's necessary, as it's never been available.

 this "smooth" thing is just a "extra" which you can do when exporting to maya or blender is just a extra option not obligatory if the character already "smooth enough/round", it's a effect which you do apply to the mesh to make it looks more round in the borders and less "sharp", it's a little effect which make the "sharp areas looks more round, then since unreal don't detect this "effect" being applied he warns about it but you can live without it in case you want to add it, i only remember how to do in maya, in maya select the full mesh, then i the "view" or window panel if i'm not wrong, just go looking on each one of the tabs until you find a option to "smooth edges" or sharp edges, choose in smooth you gona notice a little change in the mesh as it become a little more round)just a effect" then save the fbx and reimport to unreal the fbx.

nonesuch00

thank you very much

Cenobite

Ellessarr said:

David Vodhanel said:

I think the smoothing is just information that's missing from the Daz FBX Exporter.  I don't think it's necessary, as it's never been available.

 this "smooth" thing is just a "extra" which you can do when exporting to maya or blender is just a extra option not obligatory if the character already "smooth enough/round", it's a effect which you do apply to the mesh to make it looks more round in the borders and less "sharp", it's a little effect which make the "sharp areas looks more round, then since unreal don't detect this "effect" being applied he warns about it but you can live without it in case you want to add it, i only remember how to do in maya, in maya select the full mesh, then i the "view" or window panel if i'm not wrong, just go looking on each one of the tabs until you find a option to "smooth edges" or sharp edges, choose in smooth you gona notice a little change in the mesh as it become a little more round)just a effect" then save the fbx and reimport to unreal the fbx.\

Cool so Smoothing is not important then because the only reference i can sort of find in DAZ3D is under the item itself if the option isn't greyed out to add smoothing usually use it for Dformers but wasn't sure if this was the same function, just keeps saying in unreal when i port enable fbx smoothing which kinda annoys me i thought it may be linked to textures not fully importing things like opacity settings and certain textures just appear missing on the prop, it imports half the textures leaves half of them out of the port which makes the asset useless without textures & just creates more work i should't have to do.

So far i'm not having fun when i port products over to unreal and they half work where they work right away with ease in Daz3d.

Ellessarr

Cenobite said:

Ellessarr said:

David Vodhanel said:

I think the smoothing is just information that's missing from the Daz FBX Exporter.  I don't think it's necessary, as it's never been available.

 this "smooth" thing is just a "extra" which you can do when exporting to maya or blender is just a extra option not obligatory if the character already "smooth enough/round", it's a effect which you do apply to the mesh to make it looks more round in the borders and less "sharp", it's a little effect which make the "sharp areas looks more round, then since unreal don't detect this "effect" being applied he warns about it but you can live without it in case you want to add it, i only remember how to do in maya, in maya select the full mesh, then i the "view" or window panel if i'm not wrong, just go looking on each one of the tabs until you find a option to "smooth edges" or sharp edges, choose in smooth you gona notice a little change in the mesh as it become a little more round)just a effect" then save the fbx and reimport to unreal the fbx.\

Cool so Smoothing is not important then because the only reference i can sort of find in DAZ3D is under the item itself if the option isn't greyed out to add smoothing usually use it for Dformers but wasn't sure if this was the same function, just keeps saying in unreal when i port enable fbx smoothing which kinda annoys me i thought it may be linked to textures not fully importing things like opacity settings and certain textures just appear missing on the prop, it imports half the textures leaves half of them out of the port which makes the asset useless without textures & just creates more work i should't have to do.

So far i'm not having fun when i port products over to unreal and they half work where they work right away with ease in Daz3d.

well to be fair you must take in account which unreal is not daz and is not just "grap and play", you have to do some extra job and while you can find in the market a lot of "bluprintes or plugings or already made maps, it's don't means which you have a full ready to render or ready to play game, you still need to learn and do some stuffs, and indeed in the beginning is a little hard to learn, the learn curve is really not that soft or smooth but once you learn things get easy and fast. 

SnowSultan

Is it possible to apply default UE4 mannequin poses (like the Animation Starter Pack) to these converted G8 figures? I've tried a number of different ways, but I just can't figure it out. I'm not looking for blueprints (unless necessary), I just wanted to test some things in the Sequencer. Thanks.

GutoCrafts

yes, you can retarget animations: set to humanoid both skeletons and match the poses, and retarget the desired animations. Any tutorial about retargeting animations will work. The only limitation is that you can't use poses or animations created to figures that were not converted.

SnowSultan

Thank you. I actually don't know how to do most of those things yet (I'm concentrating on the environmental tools at the moment), but it's good to know. Thanks again for sharing this useful project.

OneShotgg777

Is there a reason why you aren't just using ALS V4 (other than simplicity)? Its free, and daz characters work with it (just need to fiddle :P). Great work btw, gonna take advantage of all of your plugins!

Macislav

Unfortunately the eye geografts have massive distrotion (compression caused by bad weighting) issues with heads which differ from the standard base mesh head.

Just try to use any character other than the standard one and this problem will occur and will in most cases look even worse than in my example screenshot.

 

 

frankiev888_28b3c399af

blackstallion1969_1355cfb052 said:

Is there a reason why you aren't just using ALS V4 (other than simplicity)? Its free, and daz characters work with it (just need to fiddle :P). Great work btw, gonna take advantage of all of your plugins!

Although the ALS V4 is an excellent project it's diffcult to figure out the finer details as it's to much as a starting point. That and it's a bit out of date when considering the direction Unreal 5 is heading as to the inclusion of the game play plugin and in my opinion making use of components is the way to go as to laying in the animation features.

I've checked out some of the features of the template as a project that I would be intrested in helping out and if permission is granted would be willing to retarget the free animations made avaiable as fair use to the Unreal engine including the animaitons takes avaiable in Paragon (3000+) 

Ellessarr

frankiev888_28b3c399af said:

blackstallion1969_1355cfb052 said:

Is there a reason why you aren't just using ALS V4 (other than simplicity)? Its free, and daz characters work with it (just need to fiddle :P). Great work btw, gonna take advantage of all of your plugins!

Although the ALS V4 is an excellent project it's diffcult to figure out the finer details as it's to much as a starting point. That and it's a bit out of date when considering the direction Unreal 5 is heading as to the inclusion of the game play plugin and in my opinion making use of components is the way to go as to laying in the animation features.

I've checked out some of the features of the template as a project that I would be intrested in helping out and if permission is granted would be willing to retarget the free animations made avaiable as fair use to the Unreal engine including the animaitons takes avaiable in Paragon (3000+) 

that woukd be awesome and asfar i remember this project was open for anyone to do what they want and unreal stuffs are "free" to use aslong they where did inside unreal. 

rawasch

Hi GutoCrafts, thanks for your work on this and sharing it! It looks great for a beginner like me who wants to get into UE more. Did you ever update the project to work with the new UE5 or are you planning to?