Is Diffeomorphic reliable enough for commercial production purpose?

catmaster

Have been using Daz and Diffeomorphic to develop an indie game, and I want to achieve AAA quality using workflow that has multi layers:

Meshes: Daz - Diffeomorphic - Transfer morphs in Blender using Diffeomorphic - Merge geograft in Blender using Diffeomorphic - Export with Send to Unreal

Textures: Daz - Diffeomorphic - Make HD maps in Blender - Collect new textures in Unreal and update

Animations: Mocap files -  Retarget animations in Blender to Daz skeleton with Autorig Pro - Export with Send to Unreal

I wouldn't mind if Diffeomorphic becomes a paid plugin like Autorig Pro. Because free plugins tend to not update and thus break the pipeline.

Padone

Of course there are no guarantees since it is based on "volunteer work", but diffeomorphic is the best plugin that you can get out there.

Personally for a commercial project with strict deadlines I'd first test that everything I need works fine in the pipeline, then freeze the pipeline itself. That is, don't change the daz studio and blender and diffeomorphic versions until the project is finished.

Then diffeomorphic is specific to blender and not targeted to game engines. So you may also try the daz bridge for UE and see if it works better for you.

 

catmaster

Wouldn't want to freeze this pipeline, because Unreal 5 keeps updating and SendtoUnreal plugin also updates frequently. It's possible to ignore the updates but Unreal 5 is fixing bugs and updating new features that are hard to resist, especially the Chaos physics engine and Nanite virtualized geometry, enabling billions of polygons playing simultaneously on an average player's laptop. Daz to Unreal can't merge geograft and that's the primary reason to use Diffeomorphic.

catmaster

Padone said:

Then diffeomorphic is specific to blender and not targeted to game engines. So you may also try the daz bridge for UE and see if it works better for you.

Understand that Diffeomorphic is made specific for Blender renders not for game engines, that's why it imports with multires or subdivision modifier and not bake the HD mesh, since 3D software can't handle high poly models.

Daz bridge does very nice job exporting baked HD mesh and rebuild the materials, plus it gives a nice Daz skeleton retargeter for UE5, and those features are done automatically in just a few clicks. Would be perfect if it can merge geograft and transfer the morphs for some special types of games.

Although Daz to Unreal is very useful and dummy proof, it's most suitable for quick rendering in Unreal. For game production purpose I have to use Diffeomorphic to import textures into Blender. There're too many layers of textures need to be merged for game performance, and editing UV coordinates of surfaces / material slots that share the same texture to avoid overlapping. The rendering process in Unreal is very different from 3D modelling software though the shading calculation methods are similar, so the shaders need to be rebuilt in Unreal. It would take a few weeks for me to setup the material process, after that the character materials can be easily modified and swapped.