Short Film In Unreal Pipeline Question

Dark45

Hey all, I hope you guys are well and are ready for the upcoming holidays.

 

TLDR : How to take my anthro characters with Fur and Geo-graft tails from Daz to Unreal?

 

I have some amount of expereince in Unreal, Blender, and Daz but I have yet to try bridging all of my workings together into one project using Unreal so I could make an animated film in the engine.

So I am looking for some advise if you have some time and know a little about the subject. Here are my thoughts on how I would do this but in simple terms. Basically I'm wondering if I am on the right track on how I would do this.

1. - Create my characters, morphs, cloths, geograft tails (morphs of geo's will have to be merged with the G8 character I believe), fur, and hair inside of Daz Studio and Zbrush.

2. - Use the Daz to Unreal bridge to send my characters, geografts, morphs, and cloths over to unreal. Retarget my G8 characters.

3. - Use Diffeomorphic to send my fur and hair elements to blender. Convert them into Alembic format for groom hair. Export for Unreal.

4. - Parent the hair and fur elements to the Daz figures after they are groom hair.

5. - I have a motion capture setup using 5 apple devices and move.ai that I plan to utilize as well as possibly meta human's facial mocap for my performances within Unreal. The mocap data can be brought in and applied to the retargeted Daz figure... I believe.

I know that is a very simple run down but I'm trying to make sure I don't need to buy or do anything else before I dive into this. It's a small project but seems like a good leaning experience for me.

Thank you guys in advance for any advice or help in how to set up this pipeline.

Dartanbeck

...and if anyone knows the answers to these questions, do you also know if Linday's dForce simulated hair can also be transferred with simulation intact?

I'm not planning on going this route, but I'm curious in case I decide to in the future.

 

That hair is what got me to learn how to really enjoy the whole process of rendering my animations directly from Studio using the wonderfil Iray engine - so I'm happy doing that. Just curious is all.

Dark45

Dartanbeck said:

...and if anyone knows the answers to these questions, do you also know if Linday's dForce simulated hair can also be transferred with simulation intact?

I'm not planning on going this route, but I'm curious in case I decide to in the future.

 

That hair is what got me to learn how to really enjoy the whole process of rendering my animations directly from Studio using the wonderfil Iray engine - so I'm happy doing that. Just curious is all.

Simulation intact, I have not tried that personally. The whole idea about getting everything into Unreal is to get away from dforce and use groom's realtime simulation for my short film. I actually use Virtual World Dynamics currently instead of dforce for my simulated cloth / hair in Daz for animation. Not sure about you but even with x2 3090's, it takes 15 hours plus just to render a 240 frame animation for me in iray lol. Looking to try and speed up the workflow a bit.

I'm also thinking of buying a copy of Iclone / character creator but not sure if it's worth the plunge. Not sure if it can do anything I cannot do already with Blender, Daz, and Unreal.

 

Edit: I remember seeing this character in an animation tutorial that I picked up some time ago, I thought she looked familiar.

Dartanbeck

That's my Rosie! 

Yeah, I use VWD as well, but this hair makes it cough blood. I do use it for the soft-body simulation and her medieval outfit.

I only have an RTX 2060 6GB card and have my settings optimized to get roughly 1 minute per frame. Since DS 4.22 the render time has gone up a bit, but not enough to make me cry.

Here's Medieval Rosie demonstrating my Speed Render technique

Check the YouTube description for render times of each Element rendered.

Dartanbeck

So I render each element individually which goes by Really Freaking Fast! The character renders taking the longest.

I use Fusion to blend the elements together which is also Very Fast.

WendyLuvsCatz

Dartanbeck since the hair you use is geometry based transmapped. it can be converted to particle hair in Blender then subsequently a groom via alembic export to Unreal editor 

I even did a semi tutorial I never finished  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/515486/grooms-with-instructions-added

Dark45

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Dartanbeck since the hair you use is geometry based transmapped. it can be converted to particle hair in Blender then subsequently a groom via alembic export to Unreal editor 

I even did a semi tutorial I never finished  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/515486/grooms-with-instructions-added

I believe the main question of his is how to keep the sim intact as well but I do not wish to speak for him. Diffeomorphic does a great job with converting SBH into particle or curve hair, pretty neat stuff.

Thank you for the turtorial as well!

Dartanbeck I will definitely take a look. I remember enjoying your other tutorials.

With VWD, yeah, it has so many quirks that it's infuriating at times. I've found though if you use less than 250k vertices and you use hair assistant, you can get some pretty nice results without the horrible crashing lol.

I think one of the more complex things for me when it comes to rendering is the level of hair / fur I need in my scenes. Having 3 or 4 characters with SBH, even the optimized SBH I do creating essentially hair cards is brutal at times.

Dartanbeck

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Dartanbeck since the hair you use is geometry based transmapped. it can be converted to particle hair in Blender then subsequently a groom via alembic export to Unreal editor 

I even did a semi tutorial I never finished  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/515486/grooms-with-instructions-added

I was told that before. The result was... well... I'm still not using Blender.

Dartanbeck

Dark45 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Dartanbeck since the hair you use is geometry based transmapped. it can be converted to particle hair in Blender then subsequently a groom via alembic export to Unreal editor 

I even did a semi tutorial I never finished  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/515486/grooms-with-instructions-added

I believe the main question of his is how to keep the sim intact as well but I do not wish to speak for him. Diffeomorphic does a great job with converting SBH into particle or curve hair, pretty neat stuff.

Thank you for the turtorial as well!

Dartanbeck I will definitely take a look. I remember enjoying your other tutorials.

With VWD, yeah, it has so many quirks that it's infuriating at times. I've found though if you use less than 250k vertices and you use hair assistant, you can get some pretty nice results without the horrible crashing lol.

I think one of the more complex things for me when it comes to rendering is the level of hair / fur I need in my scenes. Having 3 or 4 characters with SBH, even the optimized SBH I do creating essentially hair cards is brutal at times.

Right. I've had some sorts of success with other hair. For this one to even start to work in VWD, we had to decimate it down heavily and it didn't even come close to what dForce does with it.

 

Eventually I asked myself why I was wasting so much time? I mean... it really Really works in Daz Studio and now i've conqueredd a wonderful solution that keeps me happy aniMating, simulating, and rendering in Studio. Someone has to do it otherwise the horrible rumors that you can't animate in Daz Studio will continue to grow. 

 

I don't mind the process taking a little while. It gives me time to live a little outside the Studio. Grilled cheese anyone?