Diffeomorphic proper IK to use with Unreal
Hi everyone.
I'm working on a game right now and using Daz for character creation with further animation in IClone and exporting to UE.
So my workflow goes as follows:
Mesh: Daz > Diffeo > Blender > UE
Animation: Daz > IClone > Retargeting in UE
Everything works like a charm, but when the times come to retargeting, a problem shows up.
If the animation includes a root motion(moving or rotating hips), character's feet do not stick to the ground and start floating/sliding. After some digging I found out that it's because of differences in the feet IK structure of UE,IClone,Daz and Diffeo on the other hand.
Default UE rig as well as IClone's has both feet IK grouped under a root bone. Furthermore, if I use DazToUnreal bridge, it's skeleton has the same IK structure and retargeted animations have no issues with the feet.
But Diffeomoprhic's treating of the IK is somewhat different. First of all it does not save any IK chains when importing from Daz.
There is however an option to add them - Rigging > Add Simple IK, it creates the following:
So you see the problem here - this structure can not be properly retargeted to any animation, even Daz-created, as retargeting options require feet and hands IK to be grouped under a root
Maybe it's not a problem with Diffeo itself and there is some workaround.
Any help will be hugely appreciated.
Comments
I'm not into gaming myself. But I know diffeo users use the expy kit with success to export mixamo/rigify to unreal. Though probably using the unreal bridge is easier.
https://github.com/pKrime/Expy-Kit
Hi, if your
final destination is frequently UE5 then an investment in Autorig Pro might be worthwhile as it can re-rig your Daz figures as UE4/5 skeletons, retarget from all of the major mocap sources and export to UE.
I don’t do game dev, but I find this addon well worth money for animating non Daz/iclone figures in blender as I did here.
Well, Autorig looks nice, but it's not actually appropriate for my needs. I've made a changeable clothing system so all the imported clothing and wearable props should have the same skeleton for animation to work correctly. And manually assigning rig points for each mesh as Autorig suggests is too much an overhead.
@wolf359 That's very well done especially the haze and light effects. The animation is kept to the minimum but it serves the story fine. Did you use a real actor voice this time because that sounds real to me.
@Padone
Thanks!
And yes the “Librarian’s” monologue is an audio clip taken from and old cut scene from the HALO video game several years ago.
Its my attempt to re-imagine parts of the old cut scene with updated visuals .
And of course ,my excuse to animate some free characters harvested from Sketchfab and rigged with my recently purchased Auto-rig pro add-on
Also thanks for the sub on YT.
@wolf359 Yes it is very very rare that I subscribe to a youtube channel. Yours is a must I couldn't miss it.