Unreal to Daz
rlewisfr
Posts: 15
Hello all,
Almost all of the discussions are around Daz to Unreal, but I am trying to see if I can work the opposite.
The end goal: a high res still image render of Daz 3d characters in a high res Unreal created environment.
Background: I am neither an expert nor even an advanced user in either Daz or Unreal, but I have a concept in mind for a visual novel. It requires high res, high quality environments for the near photo quality characters.
The problem: If I go Daz-to-Unreal, the quality of the character is not there. It is close, perhaps 75% of what it could be from what I have seen, but not what I am looking for. I can't create the environment I need in Daz, so I need the Unreal environment. However, I can't get the two to marry up together at their best quality. I can get a great still image from Unreal, but no character. I can get a great still image of a character from Daz, but not in the environment with the associated lighting and shadows etc (it is an outdoor setting).
I tried to get some of the Unreal assets into Daz to see if I could recreate parts of the environment in Daz and then do some Photoshop work (my real expertise), but the OBJ/FBX import would not work for the assets I have tried.
In summary, I have run head long into a problem that seemed to be an easy proposition initially.
Anybody try something similar?
Thanks so much,
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Comments
Every render engine is different and requires its own lighting and material set up. You'll have to choose between DAZ Iray and Unreal. Head on over to Artstation and look at some character renders with Unreal. Top quality character renders are achievable. Unreal also has the option of real time or near real time rendering which is great for high volume renders needed for VN's. There is also the option in UE to perform high quality ray-tracing which takes many hours (like most render engines) but also provides high quality results. Finally, Unreal continually develops it's render engine to increase quality and performance. I think DAZ is more focused on providing assets than a state of the art render engine.
The downside to Unreal is the learning curve. It will take longer to learn. DAZ is super easy to use and can give good results out of the box.
it's a lot of work and ultimately disappointing bringing an Unreal environment into DAZ studio
I have done so many times and never liked the result
Sorry, perhaps not clear enough. I think Unreal does a great job at renders, just not of Daz imports. Daz characters in Daz are, from what I understand, the best renders for Daz characters. When importing to Unreal, you lose the ability to easily pose and alter and the ulimate end product is a solid B+ character in a good grade A environment. I'm looking, if possible, to combine the A+ Daz character and the grade A Unreal environment.
Thanks for the reply
Converting Daz characters for Unreal is easier than converting Unreal environments for Daz.
I've got decent looking Daz characters interacting with each other in Unreal, they can even be customized by players using morphs from Daz.
With some tweaks the Daz characters look on par with Paragon characters from Unreal, but not considered A+ like MetaHuman characters in Unreal, and I've used MetaHuman eyes for Daz characters. However MetaHuman doesn't have naked body skins and isn't very much customizable like Daz characters.
I'm still learning various techniques to improve Daz character results in Unreal environments.
You do have to get the scene of objects out to an OBJ (prefered) Collida, or FBX. There are some tools to help assist with that, but like in Unity the process of bringing stuff into the engine is usually a one way road. I had to write a completely custom OBJ exporter to support skinned meshes in Unity and even then the normals are so whacked it has to filter through Blender to clean it up.
There's also going to be like shaders in Unreal just have no real translation in Daz, such as I ran into an issue with parralax windows that Daz couldn't do..well now I think someone finally did make a parralax shader.
So it depends on what you are trying to bring in. If it's a complex scene maybe not likely, if it's just a simple backdrop or object yeah. But you will have to give more details on what you have tried and wanting to do.
I've had success in importing DAZ characters and environments into Unreal. I used the DAZtoUnreal bridge. The skin shaders from the DAZtoUnreal plugin really helped the character look more realistic. Here I have Genesis 8 Female in the Studio Loft Apartment enviornment. I added rectangular lights at the windows to act as light source from outside.
The shaders from DTU indeed provide better results than commonly used diffuse + normal setup, could be even better if modify them with the Github shaders For Daz3d Assets: https://github.com/guto88/ShadersForDaz3dAssets
MetaHuman shaders or the realistic human skin shaders purchased from artstation.com would give the best results ever for human skins, however they're designed for rendering, need a lot GPU processing power for the layered materials, and require different texture sets that don't come with the Daz assets.
If using Daz shaders heavily for game characters, it needs virtual textures option of UE5 instead of default mip based texture streaming, to avoid texture streaming pool overflow with lots of 4k or even 8k textures.
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With the required options turned on, new textures imported will be converted to virtual textures.
Texture dimensions must be a power of 2, i.e. 1024x1024, 2048x2048, 4096x4096, etc.
Existing textures need to be converted to virtual textures when using virtual texture streaming.
Existing Materials that reference the selected texture(s) will convert the Texture Sample nodes to use the Virtual Sampler Type instead of the non-Virtual Sampler Type.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/VirtualTexturing/Streaming/
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The effect of switching to virtual textures is significant, tested with many fully textured Daz characters acting inside a building, the video memory usage went down from above 6GB to less than 1GB with greatly improved fps performance, and the quality was not affected.
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It's quite possible to make RTS games with hundreds of high quality adult only Daz characters in the field, with the techniques mentioned above, and use the Skeletal Mesh LODs options supported with the engine. Get the ideas and go make such lewd RTS games, I knew there are many players who want such type. I'm not developing RTS games before my current simulator is completed which would take at least several more months, so it's almost free of competitions lol.
I've switched back to default textures and not using virtual textures, despite it gives optimized video memory usage in some cases. Using virtual textures gives slight blurry to the characters textures, messes the reflections and ambient shadows, turning off the default motion blur doesn't solve the texture blurry. Guess that's why the virtual textures option is not the default option for UE5.1, better to optimize the characters with other methods and not sacrifice the texture quality.
Not sure if the texture blurry with virtual texture streaming can be solved, hard to find the answers as it seems not many users use the virtual texture streaming or even heard about that.
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Virtual texture streaming seems to be one of the discontinued techniques from earlier versions, was promising but haven't become practical.
None of the example projects from Epic use this technique, and virtual texture streaming is not included in the new UE5.1 content examples project.