DazToHue

IMPORTANT: See the release 1.9 change log at the bottom of this page.

DazToHue is primarily a collection of Daz Studio presets, Houdini Digital Assets and Unreal Engine content aimed at getting realistic Daz Studio characters into game engines such as Unreal Engine 5, via Houdini.

Note:  DazToHue is not meant to be a one-click solution. It trades simplicity for complete flexibility in all aspects of how to want to set up your characters. Watch the tutorials for a better understanding of how it works.

IMPORTANT:  DazToHue requires Houdini Indie or higher to work. It will not work with the Houdini Apprentice edition.

The Houdini assets can currently:

• Generate any number of morphs optimised for either linear or dual quaternion skinning including joint corrective morphs.
• Correct the character's bone names and orientations to match those of Unreal Engine's default skeleton.
• Add the missing IK bones for Unreal Engine 5.
• Add "physics" bones which can be used to drive physics morphs in Unreal Engine.
• Delete bones and move skin weights to the parent of the deleted bones.
• Correct issues with geometry coming from Daz such as non-manifold geometry on clothing.
• Correct the character's eyes and UV's to work with Unreal Engine's eye shader.
• Generate eye occlusion geometry.
• Add multiple uv channels to your character and manipulate uvs using various operations, per channel.
• Optimise the character's materials to reduce the number of material slots generated when the character is imported into Unreal Engine.
• Bake multiple textures into a single texture to further optimise your characters (experimental).
• Optimise the character's polygon count by deleting parts of the character's body, for example you can delete polygons that are occluded by clothing which are occluded by clothing. Alternatively, you can choose to generate occlusion mask textures or bake occlusion masks to vertices.
• Perform additional poly-reduction operations on either the entire character or selected parts of the character's geometry, with control over where to preserve details in the geometry.
• Subdivide either the entire character or selected parts of the character's geometry.
• Retarget any number of animations exported from DS, Rokoko and Mixamo onto the character's new skeleton, for importing into Unreal Engine.
• Convert strand based hair into Unreal grooms.
• Generate proxy geometry used for cloth simulations in Unreal Engine.
• Support for the new Chaos Cloth Panel workflow in Unreal.
• Convert any Daz figures, not just humanoids.
• Export the files required to use Unreal Engine's ML Deformer tools.
• Supports geoshells.
• Supports rigid followers (experimental).
• Supports skeleton morphs.
• Multi-core exporting (experimental).
• And more.

The Unreal Engine content includes:

• Architype skeletons as well as animation blueprints with all joint corrective morphs and facial controls (for G9 and G8.1) already set up, to get your character up and running fast.
• Full control rigs for G3 through to G9.
• Facial controls for G9 and G8.1.
• DK9 and GP9 controls.
• Example skin, hair and cloth materials.
• Animation data modifier to convert metahuman facial animations onto G9 figures.
• And more.

Requirements:

• Windows only, the workflow is not supported on MacOS because there is no Sagan plugin for MacOS.
• Daz Studio 4.21+: https://www.daz3d.com/daz_studio
• Daz To Maya Bridge: https://github.com/daz3d/DazToMaya/releasesNote: you only need to Daz Studio plugin from the bridge. You do not need Maya.
• Sagan Alembic Exporter: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/428856/sagan-a-daz-studio-to-blender-alembic-exporter/p1
• Houdini Indie or higher - 20.5+: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
• Unreal Engine 5.5+: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Support

Discord:  https://discord.gg/R5CEFAjZVN

Changes in release 1.9

Remember to always run the Refresh Assets command from the toolbar in existing projects, after updating the Houdini assets.

Houdini

Skeleton Node:

• Improved skin weight copy operation and added several new parameters to control smoothing etc.
• Improved jiggle Preview animation. You can now control the the parameters of the animation, such as speed and amplitude, per axis.
• Added offset parameters so you can now easily preview the resulting skin deformations as you're painting the weights. This makes it a lot easier to achieve the desired results.

Material Node:

• Completely rewrote the texture baking workflow. You can now bake any number of textures you need. Texture bakers now support layers so you can blend multiple textures together. This means that you can bake textures for GP9 and DK9 (or anything else) into a single texture. Added some simple adjustment parameters such as brightness, contrast, hue, saturation etc. You can now preview textures prior to baking them.
• Added ability to auto-generate vertex tangent masks along material boundaries. This allows you to properly use the
  Recompute Tangents feature in Unreal Engine to remove visible seams along material boundaries.
• Added new UV operations such as copying from an external source as well as improving the features of some existing uv operations. For example, the auto-pack operation now supports variable island scaling.
• Additional uv channels are now numbered from 1 rather than 2. This reflects the numbering in Unreal Engine.

Mesh Node:

• Fixed a bug with calculating mesh operations Every Frame, although the per frame method is now the default and should generally be used instead as it's much faster.
• Fixed a bug where adaptive subdivision operations could break uvs along the seams.

Export Node:

• Fixed a bug with exporting vertex normals.
• Now, when exporting as separate shapes, only a single pose asset animation will be exported per category as opposed to getting one animation per shape.
• Improved exporting of vertex colours plus you can now preview vertex colours prior to exporting.

Groom Nodes:

• Added ability to define hair strand thickness along each strand.
  Strand thickness can be set globally and/or per group or per strand. This gives you much greater control over the look of the final hair.
• Added more controls for defining groom physics guides. You now have complete control over the number and placement of physics guides.