DazToHue

IMPORTANT: See the release 2.0 change log at the bottom of this page.
Release 2.0 makes some big changes and should be considered experimental.
For example, all of the old control rigs have been removed and replaced with a modular rig system.
See here for other important information about release 2.0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dbSkK1G6TaEmdcU63Zf2MJ6R2wEgYKZzCpoCcHvLi_E

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 - 20.5.552+: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
• Unreal Engine 5.6+: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Support

Discord:  https://discord.gg/R5CEFAjZVN

Changes in update 2.0

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

Daz Studio

Some additional facial poses have been added to the G9 ROM to improve facial animations.

Houdini

Import Node:

• Fixed some bugs with the statistics displayed.

Skeleton Node:

• Neck bones are now aligned by default. You can disable this however aligning them was the only way to prevent obvious popping when switching between IK and FK on the control rig.

Material Node:

• Fixed a bug with blending normal textures during texture baking.

Pose Asset Node:

• All of the G9 and G8.1 FAC related presets have been updated to be compatible with the Metahuman animation tools.
• The G9 FAC related presets have been updated to reflect the additional facial poses.

Export Node:

• Animation curves are now exported by default because you are likely to need them for facial animation controls.

Groom Process Node:

• Made improvements to how groups are handled by this node.

Unreal Engine

• All of the old control rigs have been removed and replaced with rig modules. There is a Body module which should work across all base figure types. There are separate Face modules for G9 and G8.1, both of which should work with the Metahuman animation tools. There are also modules for GP9 and DK9.
• All of the now obsolete content, or content which is currently a work-in-progress has also been removed.
• The required animation curves have been included in the ZIP file under the Misc directory. You can use these to convert existing G9 and G8.1 characters in UE, to work with the new MH compatible rig modules.

See here for other important information about release 2.0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dbSkK1G6TaEmdcU63Zf2MJ6R2wEgYKZzCpoCcHvLi_E