Daz to Unreal 4 bridge in action

[TechLord]

@FrankieV

Epic uses a parent,parent, child, child configuration where the twist bone is a child of the parent joint above it. This allows the upper and lower leg to work right with the 2-bone IK as the twist bone can rotate independent from it’s parent.

The G3/G8 rig uses a parent,child,parent, child configuration so when a 2-bone IK is added the twist bone will rotate relative to it’s parent, which causes the broken leg issue.

An easy type of fix is to re-parent the twist bones in the same configuration as the Epic configuration but would require targeting the animation to the new configuration.

Next is to post a ticket to Epic’s bug tracker but not being a bug should be presented as a feature addition to what has already been done as far as joint locks.

In our group one of our coders was able to solve the issue using a custom IK plugin solution so it can be fixed but the bridge being so new I would expect as time goes by better solutions should be provided by Epic as the Genesis is a logical replacement for the Epic rig.

I’ll ask him if he could drop in an provided some guidance.

Hello @FrankieV

I truly appreciate you taking time out to share your insight. I dont anticipate the Genesis to replace the Epic Rig. Until that confirmed or Epic offers other IK options, Is the custom IK solution available for purchase? I’m certain I’m not the only one experiencing the problem. My wallet is awaits your answer.

[FrankieV]

@TechLord

Hello @FrankieV

I truly appreciate you taking time out to share your insight. I dont anticipate the Genesis to replace the Epic Rig. Until that confirmed or Epic offers other IK options, Is the custom IK solution available for purchase? I’m certain I’m not the only one experiencing the problem. My wallet is awaits your answer.

Ask me the same questions a year from now. History wise since 4.0 Epic has made improvements directly relating to issues unique to Genesis that continues to improve as they surface.

Example

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Included was errors in texture and material mapping, zombie eyes, improper conversion of opacity maps and SSS shaders that gave the character models a wax finish with hair looking like blobs of mesh.

Epic fixed thous issues on their end so are aware of the need to support a tool as to usability on equal ground as they would with import problems from Blender that by extension would add some very useful productivity tools. As a first offering, and with out turning into an advertisement, Genesis added to Unreal 4, along with the fact that it is open source, would at the very least create a possible product pathway for others to build assets for Genesis targeted towards any “game engine” that has a functional bridge. So I would suspect such products as BP IK solutions for G3/G8 would become available as it would be rather near sighted to ignore the market potential.

Are these products available now?

No but first to market wins and with expected improvements to the bridge my money is on Daz3D

[FrankieV]

OK so I asked our coder how he fixed the G3 IK problem and his response was

Well, I checked out the code of the two bone ik node and saw how it worked. It takes the name of one bone as input - the foot. The code takes the transforms of the two bones above it as input for the IK math and returns new transforms. It then applies those transforms to the two bones. I created a custom node, which is a copy of the two bone ik node, which takes the transforms of our thigh and shin bones, basically skipping two bones inbetween. After solving the IK, I apply the thigh transform to both our thigh bones and the shin transform to both our shin bones, basically treating them as a single, longer bone.

If you can understand that then that’s how you fix the G3 IK

From a conversation I had 2 years ago

https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-tools-and-tutorials/1431342-character-developer-blog-series#post1499180