Is UE for me ?

Hello,

I make animated footage featuring various transformations (in height, muscle, into animals…) on Daz studios for two years but that software is definitively NOT animation-friendly and it gives me hard times with mocap. I’ve bought a rokoko smarsuit and I experience minor to severe loss of quality/fidelity with my animation when importing into DAZ (retargeted in Maya).
I’m looking for a new software that doesn’t need a third-party for ANYTHING (modeling, animating, rendering). BUT Daz has a quite big library of morphs and monsters very easy to deal with.

As you can see, I have just to set the bar from 0 to 100% (or even higher or lower) to transform the male model. Is this that simple in UE ? How to figure out the monstrous models in the library are compatible with my default model before purchasing ?

shape animations/blendshapes appear in the static mesh editor anim tab and in the animbp animmontage screens
it works fine for me using mb labs
import your fbx and look in those tabs you should find all your shape anims there
I was never able, personally to get a daz model to retarget properly and I switched to mb labs (included blender addon with shapekeys and poses) and metahuman
I always got bad results straight from daz to unreal
daz has an unreal “bridge” plugin now tho
you can also “A-pose” your model and send it to mixamo and let mixamo rig it
then there is a lot of details about how to retarget mixamo to unreal

Asking if Unreal is a good replacement for Daz is like asking if Unity is good replacement for Maya. Completely different tools. Personally, it sounds to me like you are more after iClone and Character Creator (both from Reallusion). CC4 is basically a 1:1 replacement for Daz and you can take content FROM Daz into CC4. Then you take it over to iClone to animate and render your videos.

In terms of ease of use the Reallusion tools are awesome! In terms of price, go mortgage your house before you start buying their tools. Once you HAVE the tools, though… my workflow is like this:

  1. Design my character in CC4 then move it to iClone in 1 click then
  2. …capture my mocap directly inside iClone and fix it all up with the plethora of tools available
  3. …then I send it to UE5 using LiveLink. 3 clicks and a coffee later
  4. …I am ready to capture the scene in Sequencer

iClone can render directly also and you can buy iRay renderer support also so technically you don’t NEED UE in this pipeline but I prefer to end in UE5 so that is part of my pipeline.

Hope this helps

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