Modern, indie-friendly, full featured character creation pipeline - is it a utopia?

[FrankieV]

Humm how not to sound like an advertisement

To start I did this as to how we are using Daz Studio > Genesis 3 as part of our character development pipeline.

Unreal 4 and the digital Procedural Framework.

Always being a Daz Studio fan since version 1 I’ve always seen the possibilities of using DS as a video game production tool but the problems has always been the 99% of all engines out there had hard coded limitations that was deal breaker issue but with Unreal 44 those limitations have been removed. My first experiences with UE4 4.0 was the same old same old that the fidelity loss was such that it was not worth the effort to pipeline from DS to UE4 due to some things were broken, butchered materials, and UE4’s inability to import the FBX file verbose.

Some where along the line things got fixed soooooo

Let’s say, we start with a DAZ or MakeHuman base model, then customize it (body, face, custom hair, facial hair), then add some customized clothes, then set up textures etc. so they can be translated to UE4 PBR materials, then add body animations (can use BVH freebies etc., but it is important to show how to deal with possible incompatibilities such as root bone issues, different skeletons etc.) and facial animations (blend shapes) accounting for clothes and facial hair (the beard should move when character talks), then create some LOD levels to make it possible to have 10 - 20 characters in a game simultaneously, and then get it all working in UE4 with full compatibility, so I can use UE4 IK constraints on animations (to climb stairs or shake hands with another character etc.) and physics. Also some optimization techniques - reusing the same skeletons, animations, facial morphs on multiple characters etc.

YES Daz Studio > Genesis 3 does that and includes the in app ability to create the required resources as to purpose and need so if you are looking for a resource to do some code stuff stop looking.

So far I’ve tested full merged characters, injectors, morph targets, expression sets, base material import, component export, animations, and it all works with our character frame work using a single skeletal rig and physics along with our animation blueprints and hard coded c++ classes.

All of this for free as a starting point so with a 200 dollar budget you can buy a lot of stuff, if you can’t find it for free.

P.S. Anyone making assets for the marketplace might want to option, animations for example, to repackage for Daz3d’s marketplace as it is WallMart huge.