Swappable Clothes Pipeline

Hi all,

I am trying to set up a pipeline that goes from character creation, to rigging, animating and adding some clothes. I was hoping somebody could help me indicating whether I am going in the right direction or what I need to change.

What I have so far is:

  1. Create the character in DAZ Studio and export it to Blender.

  2. In Blender, I am using Auto-Rig Pro to re-create the rig and re-target animations (say, from Mixamo). This rigged/animated character I can export to Unreal and this part works.

  3. Export Alembic to MarvelousDesigner where I create a piece of apparel.

  4. Export the simulated and animated apparel back to Alembic.

  5. Import this into Unreal as a child of my skeletal mesh.

This last step works, but I am not sure how to go about smoothly transitioning from one animation to another. I have considered exporting the apparel as a static mesh and use the cloth simulation in UE4. Then it would be a matter of copying the skeleton from the character to the piece of apparel, correct?

What would be the typical solution here?

Thanks a lot

Cloth is normally a skeletal mesh of the full character.

nv cloth is fully animated, and thats pretty much the only way it actually works so you have to correctly weight paint the garment.
Possibly you also have to add in an extra animation multiplier in order to get the animations to move the cloth around correctly while the MaxDistance is active on it.

You can play this in x2 speed to see the full workflow.

Ah, good to know. I was hoping I’d be able to get a good animation for the cloth in marvelous designer and pass it to Unreal.

I will give the approach in the video a shot. Thanks for the help!

Daz Sudio is an application from Daz 3D and is free for the purpose of selling digital assets that has been used for years in all forms of digital media except for video games which has been limited due to had code limitations of the “game” specific engines. Unreal 4 has change the game engine specific limitation by avoiding hard coded obstacles such as mesh or material resolutions so as an addition to a productive pipeline is only limited to one’s imagination.

Genesis is a ready made asset included as part of the free Daz Studio download and is the very asset used by Daz 3D to build all of their Daz 3D originals as its one character to build all solution that works with all other character assets available for the chosen framework. FOr example Genesis 8 is the base used by Victoria 8 that includes the necessary full body injectors for that character.

For our needs we opted to license and make use of the Genesis 3 framework to build our character needs as the starting point due to it’s ability to create full game ready characters going directly from DS to UE4 and looking at ways and means of adding our own custom art asset to DS/Genesis 3 so that we can take advantage of clothing shaping directly with in Daz Studio.

What can be done would be a bit involve as in trying to describe what you can do in say Blender, or any top shelf 3d app, but is well worth the time spent figuring out pipeline integration as the number of different characters that can be developed is unlimited using injector technology.

So yeah good starting point.

You could go down this path as part of a “you know it works” option but DS can export a ready to use character that includes all the morphs you want to make use of but G3 also supports facial clusters. For custom character design our character modeller no longer uses 3ds Max, except for post development work, and instead uses zBrush to build injectors and clothing which is then skin wrapped to the Genesis 3 base model and imported as part of the character component.

That would be away to do it until you figure out a better way via discovery

You can add cloth simulation directly in UE4 and it’s getting better all the time

Clothing, hair,eyes are all components of the G3 framework in UE4

Well there is no typical solution as UE4 does not come with any kind of ready to use character framework and for our use was built from scratch with the assistance of the talent on our team to figure out what it is that we wanted say five years from now that we could included as part of the framework development. The tricky part of content art is figuring out where things needs to go as far as directory structure goes and what are the technical requirements necessary so that the implementation only needs to be done once with out having to do unique snowflake hacks.

Proof of concept wise this is 4 unique characters built using a single framework with all added as a component of the Daz Studio G3 framework.

Visually there are 4 but technically there is only 1. :wink:

So yeah the easy answer to your question your concept is sound as to “a” pipeline direction and you can always fine tune as to needs. For that matter a Daz Studio expert is on our wish list as we have yet to tap the full possibilities

By the way 10 things you should know about Daz Studio

I think what you’re looking for is this: http://davidvodhanel.com/daz-to-unre…om-the-figure/
It should work for any clothes that are already rigged and move with the character in Daz Studio.
That uses a plugin https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…/daz-to-unreal
The plugin should be available for free soon, so I’d keep an eye on it.

Yah I’ve been holding off from purchasing the set but a “Send to” option would be awesome and more so if it handled Iray materials converting to UE4 PBR :smiley:

We been using Daz Studio in our character development pipeline since 4.0 and has continued to improve as to maintaining asset fidelity with each release and as a team is also interested in releasing free framework building assets targeted to the Genesis 3 framework. To see if this was allowed we contacted Daz 3D and was told more or less no but between the lines it wa indecated that they, Dqz 3D was working on something directly related to Unreal 4/5

The plugin has Unreal materials to match up to the iRay materials. I don’t think they’re PBR though. It does allow you to create your own materials and it will map parameters from the surface properties in Daz Studio to Material Instance properties in Unreal. There’s more info about that here: http://davidvodhanel.com/working-wit…daz-to-unreal/