hello,
I’ve been trying to get a synergy between Daz and the ue4 mannequin to little success. ill start off with this. I have been able to successfully retarget Daz and move the mannequin animations to the Daz mesh. I have also found a plugin for the Daz studio which renames and removes all the extra bones and allows for an exact renaming as the base mannequin (this is what I used)
what I am trying to do is using the Advanced locomotion 4 project to overlay the visual mesh with the daz mesh (this video shows what I am attempting to do). the problem is whenever I try to do it, it ends up looking like this. I can tell it’s from the bone orientation but I don’t know how to fix it.
anyone have any ideas on what I can do to fix this? my goal is to use the Daz character creation as it has the facial rig already set up, and all the correct morphs and I want to try to use it as is.
thanks in advance
That plugin just renames bones and moves some parents around. It’s not helpful at all trying to get into UE.
I’m not using AL4 but working directly in Control Rig, so I can’t say if this will work for your issue specifically. I’ve got 3 character made in Daz working in UE right now using Blender and Diffeomorphic. The full process I went through is a bit of a hassle, but it worked nearly flawlessly. Of 3 characters, I had to do some tweaking on weight paints and bones on one of them to get 2boneIK for the legs mostly working in Control Rig. Still playing with some maths and things inside of Control Rig to tweak it up. If I don’t get it 100% working soon, I’l be posting up here next for help -_-
This isn’t an exact science yet. I just got this figured out a few days ago myself. If you’re using geografts, importing separate clothing/hair, Daz animations things get more complicated. But here’s a quick rundown of steps I used to get my characters in. I haven’t been able to find much info on doing this anywhere else, so if anybody knows of any it would be nice to know.
Here’s where to get difeo - http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/…ersion-15.html
The quick breakdown. In this order or things can break.
1: Send your character to UE with the DazToUnreal plugin.
2: Save mats and textures, delete everything else. Blender breaks miserably in exporting these unless you rebuild your shaders from scratch, even then the DazToUnreal mats are better.
3: Send your character to Blender with Diffeo.
4: In Blender, press N and go to the DazImporter Tab.
5: Select your mesh. Under Setup > Morphs bring in all the morphs you want to use.
6: Under Advanced > Morphs convert morphs to shapekeys. (some already will be, but others need this step - check your mesh to see if they all come over)
7: Select your armature. Under Setup > Rigging click Create MetaRig with your imported Daz rig selected. This converts the Daz armature to an advanced Blender one. Keeping all the facial bones and whatnot, but getting rid of the twist bones that are breaking things in UE. Delete the extra rig that was created. (I think-- it seems to be useless but I may be wrong)
8: Set your units and resize your character. (Tutorials about this all over - search Blender to Unreal export scaling)
9: Export your FBX for UE.
10: Import to UE and fix up your materials.
There’s a few other things to know about exporting and importing Blender to UE, but you can find that information all over the net. Good luck.
8: Set your units and resize your character:
Before importing from daz to blender in DazImporter general options set scale to 1 (instead of 0.01)
Import character
Set scale to 0.01 when exporting from Blender to FBX
Import to UE as usually.
This scale thing is important to PHAT (physics).
7: MetaRig.
It kills poses and animations 
But rig (skeleton) will be more handy.
6: Under Advanced > Morphs convert morphs to shapekeys.
Yes, it’s important. But some morph will look weird (if they not just bone drives).
Overall, Daz to UE is not a nightmare but it looks like.
yes, you can export fbx from daz and import it in UE. But if you start digging…
