Well to start with an old joke.
“Doctor it hurts when I do this”
Doctor “Well don’t do that”
So I have to ask why is it so critical that this issue be fixed to your isolationist? Is there a point in your project that such a pose is required or are you striving for perfection? Are you planning on nude skins or will there be clothing involved that can hide the blemish?
I asked some silly surface question as part of our project we have been using the Genesis 3 framework since the introduction of Genesis 3 and UE4.15 when a lot of the major issues were corrected, as in realllllyyyy bad deal breaker issues, so it’s rather clear to me that problems are being corrected on both Daz3D and Epic side of things and with out chit chat with Daz3D they are in the process of doing something targeted towards use in UE4.
Switching to game design theory.
To set the context here is a test example of the Genesis 3 female character as exported from Daz Studio into UE3 and some matching animations applied.
How was it constructed.
The Mesh:
The mesh was imported into UE4 to create a asset chain so that it would be easy to re-import the mesh once corrective measures were taken.
As part of the import morph injectors and facial expressions were imported at the same time. This included cluster shaping as part of the framework can be applied to any character.
Mesh was imported into 3ds Max to apply smoothing groups. This is idea as smoothing groups is a 3ds Max only feature and by doing so is on last worry as far as UE4 complaining that there is no smoothing groups.
Fixed any unusual deforming skin weights based on local rotations.
Re-import into 3ds Max.
The animation
All of our character animations is created using Motionbuilder so the issues of uncompleted features, like re-targeting, and once characterized as a biped character tool use becomes object aware so things like shoulder and collar joints become part of the full body IK so the result on IK is a more human rotation. Long way of saying the joint crushing is not that big of an issue.
The Materials.
The base material was harvested from Daz Studio and since the UV mapping is the same as part of the framework you have access to more than a few maps by just searching the DS library so easy enough to try out a few different options. Even with a base material the result is not bad as a starting point but there are a few options available to play with. For example the skin and hair sharders were pulled from a female Paragon character along with the sss profile.
Base materials do not behave as expected as it’s applied using a shader model that works best with the type of surface it’s applied to but even then the amount of output is generally never matched to the base environment lighting. For this project though, and as mentioned, I made use of the Paragon sss shader as the base for the multi material ID’s involved so as a surface was accurate.
Since the base mesh contains morphs make sure that the material is set to “uses morphs”
Tessellation is an option provided by the material and since G3 uses material ID,s the areas that need it, like for the under arms, can be increase as compared to other ares that does not need it. With auto LOD now available one can apply a lot more detail for the up close hero model as compared to the LOD requirements from a mile away.
Even though an accurate shader was used a texture map by it’s self is never balanced as to the lighting intensity of the object that it’s applied to as a percentage of the rest of the back ground. This is why light reflectors are used in video and photography and PBR based materials lack light information directly with in the image map.
There is a couple of ways to correct this as a problem and my number 1 trick, believe it or not, is to apply a small amount of emissive lighting to the material so I can force the lighting balance of the target object with out blowing out the lighting in general to get good coverage,
To keep it short don’t underestimate the importance of PBR material construction as the rendering system will poll both the lighting and materials for the information that it needs to properly render out the object and if done right usually avoids nasty artifacts in the process.
Lighting.
This is a topic on to it’s self but as to the example room demo second channel lighting was used just for the character model that was focused to only increase or decrease the lighting output of this single object moving with in this space. The same for the hair relative to the hair shade I stole from the Paragon character.
Do not underestimate the use of indirect lighting or the use of HDRI. Pushing up your lighting levels generally blows out the lighting.
Consider Component Construction.
Each element of the dancer is a component of a character BP as part of the total construction and then driven by a master pose component in the BP event. Makes it easier to change out elements with out having to rebuild the animation BP based on unique requirements.
Sorry if I went a bit long but some where in there is the possible cure to your problem and the only way to really figure it out is with in context of the purpose being served and having the character put it’s arm in the air showing off a blemish is not something that I’ve run across as more of a side annoyance that some how get corrected along the way.
That all said I can in my opinion recommend genesis for anyone looking for a single point framework solution as I’ve yet run across any deal breaker issues, since this little bugger,