DazToHue

See the release 1.4 change log at the bottom of this page.

DazToHou is primarily a collection of Daz Studio presets, Houdini Digital Assets and Unreal Engine content aimed and making it easier to get realistic Daz Studio characters into game engines such as Unreal Engine 5, via Houdini.

Note:  DazToHue is not meant to be a one-click solution. It trades simplicity for complete flexibility in all aspects of how to want to set up your characters. Watch the tutorials for a better understanding of how it works.

IMPORTANT:  DazToHue requires Houdini Indie or higher to work. It will not work with the Houdini Apprentice edition.

The Houdini assets can currently:

• Generate any number of morphs optimised for linear skinning including joint corrective morphs.
• Correct the character's bone names and orientations to match those of Unreal Engine's default skeleton.
• Add the missing IK bones for Unreal Engine 5.
• Add "physics" bones which can be used to drive physics morphs in Unreal Engine.
• Delete bones and move skin weights to the parent of the deleted bones.
• Correct issues with geometry coming from Daz such as non-manifold geometry on clothing.
• Correct the character's eyes and UV's to work with Unreal Engine's eye shader.
• Generate eye occlusion geometry.
• Add multiple uv channels to your character and manipulate uvs using various operations, per channel.
• Optimise the character's materials to reduce the number of material slots generated when the character is imported into Unreal Engine.
• Optimise the character's polygon count by deleting parts of the character's body, for example you can delete polygons that are occluded by clothing which are occluded by clothing. Alternatively, you can choose to generate occlusion mask textures or bake occlusion masks to vertices.
• Perform additional poly-reduction operations on either the entire character or selected parts of the character's geometry, with control over where to preserve details in the geometry.
• Subdivide either the entire character or selected parts of the character's geometry.
• Retarget any number of animations exported from DS, Rokoko and Mixamo onto the character's new skeleton, for importing into Unreal Engine.
• Convert strand based hair into Unreal grooms.
• Generate proxy geometry used for cloth simulations in Unreal Engine.
• Support for the new Chaos Cloth Panel workflow in Unreal.
• Convert any Daz figures, not just humanoids.
• Export the files required to use Unreal Engine's ML Deformer tools.
• Supports geoshells.
• And more.

The Unreal Engine content includes:

• Architype skeletons as well as animation blueprints with all joint corrective morphs and facial controls (for G9 and G8.1) already set up, to get your character up and running fast.
• Full control rigs for G3 through to G9.
• Facial controls for G9 and G8.1.
• Example skin, hair and cloth materials.
• Animation data modifier to convert metahuman facial animations onto G9 figures.
• And more.

Requirements:

• Daz Studio 4.21+: https://www.daz3d.com/daz_studio
• Daz To Maya Bridge: https://github.com/daz3d/DazToMaya/releases
  Note: you only need to Daz Studio plugin from the bridge. You do not need Maya.
• Sagan Alembic Exporter: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/428856/sagan-a-daz-studio-to-blender-alembic-exporter/p1
• Houdini Indie or higher - 19.5.493 or 20+: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
• Unreal Engine 5.3+: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Support

Discord:  https://discord.gg/R5CEFAjZVN

Changes in release 1.4

Houdini Content:

• Added experimental eye occlusion generation to the Material node.
• Added options to the Occlusion node to export mesh occlusion mask textures or bake occlusion masks to vertices. Both can be used with the new Masked variant of the skin material in Unreal Engine, to mask "poke through" on your character.
• Added a new Expressions tab to the Pose Asset node.
• Fixed a bug where the Genitalia control curves where not exporting.
• Fixed a bug where the Miscellaneous poses and control curves where not exporting.
• Fixed a bug when bone names had spaces in them.
• Numerous updates to the Skeleton node. For example, you can now add a genitalia root bone and add prefixes to bones.
• Added two example presets to the Skeleton node, for commonly used G8.1 anatomical elements.
• Updated the in-app help pages for all core nodes.
• Several other bug fixes.

Unreal Engine Content:

• Added a "masked" variant of the Skin material, for use with exported occlusion masks or vertex masks.
• Added skin micro-detail functionality to the skin material.
• Added tip colour functionality to the hair material as well as several other improvements to the hair material.