DazToHue

DazToHou is primarily a collection of Daz Studio presets, Houdini Digital Assets and Unreal Engine content aimed at getting 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.

• Bake multiple textures into a single texture to further optimise your characters (experimental).

• 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.

• Supports rigid followers (experimental).

• Supports skeleton morphs.

• Multi-core exporting (experimental).

• 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.

• DK9 and GP9 controls.

• 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/releasesNote: 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 - 20.5+: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
  
  
• Unreal Engine 5.5+: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Support

Discord:  https://discord.gg/R5CEFAjZVN

Changes in release 1.8

Remember to always run the Refresh Assets command from the toolbar in existing projects, after updating the Houdini assets.

Houdini

• Release 1.8 requires Houdini 20.5+. It will not work properly with older versions.

• General optimisations across all nodes. For example, all python scripts which performed geometry operations have been replaced with faster VEX code.

Skeleton Node:

• Fixed a mistake with the GP9 UE5 preset where the gp9_root bone was parented to spine_01 when it should be parented to the pelvis.
  This means that if you have an existing UE project where the gp9_root bone already is parented to the spine_o1 bone you will need to manually revert the parenting of gp9_root bone back to the spine_01 bone in order to maintain compatibility with your existing project. Otherwise you will get skeleton hierarchy errors when importing new GP9 characters into your project.

Material Node:

• Added a new feature for texture baking. This allows you to further optimise your characters by combining textures together.
  Please report any bugs via the Discord server.

• Made some enhancements to some of the UV operations. For example, the UV Transform operation can now scale and rotate uv islands.

PoseAsset Node:

• Made some internal performance opimisations related to the processing of reference skeletons.

Export Node:

• The pre-caching option which was added in 1.7 has now been expanded to allow for multi-core exporting.
  This feature can be enabled under the Performance section of the Export node.
  Note that enabling this feature doesn't always mean faster exports. It depends a lot on the complexity of your project.
  As a general rule, if your exports are taking longer than 10 minutes to complete it's probably worth enabling this option and comparing the difference. This features is still very experimental. Please report any bugs via the Discord server.

• Added an option to export baked material textures.

• Added an option to split exported skeleton curves across multiple files. This was added to get around a UE bug.

• Improved the pre-export error checking. For example, it will now detect and report duplicate frames across multiple pose asset categories.

Docs

• A new Texture Baking Guide has been added under the Next Steps section of the learning resources.