DazToHue

IMPORTANT: See the release 2.5.1 change log at the bottom of this page. 

DazToHue 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.

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 either linear or dual quaternion 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 props and rigid followers.

• Supports skeleton morphs.

• Multi-core exporting.

• And much 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.

• Metahuman compatible facial controls for G9 and G8.1.

• DK9 and GP9 controls.

• Example skin, hair and cloth materials.

• And more.

Requirements:

• Windows only, the workflow is not supported on MacOS because the DazToHue Exporter plugin has not been compiled for MacOS.
  
  
• Daz Studio 4.21+: https://www.daz3d.com/daz_studio
  
  
• The DazToHue Exporter plugin (link available via the Discord server)
  
  
• Houdini Indie or higher - 21.0.700+: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
  
  
• Unreal Engine 5.6+: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Support

Discord:  https://discord.gg/R5CEFAjZVN

Changes in release 2.5.1

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

Daz Studio

• The original presets with linear keyframes have been restored. There are still bugs with Daz Studio 6 that are outside of my control.
  For now it is recommended to stick with Daz Studio 4.

Houdini

• Tidied up the UI across most of the core nodes.

Material Node:

• Fixed a bug where the buttons to move texture baking layers would result in an error.

• Fixed a problem with baking GP9 texture layers in Houdini 22.

Mesh Node:

• Fixed a bug in the new skinned collision proxy mesh generator that could cause skin weights to mess up.

Skeleton Node:

• Fixed a bug where the weight copy operations could mess up vertex orders.

• Weight smoothing operation has been rewritten and can now be auto-mirrored.

• All weight operations can now be enabled/disabled individually which can help with debugging.

• Improvements auto-mirroring operations.

• Surface Push operation can now accept a mask attribute and there are now separate distance sliders for the Fbx and Alembic.

PoseAsset Node:

• Fixed a bug when calculating Advanced Additive morphs and targeting the UE5 skeleton.

• Some additions and improvements for working with DTH Character Studio.

Unreal Engine

• Fixed a bug with wrinkle maps on G9 figures.