DazToHue

IMPORTANT: See the release 1.8.1 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. 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 1.8.1

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.
• All nodes will now preview with the original uvs.

Import Node:

• Improved rigid follower handling.

Material Node:

• Fixed the eye occlusion auto-populate presets and also extended them to support G3 through to G9 for base resolution and subd 1.

Occlusion Node:

• Fixed a bug with occlusion texture baking and also updated is to use Copernicus for texture generation.

Cloth Node:

• Cloth panel static meshes now export with correct material slot names.

Export Node:

• Fixed a bug with material texture baking under certain conditions. Also optimised texture baking speed a little where there are multiple Daz surfaces which share the same source textures.
• Fixed a bug with the pre-export error checking.

Unreal Engine

• There is now a "masked" version of the cloth material which works with occlusion texture masks baked out of Houdini. This allows you to mask parts of clothing which are occluded by other parts of clothing.

Docs

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