Add Better Export Support for Maya & Unreal Engine 4+
rooseveltrp
Posts: 12
Hey Daz,
You guys and gals have an amazing product! The renders are beautiful and do produce a very high-quality experience for the viewers.
I can't stress this enough but it baffles me to see the lack of support Daz has for Unreal Engine. Sure, you can export to FBX or use DazToMaya, etc. but in the end, the models look very poor in Maya/UE compared to how it looks when rendered in Daz.
Sometimes the FBX file doesn't include normals or SSS, etc and we pretty much have to manually copy the textures and redo all the materials. When we export to FBX, the mesh quality drops significantly. You can export to OBJ to maintain the subdivisions but then you lose the rig and the morphs. So, horrible solution compared to FBX.
Anyhow, I think Daz is a killer product and if you add native support for game engines like UE/Unity, this product will open doors to all kinds of possibilities.
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Comments
Why does that baffle you? how many actually use unreal or unity for renders? animations yes, but not that many here are into anumations, so why does that baffle you?
the only other use for DAZ models in Unreal or Unity is "gasp!" game design. Pretty sure DAZ is well aware of where they want to leverage their mesh assets and it seems game design isn't at the top of the list of there would probably be more support for it. they tried a game only offshoot, Morph3D and it didn't seem to do well since it is now called something else and focused on avatars.
Funny I am playing a game right now where it is fairly easy to import DAZ assets (like most games) And almost daily on their forum or discord i have to PM the mods to remove d/l links to DAZ products that users imported and shared, and I see this on nearly every game community i frequent, so I am very happen that they keep developing Daz Studio and including features that make their mesh assets stand out in DS only
My suggestion would be to go to the Unreal forums and ask them to add support for Daz!
LOL the forum where posts go to die
You talk about gaming communities or game development communities? I thought OP was more about gamedev (though we always should remind about interactive license etc. , to make things clear).
While what you were talking about, seems it was more about game modding enthusiasts, some of whose illegaly (and redistribute) use daz assets? Granted, not every game modding community is like that, and plenty of game modders are modellers/3d/2d/creators themselves and ll never do such, instead making their own meshes and resources (i often mention creative talanted custom content makers from Sims community... btw hair and clothes which they made often were "stolen" [well, their creations are freebies but they usually dont allow conversions for other games] for use in Skyrim mods etc).
Now if you talk about those who do what you said with daz assets for commercial game projects, that's much more...
And if we return back to legal ways through interactive license etc. Well, it would be cool to place your daz char in game to see how it lives and breathes... but perhaps it's faster and better just make a similar character within game character editor instead, even if they are much more primitive than daz or poser, ha.
p.s.
Now, if we talk reverse... You know subculture of making fanart with characters ripped from games? Xnalara/XPS. I don't share negative feelings against such hobby (it allows for funny crossovers with chars from different games and franchises being posed in totally ridiculous scenes), but i just want to repeat for DAZ folks that you should be careful with those xnalara models - they are not freebies, they are property of games they were took from... It might be fun render them in daz etc., but that would be fanart for personal projects strictly, and game developer may dmca it if considers that it violates copyright etc. Then again, i m not criticize anyone for anything, just letting you know to remember.
Daz 3D will benefit more by adding their support for not just Unreal Engine but other game engines too. Right now, if you export a Daz 3D model to FBX, and import it to Unity/Unreal, Maya, 3Ds Max or whatever 3D capable software, it looks like crap! The quality loss and the need to adjust every single material for every single character is a very inefficient workflow. That's why game dev or 3D artists keep going back to ZBrush or Maya for 3D modeling. And use Substance painter for the textures, etc.
I primarily look at Daz 3D as a revolutionary character creator app. Even though the renders come out very good within Daz, it's not the best tool when it comes to animation & dynamics. Daz has a long way to go before it can match Maya or Houdini; or even Blender.
Game dev is what my main focus is. In the beginning it's exciting to be able to create 3d characters using the assets from the marketplace and the time saving morphs. But it's a deal breaker when you can't use them in a game engine or other 3D software without sacrificing quality. DazToMaya is a good step forward but the end product lacks quality.
I'm already paying $270 for Autodesk Maya, etc, $35 for ZBrush, etc per month. I wouldn't mind shelling out $100 more if Daz could export game engine ready high quality models (as in File > Export > Game Engine... Game Engine / Import / Done!). No readusting materials, no fixing eye masks, no fixing hair opacity, no subdivision loss, etc.
If you're an experienced game developer... nothing makes sense about mixing Daz with any game engine (for games) because most stuff on daz is designed for high quality, up-close renders rather than streamlined for games. Daz products are built around CGI and should be used for rendering (either images or videos) and are to resource intensive for realtime rendering in a game. I use Unreal Engine myself and I do import some of my Daz dinosaurs into Unreal to render them out in a very large scale scene but the fine-detail quality of rendering in daz is still far superior.
Though, nowodays game graphics is so advanced that big enough polycount is possible depending on scale of project and budget of team.
It's not 90s-00s anymore with lowpoly stuff.
However, there is more to that than just polycount, of course.
You would not want to use a decimated models unless they're strictly served as static props. Animating and texturing a decimated model would also be horrindous.
Yes, as computers and software get more advanced systems can process more but there are still tons of limitations with realtime rendering. I just came out of college 3 years ago for video game art and design and if I learned anything, it was topology is always important. The platform you're building your game for matters more than budget or scale. Stricting your polycount and texture size is huge if building a game for a mobile device or gaming console.
Have no clue what you're trying to say with the images you posted but the second one (thumbnail of Quixel's demo video for using their products in Unreal engine) shows off quixel who uses decimated (low poly) models for you to add to your environments to serve as static props. I use their stuff and the quality is great. These models were scanned in real life for realism... but the topology is still very low. Also all artists who make products for the Unreal marketplace restrict the polycount of their products and some a lot more than others.The thrid image posted does not look like it is in realtime but a rendered video recording.
Main characters in high-end pc games usually consist of 10-30k polys max, and clothing is ususally the "skin" of the model to make animating easy (meaning no layering of clothing and skin underneath).while background characters with not much screen time will be much lower. This is with high-end pc's in mind though. If poly count was not an issue, I'm sure these characters poly counts would be in millions for ultra-realism. Software like Cinema 4D, which is used in hollywood, can handle those numbers but it is for rendering out animations for film and is not done in realtime.
Btw, do game engine still requires triangle polys? I know that in animation cg (or cg for static renders, too, for sake of better subdiv?) quads are preferred. Speaking of topology...
I didn't know that, thanks. So they bake details into normal and displacement maps?
Yeah i meant that g3 or g8 is around 20k at base mesh which isn't a lot, but then i forgot that game characters are 10-30k together with clothing, while well clothed genesis figure might go 100k, and that's without subd... right?
Depends on the game engine. Unreal Engine automatically triangulates meshes upon import.
Yeah, they are scanned but usually the mesh is produced at a very high poly count. I bet Quixel creates a decimated version and bakes in he maps from the high resolution version. Some artists create content the same way for Unreal Engine marketplace. Take a tree pack for example, they'll scan the base of tree trunks for ultra realism (because that's mostly what you pay attention to) and then create the rest of the tree from scratch (since it's more in the background or out-of-view so doesn't require those up-close details).
G8 is like 16k without subd and around 60k at first subd. Clothes depend on PA. Some can be very low and some can be very high. Depends on how much detail they're trying to capture. Game model characters and Daz characters are created very differently for the complete opposite reasons.
Then, i stay true to my joke that best fit for DAZ stuff in games is... old-school adventures like Myst and isometric pre-rendered rpg/rts like Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate :)
Also visual novels, i guess https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/154591/visual-novel-support-group
games are still low poly, alot of things with directx engine's use trickery called tesselation, which all had to wait 14 year's for microsoft to add tesselation to directx after john carmack achived the same result using bump mapping in doom 3
Umm, yeah, well, but...
You speak from professional viewpoint, in which highpoly is 3d scans or those ultra detailed creations in zbrush. But i was talking from casual point of view, comparing complexity of visuals in games/realtime 3d media over the years.
In 90s you rarely had character more than 1k polys, and items/objects even less. In early-to-mid 00s you had from 2 to 15k per character depending on genre. etc. etc.
Assets for modern games, while "lowpoly for 3d industry overall", it's totally not lowpoly compared to assets from 1997 or even 2006, if you catch my thought.
Also don't forget that there is established "lowpoly" style in design, which is extremely lowpoly and with flat shading usually.
The games have gotten higher poly the FBX DAZ figures lower poly
(FBX only exports base resolution)
I think to anyone it's obvious that technology and what a computer can handle has advanced since the 90's and I don't think anyone was trying to say otherwise. Genesis 8 (base mesh - no sub d's) exports around 16-18k poly's which is already at the high end for a main character on a fairly decent pc (not console or mobile). Outfit this character with clothes, equipment, and weapons and you're looking to at least triple that poly count. If you're using Daz store bought clothes/equipment/weapons and you could be looking at over 100k polies (laughable for any game). Some stuff here is even way higher than that. On top of that, game models are not made like that in layers due to the horrible complications it would cause in animating.
So the real question, is how actually large is daz-based production market, and why some of us think that it's relatively small comparing to [realtime 3d part of] game market (hence suggestions to expand on there)...
Everyone so hot about realtime 3d, so its easy to forget that static renders and cg animation has its place
I was saying games are low poly compared to Daz, while the main charector is 32k poly's, the total number of poly's once you add hair and clothes can easily reach 150k. as clothes are 7000+ poly's just for a pair of pants which allows resizing and all the morphs to work
game engine'\s will normally use a hardcoded maximum value for the total polys which can be used, so if a model is over the limit, they will use a real basic mean's of lowering the polys which why they look so bad, if you don't reduce to the total manually in lightwave or something using alot of smoothing
Examples of UE4 realtime render
you can do all of that with an opensource engine http://xenko.com/
where G8 FBX export is just import and fix the eyes, and maintain your 150k+ polys
this is their other toy
https://www.siliconstudio.co.jp/middleware/yebis/en/
Oh, Silicon Studio, they are cool.
Daz Inc can download xenko, replace its skeleton with genesis bones, and call it a day, or just turn it into a full real time renderer, deleting classes which arn't needed
Making their own fork of engine to complement daz studio?