Daz instances to Unreal

RexRed

I spent the best part of a couple days trying to export Ultra Scenery to Unreal.

The bridge only exports the main landscape, water and the seed objects and does not send over the instances.

It would be nice to make use of the huge amount of Daz assets that I have bought that contain instanced items.

The instance groups and the position data are simply ignored. I would rather use Daz items I already own. 

This leaves me to have to rebuy these items native to Unreal. 

I would say that besides poses on figures being retained across the bridges,

very high on my priority list is, position, rotation, and size parameters with textures for instanced items.

I look forward to a time when my Daz assets are fully useable in Unreal.

Being able to animate the plants in Unreal from Ultra Scenery would be nice too.

And, when I export scenes, sometimes they only go there in parts, I have to export a few different parts which is not too bad a thing but could be easier.

I have to zero them to the scene they do not know where they are supposed to go.

I have been told not to even bother with Daz instances and buy Unreal products instead. i.e., clothes and hair with weighting. But I really love Ultra Scenery and many of the environments in my Daz library that have instances. 

I was told one workaround was to unpack the instances. Well, this is a huge undertaking considering that in one Ultra Scenery generation can have like 70,000 instances if I am not mistaken... 

Scattering that many instances in Unreal seems well, unrealistic. 

I think the Unreal bridge is a hugely vital tool and needs a high priority for Daz items to have expanded viability ASAP.

I love the way the Unreal bridge tool works so far but some very important things are still lacking.

It would not hurt for the Daz programmers to help the Unreal bridge people to expand on the bridge functionality a bit faster.

Due to the lack of Unreal bridge functionality, many Daz assets are being left in the dust when it comes to the Unreal marketplace.

And making more assets will not solve this but rather facilitating the bridge so new and old assets remain viable in wider markets.

metaside

RexRed said:

It would be nice to make use of the huge amount of Daz assets that I have bought that contain instanced items.

The instance groups and the position data are simply ignored. I would rather use Daz items I already own. 

I don't know about a tool to transfer instances, but it's very easy to paint any kind of foliage with the foliage tool in UE. You can also spawn foliage instances from materials:

 

Being able to animate the plants in Unreal from Ultra Scenery would be nice too.

 

You can "animate" plants in UE using materials, which is more like displacement in contrast to skeletal animation. Just check out some animated plants in UE and transfer the techniques used to static plant meshes from Daz.

In general, I would like more focus on the UE bridge by Daz and PAs but I'm not sure it's gonna happen anytime soon. The differences are too big, the user bases are mostly different, focus is more on high quality pictures instead of animation with moving plants and things like that and the assets are mostly not optimized for game dev. I use a lot of Daz assets in a game I'm working on, but they do not always contribute to high performance and I also decimated some...