Workflow - Daz to Unity by way of Ultimate Unwrap

As is common with a lot of developers I am always looking for great game content. Having been a 3D artist for a goodly while, the idea that Daz content could be made game ready really got me excited. I picked up the Digami Game Developer Pack (includes Texture Atlas, Decimator, and FBX Exporter for Daz Studio) and set to.

There have been a number of discussions in different forums about whether this works and if so how well. So far the experimentation has been pretty successful. I wanted to share my workflow and let everyone here see that we just might have another workable path after all!

Here are my 3 part work flow vids

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Enjoy,

AF

 

priceless

 

Thanks!

 

Glad you're finding them useful Hopefully by next month I'll have a better solution for handling gear w/this workflow.

I am also ironing out the FBX into LW and Messiah process to see how that'll work out handling the adding of animation to purchased assets. Its already working in part with my DAZ exported FBX files.

Thanks again for taking the time to watch these.

 

On another forum I was asked how I got the V4 LOD set. I used the one created by Daz themselves, the 4K version. The best I've been able to create after tweaking the weights is around 6K.

In case you're interested, I've attached some wires as well.

Wires 1 2 are from within Daz Studio, and Wire 3 was captured within Unity.

 

Thanks for the tutorial!

btw, a new version of Unwrap is out. You can delete unused materials with a single click now.
And if you want to select multiple materials at once, see Select -> Materials.

http://www.unwrap3d.com

 

Great, hopefully I'll have a free upgrade waiting since I only picked up Pro in January Thanks for the heads up!

 

Yep, updates have always been free!

 

Great to hear, since I am really starting to adore Ultimate Unwrap.

 

Looks nice.

Did it say 250K Polys?

What's your workflow, on poly reducing these characters?

 

Thanks afalk for this brilliant tutorial.

I did a test and came up with a nice model of 60K Polys using Victoria 4 and NighHawk dress
But that was just a quick test. I think there is a lot that can be done with the Decimator yet.

 

It's great but it has too many polygons imo

 

Yes it has. Thats why I said " I think there is a lot that can be done with the Decimator yet."
To be really usable one needs to get down below 20k (at least for my needs).

 

Thank you for your great tutorials (and for smoking in the video .
May I ask if you have not had the eyelash problem? For me, the eyelashes become black blocks.
I did not follow your in-depth tutorial yet, I only followed your decimator "lessons".
Would the eyelash problem be gone if I went through all your steps?

I am watching your videos over and over again just because your voice is so cool.
There are so many points where you talk exactely like that starship captain in Futurama.
Priceless I love his voice.

 

The eyelash transparency issue is created by how daz exports transparency - i.e. as a stand-alone map. You need to combine that alpha map with the diffuse one and add it as an alpha channel (use your favorite image editor). Afterwards use your newly combined map in place of the base diffuse color one (that way you have 1 draw call not multiple).

@Roland :: good looking character -- you can certainly get her below 20K using Decimator Promise!

AF

 

May I ask what seems to be the main difference here? I am trying to get my model from DAZ studio into Unity 3D as accurately as possible.

What (for example) makes my model's edges so sharp? Is it the polygon count? I have used Decimator to reduce my model to about 40.000 polys. In DAZ studio it still renders perfectly (as long as I don't zoom in too much), but in Unity it looks really different.

Thank you for the help.

ps: The image on the left shows the rendered model in DAZ studio already decimated to about 40.000 polys.

ps2: Thank you for your reply on the eyelashes

 

Different smoothing algorithims and lighting account for the differences that you are seeing. Are you doing stand-alone decimations on V4? Are teh included LOD versions not good enough for your project?

 

Okay, that seems to be one of the major problems: The lighting. I find it incredible hard to get a good lighting in Unity 3D.
I would really like to know how to get a "natural" lighting. Everytime I try something with lights, the lights are so "hard" (even if they are miles above my scene) that one side of the model is light (lighted?) well, and the other half is almost black.
I have experimented a lot with the lights, and right now I have made 4 lights at the 4 borders of my terrain, but it still looks horrible. I would like to get a natural light. How do you manage this?

What do you mean by "standalone-decimations", please?
The LOD is fine for my project, if they would appear as in DAZ Studio, but unfortunately I have not been able to get such a great look as in DAZ studio.

I think my foremost problem right now is the lighting, isn't it?

 

I suspect so. As for lighting, my environments have a distant light with soft shadows and local lights that generally have no shadows or hard shadows. I imagine that using unity Pro the post processing effects (bloom, blur, etc ) can also really help. By stand-alone decimation - I was trying to determine if you used the provided LOD sets or had created that LOD from scratch through just the weight map assignments within the Decimator itself.

 

I have only used the LOD set that was created by the decimator. I only wanted to see if everything works before I put energy into getting everything well done.

Can you tell me which kind of light you use for the distant light?
I have put a "sun" in the sky (a directional light pointing down to the ground, intensity 1, shadow type: no shadows.
No when I have this light and a box on the ground. The "lid" (=the upper part) of the box is well light, but the shadows are almost completely black. I think that sums up my problem well: The sides are extremely dark. Is there nothing like a "sun"? Do we have to put lights on an object from all directions with different lights to make a "sun" simulation?

 

BTW Does it can sculpt like Zbrush too?

 

It's called full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) or multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA). This makes poly edges
appear smooth. This is a hardware feature of your graphics card. Without it, edges will appear jagged,
even for high poly models.

If you play games, you've probably seen it in the video control settings before, listed as
2x MSAA or 4x MSAA.

I'm sure you can enabled MSAA in Unity somehow.

 

Daz Carrara is really a strange tool....The fbx was shot in versions earlier than version 8. But i still dont like it that much. Even Hexagon is a pain to work with. I will stick with the tools i know best!!!! Ones you dont need to fight to make 3d models!

 

Hey thanks for this tutorial! I've been screwing around with it for a while and have never quite liked the results. Often when I used Texture Atlas, it would assign the textures to the wrong place and I'd end up with a shirt that had the entire texture, including the skin and everything. Have you encountered that problem?

 

Thanks for sharing this! Now I have a renewed hope in using my poser characters in Unity

 

Hi

Thx for great tuts...

I will need to do animations from Poser, so which process would be smartest?:

DAZ (Decimater) > Poser > Unity

or

Poser > DAZ (Decimater) > Unity

 

Guys dazstudio became free so can anyone explain me so is it free forever to use or only free for limited time then you have to buy it later?

 

Free is free!

Version: 4.0.0.343
Date added: August 04, 2011
Price: Free

It's a basic version without any of the extra tools found in Pro or Advance.

There is a Daz Studio 4 Pro, and a Daz Studio 4 Advanced version. This thread has more information:
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=170823

 

DAZ Studio has always been free. They have a scheme much like Unity where you can use a stripped down version for anything you want, including commercial, but if you want all the bells and whistles you have to shell out money. Unlike Unity I can buy individual add-on for Studio such as the animation tools and whatnot that come standard in the Pro version. It would be like just buying the features you want to use in Unity Pro like real time shadows without buying the entire thing.

 

Hello!

I am on my quality problem again.
I have decimated a model in DAZ studio again, created a LOD, etc, according to your tutorial.
Because I thought it was a light problem, I inserted the model into the nice bootcamp demo in Unity3D, thinking that the light would be perfect to make my model look as it should be.
But the quality is really different than I what I expected.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/207/compare1.jpg/

Would you be willing to provide me a hint of where to start looking for what I am doing wrong?

This would be really nice.

Thank you.
Hermann

 

You can't expect to achieve good lighting results with just one directional light. Emulate what photographers have been doing for years, try a 2-3 light setup.

To get started, put in one directional light, create another light and point it directly the opposite direction of your main light. This is your back light. Set the back light to an "unnatural" color, like red or purple. Then add a third light perpendicular to the main light. Try different values for that. Mess with different intensities for all those light and the ambient light. You'll get something nice. If you have pro, try a slight bloom. Turn on anti aliasing.

Furthermore, the screenshots you've provided are clearly using non-directional, view-dependant lighting, which is good for "looking at" models. You can tell by looking at her protruding bones under her neck. That shading would imply the light is below the bones, in front of her. But if that the case, her cheeks wouldn't be darkened. If you really want this type of shading, some custom shader is probably going to be needed.

There's also a great pack of "skin shaders" on the asset store, that might make your job a whole lot easier.

 

Thank you for your reply.

I was trying to achieve a look like the soldier, and the soldier appears to be relatively independend from the light, am I right?
When I add additional lights to the bootcamp demo, I will always be depending on having the lights this way.

When you talk about "the screenshots", which one do you mean, please?
The left one is from within Unity, the right one is from within DAZ.

 

An update:

With the 2-3 lights approach, I get a good result, but can you please tell me why the other objects in the bootcamp project have a great look even without this approach?

I think the answer to this question may broughten up my understanding of this problem...

Greetings,
Hermann

 

The jagged edges are simply aliasing - i'm not sure if unity supports antialiasing, but the daz renders most definitely do, and it will be hard to compare an offline render from daz to a realtime render without some fancy post processing being done. at a minimum you'll need anti-aliasing and probably need / want proper hdr / bloom and some other filters on the realtime render as well (depth of field / etc) before you'll come close to what even a default daz render can do.

I'm also using daz for characters (clothing, hair, morphs), my pipeline is to export from daz (I'm using the 11k base, the 4k is nice as well) in fbx format, which I then load in max and clean up. the model was rigged in max and then saved to fbx again.

By 'cleaned up', the default daz models have too many materials for my liking, so I've combined a bunch of them together, streamlined the material setup quite a bit and then rigged the model and exported for the 'game version'.

I'm still investigating what the best pipeline for getting morphs into unity is - found a couple of scripts that look like they might be a good starting point ,but not 100% sure as of yet.

The biggest issue you'll have with daz content is in the hair content - the vast majority of daz hair is just simply too high poly to come across well into a game engine - even with the decimator. By the time you have it low-enough poly to be useful in a game engine, the hair will barely resemble the original.

 

Thank you. I am glad that I am not the only one fighting with it.
Another issue is that my hair (not mentioning the quality change that you talked about) is off most of the time for me (flying around the hip or so), and I have not found a way to fix it.
It does not have to do with being mis-parented. I checked it, and it was attached to the head in DAZ.
Also, my textures are off for some morphed figures.
It's all not really easy.

 

Thank you for this tutorial. I too got the pro version not long ago and was wondering about this myself.
My question is Ultimate Unwrap the only software that works well with this? Or is there a free software that can be used? And if so what would you use if you were using free software?

 

I watched your vids and I have a few questions.

1. You said you bought Digami Game Developer Pack witch includes Decimator for DAZ Studio Then why did you need to use Ultimate Unwrap in the vid?

2. Witch the new Daz3d Pro changing the new Smart content tab have you had trouble using the old content created for the characters that are not Genesis?

3. Did you find any good tutorials for working with the new Daz3d 4 Pro? Though I have had good help on the Daz forums I cant find many video tutorials.

4. If you haven’t know any tutorials are you planning on making any more?

If you can could you please add me to skype: crong6131

 

Im having some of the same issues with exporting the texture atlas from Daz Studio 4. It seems like theres a transparency issue I could be wrong but for some reason my models are exported and imported with the same issue like the eyes not having color? and Im not sure how to fix it, if anyone can help?

I did change the eye texture material to a particles shader (Mobile > Transparent > Additive) to see if the eyes are there and they are, they are just not colored and the clothing has no transparency in them as well? The export from daz also exported (from texture atlas) 3 textures just like the videos in this post.

Does anyone know why this happens?

As for the other question in this post on lighting you can use Beast Light Mapping which is available in Unity (free pro) that will light your scene very nicely and there are plenty of tutorials around for that

Here is one to get you started
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITHxBQQ-ZjE

I dont think the issue your having is lighting though I believe its the same issue Im having. Does anyone know how to solve this transparency issue? or not having color in the eyes? I could also be totally wrong about it being a transparency issue and need some help.

Below is an image from daz then an image from Unity

 

I updated the post here.
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=186623

I cant wait to see your next div.
Could you please take a look at what we have so far and post anything that can help both the daz and unity communities.

 

DS4 replaces the ultimate unwrap workflow. Will be publishing a tutorial soon on my blog

www.digitech-innovations.com

 

By the way when importing into unity transparency is not instant it needs connecting properly but there is nothing wrong with Daz eyes when set up correctly.

 

DOWNLOAD CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION WORKSHOP UNITY 3.5
Posted on April 8, 2012 by gxmark
Here is the latest version of the Character Customization Workshop project code and Web Player demonstration.

Main Key features

GUI Control example code
Asset Management (Separately imported character, clothing and animations)
Joint Management (Bone parenting)
Animation Preview (Rotate and Animation test)

http://www.digitech-innovations.com

 

Would there be some way to export similar low poly characters which are based around the same char and have the same topology? I mean, it would be nice to implement some facial feature morphing...

Unity tech really should buy some of the daz tech and provide the tools to easily do a character creator. Would save a lot of people a lot of work. Of course, things would become a bit more generic etc

 

Easiest way is to integrate facial features customization into Unity is to apply morph targets. A morph target is basically a different shaped mesh which was modified from the same base mesh topology. Many modelling applications such as MAX, MAYA, BLENDER can accomplish a morph target. The unity WIKI site has a selection of free downloadable morph target scripts. If you prefer something a bit more efficient (multi-threaded core support) and comprehensive then tryout Mega Fiers which has plugins for MAX, MAYA. Other techniques do exist such as using bones displacements to reshape the face.

 

I think Veqtor knows what a morph target is. The question is actually quite specific to this thread. Daz 3D and Poser content already come with loads of morph targets, and more can be added via .obj files, which are then controlled with dials. This is really the whole point to Daz/Poser, that you can twiddle the dials to create a nearly infinite range of characters out of the original base character with the included or third party morphs.

The problem is that when using the decimator, there isn't some magical way that morphs remain compatible with the new, low poly version of the character. Daz/Poser morphs, probably all morphs, work on a vertex by vertex basis. By applying the decimator to the model, the entire library of included morphs suddenly becomes incompatible. Thus, one appears to be faced with the task of going back to hand modelling all those morphs.

Theoretically, this is in fact programatically solvable. If the decimator kept a record of which vertices were removed or altered during the reduction process, then the same vertices could be changed/removed in the morphs as well, and the morphs could be reapplied.

Or, the other possibility would be, does the decimator reduce in the same way every time given the same model and the same settings? If so, then one could set the morph dials in Daz, decimate and export, then set them again, then export again, etc., and I suppose you could DIFF out the changed vertices to create a morph object or file somehow.

Veqtor's question is alluding to that, I believe. I am also very much interested in an answer to that.

However, I doubt it. My guess is that if you change the shape of the model, even though the number and order of vertices remains the same, then the reduction algorithm will find a slightly different way to optimize the area that was changed, so the two objects will no longer be vertex compatible.

 

I'm not a modeling expert but isn't the point of the decimator to reduce model size so that is compatible with games? If so then it will remove all the unseen and unused information and retopologize what is visible to reduce model size.

If you wanted to keep all the features of the original model don't decimate it.

If you're wanting a model you can morph runtime I don't think DAZ's models are appropriate. Well, highend HW can handle it I most mobile HW can't. The most flexible DAZ models are their Genesis models.

You need to apply the morphs, decimate, and export for each character.

Or create low-poly models with the desired morphs embedded and not get so carried away adding morph targets so that the model size becomes huge.