DAZ → CC5 → Blender → UE... How do you do it?

Character Creator General
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Hi!

So after years of not really being happy with the possibilities of DAZ, I tried to move away from it to UE. This turned out to be harder then I thought. So, after a lot of trial and error I ended with CC5.

What I really like is that it imports characters and can make them UE ready, but, and here is the problem, this is only a stable pipeline if I don’t involve Blender between CC5 and UE. This is sometime nessessary because CC5 cannot create bones for things like kimonos, really long hair and so on.

But as soon if I load and save a FBX in Blender, it is not recognized by the Auto-Setup in UE when it comes to textures. I also loose the chaos cloth config.

So the question would be to you, how you solve this issue? Do you seperate the character and attach the rigged or modified prop?

I would really be interested in your best-practice on how to solve the pipeline.

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Hi! I have accomplished most of what you want in UE. Here’s a quick run-through:

  • Put your hair / kimono / etc on a separate skeletal mesh and add desired bones / rigging. I don’t use Blender but I imagine you can do all this there
  • Export this separate hair/clothing mesh and import it into UE. Auto-setup will be broken for this SKM but that’s a limitation. You can also make more than one SKM - EG: 1 for hair and 1 for kimono.
  • Place the hair/kimono SKM(s) as child of your character SKM
  • Create Anim BP(s) for the hair/clothing SKM(s) and in the animgraph add a ‘Copy pose from Mesh’ node with ‘Use attached parent’ checked. This will copy all animation from the character SKM to the hair SKM.
  • If you’re not already, use the Kawaii Physics plugin for hair/kimono bones for the easiest and best looking setup. (you can buy from Fab or get free from Github)
  • The upside of this is that your character is more modular, and if you want to update or change clothes/hair it is very simple.
  • I don’t know how to salvage chaos cloth (I ended up painting my own weights) and so you may have to redo that manually - but if you figure anything out I’m all ears!
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Thank you! Sorry for the late reply, the reminder went into spam, so I checked just now.

The recommendation of Kawaii physics seems to be a gamechanger, I will absolutley look into this as soon as my time allows it.