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i do not think this is targeted at the average daz user making their pretty pictures for themselfes
see how dead this forum is normally
this app will not change it
Daz3D has already made some smart moves, they're positioned in the Unreal Market, they have avatar stuff likeTafi, if they're able to make their clothing work with something like Metahuman it would be a big deal. (I don't know if there's a "standard human rig" for UE)
Just don't understand why they've implemented a low level real time renderer like Filament (which was originally meant to work on smartphones), on the other hand, I have no idea what is possible with Filament.
Maybe one day there'll be a version which has the quality of an Unreal or Eevee renderer...
Completely different market and purpose than what Daz3D has been doing all these years.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-sneak-peek-at-metahuman-creator-high-fidelity-digital-humans-made-easy
Here are the advantages of MetaHuman that I see:
1. royalty-free and cost-free characters to use in games, films, or however you please.
2. Extremely high quality, realistic characters that are free from the shackles of a single software or renderer. You can render in UE4, Arnold or other renders with predictable results. If it is handled like other assets that use Quixel Bridge, the shaders will automatically be set up for your chosen render engine.
3. Likewise for animation. You can export and animate in any software that supports industry standards. Freedom!
4. You will be free to use all the industry tools to further customize and art direct your assets. No limitations except your own creativity and skill.
5. All of this is free if you use Unreal Engine. This is the backbreaker of all other Character Creation Products. Epic believes in sharing with the community and offering things at low cost to free. How will others be able to compete with that?
On the other hand, those who are already established in the Daz culture don't need to panic and throw away their models. They will still work as they always have. I don't think these new tools are aimed at hobbyists who just want to push a button and render a beautiful picture. But the writing is on the wall. Daz3d must make a move to open up its walled garden or face extinction. Adopting USD would be a big start.
RTX card and and Iphone for facial mocap??
Good on Epic for being on the cutting edge in
developing their own high quality Character eco system.
Once rolled out, IMHO there will likely be little reason for UE5 users to bother
with Iclone/CC3 or Daz Studio/genesis.
Most people prefer to stay within one Eco-system
As a content creator ,I think they need to have a cloth weighting system that is as easy as the one-two click system of Reallusion CC3 pipeline or the Daz transfer utility.
I personally have no reason to use any game engine
,which is essentially just a play back tool, where I still have to create my
Character clothing and environmental sets& props externally and import them and adapt to the engine's shader system.
I need to build entire virtual civilizations and
Although I use Iclone/CC3 for Base layer animation creation& export
I am fully emersed in the Blender eco-system where I have invested in many powerful add-ons like Hard Ops/box cutter,Decal machine and likely soon flip fluids,
and of course I have the EEVEE realtime engine.
I am a sci-fi guy and dont need more naked people no matter the quality/realism
if I have to migrate to a different eco-system& pipeline to access them fully.
The competition going forward will be between entire eco-systems
not just pretty human figures because everyone has them now.
You don't need to buy any plugins for this to work in Unreal. It is completely free. You can even download the sample assets now to try for free. So you can create unlimited characters and download for Unreal for free. It will probably cost for other software like Maya. And you will have to have an RTX card to get the most from it.
Why is this panic?
)
That's bad news for iclone. Plus Daz are static high quality renders. Plus iklone is the creation and ANIMATION of the character. Now we have Unreal with real-time render - and is it then necessary for iclone with its yray render, which was most often used to create and import characters into unreal ??? Now this unnecessary problem is gone - and you can create a character and animate in unreal - then you need an iclone?
The only thing to think about is the direct conversion of DAZ content for this platform:
(
as it is done in the iclone.
There is a free bridge to unreal - for using daz content. If we add an additional conversion option for another base - why then iclone ???
I could see this coming. It's why I got more into Toon, Set, and Clothing purchases at DAZ. Not that that's those purchases are going to remain that safe for long as corporations with so many resources can easily hire staff to parameterize the realistic human models via AI so they can be transformed into different styles of human caricatures. So yeah, I alway knew my purchases have a very high risk of going up in smoke with regards to my personal captital outlay. I'm still likely to use them instead of these newer UE4 models on offer though even if the UE4 models are free with UE4 when used with UE4.
At this rate, maybe in 5 years, certainly in 10 years, it will be all about the story you tell and all this technical archana that is a huge impediment to 99.9% of the population will be gone. Well that, and advertising budget, although I image easy to participate in technical hobbies could conceivably make passive audiences subject to being captive via advertising saturation of the market outlets a thing of the past. Not really a bad thing really.
tried an FBX export
well it has lots of bones
especially on the head
not sure how to get the whole mesh out, trying the whole map now
@lordsithalex
This is potentially "bad news" for anyone who's business model included being a 3D character resource for the unreal engine.
Daz Morph3d MCS,Morph ID, Oasis, Tafi and the latest Unity/UE export plugins are all efforts to be the go to 3D Character provider for the gaming industry.
Just as Reallusion CC3 aspired to be.
Epic will soon make those efforts Moot.
At least Reallusion has a commercial software eco system
,at various tier levels, from $199 USD up to several hundred dollars
including a very good 2D cartoon program that that even has a Mac OS version.
The future is in animated/filmaking.
People already in the UE eco-system will now have a native resource for high quality 3D Avatars.
We will have to wait and see how well they export to other 3DCC's Like Blender,Maya Houdidni etc.
Merged threads
If anybody is wondering how Unreal Engine can do something like this - be prepared to thank the most annoying people you can imagine... those whiny kids playing Fortnite and spending their parents' hard earned cash on loot boxes or whatever - Epic didn't plow those profits back into Fortnite, but used it to finance their dreams of cornering the gaming market (now worth significantly more than Hollywood).
But talking about business profits leads onto international finances and things inevitably turn political when that happens, so I'll leave it there and say Epic have rolled the dice and they all came up sixes, albeit this is not entirely due to chance.
Unreal Engine terms & conditions don't even see people like us as a revnue source because they're looking at serious movie companies where profits are discussed in the millions per project.
It will also be interesting to see how long the established "big names" in the gaming industry continue to use their own in-house game engines, or will they start to see Unreal as being worth a cut of their profits? This, along with other developments Unreal are working on, could see a massive thinning of personnel right across the board.
well my brief look at it confirms my suspicions most DAZ users or iClone users and even people who create and rig their own characters in Zbrush and Maya are not going to be turning to this.
You need to be skilled in using C++ or even just Blueprints to do anything, programmers might love it, artists not so much.
I got the samples up and running in literally 10 minutes connected with my iPhone. Although I would never use the iPhone for facial animation, I found it surprising how quickly it was to get started. Blueprints is as easy as ABC.
DAZ has been a very successful market place for the 3D industry over the years. The revealed partnership with major 3D companies underlines the need for those platforms to support the products DAZ provides.
While some may see this is an issue, it is actually not but an assurance of a company heading in the right direction. Position itself to offer environment, clothing and characters for all major systems with the promise of quicker workflow to get your story out and not caught up with the technical aspects of content creation. We here at the DAZ community should be proud of being the building blocks for one of the working R&D proposal today. Where else would you sell content that 30-40% of your community engage in refining the content.
Over the years DAZ Studio has added several key features to its platform (while taking from its other products) sometime ago I had touted Carrara as the Swiss Army Knife of DAZ suite of products when the production was going well. Studio has caught up with a few areas of Carrara and surpassed it in many. It is quite common to see DAZ figures in the media today and will continue to see them in the future.
With the MetaHuman (MH) project requirements it may take 6-12 months for any major adoption. Unreal is relatively easy to use and require a 3 month commitment just to be proficient. The MH project will get people thinking, how do I port my favorite DAZ character into this environment? So this is no end of DAZ, it's a level up on content sales.
I don't have an iPhone
Yeah, I'm still stuck with a GTX 980, so my computer would likely be brought to it's knees, 64 gigs of ram notwithstanding. LOL
@WendyLuvsCatz check out Face Mocap - Apps on Google Play as an option. There is some info on remapping to mimic the iPhone.
My computer as in my sig, laptop too, handles it pretty well, but I have a GTX 1650 Super 4GB. Still waiting on a 3000s series video card at MSRP but isn't strictly needed for these MetaHumans.
Daz does not run in Danger and comparing Daz vs Unreal is pretty bizarre, is more viable Daz vs Character Creator 3 as more direct competence.
Impressive no doubt, though I suppose it was just a matter of time.
But am I the only one who wishes the incredible technology advances were in fields other than video games and entertainment?
well to be fair those models are really "high ending" levels, for things like animation or rendering, they are fine for game cuz if you pay attention they are just a head hands and a little part of the legs, all the remain skin is cut out, it's just hand, head and outfits and even that those characters are more like for "high ending games, like for ps5 + and strong ssds, for medium spec pcs and ps4 or lower daz are still the wins, another thing is which you have lods and the methuman will allow you to choose the "poly level of detail when creating the character, you can have a really high level model for cinematics and a more "modest model for game, because most of the details are maps like the wrinkles, unreal use a lot of details maps which daz don't use, most of charcters details, like wrinkles, scars, age details wounds and others details are made in details maps, not in the model.
Those who manage to keep away from Epic's offering will be in short company. That facerig alone is worth 5 figure$. It is full VFX quality with 660 blendshapes and over 700 joints. It favorably compares with my $10K Snappers rig. The body rig is full IK/FK and 100 corrective shapes. Epic is offering all this for free to UE4 users. Since Blender is a partner, it could very well mean its users will be able to download these goodies in .blend or .fbx files at a bargain cost. Make no mistake, this system looks to be a complete game changer. Anyone can have a professional VFX rig for animation. Also, you might want to consider UE4 if you're into realtime. UE4 renderer puts Eevee in the weeds. No comparison. I'm an Arnold user and even I'm thinking about it.
This exactly, yeah. I would actually be surprised if they didn't know this was coming. Even if they didn't I feel like it's pretty obvious where trends are pointing, and Daz has already started positioning themselves well as a digital marketplace and a way to easily dress and pose characters before taking them into another program.
Even if these characters look very realistic, it's because they were made that way by artists. Stylized, fantasy, and toon characters--which are very popular!--made by third parties will not automagically reproduce that. So to really compare Daz's relevance under the assumption that MH will eventually have a vendor marketplace, imagine Sakura 8 in those videos instead of a realistic human figure. Is it easier to customize that character using what we can see of MH? How long will it take Epic to build MH into a tool that supports all styles of character creation with ease? The platform still does things Daz can't, but that's incentive for both Daz and Unreal to work together.
@Drzap
Thanks...but
I am a 3D content creator, animator and VFX artist.
I need more than just a good realtime play back engine and pretty figures
with 700 joints.
I DO NOT BUY CANNED CONTENT anymore.
Sure, If those Meta human figures can autorig my custom Sci fig armors/cloths
with few mouse clicks like CC3 or even Daz studio
I would consider trying them out in Blender
if their facial Blend shapes transfered to Blenders shape key editor
,via FBX, as does the Reallusion CC3 figures.
I have no interest in noneditable formats like alembic
for Character transfer.(No experience with USD although Blender supports it)
But I wont move to a Game/playback engine for production because I prefer to produce
animated films in a Real 3DCC.
The number one ruler of content creation is,
perform your look dev in the target render engine
and with all of my content modeling, sculpting & shading tools
like hardops,boxcutter& decal machine for me that is Blender
Lookdev is the most time consuming part of CG production
for a lone artist and I build my sci fi clothing an enironmental sets with the Shader nodes & lighting of Blender.
If I send everything over to UE4/5 all of the lighting and shader node work I did in My content creation app will have to be redone with UE lighting and shaders to get the best quailty
from UE4.
I just started production on a web Micro series of 3-5 minute episodes to be delivered weekly.
EEVEE/Cycles is fine for my purposes and hardware
I am happy to see Epic take agency in this critical aspect of their Eco-system
it is way over due.
I did retry FBX exporting the whole character
took hours
it was 14GB and nothing could open it
Carrara did import the skeleton but said corrupted FBX and didn't import anything else
other UE4 characters including the Paragon ones I have no trouble exporting and can even facially animate them in other apps
I don't see this as any threat to DAZ, Reallusion, Adobe Fuse or any other character generators out there as ease of use by amateurs certainly does not seem to be a feature.
I feel the pros would still prefer to model and rig their own stuff anyway.
It may be useful to those with iPhones etc as a CGI avatar
thanks but I actually don't even use my cheap $40 Android phone for anything but phonecalls, I disabled the data with my provider after it decided to massively update on 4G (when my wifi was off) for something I never used, it will still use apps on wifi I believe but never tried and it's tiny.