Engine optimized character export from DAZ to Blender to UE5

Introduction

I’ve been looking at a way to export some characters from DAZ to Blender and then to Unreal. If you use the diffeomorphic plugin to export to Blender you will end up with UDIM textures. Those UDIM textures have some details you probably don’t need in your game if you load every texture, assuming you end up with 4k textures and use diffuse-, normal- and packed-texture, you will be at a whopping 468MB for just one character. If you now have multiple characters with different textures you end up with a huge load on your VRAM.

My workflow

We start the same way and export our model from DAZ to Blender. In order to have a simplified model we will duplicate it, delete all the materials on it, create a new empty material and reorganize the UV-maps. I used Zen-UV to reduce the textel-density on things like the mouth, nails and teeth and also normalize it for all the other islands. I use this simplified model as a template for other models and just transfer the UV-maps.

The next thing we have to do is bake the textures from our original model using the automatically created shader from DAZ (I would love to automate this part but I haven’t had the time to test it yet. Share your result if you get to it faster than me). For that we use the diffeomorphic plugin to merge identical materials and duplicate our mesh and hide it because that’s the model we will export as our high version mesh. Then we can select the vertices using the material-slots and separate them. I had to import some specular-maps/inverted roughness-maps because I wanted to bake those too.
Now we will have to move all UV-islands from their UDIM tile to the first tile or otherwise the bake won’t work.
Finally bake the textures that the shader produces -if you need help this tutorial and others from Ryan will help you-.

MARMOSET
After we baked the textures we can export our simplified mesh as our low mesh and our mesh before we separated it as our high mesh and import them into Marmoset.
In marmoset we can now setup a baker and adjust the cage on our low version because the default one will result in a bad baking result on, for example, the fingers. I bake 4k textures. you After baking the textures you can now use them in Blender on your model and use the “Send to Unreal”-plugin provided by epic – further information – . If your shader setup was correct and simple (math nodes won’t work) your textures will be exported with the model.

In my result I ended up using 3 4k texture maps that use up 35.4MB so just 7.5% of the default setup you get from DAZ.