And i mean because while in DAZ a conforming skirt OR a skirt refitted to a reshaped character (using DAZ 4.6 Smoothing modifier) fits well, i tried importing FBX to Unity and it’s messy. all the body parts poke.through.
So i guess it’s not worth it. So Is it better just to either
a)if you want to use DAZ females just dress them with pants or nude
b)buy low res characters specifically made for Unity
?
If i need to buy female characters made specifically for gaming/Unity…where would i buy those? who sells them.
ANd by that i mean characters prepared for Unity with skirts that flow correctly and do not create poke through
The issue your having isn’t only related to characters that come out of DAZ. This is a skin weight issue which requires a skilled rigger/skinner/animator artist to accomplish proper skin weights and animations on characters with clothing.
I’ve always found DAZ characters to be more suited for pre-rendered images rather than real-time rendering, but I guess some artists are having positive results with them so - that’s cool.
There are some other solutions you can attempt to get the results you are after.
I’m not going to explain the details of each solution but give a high level explanation and a direction to point towards so you can perform the research required.
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Alpha masking (Best option in my opinion) This is simply creating one additional texture map for the base skin mesh (alpha mask) which makes the skin parts underneath the clothes invisible when clothing is put on the character. You can check on the mixamo site for some detail on how to do this. There are other resources around that describes this in more detail as well.
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Create custom mesh builds for each set of clothing. Basically you will delete the skin below the clothes so there isn’t any interpenetrating of the skin and clothing items. This can be a very heavy lift for the rigger/skinner to accomplish if you have a lot of different clothing load outs.
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Match exactly the edge flow and poly distribution on the clothing pieces exactly as is on the base skin specifically in the joints, including knees, pelvis, belly, shoulders, arm pits, elbows, neck, wrist and ankle. Also have set edges above and below the bendy areas to contain the vertex skin sliding. This is also a pretty heavy lift but can work if the artist is good at modeling and rigging.
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3D Max has a very nice modifier called skin wrap (2nd best option in my opinion) which allows a top level mesh (clothing mesh) to be controlled and driven by the skin weights of a lower level mesh (base skin mesh) with a skin modifier. I’ve had some pretty good results with this method. The benefit of this method is the clothing can remain a separate object and doesn’t have to be rigged separately. The skin wrap needs to be massaged a little bit before it conforms correctly and in some cases extreme poses can cause the skin to pop through but the modifier has bulge and crease angle deformers which really help. The skin wrap modifier can also be baked into a regular skin for export/import which references the original animation rig so it works well, but requires a little work on the riggers part to get right.
A couple draw backs on this is you will have at least one additional draw call in Unity due to having multiple mesh objects and multiple skinned mesh renders, but the other solutions above suffer from this as well.
Skirts can be rigged relatively simple by a competent rigger. Dresses are a different story. Those are a little more complicated. Depending on the length the may need there own bones to function as expected. There is cloth in Unity but I’ve heard it isn’t very awesome.
I rigged and animated a long duster cowboy jacket one time with unique bones controlling the lower half of the coat and the belt that went around the character. That was actually pretty fun.
Physics colliders can also be used to control bones to simulate cloth. This is an advanced technique which I think would result in the best cloth look, but requires someone who knows what they’re doing to get it set up properly initially in the 3D app then after importing within Unity.
Hope this points you in the right direction. There are several solutions to this problem. It’s a matter of taste how to best proceed.