DAZ Studio facial animation to Unity

Hi all,

Apologies if similar topics to this already exist, but I’ve been trying to do this for over 6 months now and still had no luck.

Basically, I am developing a game in Unity for the Oculus Rift, and am trying to develop a proof of concept. The game should have a heavy focus on presence and as such, I would like to include NPCs with complex facial animation. However, until I can enlist the help of people with the skills to create models and rig/animate them in Unity, I would like to use DAZ3D as a stand-in, as it is incredibly easy to animate believable facial expressions for characters this way.

I have managed to successfully export DAZ3D models as FBX, complete with bone animation and this works really well in Unity. However, whenever I try to animate anything using morphs (such as face and tongue controls, and body modifiers) this is not represented in Unity. I have read countless posts on how Unity dos not natively support blendshapes, and I have been pointed at Megafiers and MegaDAZ a few times. There are two problems with this approach for me:

  1. The creator of Megafiers has stated in reply to an email of mine that models must be exported from DAZ to a Carrara (dae) as part of the workflow - every time I export models in this format on my PC, DAZ crashes no matter what I do or how many times I reinstall the program.
  2. While I simply want to import pre-baked animations to Unity, Megafiers seems to do a whole lot more than I need - and is therefore well above my price range (especially for functionality I am only using as a stand-in).

I would really appreciate if anyone could take me through the steps required to get full facial animation exported from DAZ to Unity - ideally one that doesn’t require Megafiers to work, if possible. If this is not feasible, then a step by step guide to doing this in Megafiers would suffice, but I am a little concerned about buying a plugin which may not do the job I need.

I should also mention that while MegaDAZ is another option - it seems to rely on models being in the newer ‘Genesis’ format - unfortunately this is no use to me as my models use the original Poser format.

Thanks for the help guys!

Adam

Unity DOES support blendshapes if they are in the .fbx file. Is it possible that whatever you are using to export the fbx from DAZ doesn’t support exporting the blendshapes in a format that Unity can read?