BIOASSHARD UPDATE 9/19/2024

Hello everyone, Meguido here!

As I mentioned in the previous report, here I want to talk about the new workflow for the characters to be added in.

Previously, to get a character up and running in UE4, it was just a matter of getting the FBX out of the DCC (Daz, Maya, Blender, whatever) and into UE4 with no other tasks. Now with the update to UE5, one of the things I wanted to take advantage of was the ML deformer tech to implement corrective shapes for better deformations 😉.

In the Arena I already tried this some time ago but the results weren’t the expected and ended up turning the majority of them off 😌. Also, the workflow back there was a lot worse, because I had to make the correctives one by one all by myself which, believe me, was a total nightmare 😰.

Now, fortunately, there are ways to automate this process, using what’s known as Range of Motion (ROM for short) animation composed of hundreds of different pose frames for every joint. Then, in Daz for example, you export the FBX and the Alembic and use a third app to calculate the deltas between the information in the FBX and the one from the Alembic (the Alembic saves the deformations as realistic as they are in Daz) otherwise you just have to create a muscle system in a DCC like Maya or Blender to simulate the body deformations and calculate the deltas from there.


These deltas are basically morphs whose information is the difference between the current pose of a joint and the look the character should have in that pose realistically 🤓.

Then you add all those deltas as morphs to the character and in UE5 you have to configure those morphs as pose assets.


Long story short, the results are worth it but -there’s has to be a ‘but’, always XD- what works so well with the characters it doesn’t do for clothes, meaning the majority of them get ugly deformations and clipping everywhere… Is that fixable? Yeah, that’s fixable. I just have to go frame by frame, searching for those that are clipping or looking ugly and manually fixing them. And yeah, it’s as bad as it sounds 😭

Imagine going through 750+ frames of ROM for every different piece of clothing fixing them by hand… scary huh? Well now, multiply that by all the characters (which you don’t know yet the exact number, but you know that there are 5 at least).
So, as you can imagine now, that’s like a hell in earth.

To sum it up:

 Pros

• +Better looking characters overall

• +Higher fidelity in deformations

• +Allows for better animations

 Cons

• -Clothes looking ugly when deformed and clipping through

• -A nightmare fixing the clothes’ problems

• -Time consuming due to all the fixes made by hand

This is why, because we don’t want to be stuck forever on this process, we decided to make a change a reduce considerably the different outfits options for every single character we had in mind at first.

I know this may sound like bad news, but I think it’s better to have more (and better) characters than different outfits for just one instead. What do you think? Please, let us know down below in the comments.



And now, it’s time to get back to work!

Until next time.