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Triax vs general weights for use in game engine (e.g. UE, Unity)

JamesMugfordJamesMugford Posts: 31
in The Commons

Please note, I am a programmer, not an artist. Whilst I understand low level programming, I do not understand advanced design. This is the reason for my question.


Just wondering about skin weights. More specifically: Triax vs 'General' Weight maps.

I am fairly set on using Genesis and Genesis 2 characters for my game.

The Triax weighting seems to really do the characters justice. I love how the deformatons work.

The Triax weighting seems superior in many ways to 'General' weights in DS. Does this superiority carry through when exported for a realtime game engine?

I have exported Daz3D characters and animated them in UE. They look great! I just wonder if there was a loss in quality (That my eyes can't detect) that G3 or G8 would have avoided?

Comments

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,929
    edited June 2018

    I always forget but I'm pretty sure triax weight maps aren't being supported in the game engine you've exported to but some general weightmapping is. What makes them look so good is probably the game engine using the general weighmap to subdivide the mesh in the game engine the same what it was in DAZ Studio. I think the algorithm is called openDiv. Those things are defined by the FBX standard, the obj interchange format, and other interchange formats.

    There will be no loss in most cases with visual quality between a game engine and DAZ Studio view of that some model in the viewport because most models are loaded in the DAZ Viewport with subdivision 1 or 2, sometimes 3. Meanwhile, more realistic renders in DAZ Studio will use at least subdivision 3, 4 or higher and you'll not see those details in your game engine. Those are the sort of details you'd add to a game engine character via bump, normal, or displacement maps not directly modeled into the character mesh. Sort of like having a coin that is modeled as a smooth disc but using a displacement map on the coin to model it's heads, tails, and rim (although you'd really probably just use a diffuse map for something like a coin in a game).

    Post edited by nonesuch00 on
  • JamesMugfordJamesMugford Posts: 31

    Aha, thank you for that information.

    So I now, I understand that Triax is great because it in a way has built in JCM functionality (It is able to bulge, using bulge maps).
    This is just not something tat game engines support.

    So whilst my G2 characters looked great in UE, they would lack this bulge functionality.

    G3 and G8 use JCM's (an arguably inferior method to Triax?) in order to acheive this bulge functionality.

    From the sounds of it, G8 is the way to go for games, as Unreal Engine and Unity can be made to drive these JCMs. They cannot however be made to interperate Triax skin weighting.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 14,889

    While JCMs are annoying to set up, I would argue they are (or can be) superior to bulge in Triax. You have a lot more fine control on exactly what stuff looks like when bent, and can take into account all sorts of effects. For example, you could have the surface shift and move, or get more wrinkled, or transform in some odd way, as a reaction to a bend.

     

  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,850

    Look also at this thread:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/134926/adding-dual-quaternion-support-to-unrealengine4-images-inside/p1

     

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