How to import clothing from Marvelous Designer to Character Creator

Character Creator has a similar workflow to Daz Studio when it comes to importing and rigging clothing. We export the avatar, model/fit clothing in MD, export an un-rigged OBJ and transfer the skeleton and weight maps. Pitfalls lurk at every corner of course, so I thought I’d make some notes before I forget it all …

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How to create a flickering light with a Light Function in Unreal Engine

I’ve been tinkering with a flickering light effect. While it is possible to animate the intensity with Blueprint code directly, there’s an easier way that lets us use the intensity as an override and make the light flicker without futzing with variables. The solution is a Light Function. To create one, let’s make a new …

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How to fix “spatilally loaded Actor references non-spatilally loaded actor” in Unreal Engine

I had this warning in Unreal Engine 5.3 recently when opening a level and didn’t quite know what to make of it: “Spatially loaded actor references a non-spatially loaded actor”. Everything seemed to be working fine, and since it wasn’t an error as such, I didn’t worry too much about it. Curious about what this …

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How to export cameras from Unreal Engine

The other day I needed to make some geometric changes to an object in Blender that relied on my object looking handsome when viewed through a specific camera in Unreal Engine. Hence the best way to work was to export the camera I had setup in UE, and it wasn’t obvious how to do that. …

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Fixed: Unloaded Actors in the Unreal Engine Outliner

Here’s another Unreal Engine oddity that many have come across, including myself: some actors in the outliner show as “unloaded”. You can’t navigate to them, you can’t right-click on them and make them show up, they just linger like a ghost. Here’s an example: This only seems to happen when World Partitioning is enabled and …

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How to show time rather than frames in iClone

iClone only shows a frame-code in the timeline by default, but that’s not helpful in all situations, especially when you’re switching between applications. If you need to make a 40 second clip in iClone, you’ll have to so some calculations we might not have mental energy for. Thankfully there is a (workaround sort of) way …

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Closing Lips with the Stick Contour Node in Faceform Wrap

I was working on wrapping a character that had their mouth slightly open, and I didn’t have a controller to close it. Without a sculpting/modelling session, this would have been problematic to turn into a Genesis morph. Thankfully Faceform Wrap has an interesting node to close those lips using the Stick Contour feature. Here’s how …

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Creating Follower Clothing with Chaos Cloth in Unreal Engine 5.4

There is a neat way to turn static meshes into dynamic follower clothing in Unreal Engine! Since 5.3 there’s a Chaos Cloth plugin that ships with the engine, although it’s only really become usable in 5.4. It looks more complicated than it is, so let me walk you through the basic workflow in principle: Let’s …

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How to remove unused Materials in Blender

Sometimes we may need to get rid of objects that clutter up our Blender scene. When it’s geometry that’s very easy to do: click on the object in the viewport or the outliner, the press X or delete and said object is gone. But what about unused textures, materials and material slots? Not so obvious …

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Changing the Premiere Pro UI Colours back to pre-2023

In the latest release of Premiere Pro 2024, Adobe thought it would be a great idea to “refresh” the UI colours we see in the timeline and on labels. As a long term Premiere user of nearly 30 years, those innovations annoy the living daylight out of me. I’m all for updates, but they should …

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Combining Bump and Normal Maps in Daz to Unreal

Some Daz outfits use both a bump and a normal map to create handsome looking details in Daz Studio. Sadly though, by default the current Daz to Unreal bridge only transfers one or the other, which means we’re not getting the same details showing up after the transfer in Unreal Engine. The G9 Summer Bikini …

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Attenuating a Morph with a Face Group in Daz Studio

Sometimes we have morph that distorts all aspects of an object, but we only want to load it onto a small part of it. This is great for splitting a full morph into smaller parts to generate multiple sliders, but we don’t have all those changes as separate OBJs. While we can reset vertices from …

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Turning Daz Hair into Groom Hair for Unreal Engine

I’ve been experimenting with Groom Hair in Unreal Engine today, first time ever and I currently know almost nothing about it. Groom is UE’s strand-based hair system with real time physics we don’t have to setup from scratch, unlike those horrible cloth weight maps and collision shapes. Groom hair “just works” – I have no …

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Fixing Geoshell Transparency in Unreal Engine

The latest version of Daz to Unreal supports geoshells (in beta)! That’s great news for objects and rely on them, because we can finally use those in Unreal Engine. Geoshells are a native Daz Studio feature, so they come in as a separate material on top of the figure they’re meant to be used with. …

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Creating a Control Rig from scratch in Unreal Engine

Control Rigs are Unreal Engine’s “easy” way of letting us animate objects and characters in Sequencer. They allow us to create new and override existing animations directly on the timeline. These things are ever so slightly intimidating to set up, but if you know how they work, you’ll be able to animate any rigged object …

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How to make sliders work with a Tablet in Blender

Anytime I need to change the value of a slider in Blender, it works fine when I use my mouse and it doesn’t work when I use any of my tablet devices. Why is that, shockingly terrible design perhaps? Or a simple tick box nobody tells you about? Perhaps a bit of both! Thankfully I’ve …

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Blender Sculpting Shortcuts

I’ve just started watching An Introduction to Sculpting in Blender by Flipped Normals, which was available as part of a fantastic Humble Bundle this month. Henning has a lot of good tips, including tablet setup and frequently used brushes. Of course I forget these things every second of the day, and every time I open …

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But what about the Textures?

Ever since I’ve explained how to convert Genesis figure shapes between character generations in several videos, many of you have been asking the same question: How to we transfer the textures? Rather than typing a variation of the same answer out every time, I thought I’ll explain all the options in one handy article that …

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How to pick stuff up in iClone

iClone has two concepts of parenting one object to another: Link and Attach. They’re slightly different. Attach is like traditional scene hierarchy parenting and good if you want to marry one object permanently to another (the parent moves, the child also moves). Linking is similar but can be animated for durations, so a bottle on …

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How to enable that slightly annoying Context Task Bar in Photoshop

A few versions ago Adobe have introduced this floaty little palette in Photoshop. It felt very out of place when I first used it, but might be potentially helpful – if only it wouldn’t constantly get in the way. It’s easy to disable with the three-little-dots menu on the right, whereupon it’ll just disappear and …

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