Do you know if one can import these into Daz Studio?
I wanted to just say: Yes! But then I actually thought about it and it is kind of complicated. First of all, yeah, there is a way to export stuff from Unreal, and the obvious choice seems to be FBX because Daz can import that, but that one really sucks.
What I do when I want to export stuff from Unreal then I actually export from Unreal using GLTF instead. Reason is that you get baked materials automatically when you do that, and you don't have to do it yourself. You can find a video where someone explains how to bake the materials for FBX export, and so you can do that, but I find it much easier to use GLTF instead.
Once you have exported to GLTF though you can't just import it into Daz, you need to import into Blender first (which is what I usually want so to me that is the natural choice). Once you have it in Blender you can then export it to FBX and import that into Daz. This also has an additional benefit of Blender being able to set the correct Up axis for Daz (I don't know which one it is, you'll have to try it out until you get the right one).
Also I have a Blender addon called "Better FBX" which gives some additional tweaking options (sadly, worse up axis selection though then the default Blender FBX export). With that one I can actually export the entire scene and import it into Daz and everything is imported with the right position (rotation ends up messed up cause wrong up axis though, didn't really figure out how to fix cause it is easy to just manually rotate everything back to 0, they all imported with +90 degrees on the x axis).
The whole process works fine for mesh + texture and it ends up looking relatively good I'd say. But you have to keep in mind that the shaders are not really transferable 1:1 from Unreal to other programs, so the shading in Unreal will definitly look better and much closer to how those models look in their promos on the Unreal marketplace.
Another problem is Nanite, if a model is only available as Nanite then I don't know how to export it without loosing all of the details. Export works, but the mesh ends up looking really low quality in Blender and Daz. For those Dekogon assets I actually did run into this problem with one of the Assets, but then found out there is a non-nanite version available. As far as I can tell this is true for most of them, but I have not checked all of the 2000 assets there.
Here is a comparison how some of the assets look:
Keep in mind this is just imported, without tweaking anything, so no adjustments to the shaders or the lightning. Also, I just noticed the Daz import lost the Emissive texture (no text on screens), so that's an example of something you'd have to fix yourself.
It can actually be fixed though, but you need this product:
You must be registered to see the links
cause that adds the ability to set a emissive texture on Daz PBR shader:
EDIT: Nah, I am wrong, you don't _need_ PBRSkin Plus, but it is kind of handy. You can also use the Uber Shader instead cause that can also use a emissive texture, but you loose the PBR stuff (looks a bit different):
Anyways, it is definitely work, but with most programs you can actually transfer stuff, and even Daz does in the end accept FBX so it is possible to get it into Daz as well.
EDIT: Final one, the import actually only sets the Diffuse texture, and none of the other ones, or at least when I switched to PBR they were all reset. So either way, you'd need to make sure the materials are actually setup correctly in Daz when importing to get the best possible results:
Of course, you can still tweak this forever until it perfectly fits into whatever you're doing. But that last image seems to be mostly it in terms of where you can get with the Daz shaders on imported assets with just the default settings mostly.
I needed to enter the coupon code DAZ-DAY to activate the freebies ... although the layout does read as if the Daz+ doesn't need a code, and by implication you should be able to get one free with every purchase, but then that's Daz Sales Speak for you ...
