Daz 3D asset support for Bevy Engine

Summary

This project comes in a few parts:

• daz_asset_types, a standalone crate providing faifhful Rust representations of the Daz 3D asset file formats
• bevy_dqskinning, a standalone Bevy Engine plugin that implements dual-quaternion skinning via a StandardMaterial extension
• daz_bevy, a crate providing plugins to load and spawn Daz 3D assets into a Bevy Engine application

This project is a very early work-in-progress and not yet available on crates.io. If you'd like to see it come to fruition faster, pull requests are welcome! (TODO: Write a contributors' guide.)

Why?

Unreal Engine has MetaHuman, and Unity has the Digial Human package, but as it currently stands, if you want high-fidelity character models in Bevy Engine, you essentially need a team of highly skilled artists and engineers to create them from scratch.

It's my opinion that Daz 3D's impressive core technology, huge marketplace ecosystem, and reasonable prices and licensing terms make it a promising candidate to fill that gap. Unfortunately, Daz Studio's export capabilities leave a little something to be desired — while Daz offers reasonably well-supported "bridge" plugins for Unreal Engine and Blender, I don't know of any direct pipelines available from Daz to glTF, and even if they existed, there would still remain quite a bit of work to get all the bells and whistles working correctly in Bevy Engine.

Tentative Road Map for bevy_daz

• Get the base Genesis 9 figure loading in Bevy Engine with UVs, joints, and skin weights
• Implement dual quaternion skinning for more faithful mesh deformations
• Translate IRAY material definitions to Bevy-compatible equivalents
• Implement corrective blend shapes and flexions for 1:1 mesh deformations
• Support "shaping" morphs for custom characters designed in Daz Studio
• 1:1 support for importing saved Daz Studio scenes as Bevy Engine scenes

Feature Checklist for daz_asset_types

• asset_info
• bulge_binding
• camera
  • camera_orthographic
  • camera_perspective
• channel
  • channel_alias
  • channel_animation
  • channel_bool
  • channel_color
  • channel_enum
  • channel_float
  • channel_image
  • channel_int
  • channel_string
• contributor
• DAZ
• formula
• geometry
• geometry_instance
• graft
• image
• image_map
• light
  • light_directional
  • light_point
  • light_spot
• material
• material_channel
• material_instance
• modifier
• modifier_instance
• morph
• named_string_map
• node
• node_instance
• operation
• oriented_box
• polygon
• presentation
• preview
• region
• rigidity
• rigidity_group
• scene
• skin_binding
• uv_set
• uv_set_instance
• weighted_joint