During this years GTC, I learned about a program called Character Creator 3. It seems very similar to Daz3D in some respects but where DAZ seems like more of a platform for making pretty still images as well as making and selling things to other DAZ users, with the ability to transfer to Maya and Unreal thrown in as an afterthought, CC3 actually is a whole suite of tools for character creation and animation, with a very well thought out and functional Unreal transfer pipeline.
In about 30 minutes, I was able to make a character, export it to FBX, import it into a 3rd person default Unreal project, and retarget it over the default mannequin. So all the default 3rd person animations worked without an issue. And the quality of the shaders was pretty well preserved as you can see below.
Mainly just dragged and dropped presets and voila.
I particularly like the quality of the eyes.
And here's the same char in UE4 after some minor lighting tweaks.
So, what's the downside? It seems like every single component of the suite, from the character creation app, to the animation app, to the skin material editor, more capable face and body creation tools, basically anything else one might need in a profession workflow are all sold separately. Oh, you can get bundles with discounts, but if you were to get their "premiere" package for human creation, you're looking at close to $1,000. Not exactly indie friendly. However, if you're in the market to create hundreds of good looking ready to go humans as quickly as possible, that probably isn't too bad actually.
I prefer my tools to be more wholistic though. Just me being old school I suppose.