If this is the wrong category, I apologize in advance.
So, after becoming extremely annoyed at Character Creator 3, I am considering using Daz to make characters for my game instead…so now the question I have is pretty simple - has anyone used Daz as their primary character creation program? How “game friendly” are the Daz models? I know these are odd questions, I just don’t want to spend the time to create all my characters just to find out that there will be some problems later. Thanks in advance.
There’s always some problem.
My 2 cents is don’t use anything. When you build from scratch you can just fix every problem you come across.
And after you successfully manage 1 model importing something from something else that generates it (look into meta human too) becomes trivial.
It’s not the best. You can build a pipeline to bring in DAZ characters and fix the myriad issues with incompatible materials (especially when it comes to eyes and hair) but the models just have a lot of materials in general with textures per region. Then you need to be sure you’re not taking in too many morph targets because even if you’re not using them in game, they all have to be loaded which impacts your load time and the Morph Target Compute event each frame.
This is possible to mitigate however. I use the morph targets as a way to edit characters at runtime, then I use a plugin from the marketplace to merge the morphed targets into a separate skeletal mesh to reduce that Compute event. Then I pack all of the textures into another atlas to reduce the texture loading overhead but the draw calls remain.
Depending on what you plan to do with the DAZ characters it can work if you can work out a pipeline and design the rest of the game around the immodest load they put on your scene. I can’t really put more than 4 full-featured characters on screen at once before my frame rates start tanking, so the optimization pass is extremely important. I haven’t started working with large crowds of people yet, but I doubt my current digital human solution would be appropriate for it.
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I’m part of a team that is converting Urban Terror from the idtechh3 engine to unreal 4, easy enough to Google, and starting with UE4.0 it was clear that the base Epic rig was not going to do the job so we started looking a Genesis 2 as 3 was not out at the time.
When 3 was made available we decided to commit to using Genesis as our preferred character development framework and over time it’s clear to me that Genesis 3, or 8, is suitable as a replacement to the base Epic solution.
With the introduction of the “free” bridge Daz Studio and the Genesis character framework is well suitable as a development development application such as adding Blender to the pipeline as what can be done goes beyond the obvious.
Things to consider.
The Daz bridge and plug in is open sourced.
Epic has granted Daz3d a dev grant to further develop the bridge.
When the plugin is installed you get the full kit necessary for full G3/G8 support.
Anything you build on the framework is free fair use with out paying a fee.