This is true for Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 where their use is better served for Vis or even feature films and if one takes the time to read the user stories is rather impressive. 100k+ and off power textures did require a lot of work to even make the output usable so DS has a history of not being suitable for use in video games. Not getting into details Daz3d has always had a history of being interested in developing assets for video games but in most cases it was the game engine that created limitations of how assets had to be made to fit the engine and where things have changed is Unreal 4s tendency to not introduce limitations as as to polygon limits or texture resolutions…and a lot more
After Unreal4 was released is when things on Daz Studio side of things started to change as hard code issues were no longer a problem so to update to a more solid pipeline Daz3d introduced the Genesis 3 framework which included the following features.
Base G3 character model at a 32k tris count (16k Polygon) By comparison Epic’s base rig is 42k tris count so as a starting point G3 is actually 10k “less” than what would be considered the acceptable level. The count can even be further reduced if say for example only a talking head is needed with clothing added as a component of the character and when exported only material or textures used as to material ID’s are include Of interest additional assets can be harvested like hands for VR or full arms for 1st person
Genesis 3 supports “both” morph targets as well as cluster shaping so as far as facial animation goes is mocap ready so in most cases and need one only needs to create the target shapes and hook it up to some device using a relationship constraint.
Genesis 3 makes use of power of 2 textures rather than the odd order used by G1 and G2
Genesis 3 uses a similar stacking order similar to the stack in 3ds Max so if you bake the base character the morph targets made for the base G3 model will be adjusted to make use of the applied morphs. Make a new character you do not need to make a new target.
The following is just my opinion but based on things that I’ve noticed since all of the buggy stuff was fixed in 4.15 and Daz Studio update to 4.10
Epic has been adding foundation building features that at the moment do not seem to be in a usable state with out a much more complex framework build on top of additions. Being able to directly drive lip sync or using characterization has been available in apps like MotionBuilder as well as Maya, and to some extent even Blender so my opinion of adding retargeting features built into Unreal 4 makes no scene unless added as a necessary addition as to foundation building
Not getting into details as the the base concept is work in progress.
There is this
So with that along with a few other e-mails which I’m not comfortable posting there is a lot of movement in just the past year that has improved a much better cross platform compatibility between Daz Studio and Unreal 4 as a 1-2 combination that until the big thing happens would solve a lot of the major issues of making a AAA character equal to Hellblade possible and should at least be on one’s must watch list.
After all Daz Studio is free and Genesis base is free and any information as to the two that is more than a year old is out of date. 