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very cool way to use it, have you considered using a autorig such as mixamo or webanimate ? would streamline you a bit more even, we are looking at doing that and then using ikinema to get the details much better, nice to know you think that daz3d would be the best character part, that cuts one step away. do you buy a lot of the morph packs or just a few, not afraid of spending money just want to make sure its what we need.
Well the rigging part is simple.
When exported the model is already bind posed to a skeletal mesh that is Motion Builder compatible, which is what we use to make our animations, and just need to drop a characterization temple onto it and tada we have a complete HIK animation solution so if we wanted to we could go in this direction if we wish as far as raw requirements goes.
The down side is one never gets exactly what they need due to unique requirements so our asset pathway is to export to 3ds Max and from there we can “Send To” from Max to Motion Builder for the animation requirements and export to FBX for import into UE4.
What this does is gives us a very strong source chain with in a preferred pipeline that anyone on our team can make additions or make changes in an adhoc manner. Example is there is a need for a lot of base offsets as an additive pose to correct for animation blips to maintain linear motion. Using DS anyone on our team can make the required pose, as it is something that DS does very well, export it over to Motion Builder and the offset pose extracted to the current base player model design.
As for shapes (injectors) to make any shape you wish you only need to purchase the the base male and female body and facial morphs and you can make any shape you wish so total cost above whatever license you need to go with, which you can defer to when you really do need to make that decision, is about 100 dollars and the other shapes are available only for the convenience of a credit card solution if it’s a shape you will need as to practical use.
Even then your not limited as you can export whatever you have in hand to 3ds Max, as an example app, make your edits and then import the target back into DS to maintain the source chain.
For that matter if you come up with a unique shape, complete with texture, you could back door it to make development funds either through Daz3D as a supplier or possibly in the Marketplace once it’s up and running.
The bottom line here though if one is serious about developing an Indie game there are still costs involved and a lot of the so called free solutions are limited in such away as they are presented as a service that can create a third party dependency that historically we found is something one would want to avoided as to best practice.
So if one is looking for a strong easy to use, easy being relative of course, then 3ds Max, Motion Builder, and Daz Studio will do everything you would want to do as far as player model design goes with out have to resort to secondary applications that in my experience has the tendency to break your source chain.
As a personal observation this is the direction that DCC is heading anyways as to procedural and data driven player models, NPC’s, that a single individual could populate a world bigger than say an Assassin Creed, all unique from one to the other just using the three applications I’ve recommended.
The good news is you can try before you buy as there is more than enough in the box to test-by-proxy for free with out any additional costs with out having to commit to the pathway as to the need of fit-to-finish art and being cheap myself I’ve yet to see any added costs required until you reached the point that you may need a X or a Y solution or plugin.