Avatars and Gaming Licenses
mikclrk
Posts: 0
Just seeing if I'm understanding the EULA and the Gaming License properly - I think there's a scenario that's not very well catered for.
I get the DAZ program and the included models - Genesis for example. Can't redistribute those. Fine.
Lets say I then mess around with a figure derived from the genesis figure to produce something that looks how I want it to.
Now if I want to put that into a game and then sell the game for $ I need a gaming license - fair enough. What does the $100,000 income figure refer to - income from gaming/modelling/graphics or total income? I'm a hobby modeller/gamer (made < $500 this year) but my day job (programming) exceeds the $100,000 figure.
How about if I want to upload it to a virtual world - Second Life or Cloud Party - as my personal Avatar? Surely you aren't expecting me to cough up the same amount as someone who's selling a game for profit? Most virtual worlds are very hot on the protection of user uploaded content - after all, they are doing the same as the community here - selling their copyrighted works for profit. A world that can't protect it's content doesn't have very many content creators. I don't buy the argument that they are easy to steal in this scenario - do you simply have an issue with people seeing (and thus wanting to buy) your fine models?
I understand that if I wanted to sell the Avatar in the virtual world that it would be a different matter - although a royalties based scheme rather than a flat fee would probably get you a lot more revenue and usage.
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Comments
I think the indie license includes your total income including non gaming related works.
it states clearly on the product page
Indie Game Developer License
(Developers with Personal or Business income of LESS than $100,000.00 annually.)
Game Developer License for Commercial Developers
(Developers with Personal or Business income of MORE than $100,000.00 annually.)
I think that is hard to misinterpret. You can push your own logic all day and night, but that's really not allowed here anyway. You accept the terms or go home. LOL not that I disagree, or agree one way or other.
I'm not trying to get around the license, I'm simply seeking to find out if the licensing terms are really as silly as they look... and the more I look at them the sillier they look. How is prohibiting games from including them going to stop them being stolen when a hacker can just download DAZ Studio under a fake id and simply export the figures themselves?
Once I've got some answers I'll make a couple of decisions - whether to buy Carrera 8 Pro as a modelling tool and whether to invest any effort (and money) into tools to easily convert DAZ Studio figures and animations into Cloud Party animations. I've a suspision it could be done by simply running a script against a DAE export - but as the license stands it's not worth experimenting with any of the standard DAZ3D figures.
You're putting the cart before the horse. In your example 1. You wont be able to upload any character to SL. With the poly count limit you wouldn't be able to upload genesis's foot, let alone genesis. 2. Stealing and selling others content is one of the worst problems on SL.
I always find this stuff a bit amusing. Genesis has the poly count of an entire game scene, meaning if genesis is the only thing in the scene your game engine might be able to push it. Your average game character has 2-5K polies. Genesis has 18K.
Carrara is far more then a modeling app. If all you want to do is model get Hexagon here, it's free and one of the best modelers going.
Studio 4 DAE has been screwed up since release. DAZ is working on DUF, so it's doubtful dae will be fixed any time soon.
You should worry about the license after you find out if you can do what you want. Of coarse you could just skip DAZ, get Make human, and make your own figures with no licensing to worry about. http://www.makehuman.org/ also free. But then you would have to uvmap, texture, bone/rig the character yourself.
@ManStan, You should do a bit of research on game polycounts so you can use more up to date information. Games have been using a higher poly count thank 5k for characters for nearly 10 years now, but 18k is still high for a single character depending on your target system/genre. Regardless there are ways to lower. Also you must be playing ipod games if you think you can only get 18k into a single scene. Even the Sega Dreamcast (circa 1999) was able to push 4 million tris, granted that was top performance so no logic or textures, but it's easy to see even that system can do more than 18k a scene.
Here are a few examples, I got this from the link below.
Kingdom Under Fire : The Crusaders, Xbox, 2004
Main characters - 10,000 polygons
Characters - 3,000 - 4,000 polygons
Keep in mind Kingdom Under Fire had hundreds if not thousands of characters on screen at once, and was for the original xbox which only had 64mb of ram and a 700mhz intel processor.
Mass Effect, X360, 2007
Sheppard + armor + weapons - ~20,000-25,000 polygons
Lair, PS3, 2007
Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)
Not saying this list is completely accurate, but will give you better idea.
http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/23520-Historical-Poly-Counts
To the best of my knowledge, there is no legal route to get DAZ Content into SecondLife or CloudParty as anything other than sprites / renderings anyway. The game license is only for new games that the purchaser of the licence is making.
Also derivative works are still covered by the EULA and thus have the license requirements still in place.
the advantage of Carrara, is you can indeed rig your own models for games.
I have gotten ugly things I made in Sculptris and rigged in Carrara into iClone, Houdini Apprentice, Unreal game engine UDK and even Blender rigged and animated!
I have yet to be able to get a Daz character into the last two successfully.
Bingo! as a supposed programmer pulling in 3 figures, i tend to think you have the ability to learn to make your own 3D assets for personal, commercial use.
I'm a programmer, not an artist. There's a lot of difference between the innards of a z/OS system and a 3D figurine. I can (and have) made plugins for Carrerra, but my skills don't extend to making a respectable 3D mesh of a human.
Carrera I like because I know how to use it - my latest copy predates its purchase by DAZ however and the good stuff I need for modelling seems to be in the Pro copy.
Hackers, by definition, ignore law, ethics and morality. If they respected them they wouldn't be hackers.
A lot of work goes into making these figures, props and wardrobes. You can't blame them for trying to protect their creative property.
What people tend to forget is not everyone wants to be an artist, or specialize in making humans. Nothing wrong with it, we have a limited time on this planet and we should use it wisely.
Being an artist, programming was always tough for me but I learned just enough to piece together a few games but I borrowed a lot of code that was shared by the community. I had ideas of how the game logic should work, but couldn't master all the particulars around exactly how code needed to be planned and implemented to achieve those goals.
I was able to make a few games that way, and would never say I'm a programmer. And I realistically don't have enough time to learn that trick, nor the sincere interest. Even so I was able to get the job done by using assets that were available to me.
So while I typically would say yeah, a game artist should model from scratch for a variety of reasons, I understand why an programmer or musician wouldn't.
Oh and I also arranged the music for the games using loops you could buy. Not enough time to learn how to write from scratch!
You can't master everything, nor is it necessary.
*this is not an endorsement for using Genesis for games, or for SL or anything at all*
larsmidnatt I would have been more convinced by your argument if you had quoted computer game not game deck games. None the less I will admit it has been a few years since I took a game apart to study the elements.
mikclrk once again I will point you to makehuman for your game figures. http://www.makehuman.org/
@ManStan Okies, I can quote some more for ya! Here are some PC games.
Crysis, PC, 2007
Nano-suit character - 67,000 polygons (uncertain whether it's an in-game model or not) ¹
Characters' heads - ~2500-3000 polygons
Characters' bodies - ~5000 polygons
Unreal Tournament 3, PC, 2007
Weapon models – 4,500 to 12,000 triangles for the first person view
Again, if you are looking at MMO's it would be different, and they change polycounts for characters sometimes when expansions come out with new hardware requirements. I found articles that said Wow characters range for 6k to 19k, but of course they have LOD so you don't see all that usually. (but it's still modeled)
And PC games tend to push more polys then consoles, well they tend to be more capable. But I know PC games these days are often designed around console limitations.
And remember, this is 2013...
Sorry OP for the OT :)
A minor correction. World of Warcraft characters have no more than 2000 polygon counts for the most detailed heroes, and that includes armor. It's an old MMO and the poly count is kept intentionally low for compatibility with older systems.
reference by chance? I've been trying to track down a reliable one, not that I play WOW but a lot of people know it so it's a good point of reference.
Gonna start a new thread to be fair.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14825/
Can't really give a reference, since it's based on the actual models. There's a model viewer available for WoW which allows you to see the tri counts for the models. Base models were around 1300 poygons to 1500. Armor varied widely, and I don't have the expansions just the free version since I'm not much of a player, so I can't speak for any newer stuff which might be higher quality. Still. the average gear only added another 800 tris or so, making the total around 2k.
I'd be interested in seeing if any of the newer stuff has higher counts, but judging by the screenshots I've seen, they're still relatively low detail meshes. Anyway, further thread deviations I'll post in the new thread you created.
Had a look at makehuman - nice.