Using DAZ environments in realtime engine

Interested to use this kind of environments Bal a Versailles into a realtime engine such as Unity, to further add other elements.

Understood using DAZ characters it's not so easy but feasable with heavy decimation, what about this kind of scenes?

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Comments

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    Please note that the product you link here is an add-on item for   this product  http://www.daz3d.com/the-ballroom-1 

  • Thanks yes I noticed, still the basic question remain the same.

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    Have you explored our partner site   https://www.morph3d.com/

  • It'll all comes down to polycounts,  textures sizes and the power of 2.   Realtime engines like efficiency. 

    Can you use it? No reason why not.

    Is there a one click solution to get it to work in Unity.  probably not yet. 

  • Yes I know about MCS characters, unfortunately I never found anything interesting since the options are really limited. Just checked there are just four available environment.
  • wolf359wolf359 Posts: 3,749

    It really is as simple as what Firstbastion said.
    If you can get the polycount& texture resolution down enough it will be usable in a realtime game engine
    Consider investing the Decimator plugin from the store here.

  • It'll all comes down to polycounts,  textures sizes and the power of 2.   Realtime engines like efficiency. 

    Can you use it? No reason why not.

    Is there a one click solution to get it to work in Unity.  probably not yet. 

    I didn't find the polycount of this model, there is any way to. Also to know if I'll need to reduce poly, texture size etc I can do it all inside DAZ.
  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    I opened it in Poser,  exported an obj and then imported that into Bryce.  It says it has 93,804  polygons.

  • davide445davide445 Posts: 27
    edited December 2016

    Do you think will be possible use DAZ to reduce both poly and textures to someting more managable from Unity or similar?

    I did tested DAZ just a few, my real interest is just to being able to use his excellent characters (especially interested in specific clothing style I can't find in game engine asset store), and content (such as this Ballroom) for my realtime projects, so before purchasing any of it I need to understood what can I actually do with it.

    Post edited by davide445 on
  • I haven't used them, but there's Decimator and Texture Atlas that may help reducing both.

  • I didn't noticed Decimator cost €100.

    Considering the cost of the assets + Decimator + time needed (and I still need to understand if all of this will really work inside Unity or my favorite realtime compositing tool) I need better look harder at available low poly art.

  • davide445davide445 Posts: 27
    edited January 2017

    Ok searching here and there I didn't find anything better than the beautiful DAZ clothing.

    Some questions about using the Decimator and importing the asset into Unity

    - Interested into this will be possible to export all the clothing and textures and import into Unity

    - will be difficult for a total newbie

    - Reading the asset require Victoria 4, but I did find Victoria 4, 4.2, 4 for Genesis 2....what's the difference and what I need

    - Arriving in Unity will be possible to animate the clothes so that they didn't appear rigid

    - the Victoria model is ready for lipsync and eye animation

    - Instead of Decimator might I use 3D-Coat to optimize the mode, or this will make the whole workflow much more complex 

    Post edited by davide445 on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890

    a. I've used the Blender decimater to good effect but it's been a while as I've since bought DAZ Studio's Decimater.

    Well most DAZ models decimate to 25% - 33% of their original polygons and look good, even with morphs included. If the morphs don't look good you can decimate to about 50%.

    If you don't include morphs and export the clothings as part of the character to Unity then it is even smaller sizes.

    The standard shader in Unity is PBR but you will have to manually adjust & resize textures from DAZ models for Unity or use DAZ Studio's Atlas Texture tool and resize too.

    Don't forget, HW & SW is becoming more capable every year, so you needn't do like some and get so carried away with 'optimizing assets' that you never actually make a game or animation in Unity.

    b. You want Victoria 4.2 Plus Morphs or better the Victoria 4 Pro Bundle or you can use Genesis with a Victoria 4 Shape Morph addon. Personally, if you weren't going to buy Genesis 3 then I'd buy Genesis as you get male & female from one model so you save money and there is a lot of $1.99 PC+ clothing and arch sets from the Genesis & V4/M4 timeframe. 

    Finally, there is a cheaper dress like the one you point out for Genesis 3:

    https://www.daz3d.com/belle-dress-for-genesis-3-females

    morphs:

    https://www.daz3d.com/belle-dress-morphs

    and you can buy these optional texture add-ons:

    https://www.daz3d.com/beauty-for-belle

    https://www.daz3d.com/garden-party-for-belle-dress

    OK, it is not much cheaper once you buy the morphs too and if you buy all the extra textures then it costs more.

    c. Unity does have Cloth Simulation but it's very HW & SW intensive so much that I've not tried it on my 5 year old laptop - however as I said, new HW & SW is getting more capable so you should check in the Unity forums for that if you have new HW.

    d. Never used 3D-Coat but I've heard more good things about that SW by more different people than any other SW. As I said earlier though Blender will decimate DAZ Models if you export them to Blender correctly and then export to Unity. It works good for some models and not so good for other models. If you can afford it I'd buy the DAZ Decimator.

  • davide445davide445 Posts: 27
    edited January 2017
    Thanks. In fact I need that kind of clothing since will be used for a '800 ballet intro. Being made for Victoria 4 I suppose I can't use Genesis character as V4 is pre Genesis from this map http://indigojanson.com/6544/victoria-michael-genesis-comparison/daz_figures_feb14/ And so V4 clothing will not be usable in Genesis? Also what about lip and eyes animation, V4 come with all is needed to animate them?
    Post edited by davide445 on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890
    davide445 said:
    Thanks. In fact I need that kind of clothing since will be used for a '800 ballet intro. Being made for Victoria 4 I suppose I can't use Genesis character as V4 is pre Genesis from this map http://indigojanson.com/6544/victoria-michael-genesis-comparison/daz_figures_feb14/ And so V4 clothing will not be usable in Genesis? Also what about lip and eyes animation, V4 come with all is needed to animate them?

    Well unless the poster of the information in the other thread was mistaken you can put V4 textures & clothing on Genesis without buying extra add-ons to make it work. I read that in these forums not even a month ago.

    As far as the DAZ animate animations and animations made for V4/M4 in general they will work on all DAZ characters V4/M4 to Genesis to Genesis 2 Male and Genesis 2 Female as far as I've read and as far as my own, un-exhaustive tests showed me.

    Anybody that knows better is welcome to correct me.

    Still if you are going to buy V4 it's best to buy the V4 Pro Bundle pricewise next time it goes on sale.

  • a-sennova-sennov Posts: 331

    1. Yes, you can fit dress from V4 to Genesis3 based characters using this product http://www.daz3d.com/wear-them-all-autofitting-clones-and-clothing-smoothers-for-genesis-3-female-s. Or if you have some modelling software you can use it to fit dress manually and then use Transfer Utility to skin it to Genesis3 (AFAIR SycleYield has product with some useful templates for dresses that will add required control bones). Don't use V4 for gamedev - her mesh is not meant to be skinned by common game engine's methods. Genesis3 is much better suited for that (actually, I'd like DAZ to not use dual quaternions for her either :) )

    2. If your realtime scene will be completely enclosed into this room then 90k triangles is pretty lowpoly for today's hardware. Actually this polycount is becoming standard for the main character closeup. I'm not sure about Unity but in Unreal I have 50k main character in 4x4 km open landscape filled with towns, military bases, foliage etc all amassing in ~10 megapolys and it all renders 60fps on 750GT :)

    3. The biggest problem with realtime is licence - you have to have at least DAZ Indie Gamedev license and then you will be limited to only DAZ Original products. For example, I have many environments from FirstBastion which would fit ideally in my game but sadly I cannot use any of them.

  • I didn't want to create a game, but just a video using this assets. So I suppose there isn't license problems, I didn't want to redistribute any asset. My GPU being a HD7950Boost (about a GTX 660Ti) I'll try before investing in Decimator if I can use as is a model. Just all the Genesis and Victoria topic is still not clear, primarily I want to stay with a clean workflow with as few as possible steps. Using Victoria 4 as asked from the asset creator what I'm loosing in term of character features?
  • posecastposecast Posts: 386

    You might want to look into iClone - which is about to have a brand new version with PBR rendering released - for realtime animation. I know Unity and Unreal have amazing tools and images, but I have been down this road before. Iclone is not as amazing visually, but is designed with realtime filmmaking in mind. That said, there are methods for bringing daz characters into iclone, storing animations for reuse, lip-sync. It is not real time when using highes level quality, but you are talking about seconds per frame. It really is a neat program and I have used it for work many times.

    Good luck!

  • jestmartjestmart Posts: 4,449

    All pre Genesis figures have high poly count, 60 to 70 thousand.

  • davide445davide445 Posts: 27
    edited January 2017

    OT ON

    Before landing to Unity I past some time evaluating iClone and even purchased the full video tutorial released last year.

    I finally didn't like his closeness, forcing you to fully depend from Reallusion for every choice. Adding the sub-par rendering quality, the unfair choice to sell a bugged Indigo Renderer plugin and never bugfix it, the price for the Pipeline 3dxchange version allowing you to export for a different renderer, some messy forumeers/fanboys, the infinite time waiting for RL releasing PBR, the lack of any serious particle system and I finally give up.

    Unity is (not so) more complex, but you learn something relevant at every corner, have ton of choice not only for 3d assets but much more important for incredible extension (i.e. trully realtime dynamic global illumination, GPU based particles, shader editors, generative terrains and may many others) that can customize your worflow, the forum is far more open, the rendering quality is already very good and pushed to increase furher (i.e. the annuncement of the integration of Octane Render in the future release, the hiring of world expert from competition), a native Timeline editor is to be added and many third party solutions are already available.

    This of course my experience and my opinion.

    OT OFF

    I'll look around for testing some DAZ character in Unity, let's see how is coming out.

    Post edited by davide445 on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890
    davide445 said:

    OT ON

    Before landing to Unity I past some time evaluating iClone and even purchased the full video tutorial released last year.

    I finally didn't like his closeness, forcing you to fully depend from Reallusion for every choice. Adding the sub-par rendering quality, the unfair choice to sell a bugged Indigo Renderer plugin and never bugfix it, the price for the Pipeline 3dxchange version allowing you to export for a different renderer, some messy forumeers/fanboys, the infinite time waiting for RL releasing PBR, the lack of any serious particle system and I finally give up.

    Unity is (not so) more complex, but you learn something relevant at every corner, have ton of choice not only for 3d assets but much more important for incredible extension (i.e. trully realtime dynamic global illumination, GPU based particles, shader editors, generative terrains and may many others) that can customize your worflow, the forum is far more open, the rendering quality is already very good and pushed to increase furher (i.e. the annuncement of the integration of Octane Render in the future release, the hiring of world expert from competition), a native Timeline editor is to be added and many third party solutions are already available.

    This of course my experience and my opinion.

    OT OFF

    I'll look around for testing some DAZ character in Unity, let's see how is coming out.

     

    Well there was a fello named JimHug that works at Unity that showed off some work he did using DAZ character models and cloth dynamics in Unity no less.

    Anyway, you can want a video on YouTube of the work Unity has done:

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/89716/interactive-real-time-dynamic-cloth-simulation

    There is a link to a video in the 1st post by the OP (JimHug) and near the end to another video at Unity Unite 2016 (I think that's what that call that).

  • a-sennova-sennov Posts: 331
    edited January 2017

    If you're targetting video then it's OK from licensing standpoint.

    davide445 said:
     Using Victoria 4 as asked from the asset creator what I'm loosing in term of character features?

    V4 is skinned using old Poser method, when you export her into .fbx it will be converted into general weight mapped skinning by DAZ Studio and believe me - you'll not be pleased by results, especially in shoulder and knee areas. In regards of clothing Vicky uses tons of magnets to drive fitted clothing - they also will be lost in conversion resulting in more distortion and poke through. For movies it might be acceptable to just convert clothing to dynamic.

    Genesis3 is also not problem-free. As I've said it uses dual quaternion skinning plus corrective morphs and game engines' implementation of DQ may be very different from DAZ Studio. UE4 droppped DQ support completely for that reason. Also Genesis3 has stone age old and erroneous setup of bones for limbs that sometimes drives simpler IK solvers of game engines crazy but again it might be not relevant for movie. I've finally ended up making my own figure from Genesis3 with different skeleton, converted to linear general weight maps and using constrained corrective bones instead of morphs - now she/he works fine in all software I use :) (well, not exactly - there is bug in UE4 bone driven components that sometimes cause weird behavior of corrective bones, but I gonna fix it and submit poll request to Epic :) )

    Post edited by a-sennov on
  • Maybe I needed to detail I'm really a noob. I was able to export a Gen3 + clothing to Unity and all appear to be fine. But I'm ignorant about the different animation systems: bones vs morphs. Understood DAZ uses morphs, Unity bones+skin weights. Easier path to animate?
  • davide445 said:
    Maybe I needed to detail I'm really a noob. I was able to export a Gen3 + clothing to Unity and all appear to be fine. But I'm ignorant about the different animation systems: bones vs morphs. Understood DAZ uses morphs, Unity bones+skin weights. Easier path to animate?

    DS uses both bones (the joints) and morphs.

  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,528
    edited January 2017

    Below is the screenshot from Unity 5.4.3 of Bal a Versailles, exported from Daz Studio as .fbx (Binary 2014) and drag and dropped to Unity assets folder.

    I disabled V-sync, to check out how much frames per second, one can have. In Unity I used Forward, Gamma rendering path and one Directional Light.

    If you are not making a game in Unity, you do not need to decimate Bal a Versailles set, because it contains many small props with not so many vertices.

    Unity has a limit of 64 K vertices per mesh and if it is larger than the limit, it just splits the mesh to several submeshes (but it is not the case with Bal a Versailles).

    image

    image

    Bal01ForwardGamma01.jpg
    1919 x 1061 - 696K
    DontSync.jpg
    485 x 1021 - 115K
    Post edited by Artini on
  • That's wonderful and need to say I’m honored from so many helps from experts. What's your GPU? Also appear much darker than the original, I suppose the illumination make the difference.
  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,528

    I have Nvidia GTX 1080 graphic card. I will try to add some mesh lights to the scene and remove the directional light.

     

  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,528
    edited January 2017

    This is an example screenshot from Unity with two point lights and disabled directional light. Deferred rendering mode.

    image

    Bal02DefferedGamma01.jpg
    1913 x 1031 - 589K
    Post edited by Artini on
  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,528
    edited January 2017

    ... and with Sepia post effect.

    image

    Bal03Sepia.jpg
    1917 x 1033 - 455K
    Post edited by Artini on
  • ArtiniArtini Posts: 8,528
    edited January 2017

    ... with Beautify post effect package.

    image

    image

    Bal04Beautify.jpg
    1919 x 1049 - 1M
    Bal05BeautifySepia.jpg
    1913 x 1031 - 1M
    Post edited by Artini on
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