How to integrate Daz meshes in a game with the 'Indie Game Developer Licence'...

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hello DAZ gurus!

We are creating an Indie game using Unity 3D and we wish to give the player the ability to 'morph' the humanoid bodies during gameplay (e.g. soldier becomes more muscular as he goes up levels, some characters slimmer / more corpulent, etc)

So far the Michael 4 and Victoria 4.2 meshes and textures appear to be a good starting point for the morphs we're hoping to integrate.

My questions relate to what we can (legally) integrate into our game given the Daz "Indie Game Developer Licence":

- Q1: Can we integrate the Michael 4 & Victoria 4.2 skinned meshes and body textures into our game?

- Q2: Can we integrate morphs purchased on the Daz site into our game?

- Q3: Is there a 'Daz runtime' we can ship with our game to dynamically morph the characters?

- Q4: Are there games that ship with Daz technology so we see what can be (legally) done?

Thank you so much for any hint in the right direction!

     Daniel

Richard Haseltine

I can't answer the technical questions on how it would be doen, but yes the Daz 3D Game Developer License would allow you to use any products which list Daz 3D as the vendor in your game.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi Richard, thanks for taking the time.

So if I understand correctly, if a vendor on the Daz 3D site is Daz then I can fully use that resource in my game?  (e.g. skinned game mesh, textures, morphs and have the ability for my players to morph their own characters in-game?

That would be really good!  However may I ask how 'sure' you are of your answer?  (i.e. is it commonly done and accepted?)  I don't what to invest months of time integrating this technology in our game and later have to take it out because of legal issues!!

Thanks for your help! :)

Richard Haseltine

As long as the assets are in the base game code (not in-game purchases or add-ons) and are encrypted so it isn't straightforward to extract them (we know nothing can be locked down absolutely, you just need to use something that works currently) then how they behave within the game is up to you.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi Richard, thank you for the precisions... both points are important and it's good to read about these requirements before as both points influence our implementation to protect the assets within the shippable game.

Are you aware of additional documentation that details these technical requirements of Daz asset integration into games?   (Perhaps a community of developers who integrate Daz assets into their game and who could answer technical questions?)

Thanks again! :)

Richard Haseltine

I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any additional documentation. Workable ways to protect content would probably be a moving target, and I imagine it is a fairly widely discussed topic on forums dedicated to the engine (there shouldn't be any special requireemnts from its being Daz content). I've absolutely no idea how morphing is handled in game engines, but again it must be a moderately frequent requirement.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

HI Richard, awesome, thanks for taking the time with this key information.  May I inquire if you're speaking on behalf of Daz on these points?  (Am trying to find authoritative answers from Daz to avoid bad surprises when we launch!)

Richard Haseltine

Yes, that is the official position. Proection of the data comes up fairly often, as you may imagine given that it is an EULA requirement, and that has always been the reply.

DAZ_Rawb

Also, if you are using Unity as your base, then you could give the figures made by Morph3D a try. They are available in the unity asset store for pretty cheap.

 

It's made by a sub-group here at Daz that are focused on getting Daz content available in the game markets. They have gone through a lot of work with optimization and getting the rigging to work just right for actual games so you don't have to redo all of that work. Also, they are fully licensed for use in games to begin with so there aren't any licensing worries to think about.

 

The downside is that only a small portion of the content has been converted over, but if what is available works (and you are using Unity) it could be something to check out.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi DAZ_Rawb and Richard,

Richard: Thanks for the prompt and usable answers of the technical requirements to host Daz assets in a video game.

DAZ_Rawb: Thanks for that heads-up on Morph3D.  I didn't know about it and I'll be certaily studying what they do and if their approach can save development time.

Q: Is there a 'Daz shippable runtime' that can legally be shipped with a video game?  I think having parts of the Daz functionality available to be consumed by video game engines would be really neat and useful!  (e.g. Daz without the UI.. only controlled programmatically to construct and morph meshes)

Thanks everyone! :)

FSMCDesigns

dvochin_980fde5d8e said:

 

Q: Is there a 'Daz shippable runtime' that can legally be shipped with a video game?  I think having parts of the Daz functionality available to be consumed by video game engines would be really neat and useful!  (e.g. Daz without the UI.. only controlled programmatically to construct and morph meshes)

Thanks everyone! :)

Since DAZ and it's assets here are not focused on game use in general, Morph3d would be the closest thing to any kind of shippable runtime since game use is their sole purpose.

I would be interested in seeing any type of game that has legally used DAZ assets in their game, anyone have any examples?

larsmidnatt

dvochin_980fde5d8e said:

Q: Is there a 'Daz shippable runtime' that can legally be shipped with a video game?  

No, it's just a license for assets. You have to figure out how to get them to work on your target. 

I would be interested in seeing any type of game that has legally used DAZ assets in their game, anyone have any examples?

Not something you advertise. It's not a selling point. Considering how commonly we see the game licenses in the top sellers, there are certainly products out there.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi FSMCDesigns!

Thanks for the hint!  Indeed joining Daz + major game engines so Daz can be programmatically controled to generate game meshes would certainly tunr some heads!

I'd love to see games that integrate Daz assets to see how they did and to what extent the Daz Indie licence can be used.

I'll certainly study Morph3D closely :-)

Cheers! :)

larsmidnatt

The Daz Indie License is pretty straight forward if you understand the art creation process at all. It's just a license to use content (covered by said license) in a real time application.

It's just for the art.

If you are looking for more of a complete solution (sounds like it) than Morph3d is what may need to focus on.

"how to integrate daz meshes in a game"
You have options. OBJ, FBX and maybe DAE :) The rest is up to you. That is all you get. So you need to have someone figure out if the workflow even makes sense for you.

As long as the assets are in the base game code (not in-game purchases or add-ons) and are encrypted so it isn't straightforward to extract them (we know nothing can be locked down absolutely, you just need to use something that works currently) then how they behave within the game is up to you.

Either this is not part of the license or it was added recently. Or is this just one of those things we should assume? 

FSMCDesigns

Good point larsmidnatt, sad thing is, it is very easy to rip meshes from most games these days with online communities that focus and share in this behavior. Surprises me anyone still wants to create a totally original game these days.

dvochin_980fde5d8e said:

Hi FSMCDesigns!

Thanks for the hint!  Indeed joining Daz + major game engines so Daz can be programmatically controled to generate game meshes would certainly tunr some heads!

I'd love to see games that integrate Daz assets to see how they did and to what extent the Daz Indie licence can be used.

I'll certainly study Morph3D closely :-)

Cheers! :)

Having done modeling work for a couple of game studios, i still feel that anyone wanting to create a game should also create their own assets. But having seen DAZ meshes used outside of the EULA, I am glad to see Morph3D taking the lead and initiative, if only to help with keeping this community more seperate from the gaming community.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi larsmidnatt,

Thanks for the useful precisions.  With everyone's comments I have a good idea of the limits of the licence as well as how to morph the Daz skinned meshes in-game and how to protect them from extraction.

I'd be interested in what the actual Daz tech requirements are in regards to digital protection of in-game Daz assets.  At a minimum I can certainly store the meshes with the vert positions, UV, morphing and skinning info encrypted as to be useless if extracted... although 'total protection' against all possible attach vectors is probably impossible.

Q: So the Daz art is thus far only available under OBJ, FBX, DAE formats?  (i.e. to your knowledge no way to morph these outputs at gametime by any kind of Daz runtime?

Thanks again! :)

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi FSMCDesigns,

Very good points on mesh protection...  seeing triple-A titles like Skyrim or Mass Effect getting their meshes extracted right from game memory shows how difficult it can be to protect the art from expert-level hackers.  Mind you I can make it 'really hard' by keeping the mesh encrypted in RAM but eventually it needs to be sent to DirectX in the clear and that's the common point of attack for game hackers.

Mind you I could slice the mesh in dozen of parts without affecting performance too much... this would make it much harder to extract the original mesh from these parts and most people would give up but complete protection is impossible unless the graphic runtime can accept encrypted assets from the game engine.

I'm interested in how Morph3D was able to do mesh protection... :)

larsmidnatt

Morph3D doesn't really need to protect the mesh, the base meshes are free anyway. You can't compare Morph3D to Daz( the business models are similar but totally different technically).

Also simple encoding holds up in court as protection. Ask Tecmo. it doesn't matter how easy it is to break, the thought is all that counts legally. (legally you can't define good versus bad projections as it changes daily) But like I said, I never saw any technical encryption requirements provided by Daz. 

Daz art can be exported however you can...but the normal formats would be be OBJ, FBX, DAE and maybe a handful of others. Daz Studio isn't designed to export directly to any game software. You have to do the middle work yourself.(you can export a daz fbx and import directly into Unity/Unreal but expect some potential quirks...again like I said you have to figure out what workflow works for you)

If you use DirectX or OpenGL expect people to be able to get the data and mod to the end of the universe. 

 

 

 

 

 

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi larsmidnatt,

Thanks for the interesting points...  really good to know about a simple encoding being 'good enough'... as long as the resources are not in the clear is easy enough to do.  Interesting about Morph3D and Tecmo.

Thanks again for the useful hints! :)

Velvet Goblin

dvochin_980fde5d8e said:

Hi FSMCDesigns,

Very good points on mesh protection...  seeing triple-A titles like Skyrim or Mass Effect getting their meshes extracted right from game memory shows how difficult it can be to protect the art from expert-level hackers.  Mind you I can make it 'really hard' by keeping the mesh encrypted in RAM but eventually it needs to be sent to DirectX in the clear and that's the common point of attack for game hackers.

Mind you I could slice the mesh in dozen of parts without affecting performance too much... this would make it much harder to extract the original mesh from these parts and most people would give up but complete protection is impossible unless the graphic runtime can accept encrypted assets from the game engine.

I'm interested in how Morph3D was able to do mesh protection... :)

You don't have to rip Bethesda assets from game memory as they make them available for download (along with the Creation Kit(s)) so that people can mod the games. Not permitting game assets to be loaded into other apps would hamstring modding attempts, and I think Bethesda pretty much realizes that mods may be what keep their 4+ year old games selling. I'm not sure about BioWare.

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi Velvet Goblin.  True that Bethesda assets can be extracted from their disk files with dedicated tools.  However it must have been quite difficult to create the tools to read / write meshes to their disk files.  I gather that they deliberately chose not to encrypt their data for modability.

larsmidnatt

Encrypting game art is pointless, so that's actually a reason people don't waste time doing it. Even for games that want to prevent mods they barely encrypt anything.

That's why I brought up Tecmo, they have a big history with this stuff. They have been to court over modding yet they put in very lax "encryption". Circumventing any encryption in games you buy is illegal. So even though all Tecmo did in their most recent PC game was reverse the bit order*, it is protected by law. People still mod very easily, but now Tecmo has grounds to shut them down and have their content removed. Modding is legal, decrypting data, not so much.

*I did not confirm this myself. However I've seen it stated in a few reliable sources who tinker in this area. It took people less than a day (I hear less than an hour) to figure out what Tecmo did. And what they did is one of the most basic forms of encryption that existed before we had computers :)

 

dvochin_980fde5d8e

Hi larsmidnatt,  thanks for the interesting anecdote with Tecmo... didn't know.  I looks like simply 'encrypting' the resources on disk with an xor fixed-random pattern looks good enough, which avoids significant performance loss, reasonable protection and is 'good enough' legally.  Thanks again! :)