Genesis 2 to trump Genesis 3 in game dev?
JamesMugford
Posts: 31
in The Commons
I know Genesis 3 is the future and looks to be receiving massive uptake in the community.
However I wonder if with the advent of Morph3D as well as a few other advantages, if Genesis 2 will maintain its place in the game development community.
Please note, I am a proud owner of a Daz3d Indie Game Developer license.
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Comments
Couldn't say since most here don't use DAZ assets in game design. To bad Morph3d don't have any forums set up yet for those into game development. Didn't even know that genesis 2 even had a place in the game development community. I do see genesis mesh popping up at places it shouldn't, but rarely see it mentioned at the Unity or Epic forums myself.
I keep wondering if/when Morph3D will be finalized and all game releated assets here at DAZ will be moved to the Morph3d side of things since I personally feel they should be kept seperate
Here is a list of game communities and assets that might help
http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-development-forums/
Do you mean that the owner may have not had a game development licence or is there any other reason the characters cannot be used?
Thanks,
Minxies
are you speaking for all developers then?
And is Gen3 development continuing to be persued by DAZ for the game developer community over the use it has with 3d artits who are not developers?
Sorry? It's not clear exactly what you are asking.
Looks like you silently edited your post.
It still makes no sense. Sorry, you're going to have to be more clear with your questions.
if G2 if preferred by developers they represent a very small percentage of the user base of daz figures, probably not enough to justify and changes at Daz with policy or development. I'm not a game developer, I'm 3D modeler, and a certified wisenheimer, but the majority of users here who would use poseable figures in a game would likely use them in 2D, not 3d that's the bulk of where I have seen them in games (and moreover it's Posette and Dork) when they are used.
Looks like you silently edited your post.
It's simply called editing. and if you had posted your response before I edited that would explain the timing.
Making your own custom items is nice and well, but not everybody has the time and skills to do so.
Customizing existing figures is easier than building one from scratch, and can save you quite a bit of time.
You could buy it at 70% off, which makes it $150, preferrably with a giftcard you got 20% off, which makes it only $120.
g2 trumps g3 in carrara animation
Thanks for all your comments y'all.
Really nice to have some light shed on the subject.
Right now, using Daz3D characters (G2 or G3) in games just seems too good to be true. I'm waiting for a caveat to crop up, though that doesn't seemed to have happened.
Building from scratch in say ZBursh and Maya is becoming less and less compelling, as for me Daz3D offers a lot of domain specific tooling like great posing features, built in IK and of course a great community :D *ding*
Premade items have a unique appeal to people starting up on their own who have no 3d experience. There are a ton of little game dev engines and software suites out there pushing ready made materials, so I believe that demonstrates a demand. RPG Maker is practically its own GENRE, and you can find a lot of games made with RPG Maker (some even using Daz renders) on Steam and other places. Steam even has a search tag for RPG Maker made games, lol. Anyway, the small developer market is what Daz was trying to target with Morph3d. But they failed. Miserably. That's a shame, too, because that is a large untapped market right there ready to be seized upon. The problem is that nothing in Daz or Morph3d is really compatible with most game engines. It is a lot more trouble than its worth to make these assets work. even worse, is that while Daz has a dev license, that des NOT cover 3rd party vendors, a number of whom have their own license to buy. This convoluted madness makes Daz basically useless for 3d games.
So here is the low down. If you want to make a game using 2d rendors, like a visual novel, rpg with character portraits, or use renders for sprite based animations, then Daz totally CAN be a good program to use. Bonus: You do not need a game license for 2d renders, ever! Rejoice! Your renders are yours to keep. You can find a number of games on Steam and mobile that use Daz renders for their stories. A number of those item finder types of games use renders as well.
However, if you want to use Daz or Morph3d figures in a full 3d game, that is a big NOPE. It is certainly possible, but not exactly optimal. As I wrote above, not only do you need Daz's license, but also a game license for any 3rd party vendor item you used. So if you bought any items that are not officially from Daz themselves (They are the "Daz Originals") for your game, you need to pony up more cash for that vendor if they require a license. For example, did you buy a product made by Zev0 or RawArt for use in your game? They EACH have a $500 Indie license separate from Daz's license. Now, there are a lot of vendors that don't ask for a license, its mostly the big vendors. So just check with each one. And again, the pipelines to import/export between Daz and any game engine are not direct. Like say the bones in a figure may not work with the game engine, and need to be rigged. You would be better off creating your own, and using a different game creating software. This is your caveat. I do not recall seeing a single 3d game that uses Daz assets like this, but there must be a few out there. But due to those license costs and other issues, you can see why there are not many 3d games out there with Daz assets.
So to clarify, you can create a 3d game using Daz -renders- without needing a license, as long as are not the object files or texture maps that figures use. That is where the line is drawn. You can always use any renders you create because you own your renders. But if you use any data from inside Daz software, from rigging to morphs to texture assets, then you need the game license. You could, for example, use a render of a face for a face texture. But you cannot directly use the face texture that is inside Daz without a license. You could use prerendered movies made with Daz for a movie in a game, but you cannot use the animation from the software for actual game animation without the license.
By all means, you can try to pursue the idea, but just make sure you research everything and make an informed desicion. Just stay within the correct legal boundries, and you still will need some ability to rig these models in a 3d program. Hope this helps.
Hi Outrider,
Thanks for the heads up.
Yep, I'm fully aware of the legal aspects and have spent a long time going through the EULA with a fine tooth combe. I wouldn't want the lovely Daz creature to go without!
I'm using UE4 as my game engine weapon of choice. It's been a fiddle to get these characters in but otherwise I haven't seen any issues. Especially not with rigging.
To UE4, the models are just skinned meshes with x many joints in a hierarchy tree. Nothing too outrageous.
I agree, Morph3D seems to be a spectacular failure. Worst, they're still using G2 tech.
just googled trump for translation
very funny the different meanings of this word
Can only speak for myself, but I started with G2 and switched to G3 soon after. In theory both are supported, but I added more optimizations for G3 meanwhile. It's a PITA to load the objects correctly, order the meshes, set up the shaders and materials, stitching meshes together and whatnot. Applying morphs is still giving me a hard time, because I use bones and the morphs are based on joints, where I still have problems translating between those. A lot of morphs work pretty well, but a lot also do very strange things. Any hints/links/help are very appreciated. ;-)
I'm using a custom made engine, because neither Unreal nor Unity were available on Linux when I started, Unity meanwhile is, but it's part of my fun to play around with code, learn new techniques and implement them, rather than using something *clicky click* - Unity also is quite problematic on Linux, there are many games on Unity which then all share the same problem, which _eventually_ get fixed, or not. It's a mess, really.
What I like about G3 is, that there are fewer materials, which in the end renders faster. There way are more bones though, which need to be animated and pushed to the shader, which makes things slower. There are also less vertices in G3, which again speeds up things, but really, I'd rather like to have more vertices and get rid of those I don't want, instead of having those G3 Base models, which can only be improved by HD morphs, which are prohibitive to be used in a game - G2 is absolutely superior here, no question about that.
So far I can not say that I have a huge benefit by using G3, the opposite is true, because all my materials and animations got useless and needed to be redone, I'm still missing a lot of animations for G3. But, should I ever make it to facial animation, which definitely are on my list, G3 is the way to go, because of the facial bones, which G2 does not have.
Why use DAZ models at all?
Because I'm super awful at creating meshes that look like humans and rigging is an art in itself. There is only so much you can do/learn within your lifespan, I rather focus on the engine, than on creating the assets. As a coder, I'm not good at creating assets at all and the DAZ assets are very good (most of the time), so it frees up time I can spend on the engine.
Morph3D is a pretty neat thing, too bad it is focused on Unity (and uses G2), which is of no use to me at this time. I'd rather see some more tools to help exporting models and integrate them into an engine - no matter which.
tl;dr: G3 > G2 in most aspects
The mesh I saw at Morph3D was very low poly and triangulated, absolutely nothing like Genesis 2.
I recall reading that Morph3D meshes are rebuilt based on Genesis 2.
While I use also DAZ figures in 3d games, I dont think Genesis2 has a established itself as a defacto standard or status of significant prominance within the GameDev community. All pre-developed figures generally will require optimization for the partricular game engine, and while some are easier than others to implement - nearly all generations of DAZ and Poser figures have been successfully optimized for game. Re-topo, UV & texture merging and such may be required.
Even IClone which has gone to great lengths to make low poly figure & animations exports easy is underutilized, IMO. Most studios still roll their own figures, or contract them on spec. Even those dial-a-character generators are not being adopted at the level the publishers expected, so I suspect there is plenty of room for new figures to enter the GameDev toolset.
Most game engines/and or platforms demand tri mesh, smaller textures and low poly mesh or other limits to figure specification to achieve acceptable runtime performance. These are decimations or re-topos of the HD qusad mesh where adaptive polygon density helps maintain features whith the least amount of verts. The game engine, shaders and smoothing algorithims should make the trade off in quality by using low poly mesh and merged textures imperciptable. Thats why its ket to optimize the figure/prop to the game engines strengths.