Would this be possible or even viable for Daz as a step closer to realism?
wickedxxangel
Posts: 71
First let me flat out say up front that Like a modern car owner, with DS I havescant knowlege of what's under the hood. It's prety much click this turn that press start andwait for the magic, Secondly, this question is in no way shape or form meant to slight or insult ANY artist, or content creator here, or denegrate the wonderous creations they produce. I amin aweof them all, and never cease to be amzed,and inspired by their art. That said I think the thrust of what most here create, even in the realms of fantasy and science fiction characters and content, is driven by a desire to make them as realisticly as possible, to create that "Is it live or is it memorex" split second in the viewers brain, that it could be a real living being that are seeing.
So here's my question: With the ever increasing tech available for scanning, and reproducing exacting replicates of living human beings, would it be possible to create a line of such scanned people, Male, female, teen child, elderly, from real human beings, rig them, alter the defining facial features, not the proportions, or defining physical shapes and sizes, and release them as ultimately real base figures? Then couldn't morphs be created from scans of different phenotypes of people in the male female etc categories to provide equaly realistic changes in shape? like I said, I ask this more out of ignorance than anything, but it seemed a feasable next step in a realistic evolution for the DAZfamily of characters. I have already considered things like being sued for using likeness etc. I would imagine it would be like signing a release to appear on T.V. I don't know. Just an idea from my fuzzy brain. Please chime in, even if it is only to inform meor call me a total ditz! Thanks all!
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Comments
it's already possible in the world of 3d to do this. The problem is the app. DAZ is just a small niche corner of the 3D world and DS is hobbyist software and as such has a few high end commercial applications, but for the most part users use it with the content sold for it in this store and others. High end commercial apps like Maya, Max, C4D, etc are made for any 3D use you can imagine and any mesh assets you can use in them. Check out sites like these for scanned 3D people that work in the commercial apps.
https://3dpeople.com/en/
https://humanalloy.com/
https://renderpeople.com/
https://www.3dscanstore.com/
There are already a few plugins and apps to help the DAZ models look like a specific person. Try Facegen, it has a demo
The other problem with scanning a real person as a DAZ figure is licensing. It's much cheaper to develop a generic figure than to pay someone to replicate their likeness and use it as a base figure.
Those models have to same problems DAZ models do as in when you pose them and change their expression they loose realism. If you have to luxury of scanning every possible pose & expression and the ability to easily combine them it'd be different.
For amateurs like us, for realism it's best to stick with DAZ and introduce blur, fog, glare, and/or darkness to increase or lesson contrast believably in your render(s)/animation(s)
+1 so true. Also, to us hobbyists and fledgling artists, Daz Studio and it's content is the new whiz-bang technology, but in the professional 3d world, most people look down their noses at DS and it's users. I don't know why ... it seems like they would welcome something that could attract young people to the industry. But whatever.
I'll say (and I'm an amateur) that I don't think we'll have a perfect human scan that can emulate movements anytime soon (like within our lifetimes). It's like the old math problem where you start out facing a wall, then you walk half the distance to the wall, then walk half the distance again, and again. In theory, you could repeat that forever and you would never reach the wall, though you would always still be approaching it. That's the way I see 3d human scanning at least for the foreseeable future. We can emulate the way the bones move, but the muscles and tendons attached change shape as they change length or tension. And you have joints like the knee where the patella has a few pieces attached to it and they move as the knee moves. It's one of those things where there's always room for improvement but there is no "perfect", at least not anytime soon. Of course I'll point out that I don't know much about modeling or rigging, I mostly fool around with rendering and raytracing stuff. That's a whole different ball of wax. A lot of this "realistic" sub surface shaded skin ends up looking like a model in a wax museum. But as long as there's a new improved model to sell people, the industry will thrive.
...or like rubber dolls.
It is eight years ago (so my memories of it may not be completely accurate), but I seem to remember Daz announcing that they had bought a body scanner to do just what you suggest. Shortly after they releases the Reby Sky figure for Victoria 4. I remember a lot of hype about the launch and I bought the figure at the time, but unfortunately it wasn't the huge step forward that you might have expected. I don't remember hearing anything else from Daz about scanned figures after that, so maybe it was way too expensive for the returns that it gave.
Here is the figure: https://www.daz3d.com/v4-elite-reby-sky
Of course things have improved since the V4 days, but even at the time there were more realistic figures being created. I would imagine though that the outlay:profit ratio would not be enough to justify it even now.
It depends on the licensing. Some people are going to want royalties, but others will be fine just being paid up front. There a lots of places that offer stock art. There are also places that offer photos of people from different angles for artists, and a number of PAs do use these as a base for their model textures. That's about as close as you will get to a 3D scan.
On Reby Sky I think the render engine of the time wasn't up to task, she looks too toonish. I wonder if anyone has tried converting her to Iray? I don't have this model so I can't. But maybe with a good conversion to Iray or Octane we could see what this model is really capable of. And also, who is Reby Sky??? I never saw this name until I saw it on Daz. I guess I don't watch the right things.
With the advances in tech and realism we've had, I think the concept behind Reby Sky would have a much better chance at selling better today. Then it just becomes a matter of who would want their body scanned. You know what some people are going to do with these models, so the people who get scanned would have to understand that. This would probably scare many away.
I did a test render of Reby (Genesis version) in Iray a while ago, still have the scene so here's a scale up (click pictures for full versions). Converted with V3Digitimes' Iray converter.