Boss Has Asked Me to Stop Using Daz and Only Use UE4
mechengineer97
Posts: 116
in The Commons
Boss just came back from an expo in the US where he saw a UE4 demo. Wants me to start using UE4 exclusively now. Is that even possible? Don't you still need to use external software to rig up cars and characters? Also, nobody at the company has UE4 so he asked me to install it on my home rig. So doesn't that also create a problem? Thought you needed UE4 in order to watch anything.
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Comments
Fire him. If he wants you to use it exclusively, then he has no idea.
It’s a game engine not a modeler, your boss has no idea obviously
Of course you could suggest he buy you a subscription to the Autodesk suite and Zbrush as you will need it if not using DAZ content
and some nice CGtalk tutorial sessions
I just did a Google search .....
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ue4
I'd personally tell the boss he needs to purchase it ......
What do you use DS for? I can see where for some applications like interactive demos, UE4 might be a better tool for the job. But you need to make your Boss aware that this will be a different work flow, and that there may be considerable time spent converting the DAZ assets you already have to UE4 (especially the shaders). Of course the other alternative is to buy/make all new assets for UE4. Just wondering why he wants you to use your own rig?
Why purchase??
AFAIK, The base UE4 is free, like Unity
@OP
If we can assume you are currently using Daz studio,
then it is possible to export Daz studio content to UE4 for Game dev(with proper Daz licensing) ,or rendering animation or stills.
Show your Employer this site for a comprehensive overview
of the $$labor$$ involved.
http://standsurestudio.com/daz3dinfo/
you can be more precise about your line of work???, if is just modeling and basic animations and rigging(walk clicles, bla bla bla and poses) then no need unreal, daz can do that, but if is to do render then both can do that(maybe unreal be a little better based on what type or render), if it's for true animations like cgi trailers, cinematics and adversiments then you would need both DAZ and unreal, daz to make the base animations and unreal to render the full final animation, then if for game then you can still use both daz and unreal.
What is matter is what you are working and what your boss want from you but in the end at last in my experience as a indie game dev i can say which both daz and unreal can work pretty well together and don't need to choose one over the other unless, your boss want you to use full unreal assets market.
Sorry guys, been trying to import an FBX from Daz into Maya and then to UE4. Was also in contact with UE4 forums where they told me UE4 is just part of the pipeline and needs animation programs like Maya/Blender to export assets into UE4. But they also warned that it will take more work and time to push out videos using UE4 vs just using animation software.
I’m basically creating short one minute storyboards of avatars using features of a car. Sometimes they’re safety related or just convenience features. The most pain in the butt scene so far was having a guy exit the vehicle and hooking up chains for a trailer. Of course, I cropped out the chain and showed only the hook and the hole it was being connected to. My last avatar scene was a guy pushing in a box into the back of an SUV. There are no interactions with the viewers, it’s just a video.
This is an ending to one of my videos using Daz. Sorry I can’t show you more.
Right now, I’m trying to find tutorials on Youtube for UE4 car rigging using Maya, as the company does have access to it, but they're all for Blender or 3DS Max and for gaming. Almost nothing for the cinematic aspects of UE4.
The reason I’ve been using my own rig because it has two 2080 Ti’s while my work rig is a CAD laptop with a low end mobile gpu which I’m not allowed to install anything anyway. Paid for iClone and all the Daz plugins for my rig too. Paying for everything myself sort of pisses me off, but not as much as my boss scolding me for not working in the office more often where I’m not allowed to bring in my own rig. He said he ordered a desktop rig with an rtx 2080 with both Daz and iClone installed last month, but I guess that got rejected and they want me to use something totally free I guess.
But as I mentioned in my other posts, I had less than a month in my contract as an engineer when they wanted to see what I could do storyboard wise. Started off with GoAnimate, then iClone and when I started to integrate iRay with Daz, they offered me a permanent position. That's why I'm so grateful for the help I've gotten here.
Just wanted to say that's it's aways interesting to see for me how people use daz in unexpected ways.
Thanks for inspiration!
Strange that they cannot claim work related expenses off their tax
your work must have lousy accountants
"He said he ordered a desktop rig with an rtx 2080 with both Daz and iClone installed"
Would it be legal for you to load your paid content onto a computer owned by someone else?
Would your boss ever let someone else use that computer, or let you delete content if you left?
You might be better off buying another desktop to use at work, with their mouse, monitor, etc.
Or install your content onto a fast USB SSD and taking it home with you every night.
The entire amount of the expense isn't taken off your tax bill. Only the percentage that is taxed. So the computer might have still cost more than they were willing to pay.
Aware of that but they also are actually running a company bringing in profit etc, never heard of any business expecting their employees to provide their own equipment at home and if they are in fact dictating what he should use they should also be providing that, the fact DAZ studio is free and they want him to use paid software itself suggests some sort of reimbursement somewhere by clients and tax.
The boss needs to do his research into the softwares and their limitations also by looks.
"The boss needs to do his research into the softwares and their limitations also by looks."
Agreed! But too many people believe that research is for the little people.
Buying your own equipment might be a precondition for working from home. It's pretty common.
Daz is THE BEST product line for Unreal (and Unity). Reallusion's Character Creator 3 is the product that acts as the bridge between Daz and Unreal/Unity (for characters only). For things like cars you're probably better off just purchasing models directly from the Unreal store, but for character models Daz blows absolutely everything else away from a price/quality perspective. No competition at all.
Well iClone CC iAvatars themselves are pretty good in Unreal but the whole pipeline considerably dearer than DAZ if only doing renders
if doing games CC is definitely the better choice licensing wise
I agree, Wendy. Unreal is good for lengthy animated scenes or games. It is inferior to Iray for non-animated renders. Not to mention costly when you factor in third-party pipelines and add-ons. My guess is the boss saw Unreal Digital Humans or similar promo and was sold on this as of yet unavailable product.
Yeah, your boss sounds clueless, need to educate him on what is really going on and what is needed.
Like the video taste
Your boss is one of those "OOOOOOOHHHHHH SHINEY!!!" people, aren't they?
This does sound a bit 'shifty' ( to me, obviously i cannot know all the variables here)
TBH, if your boss wants you to use specific programs when working at the actual office/workplace ( not at home) it is the COMPANY'S obligation to provide the
equipment and software that is required, NOT yours. Yes, if you want to actually do company work from home, then it can be your responsibility to provide whatever resources are required ( this depends on how the contract is set-out )
I hope you can negotiate with your boss to either get reimbursed some figure if he wants you to bring your OWN equipment and software into the office/workplace, or he/the Company will purchase the equipment and software that will allow you to work in the office/workplace.
The environment looks like a static photo with the Daz car casting a shadow underneath itself
Also poser is an option, since poser assets can be used in games too. Personally I believe the whole "interactive license" trip doesn't make any sense. I mean if you have to make games then go to poser or iclone, since daz is just ridiculously overpriced for that. And also daz assets are not game ready anyway so you have to spend a lot of time optimizing them for game engines.
Thanks. Done in Daz, but I cheated. It was using a 4k HDRI backdrop image that took forever to find online https://www.freeimage.us/share-06B4_5D3298BC.html. All the lighting was from using the sunset preset environment. I remember one of the Daz tutorials saying only to use environmental lighting for most realistic results. The ground was set to auto so the shadows and wheels interacted with the road properly. But I know what you mean, it took a lot of trial and error and I found that toning down brightness levels produced the most realistic results. That's why the shadow the car is making seems a bit faded. I think the reflections Daz is creating from the backdrop image to cast onto the car is what makes it look so realistic. I only use the sunset preset now for all my renderings. The car was from a Blender asset sharing website https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/91623 created by GoldenDiamondStudios for use royalty free. The iray shaders was from a huge collection that Tom2099 shared on deviant art https://www.deviantart.com/tom2099/art/Iray-car-related-shader-presets-megapack-539622361 Hardest part was getting the trajectory of the car to follow the road. Had to animated the scale of the car because it looked too big when it reached the end of the road.
As I mentioned in my other posts, what's really ironic is that they hired a Maya/Arnold graphics graduate to help me with the animation, but the stuff I create with Daz gets done faster and looks more realistic than his Maya renderings so I'm still doing all the animating through Daz.
I was contractor when I started doing these storyboards and the company laptob was totally underpowered so the company let me use my home rig which itself is a huge company violation. My situation is really unique because DAZ has let me take CAD data for products that don't even exist yet and put them into a storyboard which has never been done before (well this company anyway). The other thing is, it took IT over a year to finally approve using iClone and 6 months for Daz. But it looks like that's not going to happen now with switching to UE4. Been nagging him for over a year to get me a proper rig, but it won't be anywhere close to my home rig which was originally being used for gaming, running Siemens NX11 and video authoring. Just ordered a 2950x rig to replace my 5930k from Amazon when I saw the it on sale for $760 CAD ($580 USD) with free shipping for Prime day. Which I hope I won't be using for work.
Already tried to get them to pay for the extra $20/month to my hydro bill with my PC and 65" TV being on almost 24/7.
I was just really lucky for being at the right place at the right time. But just to reiterate, I'd be unemployed if it wasn't for the help in the forums here and at iClone and tutorials on Youtube.
My boss is a pain, but he fought really hard to get me hired on full time.
actually i tried to use CC avatar on unreal and honestly they are bad, specially the hair, the cc hair is a nightmare to make it's looks good, currently i'm using a CC in my game project and it really don't look that good, specially the fact which CC characters have less polygons and in some places like the breast it's easy to notice and catch the "low poly count" if i'm not wrong the CC avatar naked is around 14k poly and while it can be fine in some characters cases in CC is not really, unless you don't want a "realistic look character" and more "low poly character", another big issue of CC is which it unlike DAZ can't export morphs.
This is why i started to consider to use DAZ instead of CC for my next game project once the current one is finished, CC at first sight is cool, but later the only "good thing on it" are it's low poly cloths" because character wise its really bad in comparation with DAZ, it's only really wins when comes over cloths and acessories cuz they are optimized for game(low poly) with very good normal maps and others things unlike DAZ which is more optimized and focused in render.
this is something which i do agree about "DAZ" the interactive lLicenses are a lot infair and really too high price, many times is much better buy a big bundle and pya for the interactive license than buy "single products" which are for the same price of the interactive license, the fact which the license only goes in sales in really few times per year(like 2 or 3 times in a year) and even that is just for 50%(and not all products in many cases) of the price still make it looks a lot too high priced, for cases like mine, daz in many times does looks much more expensive, even the "basic figures prices" are too expensive, like 100 buckets to be able to use "each daz figure", which means if you want to use all the 4 genesis (genesis, genesis 2, 3 and 8) you have to pay 400 + each individual product license which most of then are between 35 and 50, it could easy make you have to expende really a lot to use daz stuffs, it's really only cheap for render but if you plan to use it for game develop you really must be ready to pay really a lot of money, due to that pretty expensive licenses, for now since i'm still learning how to use the stuffs and improve things then it's fine to just pay the "base price" but i'm well worried for when the time's come where i must pay that crazy expensive licenses,.
it's really complicated for game dev using daz or even CC, both of then have good and bad things, for me the bad side of daz is really his high expensive "interactive licenses" and many, really many products are "high poly count" since thet are more focused in rendering which i can understand and be fine, because i can still find some "usefull products" to avoid it, while in the other side CC does have a more game dev pipeline focused which is good because most of its products are "low poly" which for cloths and acessories are fine but for the character it make specially in female cases you can easy spot how low poly it's feel like they are almost made for "mobile" or close to it or to "low ending machines, another problem with CC is also it's prices sometimes it can feel a lot expensive almost in the same level of DAZ, overal it still less expensive, but the big problem for CC it's lacks of proper "sales" and even when sales comes the discount are "too low" like a 100 buckets product being put on 80 at best and things like that, it can make DAZ more attractive in many cases because some of it's sales plus others discounts can make the product much more cheap than CC even counting the "interactive license".
IF daz don't have the interactive license or it's prices where more "cheap" or it have more times the "50% discount" it could be much better and attractive for indie game devs.
Currently to be fair most of the indie devs are still using CC fuse(from adobe) since it's free and does give you a good "library" of stuffs to make game dev.
Yeah, I needed a Hi Res image of a road fading away to the horizon. Almost drove out to the country looking for one. Took a couple of hours to find it on line.
Started off as a contract design engineer, I'm an employee now. I paid for everything starting with GoAnimate monthly fees, then iClone and now Daz. Asked the company to pay for a 1Tb SSD after installing UE4. Had to uninstall one of the Borderlands games and Metro Last Light to get it to fit.
Figured out why I was instructed to stop using iClone. Company had plans to get the iClone plugin for UE4 couple of weeks. Price tag is $1000 USD / year.