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Great tip
will be very helpful
Thanks!!
I agree Wonderland, although I love some of the styles for G2 and G3 I find them sadly lacking and it extremely frustrating as they don't have the most basic morphs.
I still prefer working with older V4 clothing and especially hair with wind morphs not just from the hair ends, many old V4s even have a hathair morph thrown in.
We can use D-formers but shouldn't have to use them for basic morphs......between the various retail outlets we're paying top dollar on many of the items so I expect to get a little more for the money.
Virtual World Dynamics offers something similar for Daz; the bridge is currently in beta, so will hopefully not be long. It's purely for dynamics, not modelling, but it is great.
Creatives will get creative, no matter the tools, I agree and I can see game engines as viable alternatives to animation options since they are getting easier to come by and work with these days. I wouldn't even include XNA in any equation along side a game engine or DS, While you have access to a ton of rigged game models, the program is very simplistic at best and it's user base are mostly those that just want to use free assets.
There's an artist on deviantArt that does things with Source Filmmaker that are better (in my opinion) than anything I've ever seen done in DAZ Studio. These programs have a lot of potential but they're limited by the available content. That is our strength, consistent new content that works natively in an easy-to-use program. I wouldn't change that, but I'd try to expand on the software and base figure capabilities.
I agree, have seen some great things with SFM. Problem is, much of the content for SFM that I have come across on the web and in forums comes from ripping it out of games. I would be interested in seeing what can be done with other, more detailed, legally obtained assets, but really haven't so far and I wonder if users of SFM would ever purchase content like we do here at DAZ
Yeah I don't know how and if exported Studio content can be imported into SFM. I'd assume it can import OBJs, but I've never actually used it. I have seen some decent renders done with XNA, but nothing with any sort of environment.
I do feel we're starting to get stagnant - not the PAs so much, but our general capabilities. Iray was a nice technological jump, but in doing so, we've abandoned a lot of the interesting out-of-the-box ideas like pwToon that used to make things exciting. Hopefully DAZ has some big plans for Studio 5 besides the likely start of a new Genesis line. ;)
I Think game engines have the most promising potential for independant Film making
This was made in unity 5, which I have installed, but have been just busy to gather tutorials and figure out how to even render anything in unity.
Unity is definately a contender for film making. Most game cut scenes are just mini movies, and Unity does all of this very well.
At the time I posted this, I was not familiar with Studio's mesh-editing tools. They were never as intuitive for me as Poser's Direct Manipulation and other tools. With those, I activated and used them without reading the manual or watching a YouTube video, and got the results I was after quickly.
Over a year later and I'm only now getting into the Geometry Editor, and that's only to make new Surfaces for hair to use with dForce.
At the time I posted this, I was trying to pose a figure on the Flight Of The Swan furniture prop. It's a beautiful piece. The top of the seat cushion is 2 polygons. Have you tried to morph that with the Deformer? You know where it flexes? At the center.
I "fixed" it by exporting it as an Object and using Poser's intuitive tools to reverse the normals of the top, then took Poser's high-res square primitive, using the built-in tools to cut it to size, and parented that to the cushion, then imported that to DS to render in Iray. But, as I said, I was not (and still am not very) familiar with Daz' built-in editing tools.
Now we've got dForce and it shows promise for clothing. I was hoping for a full-on Marvelous Designer bridge, which had been rumored, but so much for rumors. At leas MD has a Daz Studio scaling preset, which is better than nothing. They're also getting a lot of suggestions on how to make it more functional for Daz' imported figures as avatars.
I don't expect a free program to have the animation capabilities of Maya or Max or C4D or iClone or even Poser. It'd be nice, but I can kinda understand it (and I say "kinda" since the real money is in the content).
However, in the year since I posted this, I'm seeing game engines gain ground, with concepts like PBR-based character generation. Of course the professional-quality promo images are a lot like those idealistic hamburgers you see on billboards. While I've not dabbled into game engines (loaded a sample scene for UDK I think - or one of them) and saw no built-in option to bring in an external figure asset and rig it for use. I'm not a programmer. I could do a few simple things in DOS back in 1982, but that was when Windows v1 was a topic of discussion and floppy disks were floppy and the only CDs were Certificates of Deposit, and a hard drive was a cross-country trip with the family in bad weather. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were only millionaires, not multi-millionaires.
While I'm not actively tracking the development of any sort of add-ons for game engines like the Unreal DevKit or Unity which would turn them into competition for Poser or Daz Studio, I can't imagine it will be too much longer. All it takes is someone who isn't focused on making a video game, but rather using it as the engine of a 3D figure posing and animation system. With an open slot for the Nvidia GameWorks and a photorealistic GPU-based renderer, you'd have dynamic hair, cloth, and fluid, and real-time rendering. Yes, it's be back to the "tricks" with light and shadow and bump and displacement maps, but look at the results they're getting now. It's passable for everything except replacing world leaders with 3D puppets.
On the question asked earlier "Would you pay more to get more?"
This is where we get into the whole discussion about quitting a paying gig to make money off your hobby without being financially prepared, and I have very specific views on that, meaning I don't think it's an intelligent decision, especially if you're dragging the spouse and kids into that money pit with you. It's self-centered and egotistical and quite frankly childish to bet whether or not your children eat on whether you can sell enough of a half-baked product and depend on the old "my kids are hungry because of my poor decision" sob story.
Somewhere in my 14TB of Internet History I have 3D models made by hobbyists in their spare time that feature details like realistically threaded screws going into identically realistic threaded holes. A guitar with strings that have the correct number of wraps around a realistic solid core. Controls with numbers and letters modeled into them, not just bump maps. I have a 3D recreation of a Bruce Lee interview, with his various flexing routines, and his nunchaku demonstration, that was done in someone's spare time and passed around for free. These were done before 1998, and they still outshine a lot of paid content. The movement of the muscles should be required learning.
I have a fully-articulated Imperial Walker someone made and passed around for free. It wasn't ripped from a game, because I had the game, and the game model was nowhere near this good.
You want more money for matching that quality? First, I want to see someone match that quality, then we can talk money.
Most limits in DAZ assets are because they have to work with DAZ Studio and Poser. If you want pre-made content to improve you have to first wait for DS to improve. In my opinion actually DS is very limited in animation and effects if compared to other platforms. This is why personally I mainly use DS as a content generator for Blender. Once I get the asset in Blender I can do almost anything I want with it. For what's allowed by the current 3D technology. But this also involves fitting the assets and doing some work yourself, that is, it's not pre-made content anymore.
In my opinion DAZ assets don't fit game engines. That's why I can't understand all this rumor about the interactive license. So I'm not talking about game-ready assets. But DAZ assets are quite good for still pictures and they can be easily fitted for animation in most cases.
EDIT: as for iClone and Unity, the next version of Blender with EEVEE will probably fill the gap ..
What sob story? If I was expecting somewhere around $2000US (give or take) for sales in a given month and I got $400, I'd be upset too. That's based on a store selling price of approximately $20 for 200 sales that month.
Most of these sort of details, as nice as they might be, probably would be of little note in content using them.
And the guy probably did so with no intention of ever making any money from it (and would have had to put a restrictive use license on it due to copyright).
It's 2017 and DAZ figures in the most recent generation are still low poly. And the polygons aren't aligned with the body muscles and structures causing staircase effects in close-ups (and sometimes far away) and requiring boatloads of corrective morphs that still can't correct mis-designed polygon alignments. So before we start stepping up the game, we need higher poly meshes for the figures.
On the flip side, I've seen clothing with nearly a million polygons for no good reason. lol
Daz Studio has and uses Pixar's OpenSub Dev to sub divide the figures. The setting is found in the Parameter Tab. Set the figure to high resolution and set your subd level. It will look much better when using detailed morphs.
That is an old piece. Well designed for its day. Since you are more familiar with Poser, it was better for you to export it and use what you are familiar with.
DS primatives can be made very high res plus subdivided. When you go to make the primative, there is an option for "Divisions". This tells Daz Studio how many times to it should divid each face (polygon). So a plane would be 12 polys and a cube would be 72 poly
never mind
Of course you want/need to prepare the assets to use them in a game - depending on what you want do, you don't even need to - but that is way easier than to create the assets itself. There is only so much one can and want to learn. Most Indies don't have a big team, if they have a team at all.
Well, I can see the points you are bringing in. When you look at new games, you think "Whoa, that's cool, if they can reach that realism in games in realtime, it should be easy to do in DAZ as well". But what you don't see is the amount of research, trial and error and work before you reach that look.
I do modelling as a hobby. so it's not important if I bring out a piece of clothing one month early or not. I bring it out when i think it deserv's to be spread. If you do modelling for a living, you have to calculate how much time can i Invest, that I still earn something and that i can pay my bills at the end of the month. Then time matters, and mabe you say "thats ok for me" instead of "ok, lets do that piece a 3rd or 4rth time to see if it gets better.
Modelling the cloth (in my case for example) takes the least part of the developement. It still takes a lot of time as you have to think of "what materieal zones do i need, do i want to "hide" some parts later (like long / short sleeves that can be made with transparencies). Then there comes the hard part: I export it to DAZ and convert it to a clothing object, finetune the Maps. Then it's going back to MD to create the morphs. Sometimes it takes you 3 hours to "fold" a shirt, just to find out that the poly's don't match anymore after importing the morph to daz, because you untied a button or something like that. So, you can either: redo the morph (another 3 hours) or repose the shirt you have now and redo the creating of the cloth in DAZ at least 1.5 hours as well). If time doesn't matter, you can do either. If you are PA that has to live from the income of your models, mabe both are inacceptable and you say: ok its great piece of clothing, so forget about that exat morph.
I try to bring my morphs in no matter how long it takes, but its a hobby and i use that as learning process. (and i am happy for all every single good rate or like i get, but i think not even 10% of the people downloading your packs care about rating as well). But even if you give them away for free, you could end in rather unfriendly mails or comments if somethink does not seem to work in the way somone wanted it). I love doint it and I will go on with creating new stuff, no matter how long it takes, but I understand it could be quite frustrating if you have to do it on a time shedule.
Another point: Clothing does look good, if you drape it to a certain pose. The same piece of clothing can look very very bad, on other poses. There are so many possible Poses and wishes from the users, how should you know what is needed or wanted? Like mentioned before, Aave does great poses and drapes, it looks fantastic. But then again, you can not animate that. If you want cloth that fit most of the poses at least in a acceptable quality, you have to skip some details or it won't work. But you can be sure, people find that one pose that doesn't look good...
So: I think, DAZ does a great job for beeing a free software, still improving in long waited new tools (dforce for example, that just came out and instead of saying "wow cool, thats an imporvement", there is already a huge "i want more, thats still not enough" mentality. Come on give that tool a chance to settle first). Of course it hast not the comfort or level of a maya cloth oder MD simulation. But I think' there is alos a different price tag. And I know blender is free as well, but blender has a huge learning curve compared to daz, that is a real easy and still cool way to get into 3d.
What i wanted to say in short:
- I am sure most of the PA listen to you and care what you say: Still it's just not possible to match all needs with one product. (And for sure they would love to hear a "good job"
as well as "suggestions for improvements"
- Mabe sometimes the expectations are bit too high sometimes? It should be cheap, still have the quality of a high end solution? That just can't work. In my opinion most PA do a great job in finding their gap in between "need to have" and "nice to have" and still matching a greater part of all needs.
- DAZ Studio is free and stil evolves and brings in new features. So instead of taking that as given and already asking for more, mabe we also should try to say: Ok, how can we help daz to take out flaws and still just enjoy what we have.
I am happy that there are so many content creators out there, and i am sure they do their best to bring you good but still afordable content. And if you compare some of the older props still in the store to the new stuff coming out recently, at least I can see a huge difference. If you want more than that, then you should take the sept to the next level, but then you also accept that you have to invest into higher hard and software.
I'm not sure why polygon count and perfection of polygon layout are an issue, when pretty much every software package out there that's used for making game assets, and many game engines, supports some form of subdivision (usually Pixar's OpenSubDiv) which can deal with the former issue and the latter generally will only be of concern to a significantly reduced subset of content users.
I doubt that was native resolution; it's far more likely that it was at a very high subdivision level or a set with high subdivision applied. Although, to be fair, that may have been something that was made just for the sake of demonstrating working with high polygon count items.
I very well know what subdivision is along with the different resolution meshes. I'm also on the mailing list for Pixar's OpenSub. But subd doesn't add details in the areas that need it nor does it fix misaligned polygons. IOW, it doesn't change the fact that DAZ figures are low poly meshes.
There was only one resolution for the mesh and this was subd at 1 (ie. no subdivisions).
Same for me but with studio. It really more about where your comfort level is initaly than the program I think.
You can reverse normals in studio via the editor. And you can create primatives at as high a resolution as you choose in studio. I'm not sure what mean about cut to size in poser. Does it do boolian now or something?
You would need to ask Marvelous about that bridge. But I also would not hold my breath on it since they said they wanted to do it years ago. I think the market would have to grow drasticaly before they would think it was finacialy fesable for them.
Daz has a Unity store and from what understand assets that go in there need at least some modification. Of course that is to use them as game assets. Not sure about using them as render engines and if the higher poly count etc is an issue.