A bit confused on Genesis content.
ry.nienhuis
Posts: 15
I need a modeling and animation suite that I can afford, and something more intuitive them Blender. I have taught myself a lot of what I need in blender too many times now. I keep forgetting things, and its a constant battle for me to do what I want. Right now im either getting Carrara, or Shade 3D, but assuming Carrara pro is still discounted in a few days when I have the money, Im leaning there. I have watched some videos, and the interface looks very much like what I want. Not so much from a purely visual standpoint, but it looks so organized, and easy to use.
For the time being I want to create sprites, but I plan on doing more than that. It seems some of this genesis stuff would be awesome for that. I just don't know if I would be allowed to use them for a game, and I also have no idea where to start. It looks like Carrara comes with a bunch of stuff, but does it have what I need to start making characters? all the stuff I see is "For Genesis", but I cant find just Genesis. The store is a bit difficult for me to navigate I guess. I would love to be able to buy clothing packs and stuff as I need them, so this is a big draw for me to Carrara. I also see morphing addictions and body customization stuff. Its okay if I need use DAZ Studio with this stuff as long as I can export to Carrara.
So, to sum up, I have two main questions.
1. Where can I find usage rights to this stuff. I want to know if they can in fact be turned into sprites and put in a game, and wether that game needs to be free, or if there are royalties to pay if its not.
2. Assuming number one is okay, then I need to know where to start. Addon packs are easy enough to find on my own, but the Genesis they are for seems to elude me.
Thanks for any help,
Ryan
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Comments
Here's the link to the DAZ EULA.
http://www.daz3d.com/eula
Maybe someone more versed in the legal gobbledygook can tell you if a 2D sprite requires a game license.
Games aside, if you render it, it is yours. You can't redistribute the mesh or other components such as image maps.
BTW, Carrara does have a VM (although some people don't like it- it seems fine to me), and the ability to rig figures, so if you like to model, then there are no restrictions on what you make yourself.
To be clear, Genesis1 does come with Carrara8pro already, so no need to buy the base Genesis1 character. It also comes with M5pro and V5pro bundles, which are substantial bundles of clothing, characters, textures, hairs for Genesis1.
There are game developer licenses available for purchase for I think everything daz offers, but that's beyond my knowledge scope to answer to be honest, I've never fully understood how that all works. I think if you simply take a base Genesis, add some morphs of your own, then I think you can do what you want. If you buy a completely premade character, then there are usage rights (but I could be wrong about that, it might be more complex than simply spinning some parameter dials and adding morphs to make a unique character, hopefully someone more knowledgeable will answer about that).
Shade is a great app, and is enjoying steady development from what I understand. Carrara has a very slow development cycle, and although I'm convinced we'll have a Carrara 9, I'm not sure it will contain much more than more support for Genesis2 content (though it would be nice). On the other hand, Carrara as it is currently really does almost everything already anyway, plus has native support for all the daz/poser figures/content.
Found these at a casual search in the daz store, game dev licenses for both 'indie' and 'commercial' game developers:
http://www.daz3d.com/indie-game-developer-license
http://www.daz3d.com/commercial-game-developer-license
I believe these would cover daz originals content. For specific vendors content I believe they offer their own licenses for game development.
Again all this is out of my depth, so take this as a casual answer, not definitive :)
Thanks. Part of why I want Carrara is because it looks simple enough, and already does everything im going to want to do with it. Im not too worried about future support I guess. I will make my final decision soon enough. I got a trial license of Shade 3D im playing with. Don't think there is a demo of Carrara, but there are plenty of videos to watch there.''
As for the license, thanks for the links guys. I don't know legal though, and its got me confused. My impression is I need a special license for 3D content in games, but the 2d part has me confused still. The same things about it are listed in the commercial section as the regular section. It seem like since its in the regular section that I can in fact do it, but because its also listen in the other section, maybe not. Im also unclear about the separately exported, extracted, or decompiled part. If the sprites are image files, does that mean its a no-go? Man I hate legal speak.
Renders, whether stills, animations, sprites, whatever, can be used for whatever you want. You can't distribute the mesh or the individual texture files, but any renders you make are yours to use.
If it helps any, having an unsteady income will cause me a lot of problems. Because of that I would probably release any games I make for free. It not a sure thing that I will ever release anything. I like the act of creation more than I like the outcome. On the off chance I do feel I have something wonderful, then I may be open to selling it. In that case I wouldn't have an issue with buying the license. Thats not something im expecting though. If I still need the license to use assets in a free game, then I cant justify the 500 dollar purchase. Im still leaning toward Carrara for the program I choose though, I would just not be going all in on the content packs.
Edit:
I took too long to write this it seems. Thanks fixmypcmike. That's good to hear.
I have one more question, but figure I will just post it here instead of starting a new thread. There won't be a problem with animating mechanical things, will there? I know in blender I could attach individual objects to a specific bone, and it wouldn't deform. Its important to me because Mechs are my favorite things, and I will be modeling a bunch of those. I would rather them not have visible deformations in the joints.
The short answer is yes and no. The thing to remember is that a bone is bound to the mesh when it is attached, so some deformations are inevitable, but did you know that you can attach a rig to a group of objects, so that it is made up of multiple separate meshes. It's a great way to manage influences and avoid the distortion a skeleton attached to a single mesh would cause.
You could also use constraints, no rig required.
Thanks again! Attaching a rig to multiple objects is what I meant I could do in blender, I just didn't explain it as well as you did. Sounds like Carrara will work fine for mechs then.
You can also use the "Bones" function in the weightmapping mode to give 1 bone 100% influence and exclude all other influences, so avoid distortion at the joints.
I make mechs consisting of over 100 separate parts, import into Carrara as one object and rig that way. They are too complex to set up parent-child groups - the list in the instances tray would be a nightmare to navigate :)
Thanks for the tip Roygee At this point I'm going with Carrara. I just hope that discount lasts a few more days. I don't really want to get the standard version. If the Pro discount doesn't hold out I may have to wait a while.
So thanks for all the help guys. My questions seemed to have been answered, and I won't have any more till I get my hands on a copy of Carrara.
I think you're already aware of this, but just in case, I'll mention it anyway. The cost for Carrara8pro is $65.00 currently for PC+ club members. The cost of getting a PC+ club membership is $24 for 3 months. So assuming your not a member already, you can pick up Carrara8pro for $89, which is basically an insane cost for a software with this feature set, and comes with tons of Genesis content for free. I don't know whether those prices are visible to someone who hasn't joined the PC+ club or not, so thought I would mention.
The other benefits of PC+ club membership include lots of weekly freebies, and tons of content you can pick up for just $1.99 each, so padding out your content for the Genesis figures can be quite inexpensive as well. While there are many things about the way Daz does things I'm not a big fan of, I've kept my PC+ club membership going and have managed to pick up tons of content on the cheap. Also bear in mind that with the autofit, a lot of the clothes from earlier figures like V4 and M4 also fit Genesis just fine (not shoes though, for any shoes you'll want to use made for Genesis shoes), and a ton of that V4 and M4 stuff is extremely high quality (just as good as any of the recent Genesis2 stuff) and yet can be picked up extremely inexpensively. Seems like every couple of months there's another V4/M4 sale with items 80% off, as an example.
Oh and one other benefit of Carrara = this forum. One of the most active and friendly forums anywhere online, filled with lots of great Carrara users who are happy to chime in and help, day or night. It's basically the most awesome resource for Carrara there is, at least imo, and I've learned a tremendous amount just by checking in here often (and even to my surprise and pleasure, been able to 'give back' from time to time ;) )
Yeah, once you own Carrara 8.5 or DAZ Studio 4 or higher, Genesis, Genesis 2 Male and Female and a small amount of content that works with them is free to download - you'll find the stuff in your product library within your DAZ 3D account, as well as in the Install Manager.
Genesis and Genesis 2 (in my opinion) technology is just the best darned figure resource on the market - simply because of how incredibly the way the automatic morph-following works as well as how wonderfully realistic they can be, while very easily morphing into things that don't have to look real at all... and if we want to take advantage of how easily the system works for the content builder DAZ 3D has full instructions available in text form and are currently making many wonderful video tutorials on more of the excellent tools that DAZ Studio has built in to help us make such things very easily, yet incredibly professional and easy to introduce all of the actual technology part - so all we have to focus on is the art - it's a beautiful thing!
That all being said, if you plan on using Genesis in Carrara I strongly suggest that you also install the latest DAZ Studio and keep it updated. This is what Genesis is. Triax. DAZ Studio 4 was built around the Genesis technology, and Genesis was built around DAZ Sudio 4. Together they have formed a link that is strong and I feel that Genesis will always work at its best if it and its technology (DAZ Studio) are kept at their latest development. So where does Carrara fit into all of this?
Carrara is a modeler, but oh so much more. On the subject of Genesis and Genesis 2, we are still at the dawn of its implementation, as far as my intuition is telling me. Unique compared to any other modeling suite on the market, Carrara has functionality of using the conforming, morph dial, Morph-following, rigging, etc., and the SubD (Genesis is based on SubD Cage technology) between DS and Carrara match beautifully. With any modeler we can create our own conforming models for Genesis and export as an OBJ, import the item onto Genesis in DS and turn it into a conforming item very easily, with all of the tools required to further tweak properties to behave exactly the way we want them to work as the joints move around, etc., But with Carrara, we also get the wonderful ability to bring those creations back in, fit them to our Genesis characters that we've tweaked in Carrara, and fully use the Genesis technology in our animations and still renders.
Carrara, again... reflecting my own opinion here, has an immensely powerful render engine and shader system that all works very easily - it's basically a highly advanced, but easy to use multiple choice questionnaire. The more we study, the more answers we get right!
But Carrara also includes so many tools that help in turning our backgrounds into quite literally anything we want it to look like. We can even use a simple background gradient to assist in the powerful global illumination system and/or Indirect Lighting, and then hide it entirely and render on a black background, if we so choose. We can composite directly on video footage, Blast stuff around as particles, knock things over with physics, light fires and render waves that follow the wind, fog things up with fog or clouds or even the powerful atmosphere system, create nearly any landscape imaginable with a powerful terrain modeler, create with Polygon (Vertex), Spline (Nurb), and MetaBall (Blob) modelers, sculpt with Displacement tools in the modeler or with the displacement painting in the 3DPaint facility or just applying texture maps other properties... Blah Blah... (Dartan, you're going on and on again!)
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Just a quick mention
Right now Carrara works quite a bit better (or is it just easier?) with content made for Poser than that made for DAZ Studio. So I still install my content using Poser formats in the Poser > Runtime environment - but not for Genesis content.
I say this because applying Material Presets from a DAZ Studio library onto Genesis and/or Genesis content in Carrara will often (always?) give unexpected results. Easy to fix once you get to know the texture room - even just a little, but something to be aware of - and this is just the current state of Carrara. I strongly feel that all of this will become much improved in the ear future.
Poser content (content made to open in Poser) works almost as easily as if we were working in Poser itself, as far as loading and applying Material files and such. On my system and for my tastes, it's a lot less headachy in Carrara than in Poser. The library seems to load much faster, and the interface has much smaller icons and takes up much less actual screen real estate than Poser's. Everything just seems (to me) to be a lot easier to work with in Carrara. We just need to learn how to set the shaders to be better optimized for Carrara's rendering system, which is easy to learn and has become one of my favorite tasks of all time.
This is not the case with Genesis, however. Genesis and it's compatible products are currently easier to work with - especially as far as applying materials and such - in DAZ Studio than in Carrara, in some respects.Again, I feel that this is very temporary. DAZ Studio has special tool implemented to be a very powerful solution for working with Genesis - and I look forward to more of this becoming available to us in Carrara.
An easy solution to this can come either way:
Set up your Genesis characters and/or clothes and such in DAZ Studio and then save the new setup in the DAZ Studio library that you use in Carrara (I use the default "My DAZ3D Library") and just use those files to load into Carrara from its browser as normal, or...
Just use the preset files directly in Carrara for setting up your figures, and just tweak out what needs to be fixed - quickly and easily
Either way, once you tweak out any figure in Carrara for use in Carrara, save in in Carrara form into the Carrara browser, and you've got all of that saved into a wonderful thing!
Hmmm... I'm really going on, aren't I? Sorry if none of this helps...
I wasn't aware of that. Those prices don't show up if your no a member apparently. What happens if I stop being a member though? Do I still have the full Carrara Pro? Too good to be true usually is. Im a gamer, so Im familiar with the systems Sony and Microsoft have set up where you get free games, but loose them once you stop being a monthly subscriber. Im all for this membership thing if I get to keep Carrara though.
Once you buy it it's yours, even if you stop being a PC member, just like anything you get for free as a PC member is still yours even if it's no longer free.
Yes, if you bought a PC membership and then Carrara Pro for the special price, and then let the PC membership lapse, you still have Carrara Pro and all the other stuff (if any) you picked up at the PC club discount.
Think of it less like Adobe's subscription model, and more like a buyer's club like Costco or Sam's Club. At this point nothing is in, "The Cloud," thank heavens.
Sweet! Im totally going that route then.
Yup. Buy it... Keep it!
I became a Platinum Club member to take advantage of the great pricing on Carrara at the time. I could have got a shorter membership but, after looking deeper into PC membership benefits, my wife and I decided that I could really build up my content library with a yearly membership - buy a lot of models at extremely discounted rates. That was 2010 and I'm still a PC yearly member! Even the free stuff pays for the membership!
But yeah... you can buy, drop any of your memberships - even your DAZ Account, and anything you buy here will still work ;)
Yea, it sounds like it may be worth staying on for me too. At least for a while. Since it seems I can use the stuff for sprites, I can totally use a nice library to work off of.
If you become a PC member check out this thread (Freebies - you need to be a PC member to see it)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/8880/
Regards, Bunyip
Yes. I needed as many environmental props, vehicles, and background character assets as I could get my hands on, and these two stores are mostly PC items (I bought from many others too) and I've colected most of them so far, and they work beautifully in Carrara!
petipet is a fairly recent new artist here, and I love all of his models!
Jack Tomalin has been around for some time, and kindly offers most of his work as PC items - very high quality stuff - I love it!
I've also picked up a decent assortment of Genesis outfits, hair, and accessories.
PC Items means that they cost a LOT LESS for those with the membership.
Just noticed there's a 65% off sale for "select Genesis content" today only. Worth a look since it might be a while before they're offered that cheap again. (but be careful not to buy anything that's already included with the Carrara bundle!)
Thanks again peoples! I just bought Carrara, and then used my two PC+ coupons on some content. Now I have two programs I need to start learning.
For learning Carrara.
Learning Carrara 8.5 Training Video
http://www.infiniteskills.com/training/learning-carrara-8-5.html