Thanks! Yeah I'm not planning on actually making a Daz game or anything, purely curious about how/why so many people use Daz to make games and what the process of them getting into it is like, considering they're so limited (by money, lol) in what assets can be used in the first place. I get good results from being freely experimental/iterative when creative, so I prefer platforms/applications/etc. where everything is freely available and there is no barrier of entry. People differ though.
DAZ is an interesting beast. On a quick glance it looks powerful and it certainly is, but it is also stuck to past most likely due to monetary constraints on development. Supposedly (source: rumors) there will be a new update soon(tm) DAZ 5 or something that should bring some very necessary UI and UX improvements.
The software is quite frankly terrible to use if you compare it to most other 3D software. But, there is no other software set with the amount of 3D content that is easy to *install* (using is different). Plus, it is all standardized. You have the base models G3, 8, and 9 (and the older ones), clothes, animations (terrible to use but they are there), poses, lighting, scenes, and they all pretty much work together mix and match.
Blender as a free example, does not have an asset browser (it actually does nowadays, but it is empty and in a "beta" stage) with hundreds and thousands of assets that (mostly) just work. Installing a new character look into DAZ is super easy (it also helps that I know the pipeline), and getting it into a scene is easy, posing it, etc. it's all easy. It could be a whole lot
easier. But it is what it is.
So why do people use it? Because it is (mostly) easy to use. Instead of having to start from modeling, rigging, texturing, posing, and then rendering - you can instead just buy a model (model is free, it's the genesis stuff, shapes are different), put it in a scene and render. Of course, it is a completely different question on whether or not the result is a good image - but the pipeline to buying stuff and rendering an image is quite straightforward once you know it. Much easier than starting from scratch with something like Blender or Maya or 3DSMAX.
I would not be surprised at all if I learned that some of the most popular 3DX games use pirated content. It is easy to download, it is easy to use, and there is no way to detect it traditionally. You can't see if a clothing item is pirated just from a PNG as it is just an image (DAZ does embed some creator metadata (author name -
your name set in the software - or something) I think into PNGs, but just "wash" it through a photo editor and it's gone).
Theoretically you could put some kinda payload onto a pirated item, like a small difference into a texture or something, which then would be noticeable (to the asset author) on a shirt or whatever - but that would require the author to set up a honey trap asset and hope that no one shares the legit one from the store. Too much work.