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Newbie here but artist familiar with DAZ studio.
See a lot of people talking about Honey Select but can't find an official website for that product.
Is HS like DAZ? Which would you recommend for developing a VN? I know DAZ has tons of content and supports animations, does HS? Also, how do people get around DAZ characters all kind of looking the same?
Thanks, sorry for so many questions.
Honey Select is a game from Japanese company "Illusion". It also comes with a "Studio" component that allows free posing etc, which is what the artists use to make their stuff. The Illusion games come with a bunch of pre-recorded animation sequences for various sex acts, so that's the source of the animations in those derivative games. The 3d engine is a realtime renderer and does not use raytracing etc, so the quality of image you realistically get has a hard ceiling.
You can download Honey select and a TON of user created content etc via torrent or similar. It used to be available on the Hongfire and AnimeSharing forums, but at least one of those is shutdown now.
Note that HS based games look even more "all the same" than anything from Daz - the non-raytraced 3d engine makes everything look plastic, the "customisation sliders" for the characters are very limited, and the same old boring hair/clothing etc from the base game shows up again and again. And the male characters are basically always identical as there is no real customisation settings for those ones.
Games with Daz characters look the same if the artist is lazy and just uses one of the basic models with no customisation. If you take the time you can make all sorts of unique looking characters - with the caveat that 80%+ of the available models etc are 18-25yo skinny beautiful white girls. Also there are a few vendors that keep releasing nearly identical characters over and over again, which adds to the problem.
Re: Using Daz vs HS for a game:
Daz wins:
- versatility for customisation of the character and environment
- high level of achievable quality for the result images (but has a steep learning curve)
- quality of environment, props, characters, clothing models and textures
HS wins:
- speed of learning how to setup and render scenes
- speed of rendering (basically realtime)
- available sex animations