Blender Am I wasting my time learning Blender to eventually create my own game?

[Synx]

It highly depends what kind of game (scenery/character) you want to make, your budget, your PC specs, and what you actually want to learn/achieve.

DAZ is great for making scenes quickly, but it limits you to what models you can use. While there are more then enough character models and morphs to create somewhat unique characters, its environment library isnt spectacular. There is as example only 1 school. Depending on what story and scenery you want to make, you might need to look for other options to create the environment. And if you are going that route, DAZ loses its major pluspoint in my opinion its library. If you are creating environments or downloading environments from other sites that nativaly wont work in DAZ, I would say you are better of learning Blender over DAZ. In my experience its easier to extract characters from DAZ into Blender, then importing objects into DAZ. I will say I dont have a massive amount of experience with exporting and importing to DAZ, but nontheless I thought i would mention it.

Your budget as well; There are a ton of pirated assets on here, but that limits the library even more, especially environment ones. Thats the main reason why a lot of games made by DAZ looks the same; they use the same pirated assets from here, as they dont really want to spend money on it when its more of an hobby/starting project. For blender (and other 3D-moddeling programs) you could make your assets yourself and make a unique looking game. Besides you got more options on what premade free models you want to use; you can still export pirated models from DAZ, but you can look for free models on sides like Sketchfab, Turbosquad, or Smutba.se (for adult themed models). And you can find a fair amount of paid assets that are pirated as well (I found most Kitbash3D for free as example).

Your PC; The renderengine used in DAZ (Iray) doesnt work with AMD cards. If you got an AMD card rendering in DAZ will be insanely slow. If you got a pretty crap PC overall rendering with Iray or Cycles will be almost unbearable slow, so you could maybe look into Eevee rendering for Blender. Its a non-tracing renderer and much faster then Cycles or Iray. You can get amazing results with Eevee if you know what you are doing. DAZ has a same type renderengine as Eevee, but its pretty old and pretty meh as far as I know.

Lastly it depends on what you want to learn/achieve. DAZ is great at what it does, but what it can do is limited. If you just want to learn how to make a scene, render it, and create a game with the renders DAZ is your choice.

Blender on the other hand is much more like a toolbox. It has much more options and can do pretty much everything needed to create a full scene/animation from scratch. Some parts are for sure better developed then others (The texture drawing and sculpting are better in more specialized programs as example), but compared to DAZ I would say there isn't anything in DAZ that Blender cannot do at least equally good. It takes just more time to set everything up compared to DAZ.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Time to learn something new is never wasted.

In my experience its easier to extract characters from DAZ into Blender, then importing objects into DAZ. I will say I dont have a massive amount of experience with exporting and importing to DAZ, but nontheless I thought i would mention it.

Not really, it's quite the contrary in fact. Uber Iray shader can mostly fit whatever surface you throw at it (or use any pre-made shaders for nearly every surfaces imaginable if you want to give your own flavor), it takes literally 2 clicks. Most of time is spend adjusting tiles (if needed), reverse/adjust UV maps and scaling. That's kinda all about it and nothing really special. Makes your whole point kinda moot.

Blender case is more tied to animations imho, especially frames intensive one, as Daz3D is quite a disaster is that departement. Quality wise it's the only incentive I can think of (in-build bridge to Zbrush and PS doesn't help).

 

[lancelotdulak]

its environment library isnt spectacular. There is as example only 1 school. Depending on what story and scenery you want to make, you might need to look for other options to create the environment. And if you are going that route, DAZ loses its major pluspoint in my opinion its library. If you are creating environments or downloading environments from other sites that nativaly wont work in DAZ, I would say you are better of learning Blender over DAZ.

Id agree on this 1000%. Daz's biggest weaknesses imho are its enviroments are limited and it's hard to deal with large scenes. I really want an island environment but handling an actual environment that large is cumbersome as hell and buildings are... difficult and not comon

 

[79flavors]

[...] recommend to do the lighting/rendering in Blender too? With all the amazing updates lately, the rendering must be faster, better and more efficient than Daz, right?

The choice between Daz and Blender is very much one of experience. Both are good at what they do.

The Blender purists will tell you Blender is better, obviously... and visa versa.

As to faster/more efficient... I'm not qualified to say.

My opinion though is that Daz is the easier path for those of us with no previous rendering experience. Not least, because of the ease of buying/downloading models, poses, animations and such. Neither Daz nor Blender are easy, but I would say Daz is probably the path of least resistance for a would-be game dev. Which sort of implies that Blender is the more "professional" tool... except it's a sort of "apples and oranges" comparison.

If you're the sort of person who just wants to use predefined assets... pick Daz.
If you're the sort of person who will end up creating your own models, no matter how simple or complex... pick Blender.
If you're going to need to import models into a 3D gaming engine like Unreal or Unity... it's going to be Blender.

Most RenPy 3DCG developers will never touch Blender and will never even consider it... because Daz will meet their needs.
But more RenPy developers (at least of AVN games) are enthusiastic amateurs who are just rendering static images.

I would imagine that anyone who knew both Blender and Daz would probably use Blender. But that is only an uneducated opinion of my own, based on an expectation that Blender is more feature rich.

 

[Rich]

With all the amazing updates lately, the rendering must be faster, better and more efficient than Daz, right?

As 79flavors says, it's very much an "apples to oranges" comparison. Blender and Daz Studio use entirely different rendering engines, which means that they're better at some things, and not as good at others. Both have "slower-but-more-photorealistic" renderers (Cycles and iRay) and "fast, non-photorealistic renderers" (EEVEE and Filament). "Better" is very much in the eye of the beholder, since it all depends on how you prioritize certain aspects.

My sense is that if you stay with the photorealistic side of the house, Cycles works better on systems that don't have GPU's than iRay does, primarily, I suspect, because "iRay on CPU not GPU" isn't NVidia's bread-and-butter. On systems that do have NVidia GPU's, iRay may slightly outperform Cycles for the same "quality level" (whatever THAT means) because, again, iRay is specifically tailored to the capability of NVidia hardware, whereas Blender is somewhat more generic and less hardware-specific.

I would imagine that anyone who knew both Blender and Daz would probably use Blender. But that is only an uneducated opinion of my own, based on an expectation that Blender is more feature rich.

There are absolutely things Blender does that Daz Studio does not. Modeling, fluid simulations come to mind. But if you're "just" doing graphcs for a VY, you may never touch those parts of Blender. There are also things that both have, but Blender does better. Animation being a big one. Blender is WAY better at playing back animations in real time than Daz Studio is, but some of that is because Daz Studio has a somewhat more sophisticated morph system than Blender does, and thus requires more calculations to get the meshes "exactly right" when the bone positions change.

One way of looking at it is that Blender is, on average, somewhat "lower-level." Daz Studio has a wealth of pre-packaged content, while there as far less pre-packaged content available for Blender. (Although most Daz content can now be transferred into Blender.) Daz Studio, on average, is much richer in terms of pre-made materials and models, and the ease with which you can tweak settings on the iRay shaders outshines Blender somewhat. With Blender, you have to start looking more at node graphs for the shaders, rather than having a simple panel that you can adjust dials on. That being said, being lower level, Blender gives you WAY more control over materials if you're willing to learn how to exercise it. (Daz Studio does have a shader mixer, but it's awful.)

Agreeing with 79flavors, for most things, the learning curve with Blender is steeper than with Daz Studio. But, at the same time, Blender overall is more powerful. It's just that, with that power, comes complexity.

So, neither one is "better" than the other, since they really aren't trying to do the exact same thing. My own sense is that if you're just getting into 3DCG, learn Daz Studio first. There's enough learning curve on things like lighting, scene composition, creating decent poses, etc. for someone just starting out without adding all the low-level complexity. Then, once you're more comfortable with all the basic concepts, possibly think about taking that general knowledge and learning how to do it "the Blender way," picking up more odds and ends as you go along.

I think if you start out from scratch with Blender, there's just SO much low level stuff you have to deal with just to get your first couple of renders that you'll get discouraged and quit.

Again, that's just my $0.02, from someone who started with Blender, shuddered, learned Daz Studio, and is now re-learning Blender in order to use some of the "Daz can't do it" features.

 

[GNVE]

Just to post the other side of things. Blender users think blender is better than everything, it's not. If you want to make a 3d porn game use Daz, if you want to spend all day making a building use blender. I have 3d background and never use anything for my game except Daz as I don't need to. Yes blender is good to learn but it's massive pain in the ass.

To be fair I think they both are a massive pain in the ass at times.

(For one I think that for making indoor scenes they should look at the gaming scene. problems solved there ages ago still require a lot of pain in either software. I would love to work on a scene maker utility for 3D programs if I had the money for it.)

 

[OhWee]

Still making new stuff for Daz using primitives and Hexagon, just sayin...

Blender is certainly more powerful than Hexagon, but for my needs 'ol Hex gets the job done, and more or less bridges quite well with Daz Studio. And it's also free!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

With all the amazing updates lately, the rendering must be faster, better and more efficient than Daz, right?

Not really. Mimicking Iray/UberShader will just "tank" Cycles as well if not worse.

That said, I don't think the question is about rendering time per se, even if you're going for semi-industrial numbers of renders for a VN. But how much amount of time your are willing to pull pre-production, and how flexible/rigid workflow can be in production itself. Quality for time spent ratio and all that.