Can somebody shed some light into the legality of using store bought/net downloaded daz models that someone else has created in a game/visual novel? And then patreon'ing it of course. Does that qualify as a commercial use of someone else's creation?
Daz model usages in games
- Thread starter sulaw
- Start date
- Jun 7, 2017
- 63
- 88
In a VN game, all you are distributing is the images created by daz - that you own.
If your not redistributing the assets (models, textures) then your fine.
If your not redistributing the assets (models, textures) then your fine.
- Jun 25, 2017
- 2,566
- 7,383
As @captainJugs said, the Daz Studio license allows you to do pretty much anything you want with images you create with their software. This applies both to Daz Studio, as well as to any assets sold through the Daz store. The only extra restrictions that come into play are if you create a game that actually includes the 3D meshes/textures/etc. that you got from Daz. (example: if you were doing realtime 3d rendering in Unity using models from the Daz store). In that case only, you also need their extended licenses. But for pure VN work involving only 2D images, you're clean with Daz.
Assets that are sold through places other than the Daz store (Renderosity, etc) could theoretically have different licenses. The vast majority don't, but they typically come packaged with a license.txt file which would explain any restrictions on their use. The standard Renderosity and Renderotica licenses are essentially the same as Daz - you can use the 2D image outputs for anything you want.
So that covers "unaltered characters" obtained through the major outlets.
As far as characters go, if someone else takes a model from Daz, tosses a hair and clothes on it and uses it in their VN, and then you basically take the same combination of model/hair/clothes and use it in your VN, I very strongly doubt that the original VN author has any claim on you at all. On the other hand, if they take a stock customer and apply a bunch of morphs to it to come up with a new custom-looking character, it's possible that they could claim a copyright on that character representation. Some of it would probably depend on just how "custom" the character looked. If you then recreated that custom character in your own VN, it's possible they (the other VN's author) could come after you. The odds are low that they actually would, of course, but it's remotely possible.
