So I'm starting work toward making my first game. Every bit of this is new to me except the programming. Programming I got. The 3d modelling? Not so much. Daz Studio is a huge help, obviously... but even that's new to me. And eventually i'll need to make custom assets... the stuff I'm planning requires assets that just don't exist (feel free to prove me wrong, by all means).
In any case. I started tinkering with Daz Studio... uhm... yesterday. Maybe the day before that. I'm currently stuck rendering this stuff on my Core i7-6700, but I've got a RTX 2070 on the way. Here is where I'm at:
I've always hated when games introduce a female character with soft, jiggly curves and not a hint of muscle definition and then tried to pass them off as warriors. But I also have planed a sorceress and a flanker (rogue type)... and there will be more allied characters beyond that.
For now I'm just curious if there's any critiques to be had of what I've accomplished so far.
Also, this game will be built in Unity, and I'd like to use the above character models in Unity for consistency... but worry about the models being too complex for real-time rendering. Any suggestions on that?
I have no experience in DAZ3D, but I would look into a tutorial to change settings in order to reduce the noise on rendering.
If you have already done that, I would look into better techniques to reduce noise.
I have no experience in DAZ3D, but I would look into a tutorial to change settings in order to reduce the noise on rendering.
If you have already done that, I would look into better techniques to reduce noise.
Already have. Several. I've implemented the suggested steps. I added four 10m x 10m mesh lights at 750x250x750, -750x250x750, -750x250x-750, and 750x250x750, pointed them at the subject, and turned them into light sources. As well as a distant light from the front-left quadrant. Ended up disabling the mesh light in the front-right quadrant to give better definition of curves.
I increased the resolution of the render and then downsized it in photoshop after the fact to average some of the noise out.
I checked all the settings in the rendering and set them according to suggestions:
Not sure what I'm missing. Other than just forcing even more iterations and ballooning the render time to absurd levels. Hopefully the speed boost i get from having an RTX 2070 will allow me to do more iterations without the render time getting out of hand.
Already have. Several. I've implemented the suggested steps. I added four 10m x 10m mesh lights at 750x250x750, -750x250x750, -750x250x-750, and 750x250x750, pointed them at the subject, and turned them into light sources. As well as a distant light from the front-left quadrant. Ended up disabling the mesh light in the front-right quadrant to give better definition of curves.
I increased the resolution of the render and then downsized it in photoshop after the fact to average some of the noise out.
I checked all the settings in the rendering and set them according to suggestions:
nothings wrong with the second one. its more on the preference side. the face she is making in that picture is a bit odd that's all. its a good render don't worry
nothings wrong with the second one. its more on the preference side. the face she is making in that picture is a bit odd that's all. its a good render don't worry
Oh, ok yeah, I can see that. I was pretty iffy on the expression too... but I wanted something the highlighted her inexplicably cheerful demeanor. Hmm... but looking at it again now the smile doesn't reach her eyes does it? Makes it look halfway between a snarl and a smile. I'll fix it later.
I'm a big fan of the second one. I'd let her gladiator me.
I didn't even notice the noise in the images.
I have an RTX 2070 Super and I've been renedering in 4K and after 20 minutes, saving the image and then resizing. I notice that preserves a lot of detail and keeps a sharper image that rendering at 1280 or 1920. I did a bunch of comparisons for the last few days and rendering in 4K and stopping actually looked better than going 35 full minutes in 1920.
I'm a big fan of the second one. I'd let her gladiator me.
I didn't even notice the noise in the images.
I have an RTX 2070 Super and I've been renedering in 4K and after 20 minutes, saving the image and then resizing. I notice that preserves a lot of detail and keeps a sharper image that rendering at 1280 or 1920. I did a bunch of comparisons for the last few days and rendering in 4K and stopping actually looked better than going 35 full minutes in 1920.
Interesting. That's really useful to know. I did these at 3600 x 3000 then cropped and resized them to their current size. But I also let the renders "converge" to 95% first. Honestly, the noise seems about the same to me before and after resize... even if I know that's impossible. So maybe I'm just being hypercritical. After the 2 hours render on the first image 20 minutes sounds heavenly. I actually rendered that image second. I'm assuming the long render must have something to do with her skin or hair being very expensive to render.
Also, yeah, my personal preference leans hard toward the second character as well. I'd climb her like a monkey and twice as naughty.
New render of Micha. Tightened her grip on her weapon, gave her some black nail polish to hide the fact that her nails were clipping through her left glove, changed he facial expression, rendered at 2000x4000, and then downsized to 25% to reduce noise. Render time: 75 minutes.
I don't think the nail polish made that much difference, especially given how little of it is exposed... so I'm attributing the 2x render time to the 1000px additional vertical scale.
New render of Micha. Tightened her grip on her weapon, gave her some black nail polish to hide the fact that her nails were clipping through her left glove, changed he facial expression, rendered at 2000x4000, and then downsized to 25% to reduce noise. Render time: 75 minutes.
I don't think the nail polish made that much difference, especially given how little of it is exposed... so I'm attributing the 2x render time to the 1000px additional vertical scale.
Looks really good. The thing unfortunately with the darker skin tones is that, due to the color, you're going to naturally get more noise, but you've reduced it well. You can also use the denoiser in the render settings but be warned, it tends to blur the render a bit but it WILL remove all the noise and but makes the skin smoother. Oversampling and resizing works really well.
If you have photoshop you can use the clone tool to clean up the noise prior to resizing. With the resizing you shouldn't really notice it.
Looks really good. The thing unfortunately with the darker skin tones is that, due to the color, you're going to naturally get more noise, but you've reduced it well. You can also use the denoiser in the render settings but be warned, it tends to blur the render a bit but it WILL remove all the noise and but makes the skin smoother. Oversampling and resizing works really well.
If you have photoshop you can use the clone tool to clean up the noise prior to resizing. With the resizing you shouldn't really notice it.
The dark skin tone is here to stay tho. I'm not giving up on my chocolate goddess. I actually used a skin tweaking script to make it darker than the default... so I'll just have to live with the consequences of my choices. I'll keep the clone tool in mind. I had also considered some techniques with Photoshop mentioned
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(section 4). Thanks again.
BTW, you have any experience with making clothing? I'm planning to make a custom armor for the game's primary antagonists inspired loosely on this but with some sci-fi elements worked into it and more demonic motif than draconic:
It also needs to have a retractable crotch plate and (for the female one) breast plate(s). Cause my antagonist are basically succubi and incubi FROM SPACE! Wut? I didn't say nothin'...
Regardless, afaik nothing like that exists. So I'll have to make it myself. I've got blender... but having trouble tracking down good tutorials on the subject that aren't freaking ancient or aren't paid.
From what I understand, Gaussain blur is basically the same thing that the Daz denoiser does, but you have more control over it in photoshop. The darker tones might actually be a benefit while using the gaussain blur in PS.
BTW, you have any experience with making clothing? I'm planning to make a custom armor for the game's primary antagonists inspired loosely on this but with some sci-fi elements worked into it and more demonic motif than draconic:
It also needs to have a retractable crotch plate and (for the female one) breast plate(s). Cause my antagonist are basically succubi and incubi FROM SPACE! Wut? I didn't say nothin'...
Regardless, afaik nothing like that exists. So I'll have to make it myself. I've got blender... but having trouble tracking down good tutorials on the subject that aren't freaking ancient or aren't paid.
Custom modelled armor as a daz3d wearable will definitely be a challenging place to start your modelling/3d game journey. I'd suggest if you are keen to make a very specific look for your characters you are not really focusing on making a game anymore.
The fine details of your characters' clothes, and props and scenery etc. will never be the reason someone dislikes or is simply not interested in your game. A game on here captures the interest of players by the combination of quality visuals, engaging gameplay, and interesting story, in that order. And for episodic/patreon style funded work, the volume and frequency of updates.
If your goal is to make progress on your idea for a game and actually release anything, you would be far better served to find an existing armor set that is "close enough". If you must, make some minor texture changes to emphasize the look you want. But getting bogged down in the fine details on your first project is a common way to lose your enthusiasm, leaving us with yet another abandoned v0.1
Now that I've dropped my grumpy 2-cents opinion, here's some info that might be useful:
Initial Modelling clothing for Daz seems to be most commonly done using the "Marvelous designer" software. Sickle Yield has a couple of tutorial youtubes on the process. This is the first 100%
For armour, you then would need to take the basic shapes and add the 3d details, using blender perhaps. This is the 2nd 100%. Plus another 50% to do the UV unwrapping as that is a pain the the ass until you are experienced enough on the process to design your model's seams for uv unwrap as you are building it.
Once you get that far, then you need to get it into daz3d and do the weight maps so the clothing moves correctly with the underlying character model bones. I've never done this so lets say its only another 50%, to a total of 300% mark
then you can do texturing, which is the 300-400% of the work
finally, using a combo between daz and blender, you can look at adding slider based shaping/posing morphs to the clothing to deal with all the various poke-throughs and collisions as your characters limbs move . Now lets say another 50%.
So that's about 450% of the effort you hoped it would be. And if you are not yet a reasonably experience person in doing 3d modelling/texturing then you need to learn how to use those tools along the way, which would add some multiplier.
Obviously this is all made up numbers of effort. But until I started doing stuff I personally had no idea how much details i needed to learn about 3d work. "How hard can it be?" is the words of a younger me who has no idea.
Don't do that, while in general most of the tips are still usefull, don't use any blur on your render unless you want to achieve some special effect. Daz has a denoizer you can use, but there also NVidia AI Denoiser 2.4 and Intel Open Image Denoiser 1.2 and both are better than the Daz denoizer.
Making an armor yourself will be really hard if you have no experience in 3d modelling, I'd consider searching for some armor that looks kind of like the one you want and add additional parts from other armors (most armor consist of several pieces).
If you really want to make your own armor in blender have a look at this:
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But as Morgan42 mentioned, Marvelous designer is better suited for that part (but still a shitload of work).
I get your argument. And believe I understand where you are coming from. You're right, if the goal is just to make any game at all and make a little money... if I don't care what game I make so long as I make one and get paid... then sure. In that case I should focus on churning out just-another-porn-game blindly following the existing successful templates. Just one major problem: I'll never finish it. Hell, I probably will never make an initial release. If I'm not passionate about what I'm making I'm simply going to get bored and move on.
Regardless, message received and duly considered. The armor really is mission critical. And half-assing assets in general or changing the story fundamentals to lower the bar just to avoid challenges are things that aren't going to happen. But if it makes you feel better, I'm not blind to the need for being reasonable about how I divide my time. The whole reason the aesthetic is fantasy-scifi instead of just scifi (and sexy demons from space rather than unique space aliens) is because fantasy assets are easier to come by (if more computationally intensive to render). I changed that part of my story specifically to allow using more common assets. Being purely scifi isn't a story fundamental... but travel between worlds, at least, is. It's also why I went with 3dcg instead of 2dcg... it means I can front load my development process with asset creation to get all of that out of the way before the first release. If that means it takes me a year to reach the first release? That's fine... as long as it means every release after that is no more than a month apart. I would likely need a team of artists and animators to accomplish the same results at the same rate with 2dcg (I'm saving that for game #3). And I'm actually delaying the creation of the tools portion to game #2... focusing on assets and learning the ropes during game #1. I'm an absurd over-achieving try-hard... not an idiot .
Initial Modelling clothing for Daz seems to be most commonly done using the "Marvelous designer" software. Sickle Yield has a couple of tutorial youtubes on the process. This is the first 100%
For armour, you then would need to take the basic shapes and add the 3d details, using blender perhaps. This is the 2nd 100%. Plus another 50% to do the UV unwrapping as that is a pain the the ass until you are experienced enough on the process to design your model's seams for uv unwrap as you are building it.
Once you get that far, then you need to get it into daz3d and do the weight maps so the clothing moves correctly with the underlying character model bones. I've never done this so lets say its only another 50%, to a total of 300% mark
then you can do texturing, which is the 300-400% of the work
finally, using a combo between daz and blender, you can look at adding slider based shaping/posing morphs to the clothing to deal with all the various poke-throughs and collisions as your characters limbs move . Now lets say another 50%.
Marvelous Designer isn't free, unfortunately. And since this is a pirate site, I'll go ahead and admit I already looked into pirating it. I'll probably invest in that once (if) I'm making enough money to justify the expense. Or more likely I'll get ZBrush. For now Blender and I are going to be getting real well acquainted with each other... warts and all.
See that bit about UV unwrapping is useful stuff. Now I know I should take time to understand UV unwrapping before I even start making the armor. Otherwise I'll probably have to scrap my work and start over when I get to that point.
Really this is likely to be the biggest part for me. Once I learn this part the rest should fall into place much quicker as I'll already have many of the fundamentals figured out.
I'm actually looking forward to this part. I've always hated how clothing bends and stretches in unnatural ways when it's attached the the character's skeleton. That works fine for simple pants or shirts... but not so much for a dress or a cloak. But we have physics enabled cloth now... what a wonderful time to be alive, yeah?
Lol. I'm probably already good on this one, actually. Needing refinement, for sure... but I got the concepts down. I'm already able to make textures by hand in Photoshop. And I don't mean just the base color/diffusion texture. I'm talking full PBR normal and specular maps as well. I'll need to adjust from the PBR format I'm used to to whatever Daz/Unity uses, but meh. That's less difficult than taking knowledge of an existing programming language and applying it to a new one. So I'm not super worried. "Eyes open", of course.
Probably the hardest part for me because I hate tedium... and this sounds tedious as hell. But no pain no gain, right?
So that's about 450% of the effort you hoped it would be. And if you are not yet a reasonably experience person in doing 3d modelling/texturing then you need to learn how to use those tools along the way, which would add some multiplier.
Actually, that's considerably less work than I feared. And now I have a general process to follow (thanks). And as I said, the deep end is my natural habitat. I've got experience in learning new skills while in over my head... so I know what to expect there.
Regardless, I appreciate the input and the advice.
Don't do that, while in general most of the tips are still usefull, don't use any blur on your render unless you want to achieve some special effect. Daz has a denoizer you can use, but there also NVidia AI Denoiser 2.4 and Intel Open Image Denoiser 1.2 and both are better than the Daz denoizer.
If you look closely you'll see that the suggested technique is more than just using Gaussian blur. There's an additional step used to restore detail and I've used similar techniques before. They do work. Not perfect, but sometimes perfection is the enemy of good. Regardless, such techniques are definitely a last resort. I would probably resort to a stylized 'toon shader before I went that route.
I actually already have the nvidia ai denoiser. And soon I'll have an nvidia card it will work with (already bought, ships tomorrow). I won't use it if I don't have to. And it seems the consensus is that the renders above are more than good enough... even if I can't help but notice the noise in them.
Making an armor yourself will be really hard if you have no experience in 3d modelling, I'd consider searching for some armor that looks kind of like the one you want and add additional parts from other armors (most armor consist of several pieces).
If you really want to make your own armor in blender have a look at this:
You must be registered to see the links
But as Morgan42 mentioned, Marvelous designer is better suited for that part (but still a shitload of work).
Yeah, I know. Trust me, I'm going into this with eyes open. I can't afford $500 for marvelous designer atm though. I can afford $50 a month even less. Hopefully that will change after I publish the patreon page and start making money.
And, as I told Morgan42, there's simply no armor out there already that meets my most basic requirements... not even close. I'm used to diving in head first at the deep end. And i'm going to have to learn 3d modeling anyway for other assets that I need but don't exist.
Both of you suggest Marvelous Designer for making clothes. What do you guys think about using ZBrush instead? The advantage to ZBrush is I can also use it to make models other than clothing. Specifically full character models and individual body parts.
Since you're a developer, you've probably seen this, right?
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(I'm not trying to say that your choice is bad, just some food for thought. I make posts like this as reminders to myself as much as anything.)
This is what every step of game dev feels like to me lol. It's all a neverending set of choices and associated problems. And I do mean never ending. There's just never enough time/resources, no matter how good you are or how much money you have. AAA studios can spend 9 figures on a single game and still go bust without releasing. Games are literal infinite-resource problems. Releasing one is the art of knowing when "good enough" is actually good enough... (Far more important than any other game dev skill imo)
I have a lot of faith in determined people. I'm pretty sure anyone technical enough to be on this forum can do any task in game dev, given enough time and effort, so how hard something doesn't really matter other than to the extent that it requires time and effort to overcome. The problem is time and effort aren't infinite. Doing one hard thing means that you don't have the time to do a different hard thing. Pick any random game dev skill and there are tons of people who've spent their entire career getting better at just that one thing.
This is a truly insidiuos issue for people who "thrive in the deep end". Learning something new feels good, feels productive... but learning by itself doesn't launch games. Actually doing the work, creating the content... that's what keeps games from launching. That's tedious, grinding... not nearly as fun as learning a new way to do it just a bit better. Things can always be a bit better, a bit more polished. And of course, there's always something new to learn. This new tool will really be the thing that makes the difference!
"You can do anything, but you can't do everything."
Hah! Yeah I saw that article... think it was late 2017... right at the start of a new project that was making me jump through the same hoops. Was a good laugh.
But yes I get your point. I do appreciate the input. And I appreciate the concerns that have been pointed out. I hope I've demonstrated that I'm already taking those into consideration.
This part might actually be fairly easy to acheive even if you base your eventual armour design on something that already exists: making polygons of an existing clothing mesh transparent (or deleted completely) is actually pretty easy and does not require retexturing etc.
and this final quote by Luderos... "You can do anything, but you can't do everything." ...
