How do you manage your DAZ files for game projects?

[nakedDirector]

Question for people who have been working projects requiring lots of DAZ scenes and characters.

How do you manage your DAZ files?

Let's imagine: We create a renpy game using daz renders. We write a scene in renpy. The scene has some characters talking to each other and doing "various" poses. How would you create the renders in DAZ efficiently?

The obvious start would be
1. Create a seperate subscene for the environment and each character. So each subscene can be use for different scenes. -> Reusability
2. Pull all the subscenes u need for that renpy scene inside one daz scene.
3. (Beside rare exceptions) render everything I need for that renpy scene inside that one daz scene.

Step 3 is where I struggle. I can think of different approaches on how to do that.
Option 1: Create all the poses within one timeline. E.g. Frame 1: Character 1 and 2 talking to each other. Frame 2: Character 3 joins the conversation. Frame 3 C1 doing a different pose. Frame 4 Things get frisky. and so on. Good: little overhead. no douplicate characters. all the poses are sorted linearly inside the timeline Bad: Prone to error! I often found myself in the wrong frame and changing the pose of a pose I have already rendered. Also I often use the camera instead perspective view to move around the scene. Often I choose the wrong camera which I spend a lot of time placing beforehand to the correct position.

Option 2: I got the idea while writing this post: Create a copy of every pose set and sort in Groups. What I had as Frame 1,2,3... I can do as Group 1,2,3... So Group 1 has C1 and C2 doing pose 1. Group 2 has C1, C2, C3 doing pose 2. Good: Less error prone because not working with timeline. Better sorting: I can name groups but not frames inside a timeline. Bad: redundancy. Make copies of almost the same thing. Also if I decide to change one detail of a character I have adjust them for all Groups. Disabeling and enabeling one Group TAKES FOREVER

Option 3: Idea I got while writing Option 2. Combine Option 1 and 2. Split the scene in Groups. When the poses are very similiar or easily derivated from a previous pose use timelines. PRO: not as many Group enableing and disabeling as in Option 2. Better sorting that Option 1.

I'd like to hear your approaches and opinioins? What do you think of Option 3? What have worked for you? As an engineer I love having everyting sorted the best way possible plus automate as much as possible. I prefered working with blender. The whole workflow seemed to be one a more advanced level. DAZs workflow seems very clumsy and slow but the DAZ store is what keeps everybody using it.

Also it would be interesting to see the foldertree of your projects. How do your sort your own files?

 

[mickydoo]

You are making it hard on yourself, you are never going to be able to render every scene beforehand and get it right, and I seldom use more than one camera in a scene, if so name the cameras if its an issue. Also always render in the camera, not perspective.

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

Simplest way ever example. My game has days of the week, I have folder called episode 9 at the moment, in that folder I have another folder called Monday. The scenes in that folder are called mon1, mon2, mon3, etc. When I save the renders, I make a folder called episode 9 and I save the renders into it with the same name as the scene mon1, mon2, mon3, etc. I don't make conversation scenes in advanced for the most part, as soon as you starting typing it in something will occur to you anyway and make some of them void, and making you need more even if not.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I port everything to Blender for rendering, but the struggle is similar.

First I prototype: each scene is its own file, even poses are their own file as I just explore the idea. nothing is final and if I kept this up it would take eons before I had content for a game.

Refined prototype, after getting some better if not more final models, I do option 1. Since Blender better lends it self to animation, there is basically no such things as the errors you described. you literally press the zero key on your Numpad to see the camera view, so no mistaken identity, and if the camera gets deleted and you don't remember how or when, just find a good view, and create a new camera that has your view (using 1 command).

One thing you may want to look into is "compositing," (which I believe daz can do). Basically, look into how you can render the background separately, and then the characters separately. The idea is that you still want the light simulation so that the characters match the background, but if you need to fix any characters you just need to rerender that character, not teh whole scene. In blender I can do this faster by pre baking the light so that the lighting does not need to be rerendered each time. sadly I can not automate the compositing yet. so say you want it to output 1 character, you can go through your whole time line, but then after that you have to change the composite setting for another character or for background characters and then run through the time line again, can't render each object seprately (unless you want to render and save each render to a different layer to a tif file, then that is a good work around), so it will not automate itself.

 

[polywog]

I port everything to Blender for rendering, but the struggle is similar.

First I prototype: each scene is its own file, even poses are their own file as I just explore the idea. nothing is final and if I kept this up it would take eons before I had content for a game.

Refined prototype, after getting some better if not more final models, I do option 1. Since Blender better lends it self to animation, there is basically no such things as the errors you described. you literally press the zero key on your Numpad to see the camera view, so no mistaken identity, and if the camera gets deleted and you don't remember how or when, just find a good view, and create a new camera that has your view (using 1 command).

One thing you may want to look into is "compositing," (which I believe daz can do). Basically, look into how you can render the background separately, and then the characters separately. The idea is that you still want the light simulation so that the characters match the background, but if you need to fix any characters you just need to rerender that character, not teh whole scene. In blender I can do this faster by pre baking the light so that the lighting does not need to be rerendered each time. sadly I can not automate the compositing yet. so say you want it to output 1 character, you can go through your whole time line, but then after that you have to change the composite setting for another character or for background characters and then run through the time line again, can't render each object seprately (unless you want to render and save each render to a different layer to a tif file, then that is a good work around), so it will not automate itself.

Composite your renders in the game engine, not the renderer.

Layer the background, characters, foreground, in renpy, unity, other.

 

[nakedDirector]

You are making it hard on yourself, you are never going to be able to render every scene beforehand and get it right, and I seldom use more than one camera in a scene, if so name the cameras if its an issue. Also always render in the camera, not perspective.

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

Simplest way ever example. My game has days of the week, I have folder called episode 9 at the moment, in that folder I have another folder called Monday. The scenes in that folder are called mon1, mon2, mon3, etc. When I save the renders, I make a folder called episode 9 and I save the renders into it with the same name as the scene mon1, mon2, mon3, etc. I don't make conversation scenes in advanced for the most part, as soon as you starting typing it in something will occur to you anyway and make some of them void, and making you need more even if not.

Yes scenes will change all the time. That's why it is important to have a very flexible system. I work on a more sandbox style game. So most scenes are events which are triggered by some action. Instead of day folders like u, I could have location folders and then like Home/DinnerAlone.duf, Home/DinnerWithFamily.duf, Park/MeetFriendX.duf, Park/MeetSister.duf.

 

[nakedDirector]

Composite your renders in the game engine, not the renderer.

Layer the background, characters, foreground, in renpy, unity, other.

Thats what Milfy City does and it looks really weird. The shadows of foreground characters are missing.

 

[nakedDirector]

....

One thing you may want to look into is "compositing," (which I believe daz can do).
...

I have tried that already but as far as I know DAZ cannot do that. If I'm wrong please point me out, I really need that feature.

How well does importing to Blender work? Will the iray shaders still work as in DAZ? Can u show me some of your renders? I have done work with blender a few years ago and the whole workflow just feels superior to DAZ in every way. Only reason I'm using DAZ is because of the models.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

How well does importing to Blender work?

It works good enough for me, you can use various means, From everyone I talk to

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is the best importer. I had a bit of a hard time setting this up at first because my daz files were kinda everywhere, once I unified my assets to one location on a separate drive (not recommended, it was a pain to get Daz to relocate all of its files), only then could I get Diffeomorphic working. To be honest exporting FBX seemed just as good and loading that into blender. Both include having the textures, the rig, the mesh, the weight painting. Blender does not keep any of the shape keys from daz, so technically it doesn't do mesh correction or easy posing, and also no matter what formate of importing you use, the material shading settup is always messed up a bit. If you know how to make custom shaders in blender and you know how to make automated rigs and corrective shape keys, only then would I say that blender has no down side (other than a bit of work with a bit more set up to get started).

Composite your renders in the game engine, not the renderer.

Layer the background, characters, foreground, in renpy, unity, other.

That is what I already do, I think we just see the same words differently.
Blender has a built-in compositor, by compositing, I mean to say, the act of combining images and effects on a render/image/frame to create a final product. But in Blender the compositor can also do the opposite...

When you say "composite your renders in the game engine", you are describing how often in 2D games that we layer images and layers to create a final image or a scene. This allows us to reuse assets, like having a generic character with a generic pose be able to seen in many scenes by just layering their image ontop of a background image.

But how do you get images of characters? Well you render them, nothing fancy there. But what if you want images where the characters are interacting with the scene. What if they are sitting at a table and their legs are covered by the table so that part of the character is invisable so when you draw the character ontop of the table background scene, their legs don't show up. What if you want to capture their shadows on the world around them? How do you get these more complex renders? I know Daz can render a character and make the background transparent, and can even render a transparent shadow, but I don't know what daz or the industry calls this. Render Settings? All I know is that in order to do special effects like this you can use the Compositor in Blender to not only combine images, but to pull out parts of the images you want, and better yet, you can automate this so you can pick out your poses and then be able to batch render overnight all the characters and poses. By Batch render I mean: make all the layers that you would then put into your game to later combine them to make the scene.

 

[polywog]

But what if you want images where the characters are interacting with the scene. What if they are sitting at a table and their legs are covered by the table so that part of the character is invisable so when you draw the character ontop of the table background scene, their legs don't show up.

 

[anne O'nymous]

But how do you get images of characters? Well you render them, nothing fancy there. But what if you want images where the characters are interacting with the scene. What if they are sitting at a table and their legs are covered by the table so that part of the character is invisable so when you draw the character ontop of the table background scene, their legs don't show up.

The good old background -> layers -> foreground used by 90's point'n'click.
And nowadays the power we add at hand is such that you can split every single element this way :

character :
hair background -> head -> hair foreground
clothes background -> body -> clothes foreground

scene element :
chair+table background -> character -> chair+table foreground

scene :
location background -> scene element -> location foreground

What if you want to capture their shadows on the world around them? How do you get these more complex renders? I know Daz can render a character and make the background transparent, and can even render a transparent shadow, but I don't know what daz or the industry calls this.

Or you use imagemagick to generate the difference between the background alone, and the background with the character, and after this you use gimp or photoshop to remove the parasites.

Honestly I have no idea of how long and difficult it can be, nor which approach is the better ; I'm still far to have reach this step. But it's what I plan to do.

You can even go further than that, both with Ren'py and Unity. You distribute the game with the CG split like this, and at the start of each chapter you show a loading screen the time to build and save the CG you'll need for it.
Lower size for the distribution file, and less loading time once the chapter is started.
Not necessarily faster like this, it will depend of the CG and the computer which play the game, but it's also a way to deal with the problem.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

View attachment 492827

smash her thighs XD

 

[polywog]

 

[thecardinal]

Lately I have been cell-shading my renders in Daz, I do the background separately so that way I can tinker with the background in postwork and don't have to get everything perfect in one scene.

I don't use lights, so I have no shadows which means I won't run into the issues that other people posted about.

 

[Midnite Guerrilla]

Badly

 

[nakedDirector]

Also has anyone figured out a quick way to rerender multiple existing scenes with but with one character having different clothing?

 

[Midnite Guerrilla]

Also has anyone figured out a quick way to rerender multiple existing scenes with but with one character having different clothing?

You could try spot render. If you go to tool settings and pick "new window" (I think the option is) you can then select a portion of a scene (the character with the different clothing) and save that as a sub-image and then edit in Photoshop.

You should also look in batch rendering.

 

[nakedDirector]

You could try spot render. If you go to tool settings and pick "new window" (I think the option is) you can then select a portion of a scene (the character with the different clothing) and save that as a sub-image and then edit in Photoshop.

You should also look in batch rendering.

That's still not fast enough for me. If I find time I need to check if DAZ allow writing scripts controlling the program.

 

[polywog]

That's still not fast enough for me. If I find time I need to check if DAZ allow writing scripts controlling the program.

Daz can be run from python.

Poser Pro is capable of rendering clothing only, and hiding the parts that are not visible. Last I checked, daz didn't have that feature.