Is there any worth in learning Blender or is Daz used for pretty much anything?

[Noxusa]

I've been learning Blender for more than a year with the goal to create adult games. It's difficult, but I like it and my skills are constantly improving. However, it seems Daz really is the gold standard when it comes to creating adult games in small teams.

I can do a lot with Blender, but I could never get into Daz for some reason. Blender 'clicked' with me, but Daz just didn't. Also, it seems that developing something with Daz is incredibly expensive. I know there are free assets out there and such, but I get the impression it's not enough to actually develop something with. Another thing is the creative freedom you have. I get the impression you're very limited when it comes to Daz, whereas with Blender I can theoretically create everything.

Am I missing something here or overlooking something?

 

[zger]

im using blender myself alot but mostly for modeling. creating locations and other stuff and then exporting to daz. i think daz is just simple enough to work with. poses/morphs/easy character customization + pretty iray render. also clothes are easy to use and not sure how simple that would be in blender. mb blender have something like that too? but im not familiar with that yet.

 

[MissFortune]

It's just so much easier to use, honestly. There's nothing stopping anyone from actually using Blender, and I believe Vanqwar is rendered entirely in Blender, as well. It's simply a convenience thing, especially when it comes to all the ready-made stuff for Daz that would just be a pain to create yourself.

 

[recreation]

Daz + Blender is the best combination imo. Daz alone is limited, but not as much as you might think and you'll be a lot faster creating scenes in Daz than in blender.
It's easier to edit and create assets in blender, also animating and simulating stuff, so the combination is what makes it work best.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Daz has simply a better framework - and eveything is built around it. It's just a luxury most 3D generalist software can't afford. And it's a genuine idea imo, Daz would lost a lot of its appeal trying to be a 3D suit. There is also no real incentive to use Cycles (or Octane or Arnold or whatever fit your boat) to render a pin up, as Iray and its obese shader gonna do the job and a quite decent one at that. Asset library is wide (and nothing come close to it tbh) and cover a wild range of bases.

Overall I think the good ideas in Daz (framework/assets/engine) outshine its limitations by a large marging. I mean scope your game, determine your needs (and Daz could indeed fall short) and use the correct tool for it.

Cents. 2 of them.

 

[Noxusa]

It's just so much easier to use, honestly. There's nothing stopping anyone from actually using Blender, and I believe Vanqwar is rendered entirely in Blender, as well. It's simply a convenience thing, especially when it comes to all the ready-made stuff for Daz that would just be a pain to create yourself.

And are new assets releases for Daz pirated here as well? Or how does it work?

 

[MissFortune]

There's a few sites where you can pirate Daz/Poser assets, most of which honestly just take from each other. F95 is definitely a big source for them, but there's (and apologies to the mods here, delete if necessary. Not sure if I'm allowed to post outside links to other sites.) others like

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,

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, or

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. After you download them, you can install them through Daz Install Manager (or DIM, which you can get from Daz Studio's website.). Directions in the link make it pretty clear.

As mentioned, if you're looking to make custom stuff, Blender is the way to go. Daz just makes the puzzle easier to put together, so to speak. Even so, there's nothing stopping you using from both.

 

[Noxusa]

There's a few sites where you can pirate Daz/Poser assets, most of which honestly just take from each other. F95 is definitely a big source for them, but there's (and apologies to the mods here, delete if necessary. Not sure if I'm allowed to post outside links to other sites.) others like

You must be registered to see the links

,

You must be registered to see the links

, or

You must be registered to see the links

. After you download them, you can install them through Daz Install Manager (or DIM, which you can get from Daz Studio's website.). Directions in the link make it pretty clear.

As mentioned, if you're looking to make custom stuff, Blender is the way to go. Daz just makes the puzzle easier to put together, so to speak. Even so, there's nothing stopping you using from both.

Thanks a lot! I've been looking into creating my own game, which was the entire reason I started with 3D. It's just difficult to actually start creating your own game. With Blender there are tons of tutorials I could follow, so a starting point was easy. It's a different story with Daz

 

[Synx]

People pick DAZ for the easy to use compared to other programs. With its asset library, easy to pick up framework, and pose library it gives a very strong basic to start your game. Especially if you got close to 0 experience.

Blender can do anything DAZ does, and a lot more, but requires a lot more effort and has a much steeper learning curve. For the vast majority of adult games its not worth trading the easy-to-usage of DAZ for the flexibility of Blender.

That said I personnaly went for Blender. DAZ didn't really connected with me either (it's basic functionality like moving around a scene is completely different then any other software I have used) and it's asset library is to limited to what I wanted to make (Cyperpunk type of game). I could prob have done it all in DAZ if I wanted but i already had some experience in Blender and it's complete freedom kit fitted my requirements a lot better.

 

[Dilly_]

Thanks a lot! I've been looking into creating my own game, which was the entire reason I started with 3D. It's just difficult to actually start creating your own game. With Blender there are tons of tutorials I could follow, so a starting point was easy. It's a different story with Daz

There are some great resources out there for learning Daz too, maybe just slightly harder to find. I'll drop links to some of the ones that helped me the most:

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on YT has a bunch of Daz and Renpy tutorials

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has great tutorials for absolute beginners, and some more advanced stuff as well

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videos are great for any skill level and extremely easy to follow

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has tutorials on bringing Daz characters into Unreal Engine and giving them animations+physics
And then there's

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who also has excellent explanations for all things Daz. His videos are a little rambly and long, but if you stick around for the whole thing you're sure to learn lots

I'm sure there's lots of other channels I missed too, but these are the ones that come up the most for me and cover most of the bases as far as Daz is concerned

 

[8InchFloppyDick]

When it comes to creating Adult VNs and 'games' (or VNs in any other genre for that matter) I'd consider it 'brave' to do it in Blender alone. Particularly if you're working solo or in a small team.

The reason being that you have to do sooo much more work. You have to create scenes from scratch, then create your character models from scratch and then clothe from scratch... It's just endless. You wont have any time to actually write a compelling story. And if you do managed to get v0.1 out the door before you're even older and greyer... I'd very impressed if you could stick to a monthly release cycle after that. Even living the COTS-lifestyle that Daz tries to provide, creating your VN can be painfully slow in a one-person or small team effort.

Daz has it's quirks, and like somebody mentioned above it's 3D navigation is horrible, but the library of available models is huge and combined with the posing tools... in my experience it just reduces the amount of work you have to do to get the visual part of your story done.

That said, I do use Blender sometimes to modify Daz assets. But that happens rarely these days. One, becasue I just don't care that much anymore about the perfectness of the 3D visuals; I just want to get my story out. Soon I hope. And two, once you figure out how to delete/hide polygons/surfaces of Daz assets inside of Daz and also how to re-assign polygons/surfaces to different groups so you can use different Iray shaders on them, most of the Blender round-trips become unnecessary. In my experience, adding a wall here or a something else there with Daz primitives and recycling existing textures in a Daz scene/model is good enough. I've cut down the round trips to/from Blender significantly since I've really got to grips with the Daz geometry editor and surface selection/reassignment tools.

Just my $0.02.

 

[Synx]

The reason being that you have to do sooo much more work. You have to create scenes from scratch, then create your character models from scratch and then clothe from scratch... It's just endless. You wont have any time to actually write a compelling story. And if you do managed to get v0.1 out the door before you're even older and greyer... I'd very impressed if you could stick to a monthly release cycle after that. Even living the COTS-lifestyle that Daz tries to provide, creating your VN can be painfully slow in a one-person or small team effort.

Daz has it's quirks, and like somebody mentioned above it's 3D navigation is horrible, but the library of available models is huge and combined with the posing tools... in my experience it just reduces the amount of work you have to do to get the visual part of your story done.

That all depends on how unique you want to make it. You could litterly import everything from Daz to Blender including textures, clothing, poses, etc. It's a bit figuring out how though but it's all possible. A complete waste of time if your just going to use Daz assets but you got the option.

But at the other side Blender gives you a lot more freedom. You can mix Daz assets with other assets found online (most can be pirated if you know where to look), and alter them around much easier. It's more time consuming then just putting some Daz assets together, but your game wouldn't look the same as the vast majority of games around here.

 

[mickydoo]

Without reading any of the above, this my opinion coming from someone who can use other 3d software (3dsmax in my case).

In direct relation to the question

Is there any worth in learning Blender or is Daz used for pretty much anything?

Yes there is. And no it's not
No there isn't. And yes it is.

Learning blender will do your head in at times, max and mayer are bad enough, but at least the are simpler to get your head around, they are also worth shit tons of money, so they would want to be.

Learning blender is a skill worth having, but learning it to make a porn game alone is a wasted skill, if you are going to learn it, forget about a porn game and learn 3d modelling, as that is what blender is for.

If you want to make a porn game, use DAZ, as that is what DAZ is for.

If you want to make a table for your DAZ porn game, download one, put it near a big titted MILF, no one will care.

IF you can use blender, make a whole house, car, workplace, whatever, BUT, only if you can use it. Then really think about if it's worth while as it does take time.

What I mean by the above statement, if you are proficient with blender, time aside, you will find it easy to do. If you are learning blender you will spend more time googling how to smooth the mesh and why is it tiling than you will making a porn game.

I seldom make anything in max for my porn game (I have but its far in few between), I do however edit things in blender as the path to and from DAZ is easier, but my Blender skills are not so much, so even then it's a hassle.

If I was making a porn game and wanted to learn blender, I would not make it inclusive, I would learn it to learn a whole set of new skills, and maybe implement what I can, but not rely on it.

 

[rainbowpunfz]

I've slowly been exploring blender here and there, and my take is pretty similar to mickydoo. I'm not learning blender to do lewds, i'm doing lewds to learn blender. Is this going to lead to some smutty game down the line? maybe, I have some ideas but it is not the main goal here.

I don't know much about DAZ as I've purposely avoided it when starting out with the understanding that it is not a full fledged 3D modeling suite, so I can't really make a comparison. But I do know that prefab asset libraries for blender are slowly growing (never mind the fact that there are universal formats to port meshes around), adoption rate among different circles is going up (both corporate and amateur), and thus far with every update blender sees massive improvements (I'm absolutely stoked for the everything nodes project).

The main issue to me seems to be the high barrier to entry. There is a lot to learn before you get anywhere remotely effective with some parts of blender. But the more I do things, the faster and better they go (something you might have noticed as well).

If you just want a simple blog, use wordpress. If you want a fancy website with lots of novel features, learn to code. Similarly, if you want to make a simple VN similar to most on this website, maybe play around with DAZ. If your needs are more novel than that, Blender is probably a good bet.

 

[FilthySloth]

Whilst I use Daz assets for my games... I do nearly all the real work in Blender.

My personal take is as follows:

Daz - Is a fine renderer/posing package which is frustratingly limited/janky in nearly every other respect. The lack of out of the box interoperability with other 3D packages severely limits what can and can't be done with Daz. If you are happy living with the restrictions of the package then it does great work and you can make really attractive art in it.

The biggest advantage of Daz is the Genesis character models and the extensive library of posing, clothing, shaping etc which come with these.

Blender - Blender is hard to learn, but it is really is worth it. Once learned you can do nearly anything you could possibly want to in Blender and it is a far superior tool than Daz in nearly every aspect (as far as I'm concerned Blender is superior to a number of very pricey 3D packages also). Also the super flexible Cycles and Eevee rendering engines provide great artistic flexibility, even if Cycles is neither the fastest nor the best photorealistic renderer going (it's good just not the best).

The biggest downside of Blender is finding decent human assets (and clothes, hair etc.) which are worth using, whilst things like MakeHuman exist there are much less mature than the Genesis models and not nearly as well supported. Whilst you can bring Daz assets into Blender (which is what I do) it isn't straightforward (don't get me started on the shitshow that is Daz to Blender Bridge) and requires really good knowledge of Blender to do well/quickly.

Honestly I think it really depends of what you want to do, if you want a 'photorealistic' art styling I'd say suck it up and go with Daz it will be much easier in the long run, however if you want to do something more custom (say NPR rendering) then it's Blender all the way!!

 

[dalgas]

Awesome answers so far. I want to start a small little project of my own and decided to go with Daz as I have no idea of3d or even 2d, but it seems quite more manageable with zero prior knowledge

Thing is, I can't find any free models both male and female with genitalia, and I'm not lucky enough to have 300$ to burn on Victoria's and Michaels pro bundles without being sure I'll make it work.
I found a site with the pro bundle of victoria but I'm not sure enough it will work, it will take 9h to download from uploaded, and maybe it will just brick my pc. Site name is fs-ds (dot) info (I don't want to post a link to it in case of it being a malicious site)

Anyone can hook me up with some models or assure me that download is gonna work?

 

[Lewdpanda95]

Anyone can hook me up with some models or assure me that download is gonna work?

Asset Releases on this site.

Favourite of mine:

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Afaik most people use Dicktator / NGV8 for gens because they have more morphs and poses. Importing them to other software like blender is trickier tho.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

even if Cycles is neither the fastest nor the best photorealistic renderer going (it's good just not the best).

Cycles is fine to render 'photorealistic' skin, coming from Daz good ones or whatever. Not really the problem, nor is 'speed' imo. Engine doesn't really matter all in all. (Your) time is the best metric.

 

[FilthySloth]

Cycles is fine to render 'photorealistic' skin, coming from Daz good ones or whatever. Not really the problem, nor is 'speed' imo. Engine doesn't really matter all in all. (Your) time is the best metric.

Don't get me wrong Cycles is great... I love the flexibility and I don't think I could go back to using nodeless renderers... but if you want the 'best' photorealistic render out there Cycles isn't it, but considering the price point it can only be described as fucking amazing!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

if you want the 'best' photorealistic render out there Cycles isn't it

Out of curiosity, what do you consider a 'best' photorealistic render engine?