Daz Seeking advice/help

[Moonpickle]

Hello all! Im a newbie whos struggling to create a VN and looking for some advice/tips.

Ive been educating myself about creating a VN game for couple weeks. I have some python/renpy coding skill to make it work and improve in future. Also still writing the script of my game. But Lately im tackling on Daz3d/assets. And i have some questions for you folks.
Before i start my questions i'd like to say that im thinking to develop adult VN's as full time since i left my job. I know theres lots of new developers like me who quit and left. Also i know how hard it is to develop VN by myself. But im enjoying every part of it and im pretty determined.

Art assets... Elephant in the room.
- I know %90 of art assets are paid products. Since im unemployed right now, i cant afford any assets unfortunately. Is it possible to use some free(maybe pirated) daz content around the internet? And get away with it? If not, what can you suggest?

Some daz3d questions.

- Trying to find a tutorial about model interactions for 2 days but couldnt find one. Ive created some models on daz but im not quite sure how to interact them with each other. Maybe with poses? or manually?
- Which format is the best for adding animations to game?(as gif or video file)
- Is rendering models with backgrounds a must or is there a clever/less time consuming way to do it? like adding model on to background with photoshop?

Thank you all in advance for your help.

 

[Synx]

Most games aren't started with bought assets, but pirated ones. You can check out the asset release section on this very side or use the Latest update to see pictures for each asset.

Renders you make with the assets are your own. As long as you don't brag around you made the game with pirated assets you will be fine.

Most people use poses to create interactions. You can do them manually but that's a lot of work if you don't know what you are doing. Look for pose packs in the asset release section.

Animations is a whole different story and my advice if for a first game to stear away from it, especially if you are using DAZ3D. There animation interface is horrible.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

as far as I know, this is THEE site for pirated daz assets.
So long as you don't share the 3D model or textures, you're safe. That includes using the 3D model in a game engine, you have to get a license for that. However, one good thing is that, if you use pirated assets, and only make 2D images with it, since there is a change of art medium (3D to 2D) so long as you are in the USA this is protected as a form of 'transformative work' and you have full copyrights over the image you make.

Model interactions... as far as I know (I am not a big daz user) there is piss poor none. You can grab and manipulate bones or objects, but I for the most part prefer to port over to blender using diffeomorphic, as i find it has a much more powerful interaction and rendering system. Most users don't need to do this, but I want to avoid the daz look you tend to get with renders from just sticking with daz, and its various good and bad traits. I think hexagon is suppose to be a hybrid between daz simplicity and blender/maya complexity, but I never downloaded it to try.

While I don't know how well renpy or what ever engine you use handles video, I would say videos are best simply because they are not limited in color resolution like gif is, and video offers better video compression with unnoticeable artifacting.

There are various ways to speed up renders. A good one is, render your background as its own image, maybe even make an HDRI image out of it. The point of an

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image is that it is a 360 image of the world, you can use this as the world or ambient light source, so it can simulate the lighting of your scene as if the characters were rendered with the background, but much faster. This however is only needed if you want your characters to fit the scene, and with some vns you reuse assets everywhere and can't predict the lighting, so you have to either determine a generic light style or pick a color style for your entire game, or you have to limit what charactes can do and where they go so you don't need to make a crap ton of art for each character in each possible location.

 

[Rich]

- Trying to find a tutorial about model interactions for 2 days but couldnt find one. Ive created some models on daz but im not quite sure how to interact them with each other. Maybe with poses? or manually?

Daz Studio doesn't provide any good way for models to "interact," if by "interact" you mean things like "that box he's holding squishes his hand" or "when he and she hold hands, the hands shouldn't go through one another." Daz introduced dForce some time back which gives limited ability to do cloth effects, and people have done interesting things with it, but that's still very limited.

- Which format is the best for adding animations to game?(as gif or video file)

If you're working in Ren'py, there are two basic ways people approach animations - they present a series of still images, timing each one to replace the previous one. This can be done manually with "show" and "pause", or can be baked into a single pseudo-image using Ren'py's ATL language. The other is to render a series of images and then combine them into a video - typically in VP8/WEBM format, since it's royalty-free and supported on all the platforms that Ren'py runs on.

Going the video route usually produces smoother results, but also usually requires you to render a LOT of images - 24 or 30 frames per second eats up renders in a hurry. The ATL approach is more commonly taken where there are just a few images, and you're not going for high fidelity in the animation.

As Synx said, I'd get used to using Daz Studio for still images, and only think about animations later. Daz Studio is NOT well designed for animations, and, in fact, the latest release has some really serious bugs in their timeline stuff.

- Is rendering models with backgrounds a must or is there a clever/less time consuming way to do it? like adding model on to background with photoshop?

You absolutely do not have to do your models and your backgrounds in the same render. In fact, many, many VN's use relatively static backgrounds, and then overlay character renders (done as PNG's so they have transparency) on top of them. If you look at the sample Ren'py project ("The Question") it does exactly that. One game available here which pops to mind is "Water World" - it does a whole lot of the dialog with fixed backgrounds and individual character renders. (Not all of the renders in that game are done that way, and it's not the only game that uses this technique - it's just the one that pops to mind.)

Now, having said that, it's almost always obvious to the eye that this is being done. That's not bad - it just gives a different "look" to the game. If you're going for maximum fidelity, where characters cast shadows onto the background, they, yes, you kind of have to render them together. (There are ways around even that, but they're VERY advanced techniques.) But having a single "kitchen" background and then using a variety of different "character" overlays can save you a TON of render time.

If you're going to render your characters and backgrounds separately, there's very little advantage to Photoshopping them together. And, in fact, that approach probably costs you more space than just overlaying them in Ren'py.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

but I for the most part prefer to port over to blender using diffeomorphic, as i find it has a much more powerful interaction and rendering system. Most users don't need to do this, but I want to avoid the daz look you tend to get with renders

Trying to avoid Daz render look with the tool that try to get as close as possible to Iray shader is quite funny lol.
In a more serious note, sending someone that already struggle with basic Daz fonction to Blender, not sure you're gonna help anyone tho.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Trying to avoid Daz render look with the tool that try to get as close as possible to Iray shader is quite funny lol.
In a more serious note, sending someone that already struggle with basic Daz fonction to Blender, not sure you're gonna help anyone tho.

probably not, but I'll always mention it, as some people aren't aware that you can use daz assets in other programs.

 

[Moonpickle]

Thank you all for detailed answers. This topic made my life easier. I really appreciate it. Cheers!

 

[GNVE]

i'd like to say that im thinking to develop adult VN's as full time since i left my job.

Being successful in this field will take time if you ever get there. (The ones earning a living wage are the exception, not the rule). I'm not saying you shouldn't strive for that, I know I am but don't count on it. I don't know how old you are but make sure your education or getting a new job comes first. Set the goal of full time VN making on the horizon for something to strive for.

Also still writing the script of my game.

Sight unseen I'd say shelf this script for your third or fourth project. You are still learning how the tools work. I think most devs stop working on their project is because they make a few big mistakes early on that, because of the size of the project, snowball out of control until it grows over their head and it is becomes very discouraging to work on their project. So they stop.
If I made the mistake I made in my second project in the project I am currently planning it would probably have stopped me from trying to be a dev but since it is just a small project it is worth finishing that project without it growing over my head. (My mistake is having several renders per line of dialogue btw. Great for a small project but if you are going big it will be impossible to do. A render takes anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours to get right depending on a lot of factors while a line of dialogue takes seconds to a dozen minutes to write and refine.)
Besides your renders will improve massively over time so you'd probably want to redo those early ones in a large project which takes time and isn't as fun as making new ones etc.