Others Unreal Engine Daz VAM Blender The state of creating 3D-Art is still bad

[nerfthenebelwerfer]

Daz, sucks - Decent UI but importing external assets is a pain in the %$#,you have to do one by one and half won't work, paywall is bigger than the metaverse, also Iray is a garbage and pure cancer giving me 100% on both CPU and GPU all the time and freezing my PC, plus devs have this weird thing for the bald girls so idk why but you can't import a person with hair lol)

Blender, sucks - Worst UI ever made by human, sometimes I even doubt it was human-made, but it has tons of free assets to import by sets of hundreds on one click, too bad every character has a different rig to fkn learn.

VAM, pretty damn cool, but it's not for creating renders and there are not enough different stuff to make a game with it, plus licensing is a pain in the ass too.

Unity, powerhouse, but sucks - at least for making games about human beings, rig from blender is almost always getting fkd up in the conversion, ui is not adapted to act with the rig at all, best you can do is treat it as a whole after doing animations in blender.

UE, even better powerhouse, but sucks too - Garbage UI, using a rig from blender feels like a quantum physics, also its not so great for renders as it is for making animations, and its not as great for making animations as it is for making games, and its not as great for making games as for making FPS based games, so yeah it basically sucks.

I think I'll have to wait another year for something to change here, or did I overlook something?

 

[anne O'nymous]

Daz, sucks [...] paywall is bigger than the metaverse,

Yeah, what a shame all those persons who sell their hard work...

also Iray is a garbage and pure cancer giving me 100% on both CPU and GPU all the time and freezing my PC,

Yet among the games authors, there's some who achieve to make renders with a 10 years old computer. They aren't top quality renders of course, but if it works for them, it should for you. Could it be that they past more times than you trying to understand how it works ?

plus devs have this weird thing for the bald girls so idk why but you can't import a person with hair lol)

Well, I'll tell you why, since you don't know: It's because, 99% of the time, bodies are a morph applied to a model, while hairs are a model by themselves.

Blender, sucks - Worst UI ever made by human, sometimes I even doubt it was human-made,

Blender UI is relatively standard for a 3D modelling software. It need a bit of time to learn it, but I never found it none intuitive once I got it.

[...] too bad every character has a different rig to fkn learn.

Because there's no "stuff" made for Blender, just meshes that are in a format directly supported by Blender.

VAM, pretty damn cool, but it's not for creating renders [...]

Yeah, it's not for creating renders... So why do you listed it ? Illusion games have more their place here than Virt-A-Mate, since at least their studio is dedicated for the generation of stand alone renders.

Unity, powerhouse, but sucks - at least for making games about human beings, rig from blender is almost always getting fkd up in the conversion, ui is not adapted to act with the rig at all, best you can do is treat it as a whole after doing animations in blender.

Hmm, Unity is not made for "creating 3d art"...

UE, [...] its not so great for renders as it is for making animations, and its not as great for making animations as it is for making games, and its not as great for making games as for making FPS based games, [...]

Well, I absolutely don't see what's surprising for a game engine designed for FPS to be better at making FPS games than at generating 3D renders.

I think I'll have to wait another year for something to change here, or did I overlook something?

I think that you'll have to wait way more than just another year, because there's a constant behind all those software that suck, and you clearly haven't considered it as significant.

 

[mickydoo]

OP sent me a pic of his rendering rig

 

[BuranPhan]

You seem like you don't understand much about 3D rendering. I dont understand what you want from a 3D software UI. Is not made for the general public so is pointless to complain about lack of what? intuitiveness? 3D software is made for people to study, and understand. There are so many things that you can change and do with 3D software that I find it crazy how good they get their UIs. Maybe if all software is a problem for you, the software is not the issue...

Try to spend a few months actually learning about 3D. Also, UE and Unity are game engines designed for making games, not for 3D modelling.

Finally, I would like to add that blender is not made just for character models. It is a general purpose 3D modelling software. Which means, you can make whatever you want. Rigging is pretty standardized IMO and most rigs work pretty similar so I dont get you point about learning to use rigs every time. You just need to understand how rigging works and what inverse and direct kinematics are, and you will be pretty much ready to tackle any decent rig.

TL; DR: Invest some time into 3D modelling tutorials and understand more of the basics before trying to tackle making game art.

 

[nerfthenebelwerfer]

Yeah, what a shame all those persons who sell their hard work...

Their hard work is not worth a broken cent to me, in the near future AI will create 3d models from the photos, tbh I don't even give a $hit abut things like copyrights, I am just an opensource nerd and I do believe that everyone should be able to get enough free resources to learn anything. It's like in that famous mem -> you get money from work, you get work cause of education, but you get education for money, and i'm not a supporter of such bs.

Yet among the games authors, there's some who achieve to make renders with a 10 years old computer. They aren't top quality renders of course, but if it works for them, it should for you. Could it be that they past more times than you trying to understand how it works ?

LOL. I highly doubt they can use Iray on 10yrs old computer, nothing older than GeForce 1xxx is not even on the support list. Technically its possible to use it on 1660s but it freezes my entire pc so hard that the freaking RGB lights in the pc case are changing color with delay, never seen my PC getting hammerd that hard yet.

Well, I'll tell you why, since you don't know: It's because, 99% of the time, bodies are a morph applied to a model, while hairs are a model by themselves.

Bruh, you went full IKEA with this one. Would you like having your OS in raw binary form? It's all 1 or 0 for cpus...

Because there's no "stuff" made for Blender, just meshes that are in a format directly supported by Blender.

It makes no difference to me tbh, if it works it works, but I would argue that .blend files are pretty much being made for blender.

Yeah, it's not for creating renders... So why do you listed it ?

Well, 3d animations are kind of 3d-art too.

Hmm, Unity is not made for "creating 3d art"...

You can do decent animations in unity.

I think that you'll have to wait way more than just another year, because there's a constant behind all those software that suck, and you clearly haven't considered it as significant.

What constant? I would say that the direction of getting more user-friendly is in the best interest of everybody, but maybe I'm wrong because there is always business behind everything.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I think I'll have to wait another year for something to change here, or did I overlook something?

I would say, wait another decade.

Spoiler: The changes I've seen this past decade

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~~~~

I agree, everything sucks... The solution?

While I'm an avid fan of Blender, the main issue with blender is that its rather technical. It's like a tool box of tools, but it itself is not a specialized powertool that really good at any 'one' thing. So as a result, the best way to use blender is to approach it with a technical perspective. And this is where I think the fundamental issue with all the programs you mentioned are.

While my user name on this site does not include a 'game dev' tag, I've worked on game projects for over a decade (but none for this site yet). I haven't published anything in the past 8 years, but I have been collaborating on projects, primarily as a programmer. Getting over the technical aspects of projects is the main struggle I see individuals and teams face. Often I crave to make custom dev tools to make game creation easier, such as a 'script interpreter' that converts a script into gameplay, or develope a custom modular game engine to meet the needs of projects. In the professional industry this is actually very common, and is actually how Blender started (and why blender is not a friendly to use before the 2.8 UI overhaul, because commands were hidden as 'type in' commands only), where companies actually have programmers develope the tools and software they need to make their production easier. Blender was special because rather than being locked away when the company fell apart, devs managed to make it open source and public.

I've always wanted to solve the technical challenge facing the 'casual game dev' community (people who make games for fun, non professionally), but I'm just one person... That said, I'm actually working on a solution. Currently, I have a plan for how I think true Artificial Intelligence should be 'engineered' and I'm so happy and excited by the design that I'll gladdly put my money were my mouth is, as I plan to use the AI model in a roleplaying AI. The issue is that the AI's design took me years, and its mostly just answers to hard complex questions, its not actually coded. There so much stuff to keep track of and manage, that I've discovered I am not mentally or physically capable of grasping the concept in its entirety, I can only focus on a part of it at a time. So I'm forced to invent a new way of... interfacing with computers and programming such that I can describe my idea for the AI and make sure I'm not missing anything critical, so that the AI doesn't become sociopathical (all humans must die!). I need to make some way to get over the technical barrier, because I can't trust that me (a human), will be able to accurately self manage myself in a way to make sure I don't miss anything (it would be equivalent to trying to build an engine from scratch, I don't want to miss torqueing down some bolts while assembling the engine, but go to bed one night and come back, thinking I torqued them but in reality I forgot, and the engine falls apart 5 months later driving down the highway)

I'm currently developing a new datatype, currently prototyped named as 'customizable datatype'

(if you actually read this tangent, I'd be impressed)

Spoiler: My current project, a dev tool for my future project

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[Sizzl]

Yeah, what a shame all those persons who sell their hard work...

A lot of stuff is overpriced and cant be considered nowhere near a "hard work". And the other half of things just doesn't work properly. Hell, sometimes you cant figure out what are you buying, because some products dont have a description. Honestly, the whole Daz store is an ugly, disgusting abomination, its much easier to check out whats new on pirate webites. And the cherry on top is official products made by daz dev team, which they SELL on their store. Daz3d is barebones and instead of adding stuff, they just dont do shit and try to sell some garbage, which is either: a) Not working properly, because they dont bother to update it b) Awfully desighed and created to torture people

 

[anne O'nymous]

[...] tbh I don't even give a $hit abut things like copyrights, I am just an opensource nerd and I do believe that everyone should be able to get enough free resources to learn anything.

And you also clearly don't understand what opensource is.

It's not because it's opensource, that there's no copyright, the owner of the rights just decide to renounce to some/all of them. It's why the creative licenses are named "copyleft" ; it's a construction over "copyright" and the fact that the owner left the permission to do this/that.
It's not because a software is opensource, that you don't need to pay for it. It's by example the case for Unreal Engine that you named. And, even if it's an abuse of the word, Daz Studio assets also fall under this category ; you've to pay for them, but you've also a full access to their definition files, that you are totally free to modify.

LOL. I highly doubt they can use Iray on 10yrs old computer, nothing older than GeForce 1xxx is not even on the support list.

You can perfectly render with the iRay engine using only the CPU, and it's not because nowadays version of Daz Studio do not anymore support older GPU, that it have always been the case. IRay technology is a bit more to 30 years old, and propriety of Nvidia since the middle of the 00's. Since them, and to a given extend of course, all their GPU included support for it.
Also, while it's not necessarily the preferred render engine, most professional 3D software offering a render option, like 3D Studio Max or Maya by example, support it. And among other thing, it's the rendering engine that was used for the CGI in Matrix Revolution, Attack of the Clones, and other movies from the 00's. Not a bad showcase for a technology that suck accordingly to a random guy on internet.

Bruh, you went full IKEA with this one. Would you like having your OS in raw binary form? It's all 1 or 0 for cpus...

Baby, you went full retard with this one. And by the way, the right comparison isn't "raw binary form" (what mean nothing since binary form is necessarily raw), but opcode. 0 and 1 mean absolutely nothing for the CPU, it's their combination that have a meaning.
This being said, off course that I want IKEA assets. I want the possibility to create my own combination, using the body I like, the head that please me, the hairs (all of them), genitalia, and whatever body extension, that goes well with this result. People using those software are creators, some more than others, and having IKEA assets is as meaningful for them than buying tubes of paint and a blank canvas is for a painter. It's the opposite that is full stupid.

It makes no difference to me tbh, if it works it works, but I would argue that .blend files are pretty much being made for blender.

They are made with Blender, it's not the same.
I don't know if it's still the case but, thanks to its amazingly wide range of file format support, for years Blender was used as transition software by many people, including professionals. Offering a .blend version of your creation was then a habit, since it removed one step for users who wanted to use it with a software that you didn't owned yourself.

You can do decent animations in unity.

And you can do sledging with a trash bag, what don't mean that you should, that it's what trash bags are made for, or that it will not be really easier to use a sled for this.

What constant?

You and your total lack of knowledge regarding what you talk about.

A lot of stuff is overpriced and cant be considered nowhere near a "hard work". And the other half of things just doesn't work properly.

It's both true and false.
A tool like mesh grabber clearly worth its price, both because of the works behind and how useful it is. But yes, there's broken and/or overpriced assets. The store refund policy is here for this, and it don't need much time to learn which creator you should avoid like the plague, and which one you can trust.
This being said, it don't need too much time either to learn how to fix broken cheap assets.

 

[nerfthenebelwerfer]

And you also clearly don't understand what opensource is.

...

I know exactly what opensource is, thank you for tutoring but i've never said that opensource fits the 3d assets in the first place, I live mostly in the IT world not in the artists world so our perspective may differ. IMO artists should be payed for creating stuff on demand, like 'vote with you wallet on what I will create next or pay me this much and I will create it just for you', also just getting tips from fans should work, and once created art should be free to modify and copy without paying anything for the binaries, etc.

IRay technology is a bit more to 30 years old

Cool story bro, the chineese remainder theorem is couple of thousands years older and even I can kill every pc with it, it may be complicated for you, but the trick is not to kill the pc when you are coding, do you finally get it now? Daz has a shity implementation of Iray.

0 and 1 mean absolutely nothing for the CPU, it's their combination that have a meaning

No shit, sherlock, thank you for this insightful journey to the world of assembly, I totally thought that passing single bit to the cpu is enough to make it render me a boobs.

I still would prefer my bitches to be imported with hair though, I may to prefer work on a skeleton/rig/face/whatever without it but when I import the character, I expect the entire character, what is so fkn hard to understand here?

They are made with Blender, it's not the same.
I don't know if it's still the case but, thanks to its amazingly wide range of file format support, for years Blender was used as transition software by many people, including professionals. Offering a .blend version of your creation was then a habit, since it removed one step for users who wanted to use it with a software that you didn't owned yourself.

You are arguing just to argue and it adds nothing to the discussion.

You and your total lack of knowledge regarding what you talk about.

Black is better than white, if we are going to trade our worthless opinions now, but I would prefer talking about some straight facts if we are picking a subject.

 

[Domiek]

Are you using Blender 2.79 or something? After 2.8, I'd say it has an excellent and modern UI. I even like it more than C4D.

If we want to talk about bad UI there's that patchwork mess called Maya. Zbrush I believe is from a wacky parallel universe.

 

[Carpe Stultus]

LOL. I highly doubt they can use Iray on 10yrs old computer, nothing older than GeForce 1xxx is not even on the support list. Technically its possible to use it on 1660s but it freezes my entire pc so hard that the freaking RGB lights in the pc case are changing color with delay, never seen my PC getting hammerd that hard yet.

1: I did render on a 10 year old pc with a 750ti until the end of last year when it finally died.
2: The support for older cards, like the 750ti, ended around that time too iirc.
3: It doesn't matter if they don't support them anymore if you still have an older version of DAZ installed that does.
4: Rendering eats up a shit ton of resources so no wonder your pc gets fisted.

And yes we get it, everything is shit because it is not to your specific liking.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

OP is shitposting hard lol. Come at me brother in arms o/

That said:

Blender UI is relatively standard for a 3D modelling software. It need a bit of time to learn it, but I never found it none intuitive once I got it.

Are you using Blender 2.79 or something? After 2.8, I'd say it has an excellent and modern UI. I even like it more than C4D.

If we want to talk about bad UI there's that patchwork mess called Maya. Zbrush I believe is from a wacky parallel universe.

Blender has come a long way, I still think it's cluttered af and not very intuitive (I still use a 3.1 USD custom build). I love Maya UI (I know a looooot of people who hate it), the way you can quickly build a panel for a particular need (scult/retopology, lightning with x engine, physic sim...), never feel lost if I look for something. But maybe I'm the weird guy lol.

Zbrush one truly comes from another planet.

 

[anne O'nymous]

[...] it may be complicated for you, but the trick is not to kill the pc when you are coding, do you finally get it now?

Oh ! It's what my teachers wanted me to understand in the early 90's. It's a chance that I still achieved to graduate and pass now near to 30 years working as developer. Do you have some hint to give me ? I mean, being a project manager, senior coder, and in charge of all tests writing, I don't want my total inability to be suddenly uncovered.

I'll be nice and give you a hint:
We aren't anymore in the 90's, where we could afford to develop independently for the different architectures. Face to the multiplicity of the computer configuration, and the standardization of the APIs, we now implement what we call "settings". Up to the user to adapt it to his own potato configuration.
Like apparently there's still people living mostly in the IT world who haven't heard about this, can you please to spread the word ?

 

[eCode]

Daz, sucks - Decent UI but importing external assets is a pain in the %$#,you have to do one by one and half won't work, paywall is bigger than the metaverse, also Iray is a garbage and pure cancer giving me 100% on both CPU and GPU all the time and freezing my PC, plus devs have this weird thing for the bald girls so idk why but you can't import a person with hair lol)

Blender, sucks - Worst UI ever made by human, sometimes I even doubt it was human-made, but it has tons of free assets to import by sets of hundreds on one click, too bad every character has a different rig to fkn learn.

VAM, pretty damn cool, but it's not for creating renders and there are not enough different stuff to make a game with it, plus licensing is a pain in the ass too.

Unity, powerhouse, but sucks - at least for making games about human beings, rig from blender is almost always getting fkd up in the conversion, ui is not adapted to act with the rig at all, best you can do is treat it as a whole after doing animations in blender.

UE, even better powerhouse, but sucks too - Garbage UI, using a rig from blender feels like a quantum physics, also its not so great for renders as it is for making animations, and its not as great for making animations as it is for making games, and its not as great for making games as for making FPS based games, so yeah it basically sucks.

I think I'll have to wait another year for something to change here, or did I overlook something?

All of the tools mentioned above and any other tool you can find is just that - a tool of trade to help you achieve your artistic goal. Each tool has its pros and cons but it is up to the artist to learn to use it well. Right now, when everything is bad, the common denominator in the equation is you - refusing to learn, wishing for a tool that just magically makes whatever you want happen without effort. But you do need to put effort to create something meaningful. You can't pick up a pencil and expect to draw anatomically correct portraits on the first try - it takes years of practice and study of the form, volumes, structure, how light works... There are no bad tools, you just need to choose one that suits your goals and put your time in mastering it.

As for the open-source sentiment - open-source doesn't mean free. Specially with artistic assets where you have Creative-Commons and similar licenses applied, that lets you use the resource freely as long as you don't get any monetary gains from it or acknowledge the author appropriately. I agree that some things are overpriced on the market, but there are also ones that are fairly priced for what they are, and it's up to you to find it.

The world is a dark place with great opportunities, but you can't expect for it to shift and change to accommodate you personally - you have to put the effort to find your own path.

 

[nerfthenebelwerfer]

3: It doesn't matter if they don't support them anymore if you still have an older version of DAZ installed that does.

Okay, but I'm talking about the newest version, this is what a noob like me is seeing when he wants to start doing stuff.

4: Rendering eats up a shit ton of resources so no wonder your pc gets fisted.

I don't have any issues with rendering in blender with cycles, it does use 100% of my GPU but only 5-10% of CPU and only when I'm rendering. While on the other hand in DAZ3D I can have an empty scene and as soon as I'm going to switch to Iray all goes up to 100% on both cpu/gpu and app stops being responsive, and these are the default settings so...

And yes we get it, everything is shit because it is not to your specific liking.

I don't think it's about liking if something is having critical bug in its default settings or maybe even deeper in the implementation, idk, but indeed many of the mentioned things 'sucks' because I don't like highly counter-intuitive design. Blender is not intuitive but IMO it's still the best and most complete thing to do 3d renders though, I'm trying to learn something faster and more productive like Daz but as you have noticed it is not going in my way so far.
Maybe I will try to just automate some of my most repetitive work in Blender with python, still can't wrap my head around it because most of the things demand my human attention.

 

[Carpe Stultus]

Okay, but I'm talking about the newest version, this is what a noob like me is seeing when he wants to start doing stuff.



I don't have any issues with rendering in blender with cycles, it does use 100% of my GPU but only 5-10% of CPU and only when I'm rendering. While on the other hand in DAZ3D I can have an empty scene and as soon as I'm going to switch to Iray all goes up to 100% on both cpu/gpu and app stops being responsive, and these are the default settings so...



I don't think it's about liking if something is having critical bug in its default settings or maybe even deeper in the implementation, idk, but indeed many of the mentioned things 'sucks' because I don't like highly counter-intuitive design. Blender is not intuitive but IMO it's still the best and most complete thing to do 3d renders though, I'm trying to learn something faster and more productive like Daz but as you have noticed it is not going in my way so far.
Maybe I will try to just automate some of my most repetitive work in Blender with python, still can't wrap my head around it because most of the things demand my human attention.

Yup DAZ is very heavy on a system..imagine how my old PC felt and that blender feels much better also in terms of less bugs and better optimized is that they have a good team behind it and blender is not just used by people like you or some indie devs/NSFW artists but also by professional companies.

The only thing where DAZ beats the most other programs is that it is easier to make a render in general. In general i agree with you that the UI's of all of these programs are not intuitive for people like us but that is because they aren't really meant for us.

 

[drowsy]

Daz [...] Decent UI
Blender, sucks - Worst UI

Did I go to sleep and wake up in opposite-land?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Did I go to sleep and wake up in opposite-land?

Blender UI is a bit of mess, but they put some effort in it over the years. Doesn't suprise me BfA is quite popular.
Daz one is not really good but not really bad either. As long as software as some kind of customization it's gonna be alright.

Most dangerous case scenario is decent/okayish software chasing mobile app users (Luminar comitted seppuku).

 

[osanaiko]

Gentlemen, you have forgotten rule 1 of usenet internet: don't feed the trolls.

 

[shark_inna_hat]

Welcome to 3D software, please enjoy your stay...