Why is it so hard to animate porn games?

[UpAfterTen]

It's odd that Unity keeps being brought up. As woody554 said that's usually not a good sign. I'm not sure what it is, but the games I've played that use Unity are, by and large, a lot more riddled with bugs and issues than games created with RenPy which is designed to do VNs and only VNs.

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

So would it be correct to summarize that because most porn devs choose to use engines like Daz3D over engines like Unity they can't make good animations? That's why games like Lust for Adventure have good animations but not games like Ataegina? And the reason devs choose to do this is because Daz3D gives them better render quality over Unity?

Or to put it shorter, most porn devs choose render quality over animations?

There is also the legal aspect to take into account.
Devs use Daz3d because it is open license and has a ton of premade content which is ready to use for profit purposes. Meanwhile real game studios spend millions of dollars and have entire teams of trained professionals who make their content for Unity or Unreal, but Average Joe cannot use any of that content for legal reasons. Creating your own models and animations in Unity takes a ton of time and effort... and effectively money. Most people simply cannot do that or if they could they would just work for a big game studio or sell indie games on Steam.
You might as well as why doesn't a normal person just build their own Walmart and rake in millions of dollars.

 

[GS523523]

It can take anywhere between 2 to 15 hours to render 1 image. An animation will need multiple renders. So say they have a basic set up and need 10 hours per render and need 15 renders for 1 very short animation, that's 150 hours just for that animation. Say 5 animations an update plus all the other scenes, that's 750 hours just for the animations and probably triple that for the renders.

I understand what everyone here is telling me - it takes a whole day for an artist to draw/render an image, so a second animation will take 24 days to create. OK. Niv-Mizzet the Firemind already explained to me this is why 2D cartoon animations are hard to do.
But for 3D that's not what I'm talking about with my Crysis example. Yes Crysis cost a shitload of money to make, but it's not like they had artists rendering every single possible frame. Crysis uses some sort of real-time animation. Like Unity or UE. That's why it requires a good graphics card to play. And as Niv-Mizzet the Firemind explained to me, this can't be done with Daz3D because it would melt the computer. OK.
So what I was asking with that last comment is why do devs choose Daz3D over Unity. I thought it was because they preferred render quality over animations, but looks like Fatalmasterpiece is saying that it is because Daz3D is much easier to use.

It's odd that Unity keeps being brought up. As woody554 said that's usually not a good sign. I'm not sure what it is, but the games I've played that use Unity are, by and large, a lot more riddled with bugs and issues than games created with RenPy which is designed to do VNs and only VNs.

I'm bringing up Unity because as I said in the first post Lust for Adventure is the only game with good animations I've played. With everyone talking about Daz3D I was thinking that maybe it is an engine issue. Because it doesn't seem like Lust for Adventure is being made by a "professional dev with years of industry experience" as everyone here keeps telling me.

Devs use Daz3d because it is open license and has a ton of premade content which is ready to use for profit purposes. .... Creating your own models and animations in Unity takes a ton of time and effort... and effectively money.

Thanks dude, 20 replies and I finally get an answer that makes sense. Daz3D is easy to use, Unity requires actual 3D modelling / animation development knowledge.
And this kinda ties in with what Avaron1974 said - most "game developers" here are just "average joes" with too much spare time on their hands.

 

[shark_inna_hat]

The difference between realtime (Crysis) animations and pre-rendered animations (Daz3D) lies in the machine needed to run the game. With a pre-rendered animation you can run the game on a potato, cell phone or raspberry pi, with realtime 3D you need a gaming rig (of course this is all on a scale, there are games using pre-rendered graphics that need 4GB ram to just start, and there are 3d games running on a graphic calculator... ).

The difficulty of making a animation for daz and for unreal/unity/godot/panda3d/whatever is comparable, but what makes the later harder to make is that you need to optimize for performance when doing realtime 3d - if a scene renders slow in daz, well you just leave your pc on for a night (or week) and it's done, the player will never know. If a 3d realtime scene is slow it will make the game unresponsive or even uplayable or playable only by the few people that have top tier gaming setups and are not worried about overheating and electricity bills.

With all the (free) tools available today to game devs - it's possible that even a one-man project can pull of a decent 3d realtime porn game, but from what I can tell - very few have the needed set of skills for that.

 

[GS523523]

The difficulty of making a animation for daz and for unreal/unity/godot/panda3d/whatever is comparable, but what makes the later harder to make is that you need to optimize for performance when doing realtime 3d - if a scene renders slow in daz, well you just leave your pc on for a night (or week) and it's done, the player will never know. If a 3d realtime scene is slow it will make the game unresponsive or even uplayable or playable only by the few people that have top tier gaming setups and are not worried about overheating and electricity bills.

OK now I'm confused. This is exactly what I was saying before ("Or to put it shorter, most porn devs choose render quality over animations? ") but judging from all the responses I've got I thought I was wrong.

But you're saying that I was correct in my understanding? That devs can't have good quality realtime animations, so they are left with a choice of either having good quality renders without animations or having decent quality realtime animations?
(or spending a shitload of time (say 24 days) having good quality prerenderd animations?)

 

[CocoVC]

We would have to import the animations created in DAZ/Blender/iClone/Cinema4D into Unity or Unreal. Then we would have to check to make sure it is rigged properly; then check for collisions. That is just for the animation alone. Now add on the additional things you need to do for a third and first person rpg/walking simulator and those tasks are outside the scope and capabilities of most porn devs. We would have no choice but to work together to create a 3d realtime game in a sufficient (aka under 2 years) amount of time.

 

[Kinderalpha]

The difference between realtime (Crysis) animations and pre-rendered animations (Daz3D) lies in the machine needed to run the game. With a pre-rendered animation you can run the game on a potato, cell phone or raspberry pi, with realtime 3D you need a gaming rig (of course this is all on a scale, there are games using pre-rendered graphics that need 4GB ram to just start, and there are 3d games running on a graphic calculator... ).

The difficulty of making a animation for daz and for unreal/unity/godot/panda3d/whatever is comparable, but what makes the later harder to make is that you need to optimize for performance when doing realtime 3d - if a scene renders slow in daz, well you just leave your pc on for a night (or week) and it's done, the player will never know. If a 3d realtime scene is slow it will make the game unresponsive or even uplayable or playable only by the few people that have top tier gaming setups and are not worried about overheating and electricity bills.

With all the (free) tools available today to game devs - it's possible that even a one-man project can pull of a decent 3d realtime porn game, but from what I can tell - very few have the needed set of skills for that.

You probably have some experience in 3D development but you're way off base here. The real comparison is that in Daz3d, one computer has to render every single frame (up to 60 frames per second of animation) in order to produce an animation. That's fine, it just takes literally forever. Considering some artists have their machine rendering for hours on just one image, imagine several hundred.

There are more reasons than I can possibly list as to why you don't see animations or unity games. Starting from programming them, to modeling and animating them, the pipeline for producing them, and finally the process for shipping a game. It's unexplainable in a post. It has nothing to do with GPU cost or whatever. Animations are calculated by the CPU not GPU. Lighting, shaders, particles, and some other graphical elements are calculated by the GPU. Obviously that doesn't mean the GPU doesn't render polygons. Just there's a difference between the GPU performing calculations and it rendering.

With that being said, hopefully that clears up some of the confusion. The answer is simply because nobody is making unity games. Why? There's a hundred reasons. Time, money, skills, art, process, and the list goes on and on.

 

[shark_inna_hat]

True enough that it probably takes many weeks not just a night to render a animation with Daz3D. But 60fps for a video? Hollywood says 24 is good enough, and some animations are made 'on twos' or 'on threes' so one might get away with as low as 8 fps (sometimes).
And sure you can animate a skinned mesh on the GPU. Sometimes it's the only way, for example when using hardware instancing, but that's not really important. I just wanted to point out that making a 3d realtime game (unity/unreal/etc) means that some people won't play it because they don't have the needed hardware, and porn games are niche anyways, so limiting the audience even more might not be something devs want to do.

Main point is - people don't, cause people can't (because of money, skill, art, process....).

Sorry for adding to the confusion.

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

I understand what everyone here is telling me - it takes a whole day for an artist to draw/render an image, so a second animation will take 24 days to create. OK. Niv-Mizzet the Firemind already explained to me this is why 2D cartoon animations are hard to do.
But for 3D that's not what I'm talking about with my Crysis example. Yes Crysis cost a shitload of money to make, but it's not like they had artists rendering every single possible frame. Crysis uses some sort of real-time animation. Like Unity or UE. That's why it requires a good graphics card to play. And as Niv-Mizzet the Firemind explained to me, this can't be done with Daz3D because it would melt the computer. OK.
So what I was asking with that last comment is why do devs choose Daz3D over Unity. I thought it was because they preferred render quality over animations, but looks like Fatalmasterpiece is saying that it is because Daz3D is much easier to use.



I'm bringing up Unity because as I said in the first post Lust for Adventure is the only game with good animations I've played. With everyone talking about Daz3D I was thinking that maybe it is an engine issue. Because it doesn't seem like Lust for Adventure is being made by a "professional dev with years of industry experience" as everyone here keeps telling me.



Thanks dude, 20 replies and I finally get an answer that makes sense. Daz3D is easy to use, Unity requires actual 3D modelling / animation development knowledge.
And this kinda ties in with what Avaron1974 said - most "game developers" here are just "average joes" with too much spare time on their hands.

Worse still, even if you do have experience with 3d modelling as I do, I don't know how to code in Unity or Unreal. Certainly I can't build a UI or script AI or everything else needed for a real time game. Real time games take so much more work even in animation such as rigging, walk cycles, pathing, lip syncing... that's a shit ton of work for a single person to do. For that it would take a team and millions of dollars at which point we would probably just make a mainstream game and not adult content which has limited knowledge.
Instead, one single person can animate and render in DAZ pretty easily, code in Renpy easily and release a very basic game which you see us doing on here.

 

[GS523523]

Worse still, even if you do have experience with 3d modelling as I do, I don't know how to code in Unity or Unreal. Certainly I can't build a UI or script AI or everything else needed for a real time game. Real time games take so much more work even in animation such as rigging, walk cycles, pathing, lip syncing... that's a shit ton of work for a single person to do. For that it would take a team and millions of dollars at which point we would probably just make a mainstream game and not adult content which has limited knowledge.
Instead, one single person can animate and render in DAZ pretty easily, code in Renpy easily and release a very basic game which you see us doing on here.

I understand full realtime games are a lot of work, but surely it is possible for a person to model and animate in Unity and then export the images/videos into Renpy as they do with DAZ. They should be able to create the same VNs using Unity or any other less graphically intensive software than DAZ.
Or maybe just make the whole VN in Unity without using Renpy, that should also be possible.

But yeah I get it, DAZ is much simpler to use. Thanks all for explaining.

 

[UnusedUniqueUsername]

One is more like creating your own donuts in your own donut shop vs everything from scratch including building the donut shop itself and you you do half of the chain through china because it saves money and the baking costs are much higher because bigger donuts.

Maybe the analogy isn't the best.

 

[Kinderalpha]

I understand full realtime games are a lot of work, but surely it is possible for a person to model and animate in Unity and then export the images/videos into Renpy as they do with DAZ. They should be able to create the same VNs using Unity or any other less graphically intensive software than DAZ.
Or maybe just make the whole VN in Unity without using Renpy, that should also be possible.

But yeah I get it, DAZ is much simpler to use. Thanks all for explaining.

What Daz excels at way above and beyond unity is the character customization and creation. In unity, you can't just slap together body morphs, skin textures, and poses like you can in Daz. I like where your head is though. It makes sense.

What you're actually talking about is the difference between rendering an image, and exporting an image. Let's take Koikatsu for example. It's a cell shaded game that offers plenty of character customization and posing. It's great, because the game does the real time rendering. However, it's cell shaded, so it's a lot less intensive. In Koikatsu you simply Screencap or export an image from a frame or multiple frames. There is no render time. That's what would happen in Unity if you essentially recreated Koikatsu but with realistic shaders and textures.

However, there's a reason that doesn't exist. It's due to the technical composition. In rendering, you're composing a set or group of textures, shaders, and of course models before they're rendered. Then, you bake an image by allowing your GPU to complete a one-time rendering process. This allows for Daz to offer dynamic lighting, shaders, textures, morphs, and customization. That's very very very difficult to replicate at a technical level.

It gets real nitty the further you look into it. Just know the technical process to generate characters to render in Daz is entirely different from start to finish then it would be in Unity. Unity has an entirely different graphical engine than Daz studio. It's not made to produce hyper realistic content at extreme resolutions. It's more about efficiency than quality.

It would be like saying, "Why don't you just 3D model that building in Unity instead of Blender" or saying "Why not just make that photo in Unity instead of photoshop." If that's coming off as two vastly different concepts and seems unusual, then I'm getting my point across. It's not comparing apples to oranges, its comparing apples to teslas.

 

[Deleted member 1536527]

I understand full realtime games are a lot of work, but surely it is possible for a person to model and animate in Unity and then export the images/videos into Renpy as they do with DAZ. They should be able to create the same VNs using Unity or any other less graphically intensive software than DAZ.
Or maybe just make the whole VN in Unity without using Renpy, that should also be possible.

But yeah I get it, DAZ is much simpler to use. Thanks all for explaining.

You can't model or animate in Unity. For that you could use something like blender, and then import the model and animations into unity. But that sort of beats the purpose I guess cuz you could just render them in blender at that point (it has its own realtime renderer which is pretty good).

But again it all comes down to making the animations, which I think is something that's being missed here. I guess to get the best of both worlds, you could use DAZ to "make" the models, customize them, finalize them, export it to blender. But its gonna be a pain, cuz you'll have to remake all the materials because blender uses a different material system and exporters aren't perfect. And you'll have to redo it if you want to make some changes to the model. But even then you'll still have to animate in blender. Which, if you're not really good at, are gonna end up looking shitty, and will take really long as well.

You can't really beat DAZ's workflow man, its super streamlined, easy, has shit ton of assets you can use, posing, clothing etc. But the whole program is a bulky mess imo. If only they optimize it, make it more lightweight, better animation tools, and a better realtime renderer (it has one that recently got added, filament, but its a joke right now) it'll be priceless.