There are some products that have been around for quite some time that keep getting newer and newer editions. They have a vast amount of artists contributing to them and they can be used in still images, videos, and games. There are some considerations when using them in games. (Namely many of them require and Indie Game Developer License or similar)

DAZ Studio

I had heard of Bryce, Poser, and DAZ 3D for years. I've even messed with them a few times over the years. I did not really consider them as something worth considering for my game development pipeline until the spring of 2016. A friend of mine from back in the Neverwinter Nights days recommended I check it out. He also recommended I get something called Platinum Club + before buying anything.

Prior to this I had a spreadsheet of assets I wanted from the Unity Asset store that would take me thousands of dollars to acquire before I had what I needed. The vast majority of them were humanoid shaped assets such as elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, orcs, etc.

It turns out you can make all of these things and then some using DAZ Studio at www.daz3d.com.

I have been meaning to write a game developer tutorial to help you guys/gals learn from what I had to go through. There are a lot of products on the DAZ site and knowing which ones will work with what is important.

This post will likely be a long one, but I hope to address most of your questions.

The first thing to know is you can mess with the basic stuff and some starter packs and such for FREE. You should try that before committing any money.

Platinum Club +

Platinum Club + is totally worth the money. It is around $24 for 3 months or $70 per year. It translates to substantial discounts to many products all the time, as well as some free content each week. In addition, they give you two different $6 off coupons per month to use on certain things. One of them can be used on most things so that basically is like getting $6 free per month. If you bought the $24 package it is like knocking $18 off of that. The other coupon will give you $6 off of $18 or more in purchases.

They currently have a big sale going on which is where I blew all my money I had for my birthday. It has many deals that you can purchase one new release, and then there are tons of other things you can add to your cart that further get knocked down by up to 90% the regular price depending upon what it is.

You can end up with hundreds of dollars worth of assets from Daz for a little over $10 depending upon how you shop. If you plan on purchasing a bunch of stuff from DAZ3D then it is a good idea to first purchase the Platinum Club +. It will likely immediately pay for itself on the purchases you make that same day.

Knowing the Model Generations

Learning the ropes of what the model generations are is important. The current line of models is Genesis 3, plus some specific appearances of Genesis 3 models. Genesis 3 and Genesis 2 split into Male and Female models.

Genesis 1 used one model that could be morphed into male or female.

Prior to Genesis 1 models had specific names with Victoria and Michael being the most popular. Victoria 4 and Michael 4 are the last generation before Genesis 1. Victoria 5 and Michael 5 are versions of them based off of the Genesis 1 model.
Victoria 6 and Michael 6 are based off of Genesis 2. Victoria 7 and Michael 7 are based off of Genesis 3.

It took me quite some time to determine that. It is important when buying clothing packs, morphs, and other things.

Clothing/Hair/etc

Most older clothing and hair and such can be FIT to newer generations of models, though sometimes it works best by sticking an older generation figure in the scene, applying the clothing, then right clicking on it and telling it to fit to your newer generation figure. This helpful to know, because often there will be some nice armor or clothing you want that is not for the generation of model you have decided to focus on.

There are some assets you can purchase that will enable you to do this the opposite direction toward Genesis 1. I tend to focus my work around Genesis 1 at the moment, but some of the stuff for Genesis 2 and 3 is so high quality I would like to use it on Genesis 1. To make this possible I purchased the following assets...

Genesis 3 clones Genesis - enables me to fit genesis 3 clothing to genesis 1 figures.
Genesis 2 Male Clone Genesis - use male genesis 2 clothing and hair with genesis characters.
Genesis 2 Female Clone Genesis - use female genesiis 2 clothing and hair with genesis characters.

Here is an example of why you might want this...

Say you really like this armor...
(Old World Knight)

Yet they only make it for Genesis 2 Males... It won't go back to Genesis for fitting without purchasing one of those assets. Genesis 2 Female also cannot fit it.

I own that package... I'll simply show you.

Genesis 2 Male

Genesis with no specific male or female features

There is no material (skin) applied to that and I have not tweaked any of the sliders to morph it into male, female, fat, skinny, old, monster, etc.

Genesis with Michael 5 Hero sliders active and skin

(Notice in the abdomen area of the breastplate... some clipping... so it is not always perfect, but usually you can tweak it to get it working)

Genesis with Victoria 5 and Victoria 5 super model sliders active and V5 Bree skin

Now there is some clipping here too. One of the things I've found to get clothing working the best is to tweak the body while it is nude to the proportions you want. Then apply the clothes with the "Fit To" option. It is still not always perfect but for most clothing it works great. There are some tools/assets on the Daz Store to help you touch up problem areas.

That particular piece of armor is more clippy than most things I work with. The real benefit of this is you can use any Genesis 1, 2, 3, across the board.

How to use it in game engines

When you select an object in DAZ3D in the File menu there is an Export option with many different options and the two most common are likely to be FBX and OBJ. You should use FBX with things you plan to animate and move like people, and OBJ for objects that will be static and do not need to animate moving parts.

You can use these in Unity or Unreal pretty much the same way you would import any model. It is important to note they do not have an LOD by default, they are high poly, and they usually have the textures spread across multiple materials.

To improve the atlasing of textures, and handle some of the LOD issues before exporting it to a game engine you can use a product for Daz 3D called a Decimator.

Decimator for DAZ Studio - this an expensive asset so I purchased mine when it was on sale. If you are good with blender or a 3D program you may want to use the decimator just to help with atlasing, and you may decide you prefer to do the merging of models and decimating in a 3D program. If you don't want to use a 3D program then just use the decimator.

You can further optimize them once they are in Unity for example by using something like Simple LOD.

Hair in Unity

All of the materials default to the Standard Unity shader without any of the sliders adjusted and you may need to add the normal, specular maps, etc. However, the default settings for a standard shader are NOT how you want to handle hair. It looks bad. This is easy to fix, just play around with using FADE and CUTOUT methods in the standard shader and mix and match until you are happy with the results of your hair.

Eyes

Eyes don't quite look right by default in Unity. I am still messing with these and may do a followup tutorial on getting those looking best, but we'd already decided awhile ago that we were going to make our own eyes as the ones DAZ exports are more complex than they need to be.

Licensing

The important thing to know is that DAZ Originals (things made by Daz) require an Indie or Corporate Game Developers license to use them in a game. The default license fee for DAZ Originals game License is $500. It goes on sale fairly often as well.

Daz Originals Indie Game License
Daz Originals Commercial Game License - required if you make more than $100,000 annually.

Other artists (though not all) may require you also have an Indie Game Developer license as well. I like a lot of an artist named RawArt's products and they will be useful to me so I will likely end up getting a license from him at some point as well.

RawArt Indie Game License
RawArt Commercial Game License

In general you can use DAZ to make your humanoids, elves, orcs, bear men, rat men, werewolves, lizard men, minotaurs, zombies, demons, etc depending upon what assets you own. You can also use sliders to tweak faces, bodies, and much more so you can make infinite variations. In the long run this is far more price effective than buying a lot of different assets of characters from places like the Unity Asset Store. I focus on animals and non-humanoid monsters if I purchase assets from the Unity Asset Store. The rest I use DAZ.

Steem On!