New Game Ready Content from Daz3D and BAG

I'm glad to be finally writing this blog! There's been a lot of talk in the industry lately about Daz3D's new game-dev-friendly licenses for their 3D content... That's because its BIG news to us indie developers! I've had to bite my tongue to not chime in before now. I wanted to wait until the official launch of these figures, because tangible items are much easier to describe than non-existent ones (even on the Internet!).

Today, we launched a new line of game-ready characters and other 3D content to inhabit your game projects with. We've partnered with Daz3D to adapt some of their top content for easy integration into game engines, with a focus on Torque3D. I wrote a blog about it, here it goes...

For those that don't know Daz3D, or need a reminder: They are one of the largest 3D Art brokerages on the web with a focus on high quality, Poser-compatible figures. It's said, that their figure, Victoria 3.0, is the most sold/supported 3D model in the world!

Our endeavor with Daz started back in March 2010, at GDC S.F...



Ari, our CEO/lead dev, was really pushing that we “Go talk to Daz and check out what they were working on...” At the time, I honestly thought, “meh...”, I wasn't that into it. Although I have loved Daz's work for literally a decade, we'd been losing ground in that sector trying to get such titans of the industry (at the time, Poser) to go game-ready. As you may have seen us ranting about, BrokeAss Games has been in pursuit of the indie-game-content “Holy Grail” since the beginning - which is Daz3D/Poser quality content (and that type of animation pipeline) to use in our game development.

Turns out, that's exactly what Daz had in mind too! Their big announcement at GDC was "New EULA Makes Renowned Figures and Content Available to Developers". Finally!

This got our attention and we started a whirlwind romance with Daz...They raised the stakes again by releasing a toolset to further facilitate the game-ready direction, which is pretty incredible, in my opinion.

We did some prototyping early on, but now it was time to really decide how we would approach the job.



What app pipeline do we use?
We start the process with the Daz/Digimi toolset and spend a good amount of time in the Decimator. The key here is to use the “weights” which sets the influence of the poly-reduction per surface group. This is how you can get figures that appear to be much higher polycount than they actually are. The sweetspot for me was 15k-20k polygons. My rule of thumb was “reduce the polys until I lose too much fine detail, then scale it back up.” That's an over-simplification, but basically you've got to get it as low as you can, while retaining quality polyflow.



Technically speaking, we were still missing some functionality and wanted to avoid some pitfalls associated with COLLADA import, such as the Y/Z up solution. We still had some technical specs we weren't meeting, like group/texture naming, scaling, vert tweaks, re-weighting, various pixel pushing, etc. We kept the pipeline close-to-home and opted for the DTSPlus Exporter for Milkshape3D by ChrisR as the final output to Torque.



Once we had the assets in that world (MS3D, Fragmotion, UU3D)... Things fell into place for us and we began to work on game-ready animation libraries for each of the skeletons we set out to support (V3, M3, V4, M4 – all different, and all worth supporting due to the amount of killer content for each.) Thankfully retargetting animations is an option these days (*COUGH* EcstasyMotion), which really sped this up. DSQTweaker came in handy too, throughout the process. Ha! I'm loving these shameless plugs...

What sort of polycounts do we target?
We shot for 20k poly top levels of detail, with a hard max of 25k. With today's engines, and more-so if you are developing a singleplayer game with low-to-moderate amounts of “mobs” on the screen at one time, any less would just not do you justice. You get that “AAA” look and the engines eat it up, as long as there are proper LODs, and a reasonably low number of render calls. Minimum poly count came about organically at around 15k. So, with 7 LODs these figures LOD as follows:


V3_ZombieMale - 15k poly TOP LOD

900 pixels or higher 15k
700 pixels or higher: 10.5k
400 pixels or higher: 7.5k
300 pixels or higher: 6k
100 pixels or higher: 3.75k
001 pixels or higher: 1.5k

Note: I will most likely add a lower poly bottom lod that is a simple cube for 1-10 pixel height range.




How far down the rabbit hole do we go with engine integration?
After some trial and error, we settled on a pipeline and scoped-in the builds to be basic avatar replacements for the stock engines. With Torque, where there is a well-developed character system within the engine, basic avatar replacements are anything but basic. Blended animations, ground transforms needing to be just right, a built-in LOD system to support, and numerous in-engine animation calls all demand that a Torque avatar replacement be next-gen and designed to take advantage of these features.

With the tools and plan in place, it was time to deliver. Which, turns out, is really important when you have partners. To complicate things, we landed a notable contract gig to develop a prototype mocap- controlled game for one of our international clients. (More on that in a future blog...) Somehow, we managed our way through both of these projects (at the cost of some big delays to our own goals: Mack/Fack T3D port, and a little game called Ruin Online...).

Was it worth it?

Hell Yeah! Daz are great peoples, and this promises to be a strong alliance for us. We had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner with an interesting cross-section of the Daz team and their extended family, in L.A., a few weeks ago for SIGGRAPH 2010. Everyone from Daz QA techs, published artists and web guys to strategists, and executives. One big table, bread breaking... it was biblical.

And here we are at the end of the blog... I didn't really get to hype the figures themselves too much, hopefully what they say about pictures is still true... If so, here's a few thousand worth...












You can purchase these figures for 30% off (introductory), and find out more about them in the Daz3D Dev store, here.


Peace!

Jondo



P.S.

Here's some more vids...