Daz DAZ / Cost / How?

[Daikichi1090]

premier & 8 tokens & holiday punch card 3x & debut new set & wish list.
If you want to use it for 3D games, buy it when the interactive license is 50% off, which is held from time to time.
I don't pay for interactive license as I only use it for rendering and my own mods

 

[AlternateDreams]

premier & 8 tokens & holiday punch card 3x & debut new set & wish list.
If you want to use it for 3D games, buy it when the interactive license is 50% off, which is held from time to time.
I don't pay for interactive license as I only use it for rendering and my own mods

Thanks. I'm not sure what all those things are but now I can use them as search keywords

 

[Justhuman88]

Very insightful folks now it makes sense why most game characters etc are plain AF. I'm on a similar journey , was willing to go full jack sparrow with the asset usage for release now rethinking that approach. The daz originals are gorgeous but so there are a few creators who rival them usually sub $20. They can be found on daz and 3rd party stores.

As for your goal as a hobby project idk man just drop maybe $30 it may be rather generic but also executed. Then you can see if it should be take further.

It's wild as a solo dev you also need deep pockets or an intermediate blender skill level. I think the only way around this is money pit is a barter system team (writer , 3d artist , programmer) ... and that works well with trustworthy friends or in a utopia :-/

 

[n00bi]

I think the only way around this is money pit is a barter system team (writer , 3d artist , programmer)

That money pit is how the industry works. member of the teams is specialized in each area.
You dont want a story write to touch any C/C++ code

How exactly is this barter system suppose to work? you trade your writings for some 3d art or code ?
I dont see how everyone would get their equal share.
How do you quantify the work done in Code vs 3d Art vs Writings.
A barter system works if example a carpenter needs rice and the farmer needs a table.

Also. a writer/storie-teller might be a thing of the past. with the power of AI you can make some damn good stories
AI as a replacement for 3D Artist is still to early if you ask me.
AI for code generation is also damn good already.
By using some AI in your workflow you can come a long way as a solo dev.

 

[AllNatural939]

It's wild as a solo dev you also need deep pockets or an intermediate blender skill level. I think the only way around this is money pit is a barter system team (writer , 3d artist , programmer) ... and that works well with trustworthy friends or in a utopia :-/

Or you could go with what probably more than half of small independent developers do and it's an open secret, and was mentioned already...

 

[Justhuman88]

Someone had a similar post regarding the discounts. I thought they were wilding but it's legit.

Summary...Check the sales daily they go live 2hrs after midnight but you can just seek them in the morning.Wish list what you and buy it when on sale.

They have theme sales ( Valentines day , end of the month , oh it's big titty tuesdays ...etc) with that some creators participate, having discounts on a few or all items in their library. Then there is often a buy more or buy something new incentive which provides more discounts. And if your a daz premier member there are even higher discount tiers and coins you can use for more discounts. The discounts have a cap, I'm unable to say what is the max but 100% is certainly possible lol.

Example

It's Big Tiddy tuesdays theme discount 60% on all of Koo and a select few vendor items
Big Tiddy tuesdays also has 30% off discount on all new items
The bonus incentive provides an additional 10% when you buy a newly released item and something from the listed vendors
I'm a Daz premier subcriber more discount on purchases
Purchases accumulate Daz coins which gives discounts as well
As a Daz premier subscriber all items from Artistaz Originals have a higher discount


And with the magic of math KOO Kevin becomes dirt cheap $2.19

 

[Synx]

I'm kinds confused by this whole topic. The question was how are people affording using DAZ, and every response is about how its so expensive and all, and not just giving the very simple answer; they don't. I can gaurentee you 90%+ of the games start out with pirating pretty much every single asset they use.

Is it morally wrong? Yeah but so is pirating Adobe software (which they 100% deserve with their shit subscription plans nowadays) or hell even downloading an adult game form this website instead of subscribing to their patreon to get it the right way.

It's just an hobby, nobody is going to find out or even care where you got the assets from. With how expensive life is, and how most DAZ assets even on sale are overpriced (30 bucks for a badly done character morph, or a character that looks exactly the same as the other 50 from the vendor) just go pirate the stuff you cant afford. Try out assets, see which you like and which you don't. Maybe buy some of the really well made ones, but just don't worry about.

Who cares about all the legal stuff when you start out. Your not even sure if you are going to stick to this, or if you even like to do in the long run. Besides Renders made by DAZ (or any other program for that matter) are your own creation and has 0 relation to any of thr assets you use. Even in the extreme unlikely event DAZ or an asset creator would go after you (I have never heard of this happening, and why would they go after 1 dude using their assets for free, instead of the ones sharing it for free), you can just ignore them and there is litterly nothing they can do.

And in the very unlikely case you actually manage to start a game, release it, and get some financial support, you can always go back and buy the assets you have used.

 

[LoMLFan]

How many DAZ proficianado's are looking at the creative benefits and zero cost (once you have a GPU capable of rendering) of AI to create their scenes?

 

[Justhuman88]

LoMLFan we likely 2 - 5 years away from the every day person using a pc / workstation / phone with the capabilities to not only be reliable , consistent , cost effective and easy to use implementation of ai in the way your describing. The major hurdle which image to image, text to image , image to video and text to video has is pure consistency.

What I can see by the end of next year is text + image prompting to create sophisticated ultra detailed models like some Zbrush 50hrs sculpted works of art ish.They already rigged with several outfits , metahuman + etc.

I have spoken to a daz user on this same topic (has a patreon with years of renders etc) and he is in the place of tapping out with the sentiments of most ppl using ai and it's impossible to compete. To that I say negative as most people are using some version of SD with the same basic Loras . Haven't checked out deepseeks text to image gen but it's still no where near where we need it to be.

 

[LoMLFan]

@Justhuman88 Thank you for your insight into this, I've seen the gaming projects on here stalling due to time needed to render and given AI generations take < 30 seconds I did wonder how many had explored this already.

When you look at something like ComfyUI (a free tool that allows you to set up workflows for image generation), this includes hundreds of custom 'nodes' that allow you freedom to compose scenes any way you need, repeatably, using open pose wire-frames, character LoRA's created from your own assets and backgrounds. The ability to say you want 10 different versions, let it be a little creative and it takes 5 minutes to produce them must surely be quite attractive - don't the tools you already use leverage workflow type generation anyway?

Also note that people without their own capable workstation for AI generation can register for free on ArtBot, this connects them with workstations capable of generating AI images cost-free to you (by volunteers who understand that not everyone has the budget for hardware than can do this efficiently -

You must be registered to see the links

) - this isn't as powerful as using something like ComfyUI locally as it doesn't allow you to set up workflows, however it's a good way to dip your toe in the water!

 

[mibc9394]

I think when it comes to cost, money is never the most expensive in game development. Time, however is the most expensive. Making a game requires a lot of knowledge from a variety of domain and each aspect in game development can take years to learn. Say you wanna learn how to make an appealing character for an adult game. If you are a total beginner, it takes around 4-5 years to really acquire the knowledge to produce the art with acceptable quality, given that you work really hard in the 4-5 years. Therefore, what you are spending for when buying DAZ assets (or any assets) is not just the assets themselves, but for saving months or years of time as well, which is very valuable.

That's said, buying assets does not guarantee time saving. Making art is like writing an essay. There are the ideation aspect and the more technical writing aspect. You have an idea, and in order to deliver your idea in an easy-to-understand way, you write it down with words. Buying assets would save time in the technical "writing" aspect, but can never save time in coming up with an awesome idea. Therefore, I think if people really want to spend money wisely in buying assets, they should first get a solid understanding of aesthetics and how to make good arts. Only with a good understanding of how to make good arts, they can truly know what they really need when buying assets. That way they won't waste money in buying assets that they don't absolutely need. Ready-made assets will not help people make good art if they don't know how to combine them together to make something beautiful.

Despite all the controversy over morality, AI image generation could be a great helper in producing good character art along with DAZ. For example, you can use DAZ to rough out a character and pose them however you need. Then, you render them out as still images. After that, you use img2img to refine the renders, combining different generated images together and do some manual paint over to finish the final art. This way of working could be quite nice for making still images for adult games

 

[Justhuman88]

idk guys I still think the uncensored ai systems will lag behind something like a midjourney or flux . Even with all the fandangles such as control net , loras , comfy ui addons etc . We will still be lagging behind drastically . For instance this

prompt : a freckled faced female , fair skinned ,bright blue eyes, 25 year old , with smeared makeup , an expression of happy ecstasy , with a mouthful of thick cum dripping on to her chin , blue dress pulled down showing cleavage ,wearing ripped stockings , thick thighs , bubble but and red high heels.

That is mighty difficult to get with her on her knees , her standing etc. Even with out/in painting it's still a mess and for your gpu to keep be moving at a decent pace you will need at 8 - 12 gb of vram something like a rtx 3060 and it's still crawling performance.

Gilf finder is a game built using only ai images , idk buddy may not have put his heart and soul into the dev.Referenced that because his patreon is doing almost 2k monthly which is way more than most games (should be noted hasn't touched the game in months and also offers custom imagery for the patrons)

On the model asset / development
With decent characters and mods ... a month at 30mins a day is all you need with daz to create pheneomal unique characters. Daz3d artist like koo, feng ,v3d , e3d...etc

We are talking about stuff like : real hands , real feet , head morph packs , sonsy systems , aging morph , glute etc.

 

[LoMLFan]

That is mighty difficult to get with her on her knees , her standing etc. Even with out/in painting it's still a mess and for your gpu to keep be moving at a decent pace you will need at 8 - 12 gb of vram something like a rtx 3060 and it's still crawling performance.

It's extremely simple to pose the characters in AI since all base models now have an Open Pose compatible model, the issue was getting consistent look-a-likes but that is now extremely easy to do with LoRA's (see the LoML FanArt thread, I created a LoRA of Denise, took about 2 hours but now I can create her in any pose you can imagine by simply including her LoRA in the generation process..!)

 

[Justhuman88]

It's extremely simple to pose the characters in AI since all base models now have an Open Pose compatible model, the issue was getting consistent look-a-likes but that is now extremely easy to do with LoRA's (see the LoML FanArt thread, I created a LoRA of Denise, took about 2 hours but now I can create her in any pose you can imagine by simply including her LoRA in the generation process..!)

Just did and yes we have made advancements but they are not up to par ...same issues we need more time and better tech such as the 2d to 3d image mod (it's some github paper for now ... can modify expression and poses etc via dials ) and many others. The current stack will create a subpar product the great advancements are still conceptual papers and most importantly the uncensored versions take time to release.

To get back on topic , daz stuff expensive but you can get most items outside of a large bundle etc for $1.xx - $6.xx when they are at something like 90% off. Look for sale deals , combined with daz premier subscription and the coins . I think the end of month - beginning of month has better deals. They had almost everything at a base discount 75% off without the conditional discounts . Now can it equate to 100% off doubt it. Did the 100% off on a few items but that's with a $10 discount code.

If your aiming for for that 5/10k+ patreon mmr it may not be a bad idea to buy exceptional assets when they are at a steep discount. Also check out blendermarket for environments they look great and cheaper just not as much variety. However they have packs in which you can build whatever scene. Lol if you want to make money and better quality blender has to be a friend and not the complex beast by comparison.

Or you can continue the jack sparrow route. Btw how can anyone tell the content has been jack sparrowed ?