Renderotica

I believe I posted links to MetaHuman in our other site's discussion. I personally use Unity, but have followed Unreal for decades. This is the power of a game engine that has adopted a user community contribution to it's products, in contrast to a straight render engine that regulates and self picks contributors. Because you can import these metahumans into Unreal it won't be a year or two before several porn shoot offs appear, and they will for sure. How amazing is it that you can do in real time animation with this tool that would take you dozens of hours to render in Daz and not even get close the realism or natural movement? This will be the state of the games to come in the near future. Daz will need to up it's game, either figure out how to come up to the same level of realism or adopt these other technologies or it will be nothing more then a cartoon making engine, but as me and you have already heard a countless times in these type of forums, that is what a vocal majority seem to want. But I know you are like me and chase after something greater. Cheers.
 

After reflecting on the sentence I removed, Daz is actually thinking in this direction with their extended licensing. Grab them up while they are cheap (if you are a game developer). They've already gone from $5 to $10 per asset.

Edited by user Tuesday, June 15, 2021 11:02:40 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Originally Posted by: Hellboy

Metahuman realism comes from 3D scans and performance capture, which looks nice, but it's very specific, painfully limited and not consistent with our DAZ Studio world. 

The appeal of DAZ Studio is the huge amount of content and options. It's not realistic to expect every vendor out there will create characters and content from full 3D scans or animators doing everything from motion capture. Besides, you can notice in the Renderotica galleries, people are not really interested in real-life-looking people or scenarios anyway.

Rendering with Iray is seconds fast with recent graphic cards. The free Octane for DS is almost real time. But I do agree that a better option than Filament would be amazing.

Yes, the approach comes from more of a photogrammetry nature than an artist sculpting, but to be honest there are only a couple of good character sculpting PA (for Daz, I've seen several more for Maya that are amazing.) I don't see why one couldn't start with scans and then sculpt and blend (Metahuman has a blend mode.) It's just vertices that can be manipulated through math.

Are you sure people aren't really interested in real-life or are limited to by the tools and skills? I would imagine if there was a porn version of MetaHuman there would be a significant number of artists jump from one ship to the other.

The biggest advantage of Daz is the content for sure, and also the ease of posing and playing dress up. But with extended licensing you can bring that over.  I have successfully brought any pose from Daz over to Unity for G8 (clothing and hair is a bit trickier sometimes.) Animation based on mocap can be pretty advanced with animation blending and IK, you can also get physics far beyond what Daz can do.  Animation also doesn't need to strictly be mocap, you can do it with code pretty easy, it's just mocap is usually the best natural animation. Simple code can adjust the transforms of the joints and things like eyes. One can also use code to adjust the mesh to get effects like like soft body and muscle flexing, not trivia but not beyond an intermediate programmer to pull off. 

I'm not fully bashing Daz, I find it very useful and in some ways can still do some things the others can't do YET, because they were designed as game engines. But installing the latest Unreal last night, they already have branch project setups for animation and rendering instead of strict game dev.

And sure RTX isn't as good as a real Iray render but it can get good enough.

I didn't understand filament to be honest, I use it sometimes for figuring out HDR lighting but beyond that, why?

Let's not forget what a BIG DEAL Daz always makes out of Cameron Wilson's Digitals and the succuss he has had creating photorealistic characters for advertising. I would imagine he's still not working in Daz though, I am pretty sure he can finally afford an Autodesk subscription.

There are a significant number of vertex control groups and impressive SubD levels.

MidnightWatcher attached the following image(s):

So after tearing down Metahuman and all that jazz, I'm not so knocked out. Once one peaks under the hood it's like ehhh. Basically scanned busts on top of a pretty generic body with morphing and whatever that unreal hair system is. What is impressive is the shader materials and mocap. I think it would actually be easier to start with Daz characters and apply mocap to them in either Unity or Unreal.
However I would take away that Daz could benefit greatly from adopting a character editing tool like Metahuman does for sculpt. Not too much unlike the face rig tool they already have but making one for shaping.