Carrara and games

Pjotter

Is it possible to use Carrara for creating games and export to the right format? I have to say, I have no clue about this.

Territan

Yes. It can. And it was almost mentioned by name in a book on Unity (there it was unfortunately spelled "Carara"). But that said, you want to watch a few things.

Don't expect to drag one of Daz's pre-made figures into Carrara, dress it up, export it to OBJ, and say "There!" The base Genesis figure clocks in at 37,744 facets, and that's about 37,000 (±400) too many for a properly tuned high-performance game.

That said, the well-dressed and proportioned Genesis figure makes an excellent model on which to base other models. Set up the figure, then build new topology around it. And by "topology" I mean "a vertex object with a much lower poly count."

Carrara has the tools you need to unwrap UVs for shading, place bones, paint weights, and even create some animations for it, though to be honest I'm not sure how well Carrara-made NLA clips do outside Carrara.

Carrara's modeling tools are also up to the task of building other game assets, including terrains (I think there's a way to bake the shape and export the resulting displacement map). Carrara has a bunch of other tools like the ocean primitive, plant editor, and replicators, that won't play well with systems outside Carrara.

Admittedly, Carrara is a little better tuned as an artistic tool in its own right, either creating fairly high quality still images or animation. This is not a recommendation against using it in game design. This is a recommendation for using it to reproduce game images (storyboarding, promotional art) and animations (actions sequences and cut scenes).

Pjotter

Found some more info at http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5227/

Clothes seems to be a problem and for distributing DS items, one need a license.

Fetito

If I export the items as a sprite, let's say as a PNG for a 2D-jump'n'run, may I use the content?

Chohole

patrickgobels said:

If I export the items as a sprite, let's say as a PNG for a 2D-jump'n'run, may I use the content?

2d sprites are fine, come under the EULA.

It is the actual 3D mesh that is not allowed to be re-distributed in any form, not even a modified form.

paulg625

Pjotter said:

Is it possible to use Carrara for creating games and export to the right format? I have to say, I have no clue about this.

If you had the proper licenses to export for games and had a copy of Decimator. you can reduce the polygon count down to a more acceptable level using Daz studio.