wolf359 posted at 9:39AM Mon, 21 January 2019 - #4343850

The amateur Market does not offer the income growth needed to be competitive in todays economy .

This is not 1997 old friend. The video game industry made $137 BILLION in 2018 Hollywood only Made $43 Billion that same year.

What happens in video games?? Cool looking 3D characters moving about in realtime

I gotta agree to a good extent here. There's still money to be made in the amateur market, but the gaming market is tempting as hell, with visible polycounts going up all the time there (used to be you could only do hi-rez in the cutscenes, but thanks to Sub-D and other neat tricks, they're almost to the point where you can toss in a Posette-level mesh and have it render in realtime (assuming you have a sufficiently badassed PC with a sufficiently badassed GPU. You can do it with Genesis in near-realtime now with the iRay preview in the viewport on DS... but again, your PC had better have eaten its Wheaties that morning ;) ) I still recall the days of Quake3, where you were stuck with 3k polys in a pre-baked mesh with pre-baked animation cycles... Unreal Tournament had better model mesh counts, but in some ways was was even worse, with only 150 non-player polys max visible in the viewport at any one time, from any angle, before the engine started to get all wonky and certain view-angles went straight to hell for the player.

It's come a long way, baby.

But I digress... DAZ and Reallusion (and others) are fighting like hell of a piece of that really big pie. If any of them can pull it off enough for wide acceptance within the gaming industry, that'll be a massive thing (mostly because a gaming studio won't have to hire as many mesh-mongers anymore - just a few folks who can whomp out differentiating morphs from existing pre-digested meshes. The studios' lead-times/schedules can shrink by a substantial amount as a result.)