Firstly, apologies if this is the wrong topic, no idea what this would technically fit into, either Game Deisgn or General.
But the idea is pretty simple, I’ve been thinking about making my own game for a while now and since I’m a writer, I sadly don’t have the skills to draw. So I’ve been looking into Daz-3D stuff since a lot of VNs on this site use them and I realised that not only is it pretty hard to find anything plus size, but also that it’s pretty dang pricey too.
Am I just looking in the wrong place or is it just that steep of a starting price to get the assets one would need to start?
If you want my advice, it would be to not bother with DAZ. It is woefully incapable of creating anyone at a plus size simply because of the way it is designed. The moment you try and bend a model you will see that everything is rigged in the most basic manner possible meaning that actually posing a plus size character will result in the body distorting with even basic movements. That and every single feature is often so broken that many of the addons for sale are basically patches designed to fix or work around them, and of course since anything new in Daz needs to be a store bought addon you either have to spend a lot of money just to make your renders seem even slightly different or else try and find alternatives for free. And that’s not always an option. Frankly you are better off skipping Daz and instead going straight to blender and learning how to adjust models there if you want good results (though I suppose that is kind of a big ask).
If you want to render good looking bbw girls in Daz3d you will need to create model shape keys by yourself, because all morphs which you can find on marked looks bad. First you will need to make basic morph for body, then create a pose you want and after that make another morphs to fix skin distortions. With those you can get some fine results: coldsteelj - Hobbyist, Artist | DeviantArt
If you are just a writer and don’t know anything about sculpting models it is better for you to install Stable Diffusion and create AI generated pictures (like that for example OIRTS - Artist | DeviantArt ).
I’ve been using Daz for years, and my advice would be, if you’re looking to create anything other than default size (i.e. very skinny) characters, look somewhere else. Anywhere else. As @Tombot and @coldsteelj rightly say above, it’s rubbish for fat characters. And I do mean utter rubbish. You can get round some of its many shortfalls by careful posing, using multiple morphs, copious photoshopping, etc., but it’s still really, really poor.
I’ve attached an untouched render from an abandoned scene in my game as an example. Yeah, I know the pose is a little out… Lots of clipping on the bra (and notice how her boobs don’t look naturally positioned. You have to do that yourself. EVERY bloody time), even more clipping on the panties - would be easier to photoshop them out completely than try to fix them - and look at the stomach. That’s Daz rigging for you.
Sadly, this is far from the worst example. I’ve seen much worse.
Oh, and don’t forget the clothing. 99% of Daz clothing looks fucking awful on large characters. Dforce is a time-consuming joke and no matter how many morphs you appy to the chest and/or clothing, it’s nigh on imposible to get clothes to look good on anything but the tiniest of breasts.
If I was starting from scratch now, and knowing what I know about how awful Daz is for fat characters, I’d never have started using it. I’d have gone the Blender route, or waited another couple of years for AI to improve a bit more. I honestly believe that unless Daz massively up their game in the near future, they won’t be around much longer.
I’ve done plenty of fat women art with DAZ. There aren’t a lot of good morphs available through the DAZ store, obviously. But I got a bunch of morphs from HevieState3D which I’ve used a lot. You still need to be careful with posing, as DAZ models can get a little wonky at the larger sizes, but for the most part, those morphs should give you plenty of options.
Apologies for taking so long to reply (very much forgot about this since whenever I normally check the site it’s late at night and I don’t have the brain power to do a proper reply, I say as I’m typing this at midnight)
Glad that DAZ really is just that expensive and plus size model unfriendly. Although I definitely won’t be touching AI as that’s just not something I want to delve into any time soon.
But thank you all for responding and I’ll see what other avenues there are to make games as a solo writer (probably text adventure stuff)
If you’re interested, I’d be up for working on the visuals for you if you still want to do a VN or something. I’ve been wanting to get into making a game, but I either get writer’s block or don’t have the patience for the programming side of things.
You can see my work here to see if my style is what you’re looking for.
