I've posted quite a few Daz Studio posts, but it has been some time since I've posted any talking about Game Development. Those that know me, know that I spend a lot of time messing with the Unity Game Engine as well, and that I own a rather extensive amount of assets.

I've posted a lot of Daz Studio figure reviews and I had someone reply recently talking about how the figures are too detailed (too many polys) for good use inside of Unity.

To some degree this can be true. It purely depends upon the detail level you are using, whether you setup a Level of Detail (LOD) system, and how many figures you want to have online at a given time.

This lead me to thinking it might be valuable to do a post comparing the actual statistics on geometry on various Unity assets, and different Daz Studio Figures, and basing our thoughts about this upon actual facts rather than guessing.

I am going to start with Unity Assets that I have and grab a few different varieties to get their statistics.

I recently purchased Synty Studios asset POLYGON - Fantasy Rivals and they are designed to be a lower poly style. I will show that off here to give and idea on the low end.

Ancient Queen

The important value to see there is the tris. They are 3341 for this model. Now you'll often hear the term polys which a polygon in modeling is typically built from two triangles so simply divide this number by two. 1,670.5 Polygons.

This is considered a low poly model when it comes to humanoids.

Dark Elf

This was the lowest triangles I found in this pack. 2818 Triangles, or 1409 Polygons.

For something at a little bit higher detail I am going to show some different examples by Maksim Bugrimov.

20 Creatures MegaPack

Creature Fat

This is 5122 triangles or 2561 polygons.

Character Mutant

This character is 2970 triangles or 1485 polygons. It's amazing what magic can be done with good texturing.

Another publisher on the Unity Asset Store is the All * Star Characters.

Female Warrior Princess

This is broken into a few different models.

If we add those together we'll get 4942 triangles (3964 + 772 + 206) or 2471 polygons.

Another publisher I like is Mister Necturus and I am going to show the Ratkin's Army pack here which reminds me of the rats from the game Vermintide and Vermintide II.

This is the largest triangle model I've shown from official Unity Asset Store so far. With just it's body and no additional props it is 13497 triangles or 6748.5 polygons.

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Now let's try importing various Daz 3D figures and seeing what their geometry is without any LOD process. These may be NSFW for some people as I am not adding clothing to them in order to keep the geometry an accurate comparison to the items above.

Genesis 8 Basic Female

This is 32736 triangles or 16368 polygons.

Genesis 8 Basic Male

This is 32392 triangles or 16196 polygons.

Genesis 3 Female

This is 34000 triangles or 17000 polygons.

Genesis 3 Male

This is 33656 triangles or 16828 polygons.

Genesis 2 Female

This is 42162 triangles or 21081 polygons.

Genesis 2 Male

This is 42162 triangles or 21081 polygons.

Genesis Female

this is 37744 triangles or 18872 polygons.

Genesis Male

This is 37744 triangles or 18872 polygons.

Victoria 4

This is 132048 triangles or 66024 polygons.

Michael 4

This 132048 triangles or 66024 polygons.

Victoria 3

This is 143444 triangles or 71722 polygons.

Michael 3

This is 143444 triangles or 71722 polygons.

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Conclusions

The triangles and polygon count are higher than the game ready assets I pulled from the Unity Asset store. Though you can also look at it as higher detail as these Daz characters look really good close up. So as with art it is possible to take larger detail and reduce that detail. It is not possible to generate the extra detail from a lesser detailed model. So there are a lot of polys there, but we can also use decimation and tools to create LODs that are lesser in detail.

All of these DAZ characters can also have a lot of morphs attached to them so you can make many different detailed characters using morphs (blendshapes) which can be accessed in unity. So you can use different textures with a single model to generate a variety of characters.

I didn't go over the hair exported by DAZ Studio in this post. That is actually where a lot of waste and obsessive polygons occurs.

So if you have skills with blender, or have some good decimation tools you can use something like DAZ to make things that are even AAA in quality when it comes to characters using Daz.

If you don't have those things you can still use the characters you just will need to be careful about how many of them you put into each scene and monitor the performance as you develop.

It is also interesting that the farther you go back in DAZ figure generations the more triangles they use while looking progressively less detailed. The DAZ team has gotten really good at increasingly reducing the triangles of characters while simultaneously increasing their detail.