After lunch, I got to meet with Eyal Geyer and Dan Farr from the newly merged Daz3D-Gizmoz company. Daz3D has long been focused on creating 3D character models and has grown a huge marketplace of 3d character models with interchangable clothes and accessories. Gizmoz has focused on creating realistic textured faces and heads for avatars, so combining these two companies together makes a lot of sense. The merged company can now offer the best fully realized characters.

The Daz3D models have been used for pre-rendered cut scenes, but have not been licensed for real-time games in the past, but they have now expanded their licensing agreements so that these models can be used within real-time games. Game companies using the pre-built Daz3D models can save a lot of money and still have high quality models. And if the current repository of clothing and accessories doesn't have exactly what you need, Daz3D will work with game companies to make the modeling companies that populate their marketplace accessible for custom work.

Daz3D also has a broad array of tools for animating, previewing and working with the Daz models. Dan showed off a beta version that included a decimation features for reducing poly count on high res models quickly and efficiently.