Legalities of Kitbashing??

tring01

I've been building my own spaceship recently by kitbashing other models.  One really helpful thing I learned is how to use the Geometry Editor tool in Daz to chop off chunks of things I don't want.  For example, I needed a good looking seat so I took an old SciFi style asset I bought during some special sale back when and hacked away all the geometry except for the seat.  I was even able to reassign material zones to get the effect I wanted.  Went a step further and exported it to Hexagon and started building up my Bridge set using it.  Then it occurred to me...is it legal for me to use geometry someone else created in this way?  My instinct is that it seems a bit dodgey.  Anyone know how our licensing works in a case like this?  

I'm not planning to sell or give away the kitbashed asset.  Just use it for creating renders.

RKane_1

Check the EULA or license for the product. Most allow renders with no issue but check with the license which came with the product.

tring01

Wow.  It would be a silly amount of work to track down the EULA for each product in the Daz documentation labyrinth - not to mention reading and interpreting all the legalistic razmatazz.  Thanks for the advice though.  I was hoping for better news.  Guess not.

Oso3D

Not a lawyer, but I can't imagine it would be not allowed, provided you aren't distributing it.

 

kaotkbliss

If I recall correctly,

If it did come from the Daz site, then as Timmins said, as long as you aren't sharing the mesh of your creation with anyone else, then it's fine to manipulate and mutilate as you see fit for your renders and/or animations

Tobor

With virtually no exceptions, the marketplaces have a standard EULA. You don't need to refer to each product. Pretty much anything you got from the main marketplaces -- here, Rendo, etc. -- will allow for most any 2D result, commercially or otherwise, regardless of your editing. (From an artistics standpoint, that only makes sense. This isn't supposed to be paint-by-numbers. You're encouraged to make the renders your own.)

You're work is cut out for you if you mixed in freebies and found assets, and you're aiming to distrubute your end product commercially. A good portion of these license the asset for non-commercial use only. This is more common in the scifi realm, particularly assets based on other prople's intellectual property (Star Trek universe, Star Wars universe, etc.). With these you need to do your homework and note the licensing terms the creator gave you. 

 

Chohole

Yes,  as has been said   2d render, video, animation, any of these are fine. Selling any of these is fine, subject to the provisos Tobor made     But do not redistirbute any of the mesh (geometry), not as freebie or commercially. Regardless how you have pulled it about it will still be a derivation.

tring01

Thanks!  That puts my mind to rest.

joea64_bdfaa5ca94

Agreed with all the above. Provided you're not redistributing your kitbashes, keeping them for your own use only, I really don't see why anyone would have to worry about getting into trouble about modding the things in their runtime. In point of fact, given that kitbashing is one of the fundamental skills of a 3D artist - heck, right now I have an ongoing thread in this very forum about the best way to go about kitbashing a single-mesh object I recently bought - it'd be kind of absurd to forbid it if you wanted artists to buy your products. I do a lot of work with an Edwardian/late-Victorian theme, and I HAVE to kitbash in order to get the right look on the dresses and such. (I don't know if you remember, Chohole, but we had a few discussions about that several years ago.) In fact, until Edwardian Hair for G2 came out, I had to kitbash to create the "Gibson Girl" pompadour so characteristic of the period (and I kitbashed that one to be able to fit it onto Victoria 4 by first loading it onto base G2 female, then separating it and saving the hair figure on its own, and then tweaking the size and X, Y and Z axes a bit to get it to sit properly on V4's head). Moreover, what else could you call applying new textures to an existing object but a form of kitbashing? If that were illegal, then we'd have to remove every single texture set from the market!

Chohole

In fact, if you also remember we also had a contest, started by some of the PAs, which was all about Kitbashing.   I remember that one because I was able to kit bash an outfit and then texture it completely with Bryce mats generated from the DTE, and of course then render it all in Bryce.