Yeah, stick with Daz and the RL marketplace (or RL themselves) and you'll be fine.  Between the two you ought to be able to find nearly anything (and if there's something specific you're looking for, just ask here -- members can point you to the right directions).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

That's really good to hear. Thank you, Mike!


Mirror Valley
*Tales of the Strange and Unusual*
Mirror Valley on Youtube

And don't get too discouraged.  You can get some *quite* beautiful stuff with little effort (I was just grabbing a scene at random but here is "Streets of Asia" from Stonemason and there are literally hundreds of textures in place here, all handled automagically by either my Python routine or by CC3/Transformer (I forgot which I used but they work the same since it's mostly the same code).  The only thing I did was adjust the water slightly so basically a five minute import:

75% of original size (was 670x19) - Click to enlarge

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thanks to everyone for all of the helpful and insightful responses. Not was I was hoping to find out, but I now feel like I have a much clearer (and more realistic) idea of what the situation is, so I can at least move forward and plan accordingly.

Again, very much indebted to all of you who took the time to respond. Very grateful for this community.


Mirror Valley
*Tales of the Strange and Unusual*
Mirror Valley on Youtube

@mrl
Since @4u2ges mentioned CGtrader: as one who bought from there, one practical advice - before you buy, apart from scrolling down to look at poly count, UV map and so on, ask the developer if his product is suitable for you, some of them are even familiar with iClone. Everytime I've asked them they responded, helpful, quite a pleasant surprise but, bottom line, their interest is to sell their product.

Later edit: and always check first if what you need is not already available in Reallusion Content Store or Marketplace, ie fully compatible with iClone and/or Character Creator.

______________________________________________________________________________
Software developer. iClone hobbyist since January 11, 2020. Best work so far: Robots among us: The Lab and The sad end of a legend
In progress: Black Mamba
AMD Ryzen 3950X 16C/32T 4.2 GHz, 64GB RAM, RTX2080 11GB, 2TB Samsung 970 Pro SSD, 8TB Seagate BarraCuda HDD, Win11 64-bit, iClone 8.12

I think you have to split up your needs. The model you show has an interior plus a whole bunch of clothing and as 4u2ges mentioned, the polycount will be enormous, which will make it very slow in iClone.

Unless you do architectural previz, which are pretty stills, your purpose is to tell a story with animation. Think in terms of film sets: you only need what is seen by the camera.

There are interiors in the Market Place that would be a good start (DAZ also, Mike knows more about that). There is even the free loft project that comes with iClone. Think of it as location scouting: it may not be exactly what you have in mind, but it will be good enough.

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75% of original size (was 670x19) - Click to enlarge

Do not waste your money unless you have 3ds MAX and you are an expert in modeling (which I suspect you do not).
Those pretty looking renders are taken in MAX. You are not going to get that in iClone even if you'd be able to import it (regardless whether you get it for free or you pay for it).
Reason is, that most of the time export assets (FBX/OBJ/3DS) they supply are done wrong. Broken geometry, broken texture links, no UV maps. Not to mention whooping poly count.
FBX size of that bedroom is 241 MB, which tells me the poly count would be no less than a few millions. And no UV mapping?

So stay away from CGtrader and Co. unless you need some simple props, which you can afford to spend some time with geometry and texture and UVs...
But again you still need to have some modeling skills and free Blender is your best friend.

Most people DO reassign textures -- and it's seldom even as easy as THAT sounds.

Look -- for one thing no model maker can assume what shader you will be using.  I assume you don't understand shaders, but let me give you the Reader's Digest version -- a material is only as good as the maps assigned and how they are rendered.  And every shader needs different kinds of maps and different ways to process them.  iClone uses PBR and some other things use that as well, but it's not the only shader out there nor is it even the only shader inside of iClone.

So you couldn't expert a developer to develop shaders and materials for every single program you could use -- would never happen.  Daz and RL stuff works well in CC3 because 1) RL developed routines which translate Daz textures into the PBR model and 2) Devs wrote materials directly for iClone.  Those (and Rendersosity, who makes stuff that's *mostly* Daz compatible) are the only easy models to use.  Everything else you need to gain experience in texturing yourself.

That's not horrible -- most stuff rarely uses hundreds of textures, and learning how to adjust and texture something is a skill like anything else.  If you are going to buy assets and use them in whatever program then you had better either buy them that are made for that program or learn how to texture.  It's one of the other.  There's no such thing as a free lunch.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thank you both for the information. Very helpful!

Now that I realize the issue lies in the way these particular models were created and packaged, I’m left with different questions.Perhaps I’m still not fully understanding all of this, but my hope was I would be able to go on various sites and purchase all of the models I needed for my projects (primarily locations house interiors and exteriors, etc.)

I’ve been successful importing assets from the DAZ store and the Reallusion store in the past, but feel the selection is pretty limited. I was hoping some of the larger sites selling 3D objects (like Turbosquid, CGTrader,etc.) would be good resources for me to draw from for paid assets. This brings up some questions for me. For example, here’s a model I was considering for the project I’m working on:

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/interior/bedroom/bedroom-45afde3d-826d-4402-b15d-d68c53fe4780

It does say that it is available as an obj/mtl or an FBX file download. My questions are:

1.  Is there any way to be sure this will have the files in the right format before buying it?
   
   
2.  Do most people who buy these models go through the laborious process of reassigning all the materials and textures manually or is there a part of the process that I’m missing (or that’s missing in reallusion tools), that most 3D artists use to streamline this when using pre-made assets?
   
   
3.  If the obj/mtl files were not conformed properly to auto-assign the materials, is the only option the time-consuming process of manually assigning them to every single object in the scene one-by-one?

I’m suspecting there’s still something I’m not fully understanding, as I can’t imagine most of the people who buy all these pre-built assets are taking the time to manually connect all the materials and textures every time they buy something (at least I sure hope not!)

Thanks again for the help.

Mirror Valley
*Tales of the Strange and Unusual*
Mirror Valley on Youtube

One problem is that the .mtl file, which is supposed to specify which textures to put where on the OBJ file contains none of that information.

I have imported OBJ and FBX files and they did get their textures so it seems that the texture mapping information is lacking. 

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75% of original size (was 670x19) - Click to enlarge