The "Animators Assemble!" thread for Daz animation WIPs, clips, and tips

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  • Here is my first animation done few months ago: All done with daz and mixamo. Still working now on other project with animation of course ;-)

    Very cool! Excellent lighting and camera work!

  • Here is my first animation done few months ago: All done with daz and mixamo. Still working now on other project with animation of course ;-)

    Very cool! Excellent lighting and camera work!

    Thanks!
  • I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

  • 31415926543141592654 Posts: 975
    edited October 2019
    The ship sailing looks great! How did you make the water move like that if you don't mind me asking. I have that ocean aniblock set, but I don't recall there being a wave that was that calm.

    Nice! Tell us a little about how it was done!

    Items Used: primarily Pirate Cove, Licorne ship, and Ireal ocean.

    I scaled the ocean up to 2182% to cover the entire pirate cove. Then I scaled down just the Y axis to 17.4% to get the waves so calm.

    I manually keyframed the ship movements. At 1 second intervals I moved the ship forward. At 2 second intervals I would have the ship rock back and forth.

    Also, the Terradome Red Sunrise to get so many shadows involved.

    Ship Sailing Out link to video for those that missed it earlier.

    Ship Sailing Out

    Post edited by 3141592654 on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311

    I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

    It uses more memory

    the issue is it isn't ticked and my scene fits on my card but then next frame it is and it doesn't 

  • Ah, got it. Hope they fix that soon!

  • I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

    It uses more memory

    the issue is it isn't ticked and my scene fits on my card but then next frame it is and it doesn't 

    As I understand it, as I said in reply to one of your previous posts, OptiX Prime is used for not-RTX cards. It isn't soemthing that can be switched off in this version of Iray

  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,165
    edited October 2019

    I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

    It uses more memory

    the issue is it isn't ticked and my scene fits on my card but then next frame it is and it doesn't 

    As I understand it, as I said in reply to one of your previous posts, OptiX Prime is used for not-RTX cards. It isn't soemthing that can be switched off in this version of Iray

    I wonder why it was designed like that in the first place. with no option for turning it off .  Surely they must know not everyone has a RTX  graphic card. &  OptiX Prime is not requirement for every render set up, I would think darker scene would benefit with it off where raytrace is not as much needed  . I sure hope it is something  that can be fixed or addressed

    Post edited by Ivy on
  • Ivy said:

    I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

    It uses more memory

    the issue is it isn't ticked and my scene fits on my card but then next frame it is and it doesn't 

    As I understand it, as I said in reply to one of your previous posts, OptiX Prime is used for not-RTX cards. It isn't soemthing that can be switched off in this version of Iray

    I wonder why it was designed like that in the first place. with no option for turning it off .  Surely they must know not everyone has a RTX  graphic card. &  OptiX Prime is not requirement for every render set up, I would think darker scene would benefit with it off where raytrace is not as much needed  . I sure hope it is something  that can be fixed or addressed

    This is new behaviour (if I am understanding it correctly), so presumably it was deliberate. Perhaps nVidia will reenable it as an option in a later version.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311

    well if I need an RTX card to render animations I better get Octane 2 installed on this PC as well as 4 which I use for Carrara as I have the DS plugin for 2

  • 0oseven said:

    Interested to note Daz 4.12 has new timeline so I must investigate.Animate has some nice features but I was never comfortable with Daz Studio interface and am an ardent supporter of Daz Carrara which is an amazing program with great animation tools but sadly has problems with new generation daz characters because Daz are not supoorting Carrara anymore. God knows why - it really is great 3d application -

    Carrara? I tried to try it a few years ago. The installation procedure was weird and I got so frustrated I just dumped it. Could you describe in what ways its animation is better than Daz Studio's?  
     
    I'm still using DS4.10, and have tried some very simple Iray animations, but my system's too slow to be worth it. Hence, I have no way of comparing any of our options. Didn't even realize Carrara WAS an option!
     
    Ah! One more question comes to mind: Can an animation be made in Carrara consisting of semi-distant objects in 3DL (or whatever renderer Carrara uses), which can be composited with close-up objects animated in Iray with DS? IOW, do the scene settings line up exactly between the two systems?
     
    I'm thinking I could use my current machine with Carrara and a hopefully-soon new machine with Iray, both working on the same scene at the same time. A poor man's sort of animation studio.
     
    I've considered this idea using two Daz Studios, but if Carrara is better, as you say, I'm interested! As for the compositing, I'm hoping Dogwaffle, which I haven't learned or even installed yet, might handle that process... Thanks!!!

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311
    edited October 2019
    Kenkoy said:
    0oseven said:

    Interested to note Daz 4.12 has new timeline so I must investigate.Animate has some nice features but I was never comfortable with Daz Studio interface and am an ardent supporter of Daz Carrara which is an amazing program with great animation tools but sadly has problems with new generation daz characters because Daz are not supoorting Carrara anymore. God knows why - it really is great 3d application -

    Carrara? I tried to try it a few years ago. The installation procedure was weird and I got so frustrated I just dumped it. Could you describe in what ways its animation is better than Daz Studio's?  
     
    I'm still using DS4.10, and have tried some very simple Iray animations, but my system's too slow to be worth it. Hence, I have no way of comparing any of our options. Didn't even realize Carrara WAS an option!
     
    Ah! One more question comes to mind: Can an animation be made in Carrara consisting of semi-distant objects in 3DL (or whatever renderer Carrara uses), which can be composited with close-up objects animated in Iray with DS? IOW, do the scene settings line up exactly between the two systems?
     
    I'm thinking I could use my current machine with Carrara and a hopefully-soon new machine with Iray, both working on the same scene at the same time. A poor man's sort of animation studio.
     
    I've considered this idea using two Daz Studios, but if Carrara is better, as you say, I'm interested! As for the compositing, I'm hoping Dogwaffle, which I haven't learned or even installed yet, might handle that process... Thanks!!!

    the main issue is genesis 3 and 8 are not supported unless you use a third party workaround by Misty on Renderosity

    because DAZ decided to mispell some of the bone nodes which crashes it because they don't match the bone names and it needs to be converted to blended weight in DS too and resaved as a character preset (with those nodes corrected)

    Carrara uses it's own render engine which while not PBR is in some ways faster than 3Delight but if you up the settings using indirect lighting, IBL blurry reflections depth of field and caustics it is way slower than 3Delight

    as to compositing

    a huge advantage is Carrara supports animated textures 

    you can insert planes and it supports alpha channel png series

    Post edited by WendyLuvsCatz on
  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,165
    edited October 2019
    Ivy said:

    I can get the animations back in but thanks to DAZ studio 4.12 update I cannot render more than one frame in iray, so yeah that sucks

    That does! Do you know what they changed??

    Unticking Optix acceleration is ignored

    I'm guessing that slows it down? (Not familiar with Optix)

    It uses more memory

    the issue is it isn't ticked and my scene fits on my card but then next frame it is and it doesn't 

    As I understand it, as I said in reply to one of your previous posts, OptiX Prime is used for not-RTX cards. It isn't soemthing that can be switched off in this version of Iray

    I wonder why it was designed like that in the first place. with no option for turning it off .  Surely they must know not everyone has a RTX  graphic card. &  OptiX Prime is not requirement for every render set up, I would think darker scene would benefit with it off where raytrace is not as much needed  . I sure hope it is something  that can be fixed or addressed

    This is new behaviour (if I am understanding it correctly), so presumably it was deliberate. Perhaps nVidia will reenable it as an option in a later version.

    I hope they do. because its makes rendering animation with daz studio to rough on equipment without a RTX gpu.  I also noticed after i updated drivers . my cpu rams spool up alot more  almost double, than it use to as well .. Would rolling back my GPU driver to a earlier one fix that ? or is it Daz Studio specific thing?   I am currently on gaming version 436.48 . and i can roll back as far as gaming  434.87.  I also notice i do not get that OptiX Prime disabled error message with daz 4.10.0.0123 or 4.9 that is why i questioned if it was Studio specific.

    Post edited by Ivy on
  • the main issue is genesis 3 and 8 are not supported unless you use a third party workaround by Misty on Renderosity

    because DAZ decided to mispell some of the bone nodes which crashes it because they don't match the bone names and it needs to be converted to blended weight in DS too and resaved as a character preset (with those nodes corrected)

    Carrara uses it's own render engine which while not PBR is in some ways faster than 3Delight but if you up the settings using indirect lighting, IBL blurry reflections depth of field and caustics it is way slower than 3Delight

    as to compositing

    a huge advantage is Carrara supports animated textures 

    you can insert planes and it supports alpha channel png series

    Interesting! But... Genesis 3 & 8 aren't a problem because they would be my close-up characters, rendered in Iray. The foreground would be sparsely populated, but iray-ishly beautiful. The background would be filler, a few characters milling around in the scenery, rendered in Carrara or DS.
     
    But I hadn't even thought of lighting! That would be awkward...
     
    OK, animated textures is nice. A TV set running or a fireplace with fire. I think I have a script for that for an older DS, though.
     
    However, as you hinted, I might be tempted to balance the quality of the background renders with the Iray foreground using indirect lighting, IBL whatevers, etc, and end up losing all speed benefits.  
     
    But back to my question, to anyone in general, what is better about Carrara's animation?????

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311
    edited October 2019
    Kenkoy said:

    the main issue is genesis 3 and 8 are not supported unless you use a third party workaround by Misty on Renderosity

    because DAZ decided to mispell some of the bone nodes which crashes it because they don't match the bone names and it needs to be converted to blended weight in DS too and resaved as a character preset (with those nodes corrected)

    Carrara uses it's own render engine which while not PBR is in some ways faster than 3Delight but if you up the settings using indirect lighting, IBL blurry reflections depth of field and caustics it is way slower than 3Delight

    as to compositing

    a huge advantage is Carrara supports animated textures 

    you can insert planes and it supports alpha channel png series

    Interesting! But... Genesis 3 & 8 aren't a problem because they would be my close-up characters, rendered in Iray. The foreground would be sparsely populated, but iray-ishly beautiful. The background would be filler, a few characters milling around in the scenery, rendered in Carrara or DS.
     
    But I hadn't even thought of lighting! That would be awkward...
     
    OK, animated textures is nice. A TV set running or a fireplace with fire. I think I have a script for that for an older DS, though.
     
    However, as you hinted, I might be tempted to balance the quality of the background renders with the Iray foreground using indirect lighting, IBL whatevers, etc, and end up losing all speed benefits.  
     
    But back to my question, to anyone in general, what is better about Carrara's animation?????

    a much better animation graph for a start

    DS has been improved but still nowhere near as feature filled

    also target helpers and tracking two things I simply cannot live without the only other thing is iClone which also has a target system but not as flexable

    paths another thing I use in both

    of course there is the particle system,

    bullet physics

    terrain editor

    tree generator

    volumetric clouds

    metaball, vertex and spline modellers

    Post edited by WendyLuvsCatz on
  • Thanks for that info, SadKitty! I'll have to research some of those items. Some of that, trees, modellers, terrain, for example, wouldn't be related to animation. Unless the trees can be animated! That would be amazing. Or just put a video of trees on an animated texture in the background...

    I have a feeling it'd be wise to just continue studying the basics with DS4.10, move up to 4.12, and go on from there.

    Thanks again for the good infos. This is going to be a very interesting thread!

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311
    Kenkoy said:

    Thanks for that info, SadKitty! I'll have to research some of those items. Some of that, trees, modellers, terrain, for example, wouldn't be related to animation. Unless the trees can be animated! That would be amazing. Or just put a video of trees on an animated texture in the background...

    I have a feeling it'd be wise to just continue studying the basics with DS4.10, move up to 4.12, and go on from there.

    Thanks again for the good infos. This is going to be a very interesting thread!

    they rustle and shake

  • What th!!? A simple thing like rustling trees would bring life to a scene. And distract from my amateurish animating. Well, thanks again. Looks worth checking into.

  • Having been able to pop in as a reader to the forum a couple of times since this thread began I'd like to offer a couple of thoughts and don't mean to cut across particular discussions

    First, I have Iclone 7, Character Creator 3 Pipeline and 3dXchange 5 Pro.  So I don't quite have all the latest and greatest of Reallusion's software but I can do a lot with what I have.

    Also, I have Poser 11 Pro, the latest version and I have Carrara, which I'm a big fan of.

    To me, not wanting to animate a scene I've built is as strange as not wanting to do a render of the scene.  I always want to see what I've done animated but I'm in no way criticising anyone else who is content with still renders only - I do plenty of these myself and can only dream of reaching the quality achieved by so many others.

    So, hoping this might be useful, here are some of the 'workflows' I've tried for animation:

    1 Animations can be done wholly in Iclone, Poser or Carrara (I don't tend to use DAZ Studio but that, too can definitely be used).

    For getting quick animations done, Iclone is the best of these because of the many motion-captured movements supplied with the software or available for purchase.  Camera movement and scene-building are good also.  Figures from DAZ (all Genesis, V4, M4) and Hivewire can be brought in to Iclone via 3dXchange Pro or Character Creator Pipeline and can use most of the Iclone motions.

    For those who want the absolute best, most realistic visual results possible, Iclone's final output won't be good enough.  But how many of us could ever have the time or computing power to achieve that?  Reallusion positively promotes exporting animations and scenes to other platforms such as game engines where better scenery, etc. is possible.  But Iclone-only animations can be very impressive.

    2 Carrara has very good animation tools.  As an all-round 3d package, a user could if they wished, build characters of their own, rig, texture and animate them.  Not to re-invent the DAZ/Poser/Iclone wheel but simple, child's-cartoon figures such as toy soldiers are easily possible.  Or a user could use DAZ figures up to G2 or Poser figures up to Poser 9 (I think it was) natively.  Paid-for motions for these figures can be used in Carrara (as well as some BVH files found on the web which will probably be far from effortless).  Vertex animation of objects is easy in Carrara and a user could build their own boned objects with animation (such as a flower opening) and export them to Iclone via 3dXchange.  It can be very satisfying to build unique assets.

    3 Animation can be done in Poser and some wonderful examples can be seen on YouTube.  The animation methods for figures are limited (I think) to pose to pose changes along the timeline.  I often run into problems if I make changes afterwards to mid-way poses or to switching IK on and off.  So, I have much to learn there.  Another problem (with bringing in library poses) is that the character may face one way in the first pose and exactly the opposite way in the next.  So I might have wanted to see arms being raised but the whole character turns as well.

    Motions can be bought for Poser.

    Poser has the cloth room which allows animation with realistically-draped clothing and wind effects.  It's possible to export a Poser scene using a utility called 'Dyn-to-morphs'.  Such a scene can be brought into Carrara complete with the cloth movement.  Why do that?  I found that I could save an animated clothed character as .fbx and keep it for re-use, duplicate it, place it anywhere, etc.  So Poser and its cloth simulator was used as a 'character-with-animation' builder.

    4 A last workflow I've tried is to export Reallusion's Character Creator figures with motion as .fbx files and import them to Carrara.  This works perfectly apart from the need to adjust textures in Carrara to reduce shine and so on.  In this workflow I've exported Reallusion's CC3 Characters and also DAZ characters which were first put into CC3.  Within CC3, I could morph them in many ways.

    This has been a long post.  Thanks if you've stuck with it.  I have examples of what I've done to link to in a further post.  They are all quite poor, unfortunately, but are short at least.

      

  • As said above, my examples are poor but short.

    Here is Daz's V4 in Carrara.  The clothing was made in Hexagon, cloth-simulated and animated with a bought motion in Poser and brought into Carrara using the Dyn-Morphs utility.

    Once in Carrara the figure was duplicated.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-EVo7APtdw

  • Hermit CrabHermit Crab Posts: 841
    edited October 2019

    Well I forgot how to embed video

    Here is another very short vid showing Genesis and Reallusion's CC3 both imported to Carrara.

    I used CC3 to export them as .fbx with an Iclone motion.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdg7B1bwucM

    Post edited by Hermit Crab on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,311

     

    paste with source clicked

  • Here are bits of animation in Poser and Carrara.  There is no story, just a few clips.  It ends with Teen Josie brought from CC3 Pipeline with an Iclone motion:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSMNJc7Kdm8

  • This is a pose-to-pose animation of my own with Genesis2 in Carrara

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Tc-CQGTfE&list=UU8QKWA-6DAMb6bT5m2hXJDg&index=19

    Yes, poor, I know, but these things help with learning.

  • This is one of my very early attempts to make something in 3d.  I made the figure in Sculptris rigged it with bones in Carrara and made a quick animation.  All the steps were rushed to see if animation was possible - I was just starting out

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlrlPJH2Uys&list=UU8QKWA-6DAMb6bT5m2hXJDg&index=38

    Although anyone following this will shake their heads sadly, I hope it helps someone in some way!

     

  • Ah, Wendy, you showed me how to do that before. Thanks.  My posts are usually way too long - you knew that but still looked - thanks for doing so.

  • To me, not wanting to animate a scene I've built is as strange as not wanting to do a render of the scene.

    LOL--I think you can speak for a lot of us here!

     

    So, hoping this might be useful, here are some of the 'workflows' I've tried for animation:

    1 Animations can be done wholly in Iclone, Poser or Carrara.....

    .........perfectly apart from the need to adjust textures in Carrara to reduce shine and so on.  In this workflow I've exported Reallusion's CC3 Characters and also DAZ characters which were first put into CC3.  Within CC3, I could morph them in many ways.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts on software and workflows, and samples of your work. I think there are a lot of different possible workflows, and each animator is going to find what works for them based on their hardware and software. Sharing information is really helpful, because I think in the case of 3D animation where the tools keep evolving, even an old dog can learn new tricks: I was a Poser animator (with Daz characters) on a Mac for 15 years and made two movies that way, but this week I've become a Daz/iClone/Windows guy, and I don't think the leap would have gone as well without the input of other animators here at Daz and elsewhere. 

  • RobinsonRobinson Posts: 751

    I'm not sure if this is anyone else's experience, but I actually prefer Daz for animation these days.  Order 1 explanation is that I know how to do it in Daz and order 2 is that some tools Daz has that, say, Maya does not include ActivePose and Mirror.  No, really, I think I have to write a script for the latter.  For the former it's the same with iClone.  I can't just grab part of a character and drag it around (perhaps I'm just ignorant and you can in iClone and Maya, in which case somebody will correct me).

  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,165
    edited October 2019

    Happy Halloween

     

    Black Stone Haunted Castle II

     

    Post edited by Ivy on
  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,165

    I am guessing we can't embeded vimeo videos anymore sad

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