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Very nice. Thanks for sharing. I like your animation thus far.
I'm thinking the program would have an easier time reading the motion, if there was more contrast from the background. more light in general or lighter color fabric.
Put a bunch more work into this, and for now, this will have to be good enough. Found a way to fill in the background without exploding the render time, got an animated HDRI working, gave her hair, reframed it, probably some other stuff. Any attempt I've made to improve the quality of the render (let alone the size) would balloon the render times to around 30 minutes per frame, at least.
That water animation is really nice.
A short animation featuring the IronStar spaceship model. It is 1114 frames rendered over 5 days on my ancient I7 with a laughable video card. The frames were assembled and edited with Hitfilm Express. All of the models used are intended for 3Delight use, so I went back and applied emissives to any surface that would act as a light source like lights (obvious), display screens, stars, etc...
I've been experimenting with Cascadeur, which is a great free* tool for character animation that works well enough with Genesis 8 characters despite all their peculiarities. Considering I've barely attempted character animation before, I think it turned out pretty well, and I learned several important lessons in the process.
*it's free for now with a paid option, but it's still early in its development. Once they've released a full build, it might go paid only, and the free version does have some limitations that might make it unfeasible for some of the more seasoned animators.
Hoo boy. Still lots to do on this one, from small fixes to the animation to finishing his outfit to working out what happened to the fire in its first few frames to filling out the environment to learning how to effectively use DOF and motion blur in Cycles 4D to....
Maybe a weird question, but how do you actually import FBX animation into DS? I built my Cascadeur animations on G8 characters, and I have no problem using them in C4D or Houdini, but the only way I've found to get them into DS is to import the FBX, then Copy Figure and paste to a G8, but the results always look wonky, like I'm trying to use G3 animation on a G8 or something.
It has a very bad issue: subscriptions.
Subscriptions for softwares are the worst thing ever, I prefer to pay once for my copy and use it as much as I want.
But it's a great tool, anyway.
For the moment, it is still free for shorter sequences. OK for a <5 min. movie. I *think* the rentware thing is focused on exporting to games. Run run run, shoot shoot shoot.
So this is the Vanguard ship and I've lit all the panels and lights as iray emissives. I did the same with the station which is built out of parts of Solaris Station parts. Other than some odd flickering from the emissives, it works pretty well. Everything was imaged and animated with Daz Studio. Video editing was done with Hitfilm express.
looks good. Lot of work went into lighting the ship. Thanks for sharing.
A Iray render with some dForce and lip syncing.
Well, I'm pretty new to creating actual animations but Cascadeur is pretty cool and imports back into daz studio very well. I did have a problem not being able to export from cascadeur in the "free version" due to Genesis8 bone count (i think that's what the problem was) but I just found the solution was to, in daz studeo joint editor, delete all the bones that I wouldnt be using in Cascadeur (facial rig mostly) befor exporting the fbx to animate in Cascadeur.
So now that I know it works and I can get the animations back into daz studio I'm happy to try to learn how to make fancy animations lol ;-)
edit -ok maybe not "very well" ...but somewhat ok
How do you apply the animations to a figure in DS?
Export from Cascadeur as "fbx without meshes" then import the fbx into daz, lower to ground and save as animated pose preset
then apply pose preset to a loaded Genesis 8
ps it's not perfect or anything, still some foot slipage, not sure how to fix that
Still, very promising
OH! save as an aniblock seems to work much better for me
So create aniblock from studio keyframes (I used direct copy) save that and use on another genesis 8.
Enough testing for tonight hehe
I'm still not having any success with it. Could you play around with this and see if you can make it work?
Yeah, the aniblock thing didnt work on that one. Poor G8F was flung around the scene. And I can't replicate one I tried earlier that worked. Weirdness! Back to the drawing board -facepalm-
Here's your animation using the copy figure way.
on the fbx import - edit>copy figure
on Genesis 8 - edit>paste>Paste figure pose
Is this how it looks when you've tried it? Seems still some foot slippage. I cleared animation on the pectorals. The figure on the right, I tried moving the hip bone/points roughly into same position as normal genesis 8 on the fbx first. seemed to make a slight difference.
This is more or less how it turns out when I tried to do it, as well. For reference, this is the animation inside Cascadeur:
It's built on a G8F, and I definitely didn't do anything with the pectorals, so I don't know where that's come from. Like I said, I can get the animations I've made onto G8 figures in C4D and Houdini, but DS is thwarting all my efforts to import. Hopefully Cascadeur adds a BVH export option soon, because that's what I've had the best luck with when importing animations into DS.
Looks good. If only the import to daz worked better
I was all excited too. I think I'll learn to animate in Cascadeur anyway though and hope things improve. I noticed and "export to daz button" in cascadeur commands menu but it doesnt seem to work either at the moment.
I was starting to figure out how to make Cycles look good when it became unusable for me, so now I'm back to square one with Octane.
Like I said, the animation works just fine on a G8 in other programs, so I don't know why DS of all programs would have trouble with it. Both of the Avatar animations I've posted in this thread were built with Cascadeur and applied to G8.1s bridged into C4D.
Super, what did you use for lip sync? It looked good.
Here's what I've got to show for several months of work. The good news is that I've been putting in a lot of groundwork, so future shots will be much easier to execute.
edit: turns out I've only been working on this for about two months, so I guess I don't have to feel quite so bad about only having six seconds of footage to show for it.
Thanks! I used a free tool called Wav2Lip available on Github.
A comparison of the three render engines I've been experimenting with in C4D. I am very far from an expert in rendering or texturing, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.
Shot 1: Cycles 4D
This was my original engine, and I've had to move on because it's become unusable on my system for reasons that are as yet unclear. Because I couldn't use it to render beyond a certain point, it's also a less developed version of the shot with fewer kinks worked out.
Pros: Great at procedural textures and most flexible in terms of displacement because displacement isn't directly tied to mesh density. The road definitely looks best in this version, and to reach this level of detail with Octane or Arnold would have required a very dense mesh, where I could use a completely undivided mesh in Cycles. It's good for skins, and it's also by far the easiest to use with X-Particles because it can shade the particle simulations directly, rather than requiring the simulations to be cached as VDBs. Insydium also provides a wealth of shader presets with the Fused subscription, so you have a lot of pre-made shaders to use. Cycles has the most flexible options for altering the colors of texture maps, where I struggled a bit with Octane and Arnold to accomplish the same things I was able to do easily using Cycles.
Cons: Some of the presets are built in ways that are a bit too complex for my tastes, and I felt like I didn't have as much control over, for example, the fire as I would have wanted because it was hard to identify which part of the complex node system would make the change I was after. It also colors any object with missing texture maps or incompatible shaders an obnoxious bright pink, which I can understand from the perspective of identifying things that need to be fixed, but is still annoying.
Shot 2: Octane
Pros: Probably the easiest to use, and a good all-around renderer. Even if I never rendered in Octane again, I'd definitely keep my subscription if only for the free monthly KitBash3D set (most of the architecture in this shot comes from the Shangri-La set).
Cons: I had the most trouble getting displacement to work well at all, and it seems to pretty ill-equipped to make procedural textures. I'm not in love with the way a lot of the operators worked, and even in the node editor, you seem pretty limited on what you can actually do. I watched a few tutorials on how to make good skin in Octane, and even the makers of those tutorials seemed to think that Octane wasn't the best option for skin, and I agree with that. I had a shockingly hard time figuring out how to make transparent materials work, and it seems like that should be one of the simplest things to do. Octane's out-of-core rendering system seems like a great feature until you really try to use it, and on a complex scene like this, I would reach points where it just wouldn't render any more. I did eventually figure out how to increase out-of-core memory, but it's an annoying limitation, especially considering that Cycles and Arnold don't require a GPU at all.
Shot 3: Arnold
Pros: Very good for skins, incredible for hair (though this shot doesn't show it off very well). For my money, Arnold is the most realistic of the three renderers being compared, and also the most cinematic looking. Very flexible, comparable to Cycles in that respect.
Cons: I don't know what the experience of using Arnold in 3DS Max or Maya is like, but the integration into C4D is pretty bad. There's absolutely no ability to use texture maps that are already in the scene, so EVERY SINGLE IMAGE must be loaded through file explorer. If, like me, you like to use absolute paths for textures instead of saving them with the scene, that means that converting shaders to Arnold requires a whole lot of digging through directories to get everything moved over. I definitely would have preferred Autodesk develop their own GUI for Arnold rather than using a modified version of XPresso. The Arnold volume object refused to work properly in this scene, so I couldn't really affect the size, position or orientation of the simulation. This definitely isn't a limitation of the object itself, because it worked as expected in a new scene; it just refused to work in this scene for unclear reasons, so I had to use C4D's native volume loader. Fewer options are available for controlling samples for different render elements when rendering with GPU versus CPU, which makes absolutely no sense to me. The Arnold Parameters tag adds a lot of useful functionality, but it's becoming apparent that you need to apply it to almost everything, so I wonder if more of the functionality could have been incorporated into the shading system instead.
Two more shots.
The farther I get into this, the more I see that needs fixing.
edit: re-uploaded with some edits
I just found this thread so I decided to share. There are still a lot of problems that I'd like to correct but it's taken so much time just to get this far and I have other projects that are more important to me.