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

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  • wolf359wolf359 Posts: 3,828
    edited July 2023

    @CoXComics

    There are several AI voice options available for lone animators now.
    This was made with one of the free voices over at Artflow.ai

    Post edited by wolf359 on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    A couple of fun videos I made using test renders from Daz Studio

    I made this one trying various post production methods in PD Howler

  • amehtanasamehtanas Posts: 20

    Hi,

     

    Anyone here familiar with animating Daz characters with dForce clothing? I'm looking to hire for a project.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568
    edited July 2023

    amehtanas said:

    Hi,

     

    Anyone here familiar with animating Daz characters with dForce clothing? I'm looking to hire for a project.

    See the post above yours

    EDIT: Particularly the top most video

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568
    edited November 2023

    Wanna have some Fun aniMating in Daz Studio?

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,053

    Spent a whole lot of time getting all of this to work, mainly the complex mixed simulation of the top, which isn't where I want it but good enough for now. I also dove into using Houdini's FEM system to add jiggle to her boobs and butt.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    Looks awesome!

    Curious, do "life" morph dials work in Houdini? Like various shape-changers for twitching the nose, flaring the nostrils, making a smirk, those sorts of things?

  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,053

    I haven't used any, but I see no reason they wouldn't. You could even set up a CHOP network to automate and randomize things like blinking and breathing.

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,155

    amehtanas said:

    Hi,

    Anyone here familiar with animating Daz characters with dForce clothing? I'm looking to hire for a project.

    Check my signature, you can check my previous works there. wink

  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,053

    Adapted an animation for Coral 8.1 to the older Laguna mertail (which I prefer). The hair isn't moving quite like I want it to after setting the gravity to 0, but I also have a pretty strong wind, so maybe that's canceling it out. I'll probably end up just making my own animations from scratch, because even this one isn't great.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    That's cool, Gordig!

    Don't give up on the hair. Try more things with it. Example, to simulate being in water, you'd want to perhaps run the wind forwards and backwards to get that motion opposition effect that hair does under water - something to that effect. Looking great!

  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,053

    Made some slight tweaks to the animation, got a better handle on the hair and experimented with an underwater rendering style. I think there's a mismatch on the surface settings between her head and face, and I still don't really get how to get Karma renders to clean up without exploding the render time yet, but we're getting somewhere.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,206

    I discovered something that's a gamechanger for me, maybe not others

    it's painfull to do the first time but after that is mindblowingly easy

    I created a Dforce2Morph animated walk cycle oin the Morphing Fantasy dress to match the basic Poser Walk Designer walk

    I had to save 30 morphs and then keyframe an animation

    it took all day a few months ago

    BUT

    I can fit any dress to the MFD instead of the figure and thanks to Skin Weights it will follow the animation AND morphs just make sure the smoothing collisiuon is set to the figue NOT the MFD

    Capes work too

    is it as good as a discrete Dforce simulation, well yes and no

    NO explosions, No pokethrough but it is tad stiff as morph based but does at least interpolate if more frames per second

    bonus I used the genesis 1 MFD and it works on Autofits to other generations too as long as you convert the walk cycle too

  • CoXComicsCoXComics Posts: 80

    On January 1st I gave myself a one month animation challenge. Using only DAZ Studio I rendered and edited as much as I could over the course of January 2024. This is the result from that self challenge.

    https://youtu.be/y0dOmJXXM6I

  • wsterdanwsterdan Posts: 2,344

    Looks very good; it ends with a nice cliffhanger leaving the viewer wanting to know what's next, well done!

    Thanks for sharing.

  • AuroratrekAuroratrek Posts: 218
    edited February 23

    CoXComics said:

    On January 1st I gave myself a one month animation challenge. Using only DAZ Studio I rendered and edited as much as I could over the course of January 2024. This is the result from that self challenge.

    https://youtu.be/y0dOmJXXM6I

    This looks good. The lighting and environments are effective and atmosphering (no pun intended)(well, maybe a little). Two small suggestions would be to add a little head movement when we see the person from behind. And particularly where we don't see the character's feet later when they are walking, you could probably add a lot of smoothing in the walking animation to take out the bit of jitter there. 

    Post edited by Auroratrek on
  • AuroratrekAuroratrek Posts: 218

    Happy to announce that Chapter Two of my medieval fantasy series "Quest of the Key" is now online:

    As usual, it makes use of a lot of Daz assets!

     

  • Auroratrek said:

    This looks good. The lighting and environments are effective and atmosphering (no pun intended)(well, maybe a little). Two small suggestions would be to add a little head movement when we see the person from behind. And particularly where we don't see the character's feet later when they are walking, you could probably add a lot of smoothing in the walking animation to take out the bit of jitter there. 

    Thank you. In hindsite I think there were too many external beauty shots of the starship before the dropship launch. One of the motionless headshots you mentioned could have been a deliberate time saver on my part by using a static foreground PNG overlaying an animated background. Some of the assets used turned out to be less than optimal (Dropship) but noy discovered until well into the challenge. I'll experiment with smoothing, maybe try extra frames from 30/sec to 60/sec within Daz Studio.

    Only a few days until February's challenge project is wrapped up and posted.

  • CoXComicsCoXComics Posts: 80
    edited February 26

    Auroratrek said:

    Happy to announce that Chapter Two of my medieval fantasy series "Quest of the Key" is now online:

    As usual, it makes use of a lot of Daz assets!

    May have spotted a few of those Daz assets. What other applications are you using to produce the final product? Having voice talent available is a real boon no doubt.

    Post edited by CoXComics on
  • AuroratrekAuroratrek Posts: 218

    CoXComics said:

    Auroratrek said:

    Happy to announce that Chapter Two of my medieval fantasy series "Quest of the Key" is now online:

    As usual, it makes use of a lot of Daz assets!

    May have spotted a few of those Daz assets. What other applications are you using to produce the final product? Having voice talent available is a real boon no doubt.

    Daz characters and assets, Optitrack mocap, characters imported into iClone for composing animation, rendered in Cinema 4D. Yes, good voice talent is key! 

  • CoXComicsCoXComics Posts: 80
    edited April 9

    I repeated the challenge for February. Some odd model and texture issues with some of the assets or generated by Daz Studio rendering. The worst of course was with the last portion on that models cockpit windows for some arcane reason hat finished rendering late last night after 25 some odd hours..

    Post edited by CoXComics on
  • CoXComicsCoXComics Posts: 80

    The result for March's personal animation challenge.

     

  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,165
    edited April 3

    My latest animation . Voice done with Ms Asure Ai

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVccqtFT8_o

    Karate Girl Pormo. intro.jpg
    1920 x 1080 - 809K
    Post edited by Ivy on
  • CoXComicsCoXComics Posts: 80
    Nice. Just over 11 minutes with titles, what was the ballpark production time for the rendered images? I wasn't aware that Azure AI did voices. Any tips or tricks you'd like to share concerning it?

    Ivy said:

    My latest animation . Voice done with Ms Asure Ai

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVccqtFT8_o

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    CoXComics said:

    Nice. Just over 11 minutes with titles, what was the ballpark production time for the rendered images? I wasn't aware that Azure AI did voices. Any tips or tricks you'd like to share concerning it?

    Ivy said:

    My latest animation . Voice done with Ms Asure Ai

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVccqtFT8_o

    Yes. Ivy Rocks! I've been a fan for... well... a  l o n g time! :) She'll answer too. She's very cool about all of that!

     

    My stuff lately has been very 'down n' dirty' having to be done so quickly - so I'm using very much test-render speeds (lower quality) and doing what I can with music and I'm still learning the postwork side of things. Working at getting better. Here's a promo I did for a recent webinar:

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    Oh, but I wanted to say, CoX Comics, I really like the videos! Very Very freaking Cool! Keep it up!

    Auroratrek - Very nice - as always! Kudos to all of you folks in here! Cool thread!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    I do webinars showing my speed rendering techniques - fun!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    Ivy has a cool learning session available here too. It would be cool if both of us could get together one day at Digital Art Live and do a show together, sharing our workflows together - since no two artists work alike - these differences are what make learning fun - no matter how long we may have been doing this stuff. I love seeing my progress grow - sometimes just over night!

    My "Rosie 8" page (latest news toward the top of the page) has some cool ideas that I've been introducing to my Rosie character - the tools of which will of course then work on all of my Genesis 8 and 8.1 Females.

    The latest being micro-musculature animations of the face - FACS. 

    I've been observing the facial behaviors of real people my whole life. Even when I was very young I loved to draw interesting people - so I eventually learned that All people are very interesting. Everybody has their own, very specific muscle movements - even when they're not doing anything. So I'm working these custom control dials directly into my figure Pose Control hierarchy - it's a Lot of fun and I have a lot of Rosie renders done that show what it can do.

    Rosie's hair averages 1 to 2 hours for each 4 to 7 second clip of animation, so it takes me a little while to get them all going - but hopefully soon I'll have my Rosie 8.24 demo video together. A little higher render quality (thinks to tips from Ivy and Jay Versluis) and I'll spend more time working on the Postwork. 

    I'm also constantly fighting for computer time to make more fresh music for my videos.. Having only one computer... oh well! LOL

     

    When I first started trying DAZ Studio as my animation/rendering software (I've been into Carrara forever) just a few years ago, the forum was Filled with negativity about 'Animating in DAZ Studio', so I rebelled. I knew I could make things a Lot easier for animators in Studio - so I did.

    I used what I know about DAZ Studio's Content Creation Tools that I learned to use for my Carrara endeavors, and used that to leverage an easier way to animate - since, although they've improved since all of this, DAZ Studio timeline can be pretty... unfriendly? and crude-feeling when we first start playing around with it.

    It turned out that my method can almost entirely remove the need for a graph editor. I still use the graph editor - and I certainly wasn't 'looking to replace' the graph editor by any means. I'm accustomed to working in graph editors. But the solution just had that side-effect to it - using dials right on the figure instead of using the graph editor.

     

    There was still a Lot of dis-belief. So I decided to make a mock-up animation video to demonstrate some animation and prove that the negativity doesn't hold the weight that the authors (of said negativity) say it has.

    This was the resulting little short - just a fun exploration of my new method and learning to really enjoy rendering in Iray!

    Which all started building and growing and... well... then came Paul Bussey at Digital Art Live, offering me the chance to tell my story to the world, and we came up with Dynamic Character Animation in DAZ Studio!

    Which, in turn, led to The Power of aniMate 2 - which covers a Lot more than just aniMate. I'm having a lot of fun with these!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568

    Single frame stills just don't capture what's going on. This is one frame of an animation demonstrating Rosie listening to someone else talk - all of the various movements from her facial muscles firing as she listens - doing relatively nothing else. But the thing is... nobody is EVER doing nothing. Even when we sleep our minds are working away and our facial muscles fire in response.

    The actual videos are coming - the ones that show how this all works along with the demonstration animations. I'm constantly animating, simulating, and developing more new controls that bring DAZ Studio out of the dark and into the light. I think the DAZ Studio developers deserve that. They've worked all of these amazing tools into a Pro-version of software that we get for free - software that allows us to build brand new, custom, fully-rigged characters with delicious automated process and fine-tune controls.... Kudos to them! So my endeavors to prove how amazing DAZ Studio can be is my appreciation for the hard work that they are always pouring into this amazing suite of tools!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,568
    edited April 8

    I'm also working hard on developing new costumes for my Rosie character, who has to deliver in so many situations and multiple genre.

    dForce is what brought me to DAZ Studio in the first place - that Amazing hair by Linday! Drove me nuts until I could actually use it! Now I'm using it and it still drives me nuts with Glee!!! I love this Hair!!!

    Linday also made this amazing dForce shirt. So using Fit Control and Mesh Grabber, I was able to make a plethora of morphs that allows Rosie to tuck it into Aeon Soul's Awesome Urban cargo pants! I think it looks really cool, and simulated really well - as I show off in my Movie Magic mini-course.

    She's got spunk, the Rosie - and it's well deserved. She's always saving people and... well... the world! So it's only fair that we let her get comfy now and then. And then the Shi... um... poopies hit the fan and she's got to jump into the fire once again! I'm proud of her - fearless little thing that she is!

     

     

    Same animation - same hair simulation - different version of the same costume

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
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