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Those last four images are pretty darned old! They help me recall some of the things I was doing though
Here are some early WIP tests using the early concept of Starry Sky Iary for Daz Studio that I mentioned before.
You should be able to clearly see the difference. I've added some subtext in the lower left in the first half of the video - "Not Starry Sky Iray" - "Starry Sky Iray"
The second half is all Starry Sky Iray whenever we see stars. Inside the Marc Hunter bridge (Rosie's ship) we see stars out the window in some shots. That, too is Starry Sky Iray.
This is the same video as above, but without the subtext
Visit Dartanbeck.com for a Whole World of CG Filmmaking topics and articles!
The Power of aniMate 2
A new page at my website
A truly wonderful experience of animating in Daz Studio awaits, and this page will help you delve right in with ideas, links, images and videos
Along with the actual User Manual for aniMate 2 viewable/downloadable right on the page!
Links to products specifically designed with animation in mind as well as direct links back to this forum thread if you need help with any of it - I monitor this thread manually and I also get an email if someone responds - so you can expect to get answers in a timely manner.
I'll also be adding subpages to this one that will expand our learning experience within the realms of aniMate 2 and animating in Daz Studio in general - because in my world, animating in Daz Studio almost Always involves aniMate 2.
The Power of aniMate 2
A new page at my website - Come on in an Join the Fun!!!
I wish I had time to study all this because it looks awsome. I have limbstick. Might start playing with it.
Definitely!!!
When you do, watch this all the way through - and try and read between the lines of all of the incredible possibilities this gives us!
Thanks!
It's been years in the making and not intended to try and absorb all at once.
The fun way to do it is to hit something of interest and maybe hit some of the links along the way to other things that catch your interest.
I know the navigation menu really well. I mean... I make it! LOL
But I put links to places within throughout the various articles that are related in some way.
There's a Lot in there - even a whole bunch that isn't ready to be published yet. :)
Dartanbeck.com is my sanctuary where I go to learn stuff and get inspired, built in a way that hopefully others might enjoy too. Since then I started writing more about my discoveries and... well... I really like doing that! So it's really growing into something kind of cool, I think!
Wow! There's a Sale going on!
I just finished collecting all of the legacy generation 4 Reisormocap products! Sweet!!!
They'll be Genesis 8 motions soon, thanks to my wonderful Bone Minions! :)
I also got Moon Over Saturn, by Uzelite
We'll see if Rosie 8 likes it ;)
I just got 3D Universe's Pose Architect and the Addon for Genesis 8 Female
Very cool products!
While they don't eliminate the need for the dials we make in my Dynamic Character Animation for Daz Studio course, they are an Excellent supplement and, as I was expecting from 3DU - they're neatly located in their own wonderful hierarchy structure on the G8F figure - just the way I demonstrate doing it for our own custom dials.
His are really cool in that they're all animated dials, meaning that the changes in joint rotations change depending upon the value of the dial - there are keyframe embedded into them.
Further, they operate several joints at the same time countering each other - much like some of those I demonstrate - like Breathing, for example.
Very happy to have this toolkit of dials added to my figures, and will be grabbing up the Genesis 8 Male version and its addon as soon as I can!
Nice haul from the sale. Rosie will look great in the new adventure outfit.
OMG!!! These new Pose Architect dials work So Well with my own collection of custom dials. 3D Universe knocked it out of the park with this!
Now I can go through my usual process of mastering out my animations to be how I want them and then, when I'm done, breathe life into them using these excellent dials! Just a little nuance here and there or massive changes to what's going on... very nice!
Pose Architect for Genesis 8 Female(s) - Pose Architect Add-on Pack 1 for Genesis 8 Female(s) - Pose Architect for Genesis 8 Male(s)
dForce -
I love using dForce. I really like how we can use morphs after the simulation is complete to tweak certain parts of the result.
One thing I would Really love to see is a new button on the Simulation popup that allows us to stop draping and start simulating. I know that we can set Initialization time, which is Awesome. But it would be so nice if we could tell the engine during that process - okay... enough initialization... start simulating the animated range Now! :)
Although I couldn't really afford to, the sale is too much to ignore and these tools are far too crazy-awesome, so I went ahead and bought the Pose Architect for Genesis 8 Male as well. Looks like it comes with all of the Addon dials, so only one is needed. There doesn't appear to be an Addon for Genesis 8 Male.
Wow. These tools are priceless and I just stole them from 3D Universe! I hope he doesn't mind!
Stay Motivated!
Saw that your Animate tute with DAL hit the Daz store. Going to get you a whole new group of fans like me, I am sure. Hope this encourages you to become a Daz vendor again. Perhaps some of the resources you develop for Rosie can have a more generic version appropriate for sale? Or your Enviro-kits be made Iray compatible, with instances replacing the replicators? Or....
Yes! Working on the same path as I did with Carrara - Starting with Starry Sky Iray for Daz Studio!
Um... well... there's nothing generic about any part of Rosie - so she'll have to just remain the custom little IP that she is! Besides, I buy everything about her in the Daz 3D store! ;)
Join me in discovering all of the wonderful tools and features of GoFigure's aniMate 2!
The Power of aniMate 2 - Now Live at Daz 3D
An essential part of my entire workflow, aniMate 2 eneables me to go back and forth between it's non-linear block format of adjusting animations and Daz Studio's timeline fluidly to get exactly the motions I'm trying to achieve.
Along the way we'll visit more essentials to this whole workflow.
In this course, you'll clearly see why I'm having such a great time aniMating in Daz Studio!!!
To help even further, I'm growing a cool pile of pages in my website: The Power of aniMate 2
Wow! Just... Wow!!!
I'm shooting an animated render at the moment - flying into Starry Sky Iray for Daz Studio's Nebula system. Oh My!!!
For shots like this, we're truly doing the impossible as far as current space travel for humans (from Earth) is concerned. The distances are ENORMOUS. Well... more vast than enormous!
There's simply no way to get this feeling in your gut using an image of space as an HDRI or mapped to a globe - No Way! This is truly thrilling!
I've also already created a Warp Drive sample animated scene - initiating FTL (Faster Than Light) travel far beyond the speed of light, and then coming back out of it - a ten second animation in total. Pretty fun!
And again... 3D space really makes it possible to do these sorts of effects!
A small glimpse of a tiny portion of the massive nebulosity system in Starry Sky Iray, shot with only the deep space star fields. The animation I'm rendering now will take us into the lower left third of this image - avoiding getting trapped in the gasses.
Although this is Not the Warp Travel example (which goes Much Faster!!!) we'd be traveling many many many times the speed of light to travel this distance in space - but it appears to be a nice, mellow cruise.
During this cruise, the depth that we encounter from the stars being in 3D space Feels Amazing! Feels Real!!!
The nebula has multiple material presets. It can look like a nebula, like the above image (and there's a Lot more of it to see with a lot more formations of colorful gasses in space, lit by stars) or with a lower luminosity setting to be more of a background space gas sort of effect - which is really nice for simply adding a touch more interest to a space scene without becoming the star of it (see what I did there? LOL!!!).
Like real stars in the sky, these stars are briliant points of light - whether they're the bright ones or not. That's the way stars are. The blurry stuff is something else - often a cluster of stars with gasses present, or even the sight of a distant galaxy or a nearby nebula. The Messier catalog is a famous collection of 110 beautful deep sky objects. He cataloged them with their locations so that he could avoid them while "Comet Hunting"! ;)
I've only entered a Messier Marathon once.
That's where we gather at a dark-skies location and prepare to start observing through our telescopes before the sun goes down in order to check a few off the list, and stay until after the sun comes up to try and bag the last of them.
It takes a lot of endurance, but it's great fun! The clubs that I did it with had warming tents, great food, galactic games to play, folks with their computer-operated telescopes and giant Deep Sky Observer scopes... great people, great time, wonderful music... and oh my, although I was only able to bag 87 Messier objects, it's an adventure I shall never forget!
I preserve my score along with all of the star charts I made to prepare and observe all in its own three-ring binder.
Starry Sky for Daz Studio looks versatile and powerful. Nebula! Very creative.
Thanks! :)
So I watched Part 1 your July release (bought in September). So far it has been painless. I am not regretting this purchase. I figure if you learn one or two new things, the purchase was worth it. I wish I could say that for some others I unfortunately watched long past the 30 day return date. I found the 'tedious parts' not so tedious to watch. Looking forward to Part 2.
Edit: I normally use After Effects & Premier Pro, and each program/software differs but this is a great buy for anyone who buys animation blocks. You are certainly proving Daz can be used for animation.
Edit 2:
You're welcome. So . . . I always use save as and version. Eg: blah_whatever_v01 or blah_whatever_v02, so i can go back if need be. So far, partially into Part 2 you seem to use Ctrl S which in my experience overwrites the last save. Just curious as to why? Is it a Daz animation no-choice thing or just your preference?
Yes, that's just a preference thing. My incremental saves (for my style of workflow) come after I'm done finalizing my animation.
In this case I'm working with my main hero, Rosie. I have several versions of her - each related to which costume she's wearing. So my initial Saves have the version of Rosie within the save name:
"RT7CPS_" being the prefix for the cyberpunk Hero version, "RT7Plat_" being the prefix for the Platinum Knight Warrior hero version, and so on.
So once I have my main animation work completed, I might end up with a final Save under the name "RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR", which tells me that this save was using the Cyberpunk Hero, she walks and stops in surprise and looks to the right, then creeps into that direction.
Later I might need that same motion for my Platinum Knight hero, so I'll open that save and immediately make another save under "RT7Plat_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR", after which I change out the costume and simulate the cloth keeping the hair simulation frozen.
I work this way to save on having to simulate the hair again, if I already have the motion I need with the hair already simulated.
The biggest reason that I feel less of a need to save incrementally as I'm building the main animation is the method in which I'm animating.
The edits I'm making to the original motion capture are easily viewable and editable within their own entire block within the timeline - "Pose Controls".
So if I ever want to get back to the original motion capture - or even just part of it, I can easily open the Pose Controls hierarchy in the timeline and delete or edit Only the changes I've made - which becomes a Really Powerful and Fast workflow!!!
That's a big reason (as you'll see when you get into the Part 2 series of videos - regarding building these controls) I create my control dial in categories that make it easier to work with in the timeline: Arms controls under Pose Controls > Arms > Anim +, for example, and some of the most used tweaks that I use for getting the characters posture to be her own all within the base: Pose Controls > Anim +
So now if I want to get back to a state 'before I made the arm do THIS', I can open the Pose Controls hierarchy in the timeline, open Arms and then Anim + within arms and see exactly where I placed my changes. It's Much easier and faster to do than it is to type... that's for certain! :)
So using the above example:
When I'm rendering that animation, I may have several cameras - or perhaps only one. Either way, my rendering nomenclature relies on the idea that there is a possibility of having more than one "Take" or camera view.
So the saved file: "RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR" will get rendered using image file names (with matching folder names) as follows:
"RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR_CamA01a" (camera A, take 1, "a" being the lighting I'm using - so if I had another folder "RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR_CamA01b", I'd know that it's the same render using different lighting.
If it's a camera that moves along with the character, I'll know simply by looking at the folder name that I'll need a moving backplate render for the background.
"RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR_FllwCamA01a"
In DaVinci resolve, I can take the folder that contains All of these folders and drag it in as a "Bin".
Within that Bin, I'll have each folder. Click on them brings up the images inside as a video.
Having a sensible nomenclature for folders makes this process painless.
"RT7CPS_WalkStopSurpTurnCreepR_FllwCamA_BG01a" - the backplate for the shot - first take.
The BG part of the name tells me that it's the backplate or background - the Fllw part tells it's in motion. The fact that the rest of the name is that same as the character render puts in right next to it in my Bin.
Just a quick update, as I DO NOT want to be misleading!
While I love that I have these, the dials from these collections ARE NOT a good REPLACEMENT for waht we make in my Dynamic Character Animation course.
They're brilliant to have In Addition, but they're more for adding extra motions to pose than for correcting or even changing animations.
That said, however, they're also an Excellent source of inspiration for what we can do with this whole dial-creation idea!
Kudos to 3D Universe for making such an excellent product!
Also after saying that, something that these Pose Architect Dials will be Awesome for is to take a static Pose from our collection and turning it into an animation by adding the motions that an idle or other motion would require from an initial, standard pose!
Just an FYI about those Pose Architect products:
The poses on the promo thumbnails for the product as seen above - we can create those poses from an otherwise unposed character.
Therefore, we could actually create an entire animation from them as well. Not just Idles either.
In my Dynamic Character Animation course, we change the original walk to include her tucking her hair back behind her ear. While I haven't actually tried to achieve this using Pose Architect just yet, the product includes animated dials that should allow us to do this easily!
Simply clear the animation for that arm, and use the Pose Architect dials to direct that motions of that arm for the entire animation. It should be very simple and with very good results. I'll be trying it myself, but that might be a while. If any of you try it, I'd love to hear your results! :)
That said, however, incremental saves is a great idea - and I certainly do Not want to try and deter anyone from using them! ;)
In a few short days, Rosie goes under the knife for surgery on her spine.
All pre-op exams and physicals came out resulting in top scores - Rosie's in perfect health for the procedure.
The incredible young surgeon and his team give us both a good feeling of trust and optimism.
All is a go.
Now there's just the matter of holding it together. She's my Reason for Living - for Being. I worship the ground upon which she walks.
I am Madly and Passionately in Love with My Rosie.
So, I think it's natural that, as hopeful and promising as all of this is - I am still terrified.
One of my first nicknames for her is "Treasure", for to me, she is certainly that. My Beautiful, Wonderful Rosietreats!
Okay. I feel better already. I have to be her Rock. Can't go getting frazzled and full of tears in front of her. This is a Good Thing, and will help alleviate the horrible pain she goes through.
Sending positive everything to Rosie. Blessings to you and your family.
