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Yeah, after buying and returning 2 no longer supported Kinect Sensors to do motion capture because Microsoft doesn't support all UBS 3.1 chipsets and have dropped support for Kinect Sensors I am counting on UE4 releasing a fully professional animation toolkit and Unity doing so as well (but that I mean integrating AI assists from these extremely expensive video cards). I am taking animation courses where you keyframe and all that, but having been advised by professionals in the course I'm taking of the glacial productivity professional animators get paid for, so I know I need an AI assist from the likes of nVidia/AMD/UE4/Unity.
It's coming and if it actually helps me great, if not I'm continuing my courses regardless, but as advised I just won't be producing much if I produce to professional standards, since I'm not using motion capture hardware and such (which properly cleaned up & integrated needs lots of glacial work too). I may buy an intel Lidar camera in a couple of years as they are about $350 now, so very expensive, but they are still supported by intel. As likely, is buying a used or new iPhone with the needed hardware as my iPhone S was bought in Oct 2016 and the new iOS versions are slowing it down.
I'm mainly taking the animation courses for fun though as I'm tired of rendering stills but not being able to complete a story because I can't animate well.
Have you looked into Cascadeur? They have this AI-powered auto-pose feature. The AI guesses what pose you're trying to place your character in and just does it for you (basically Clippy on steroids). Because it's still in Beta this feature doesn't work with custom characters:
@Faux2D, you beat me to the punch there. Cascadeur has very good potential for us would-be animators. Manual keyframing is tedious and slow, exactly what AI is supposed to excel at. I have been participating the beta program and it's not ready for prime time yet, but if they keep going in the direction they are, this software could be a killer app. There is also Rumba (https://rumba-animation.com/), Animcraft (https://www.animcraft.com/), and a few VR-based platforms like Glycon3d (https://www.glycon3d.com/). You need not stay in the hand-key realm unless you prefer it.
@Drzap
It would not surprise me if epic hedged their bets with thier own AFFORDABLE native character animation system for UE & the MH
They can certainly afford the development costs yes??.
Indeed if you learn of any definitive developments (beyond theoretical speculation/extrapolations) please share
with links.
I agree that There is literally no reason to hand key an entire animated production in 2021 except out of some ludicrous nostalgia for the "old days"
With AI assist,Human mocap and motion libray resources like Mixamo,NIVIDIA omnnivers and Reallusions online Actorcore system
and realtime/near realtime engines for both lookdev and final render,
We solo ,CG filmakers/producers are now finally being liberated to focus on thematic story driven narratives and digital cinematography instead of masochistic excercises the "12 principles" that were originally conceived for the cartoonish "cute stuff" that is only a small segment of 3D/CG animation and VFX today.
@nonesuch00 Not sure if you are paying for your animation courses
but IMHO most of them are a complete waste of time and money.
I am a member of a private facebook group called "Blender for CG filmaking".
There are some uber talented Artstation members who are very helpful to total newbies who just dove on on a short animated project and asked for advise and critiques and quickly get many helpful "real world" instruction on how to acheive the objectives at hand.
Working on an actual project ,no matter how modest, can be a great teacher and sitting and waiting for the next exciting new software/hardware solution will have you sitting idle forever because there is always some new exciting thing on the horizion.
have a story idea ?? just take what you have and start something.
Except that Studio users have access to virtually none of those advanced animation methods without ridiculous multi-program workflows. I've been experimenting with animating Genesis 8 figures and it's so much trouble to get them to Unreal or Blender and fix all of their materials that I'm actually finding it less frustrating to just hand key the animation in Studio so far.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but we could really use some of those techniques available in the only program where DAZ content works exactly as it's supposed to.
I haven't tried this myself SnowSultan but the YouTube video is from February and looks good.
Thank you Kevin, but 1. you may have posted in the wrong thread, and 2. I actually want the opposite; I want to use Unreal animations in Studio. Thanks though! :)
I don't think hand key animation is a thing of the past. All these techniques like mocap and AI-assisted animation are tools. Their purpose is to ease the creative process and not dictate it. Instead of blocking the classical way you could use AI and/or motion capture to get around 50% of the work done. You still have to put a lot of work in the animation but at least you don't have to waste time on the dull repetitive work that has to be done beforehand.
In the same way a painted landscape has a different effect than a photographed landscape, a keyframed animation has a different effect to a mocaped animations. But I don't think it's an either/or thing, one technique can be used to enhance the other and vice versa.
Edit* not sure what happened to my comment here. I was going to agree with you about hand keyed animation. It is an art form that deserves its place in the industry. Just need to make it more reasonably approachable for short handed studios or single artists. This paper shows a technique that will certainly help. Sure, it's just a paper now, but it's been demonstrated and surely there are one or more companies who are working on an implementation. This is the "hand keyframe" animation of the future.
I have it & installed it. It's quite nice, but as I ultimately need to know the basics I've held off teaching it to myself and went for paying for animation courses in Blender.
Like you already have done, I want to animation one Marvel comic, 31 paneled (16 total pages) from a comic book for fun but I have other things too I want to animate.
I am paying for courses and they really aren't too expensive, no more that what I was spending each month at DAZ 3D for new models. They are a HUGE time sink though, there is just no other way around it and why I was so patient until I came to realize I have to learn keyframing for the style I want, like it or not. I am one that wants to do old style toon animations as a matter of fact and the instructors already have been a big help to me. It's not too much feedback but the videos have been good and I get enough feedback pointing out my mistakes. It's CG Cookie as I'm sure you've all heard of. I like the graders to pick apart my work as I know I couldn't be any good and thankfully they've obliged, matter of factly so, so it's helpful.
I do have hope for tools from nVidia/AMD/Blender/UE4/Unity/Cascadeur/Rumba to will do like say, 80% or even 95% of the mundane animation for me but I need to learn to do the animation cases that are, as the teacher says it, cartoon style that emphasizes emotion through exaggeration and not what is physically possible, although it should still look physically possible when animated. Given the glacial output of key framing I need to reserve that for short segments that require it. An entire film of exaggerated events and resulting emotions would come off as tiresome and unbelievable. So it's going to be a few months I know but I will get decent at it with enough practice.
I will join the group on FB you speak of.
here one more tutorial video of control rig animation tool for unreal( to animate inside unreal)
In regards to my question, disregard what I said; I'm done trying to get stuff out of Unreal and into Studio. Thanks again for that video Kevin, it may come in handy after all. :)
Good!
Yea I saw this too. I was thinking maybe it's a better way to get proper IK setup and make animation than doing it in studio. As always the devil is in the detail, i.e. you've got to setup all the handles yourself. On the other hand there are many useful features in these blueprints. For example you can drive part of the animation with keyframes and part of it with physics. So many possibilities.
That's a good video. It's at the YouTube site for UE.
Also there are several other video of animating in UE at their YouTube page and videos of using Blender's Rigify and Blender roundtripping with UE using Plugins that UE wrote. Then you have the UE exporter from DAZ and the Blender exporter from DAZ as well as the Diffeomorphic plugin by Thomas Larson.
Interesting news...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/480826/daz-awarded-megagrant-from-epic-games
here more digital humans talk from epic
about eyes.
Wow! I can't believe it!
https://www.daz3d.com/unreal-bridge
In case someone's interested, here is an update of my MetaMorpher project:
very nice
Unreal Fashion Game with Metahumans
Very nice.. Wendy thanks
Faux2D's morph system is nice
but no different from character customiztion systems
found in may Video game titles like Eve online
or the more recent
Cyberpunk 2077
There really is no comparision to the Epic Metahumans because the metahumans exist in a platform system that focuses on realtime
final quality visualization without having to wait for renders Like with Daz studio.
Daz store has still plenty of cool characters and things, I think they can complement each other.
You can now sign up for early access to MetaHuman Creator. They also released a new YouTube video:
Also a nice review of the interface in here:
It looks amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
my only issue about metahuman would be if it only can generate "clothed" characters, which is what it's looks so far, if we can have "naked" or half naked like swinsuits or underwear characters.
ok i've tested the "metahuman" and man it's really for high ending works, the 8k textures and really high poly model make it's really a lot complex model, one thing which i don't liked is which so far you can only "edit/sculpt" the face, the body you have only basic body types like tall, fat, voluptous you can't really modify the body for now and the ammount of "outftis" is really low for now ofcourse.
Another thing which i don't liked is which you can't create a character from 0 you must choose a "premade character" which are all peoples looking like where scanned from a bunch of middle age peoples, making the models look a lot "too old" is really hard make a "young character" with the current presets.
there are actually a couple kids and younger people in there. From the 58 free characters on Quixel.
I'm hoping they add the body scuplting. I know there are less clothed characters, I was watching a video , and one lady was in under wear. I think the clothing will change. I'm thinking that is why Daz3d got a Epic Mega grant. They are going to be working on Daz inventory of clothes working on Metahumans. Thats my possible take.
Check out this video. This gentleman does a great job. and shows the underwear gal in it.
It will never ever beat DAZ3d when it comes to variety of character types, moddability, range of different morph packs, material, clothing and hair options, openness/accessibility of the framework and performance.
There aren't even full bodies available yet, not to mention bone driven morph targets and there probably won't ever be, at least we will not see any anatomically correct bodies (like in every "server based game").
I'm wondering how subdivided (1st subdivision) daz3d characters would look like in UE4 with full PBR skin material setup. Has anyone experimented with that yet?