Funny Dancing Squirrel Animation

TJMusic

Today I've finally finished my recent animated project, based on DAZ Squirrel figure. All animation has been done using simple keyframing in DAZ 3D Studio 4.0 and after rendering there was some additional postprocessing used for the final visual look. Enjoy! I hope you'll like it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tJcvDg23bc

RoLoW

Very nice! Shows off how nicely DAZ Studio can animate, and may inspire someone to use DS to create an animated Avatar.

mrposer

Wow that was terrific. I love squirrels and feed them peanuts everyday at the dogpark. Your movements were very well timed to your music track too. What video software did you use to connect it all together?

TJMusic

MrPoser said:

What video software did you use to connect it all together?

I've listed it in YouTube description.

The squirrel was rendered to sequence of PNG images (I didn't even use shadows this time, to make it simple and fast).

The background was a single PNG image but I used different zoom and crop on it for each shot.

For every squirrel rendered frame, I've generated inked edges as another PNG image, using Potrace http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ to convert to vector and GhostScript http://www.ghostscript.com/ to draw the ink-looking image. I've wrote a Perl script to automate this processing.

To composite the 3 images to a frame (background, then squirrel with alpha channel, then inked edges with alpha and opacity), I've wrote a small program in C with GD library to do what I wanted (I guess Adobe AfterEffects or HitFilm would do the same easily if I could afford it).

The sequence of images has been changed to AVI with VirtualDub. I've made 10 sequences 100 frames each. There were 7 DAZ animations but I've made 3 extra renders using just different camera angle.

Finally I've put all the cuts together using Wax 2.0 to have every shot in the right place.