My movie project. Part 1: Developing a workflow

drzap

Hello everyone.  I will be making a realistic animated film using Daz Studio characters as assets.  I'm not sure if this is the right category for this post, so if this is the wrong place, feel free to inform me. I will share my pitfalls and mistakes in this discussion to help others in the future and I hope you can help me with some of them.  My first step is creating an efficient pipeline.  The first thing I noticed is that much of the cool things I like about Daz Studio is only available within Daz.  This will be my biggest challenge: Keeping as much of my workflow as possible inside DAZ.  But there one necessary reason to export geometry and that is for facial animation.  Daz doesn't have a realistic way for facial animation yet.  Currently, I plan to use Faceshift for facial animation.  Faceshift tranfers it's animation via FBX.  It seems DAZ only exports low resolution .fbx files and I find that insufficient for realistic animation.  I'm sure many of you have found this same roadblock.  iClone has interchange software, but there is a polygon limit (17k?).  Here is my first question:  If I just export my Daz character's head, would I still be able to use the max 17k limit?  If so, by extension, couldn't I just export body parts individually instead of the whole character at once, each of the parts maxing out the limit?  I could assemble the body again back in DAZ and keep my high resolution. Am I that clever or has this been tried before?   Actually, I just need to export the head for animation and then re-imported back to DAZ.  If this trick can work, I can proceed with my workflow pipeline plans - character creation and animation in DAZ with head export out to Faceshift for facial animation, reunite the animated head with the animated body.  Final animation goes out via alembic to Clarisse IPX for assembly and rendering.  I choose to render in Clarrisse because of it's fantastically quick and memory efficient renderer.  This is my current plan.  But you know the rule about plans.....

 

Anyways, if anyone can answer my question about the Daz to iClone exchange fbx problem, I would be very appreciative.

wolf359

Greetings, I too am working on an animated film project that is currently bing rendered in Maxon Cinema4D studio Via DAZ exported.obj/MDD 
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/94651/the-official-galactus-rising-wip-thread#latest

On the matter of facial animation You Might try the Demo of this software:
http://f-clone.com/

drzap

wolf359 said:

On the matter of facial animation You Might try the Demo of this software:
http://f-clone.com/

Thanks.  f-clone looks promising, I'll give it a try.  I will keep up with your thread and look forward to seeing what you produce.

drzap

I finally settled on a workable pipeline:   Daz to Maya with a little Houdini thrown in the mix.  It took awhile for me to get in the flow of Maya.  I never animated on a computer before.  But after a couple of months of training myself, I feel more comfortable.  I had learn rigging and skinning and texturing and blend shapes and animating and.... everything.  It's been a blast.  I bought some cameras to set up a mocap studio.  No keyframe animation for me.  After 3 months, I've produced my first character.  The DaztoMaya plugin helped me get started and ease me into the process, but I soon learned I would have to re-rig her myself until the developer completes the script.  Right now, it brings the Daz character into Maya fully rigged, which is not what you want if you need to add blend shapes.  So I had to break the rig and figure out how to put her together later.  That was frustrating.  Hopefully my next character will be smoother sailing.  This is my learning pass.  She will definitely improve as my texturing skills get better.