My recently finished small dancing sequence

TJMusic

I've recently spent some time making a short animated sequence, which is actually very similar to the first animation I ever made in DAZ 3D Studio. This time, even if I started with some aniblocks, I've baked them to keyframes and edited a little bit. I've also keyframed dynamic hair movement and put some other nice details. I will certainly improve it later and add more similar scenes to make a full length music video, and this sample is just another step in the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYKmpXVUOU

John Sims

The hair looks very good and well done for the video generally.

casey42_2f850f0fa3

Like the ani, am really intriqued by the added in back ground, neat trick, how do you do it?

Steve K

casey 42 said:

Like the ani, am really intriqued by the added in back ground, neat trick, how do you do it?

Agreed, and the background is interesting.

DUDU

casey 42 said:

Like the ani, am really intriqued by the added in back ground, neat trick, how do you do it?

You renders your character with alpha channel, and you add the sequence on the top layer in a compositing software.
The background could be what you want, 3d render, picture or real life footage.

casey42_2f850f0fa3

Thank you, which composting software do you use? I haven't found one that works for me yet.

DUDU

I use After Effects but there is a cheaper soft here : http://hitfilm.com/

Add: Adobe premiere do that very well and it's a light version for about 100 euros "Premiere Element".

Steve K

I also have After Effects, a very powerful and expensive program. But I use Magix Movie Edit Pro MX Plus for editing, an affordable program that has many of the AE type features. In many cases I just use MEP since its easier to stay in one program. More here including 30 day trial versions of the various Movie Edit Pro versions:

http://www.magix.com/us/movie-edit-pro/

TJMusic

am really intriqued by the added in back ground, neat trick, how do you do it?

The background was based on a live footage taken with a vintage analog camera. I've used a full 36mm film, taking one picture every 10s, each picture exposed for 8s. The film was developed and scanned, then I've processed the scanned frames by a simple deshaking plugin, a few filters and a motion blur on VirtualDub.

which composting software do you use? I haven’t found one that works for me yet.

I've exploited the fact that I'm a Perl developer, and I've written the compositing scripts on my own, using GD library. It works perfectly, I just put each layer as PNG frames in a separate directory and I run the script to render it. I also used this scripting to apply a bokeh filter on background in close-ups.

I'm sure Adobe After Effects or HitFilm Ultimate would do the job even better, but I couldn't spare money for them yet.

I also use Wax for mixing different video clips, it works decently but it doesn't handle PNG image sequences so I don't use it for alpha-based merging layers.

DUDU

Ha ha…, you are an old dynosaur of the cinema, like me!
Can you say to us more concerning your software, that could interest a lot of people ?

Jaderail

For a Cheap semi Pro video editor with a few effects including Green Screen and Sound I suggest the Roxio Creator versions. They are cheap, do a good job, and for a hobby level user are easy to learn. Tip: It helps to think a bit outside the box for somethings. Example: Doing multi green screens as in Layer one saved out then loaded back in as the Background with a second green screen effect added over it works very well. The layering of sound effects, music tracks and audio tracks is also easy. As a Hobby level animator on a tight budget I'm happy with what it can do, Remember folks I'm not after Hollywood type output so don't flame me for a suggestion.

jdscogin_5266911039

I like this. Very well done IMHO. Just wondering, how many frames? Were you able to render it all at once?
I am having problems with that. My ani is 6112 frames. I have to render it in 500 frame blocks or the video is messed up.

TJMusic

Just wondering, how many frames? Were you able to render it all at once?

The whole animation contains 514 frames, but it consists of 3 composite shots (1 wide view and 2 close ups) which are mixed together. Each shot had about 200 frames and its foreground layer was easily rendered at once. But this video contains a lot more things than just rendered graphics - there is a live action background and custom compositing effects, so it couldn't be rendered in one pass. But I never had any problems with rendering more than 1000 frames at once in DS.

If you're going to render 6k frames animation at once, it means you're using a completely different workflow than I do. I render each shot separately, using PNG images sequence, and I composite them with other layers after rendering. This is completely different than having one shot a few thousands of frames long.

If you are rendering to AVI file instead of separate images, you may want to check what drive your DS uses for storing temporary frame images. It might be the problem, that it's using a small drive (like C:\ for example) and is running out of disk space with longer shots? Make sure you have a really large drive configured for storing all temporary files DS needs for rendering - apart of temporary frame images, it creates optimized texture files which are very large.

John Sims

I work in the same way. It is so much more controllable than rendering out avi.s and much much more forgiving if the render crashes part way through.

I'm also a fan of HitFilm although I tend to do the majority of my straight compositing directly into Sony Vegas. HitFilm is very powerful and great value for money but I try to do the majority of the work in the 3D environment prior to rendering so most work is just overlaying layers without the depth of manipulation HitFilm provides. Considering the raft of features available in HitFilm, and certainly HitFilm Ultimate, I struggle to see what AE could offer to justify the price.