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Wow. My new Rosie animations are rendering out really nice! Like this one up a few posts
Big TOS fan , because, well, I lived through it. Have you seen "Star Trek Continues?" It's an attempt to create new stories using the characters and visual style of the the original series. The attention to detail is amazing. Everything is exactly spot on. Even Scotty is played by James Doohan's son!
I haven't seen it, but I've seen of it.
Just finished watching Star Trek Beyond. Night 3, movie 3. I also then (now) go through the special featurettes that come with them. Very cool stuff.
Years and years ago I watched a really cool documetary on the making of TOS, which is where I leanred about William's dog being on set every day and that the stage crew searched through garbage evey night after work for more stage prop material. It was a really good documentary.
The first TOS episode came out when I was a few weeks shy of 7 months old - so I lived through those too. Watched them all the time and loved them.
My baby sister and her kids are Huge Next Generation fans. They watch it all the way through and start over! Reminds me of me with Star Wars - The Clone Wars! LOL
I'm going to watch this one through to see if it's it... but I don't think it is. Maybe. I think it came with some special edition TOS Complete Boxed Set or something that a friend had... or something. So long ago I don't recall how or where I saw it.
Star Wars is different. I have a bazillion documentaries on that and have a pretty decent memory of where they all are and what they come with.
The documentaries that come with each season of The Clone Wars are truly magnificent!!! A bunch of incredible and enthusiastic artists working together in a house on Lucas Ranch to make a weekly TV event out of CG!
Which do I like better? I'm odd that way because I don't. To me they are equally awesome, equally ridiculous, equally artistically inspiring... I love them all!
OMG! Rosie 8!!! I'm having Way Too Much Fun!!!
For today's experiment I have Rosie running into a slide - a fast slide and she keeps sliding, shooting in the same direction. For the gunfire I'm using 3-d-c's Muzzle Flash for his combat rifle for V4 and M4. Not sure if you're familiar, but the flash prop doesn't come with decent x,y,z rotations, so lining it up with the gun was problematic and then trying to work with it... ungh!
So I sent it to Hexagon and straightened it out for the most part, and sent it back as a new prop. It gained an extra, empty surface material zone in the process. Why? Not sure. But it was a simple thing of choosing the geometry editor, hopping into Tool Settings and removing the extra surface - which indeed shown to be empty.
After all that I saved it as a Smart Prop so I can (hopefully) easily use it again and again, and on both guns.
Iray Uber shader automajically put it emissions on the prop I sent back from Hexagon. The wonderful thing is that the original did not have Uber applied to it yet. Hmnpf... I just keep likeing 4.22 more and more each day!
I still had to crank up the lumins, but that's also really easy and, we all have our own take on how bright stuff should be anyway - so that's not even an issue.
3D Universe's wonderful Catcher Plus will be providing todays shadows and surface reflections on the alpha floor. Love the ease-of-use this product has!
It's fun getting the opportunity to try out my new tools!
The three dimensions of the muzzle flash looks pretty darned cool as I watch the rendered frames come to fruition. Scaling the thing from 0 to 100, then to 150 on the next frame and back to 0 for the next frame... it gives a beautiful impression of velocity fire.
New Tutorial Video - Daz Studio - Create dForce Hair Collision Helpers
It was at the tender age of 11 when I first watched the premiere of Star Trek September 6, 1966, on Canada's CTV network (two days before it was aired in the U.S.) and I was hooked for life and have watched everything so far.
I enjoyed the first Star Wars trilogy quite a bit, but not so much most of the other trilogies but what I absolutely loved was The Clone Wars, Rebels and Bad Batch. I like those three animated series more than any other Star Wars movies.
My kids stumbled on Star Trek in a... different way. When they were younger they loved Futurama and were puzzled by some of the jokes regarding the Trek actors' heads in jars in the Star Trek-themed episode, so that summer I let them watch old Star Trek episodes on a channel here that was showing all the old episodes for all the series. In one long summer they caught up to current broadcasts and then started watching all the new episodes with my wife and me; they still love the franchise.
It sounds perfect, I will have to test it. Thanks for the tip.
@Walt
I Loved the first season of Piccard! So much so that I bought a bundle of Star Trek Discovery. I was so bummed when they started showing promos for Piccard season 2, and I know I'm going to get mobbed for this but... I have Always Hated any episode with Q! Always!!! The promos made it look like the whole season wraps around Q so Season 1 was my last, unfortunately for me.
So quite a while after they get caught in time, everything just slowed to a crawl - or so it seemed, and became a lot less enjoyable for me - especially since I stopped turning the volume up for Michael, and her dialog often carries the entire show - so... yeah. Hmmm.
So I go back and watch TOS and their related movies, TNG and it's related movies and the new trilogy of Trek movies, which I really enjoy a Lot.
It was an odd test for me, since muzzle flash is such an easy post effect. But this actually turned out pretty cool and was a lot of fun to work with in scene!
It's time to start rendering other elements for Rosie 8's demo reel, which is So Freaking Difficult!
"What's so hard?", you might ask.
Rendering Other Elements means that I have to stop animating, simulating and rendering Rosie! Argh! That is So Hard!!!
I found that Q was much more of a background player in Picard Season 2, you might be able to handle it. At any rate, Picard Season 3 is more of a final episode of The Next Generation, it's the best season of Picard.
I'm mostly just "okay" with Discovery; the best thing about the series is that it gave us Strange New Worlds, which might be my favourite Trek series of them all. I'm also a huge Lower Decks fan where inside every episode, when you don't worry too much about the laughs, lies a solid "Trek" story. Surprisinly good.
What I like agout your method is that it'll work just as well for me in 2D.
Absolutely! So, after I had the muzzle flash prop sorted out so that it lined up nicely with the gun (so the rotations weren't completely going in wrong directions) - after each time I made if Flash I'd rotate it just slightly to hold that rotation for that flash, then just before the next flash I'd rotate it again, so that each flash isn't identical. It's amazing how much the effect doesn't work if they're all the same.
Star Trek - so did you subscribe to Paramount?
The Power of aniMate 2
Join me at Digital Art Live
Sunday, Decemeber 3rd and 10th
19:00 GMT / 12PM EST / 1PM CST / 2PM MST / 3PM WST
(I think I have the times right)
Two Part Event - I will cover all of the Amazing possibilities discussed my aniMate 2 thread Live, so we can get interactive and see a personal view of how we can put all of this to good practice.
aniMate 2 and Daz Studio make for a Powerful combination - making Animating in Daz Studio a real dream! I'm Loving It!!!
I'll post more about this as I learn more information ;)
I do subscribe to Paramount, but I've purchased DVDs and Blu-Rays of Strange New Worlds Season One, Seasons One, Two and Three of Lower Decks and Parts One and Two of Star Trek Prodigy for a buddy who doesn't. Season Two of Strange New Worlds is due out shortly and Lower Decks Season Four should follow a little after that.
Thanks for the extra tip on the muzzle flash rotation, I wouldn't have thought of that, much appreciated.
I'll probably buy all of those on Vudu as I can. I do like buying them so I get any/all of the Behind-the-Scenes I love so much!
Okay, this makes it much easier!
The fact that I Finally get to look at all of my cool new content I've been getting in these Amazing Daz 3d Sales Events... Oh My!!!
Stonemason's The Rift was the first port of call, which was originally purchased to work with the animation used in the above Power of aniMate 2 promo. Yikes! So Good!!!
Pretty cool workflow. I load up that scene of Rosie, which has the three cameras for the three versions of aniMation I rendered, delete the hair to reduce overhead in the scene, then load in The Rift and render using the same cameras.
Normally I spend some time playing with lighting/environment settings, etc., but in this case all I did was to apply the included "Night" render settings preset, make sure that what I'm seeing through the camera will work with the animation, and render.
The first camera doesn't move, so I could leave the render settings high and just render a single frame.
Cameras B and C each follow Rosie's path, so those get slightly lower render quality settings, turn from Still to Image Series, give it the appropriate naming convention so I can match this backing plate with the correct animation, and let 'er schnap!
From Camera A
Wow. You know that Daz 3d has been having Amazing Sales when you have to click through five pages in your account library to find the name of something you just bought!
This is a vastly unfinished work, but shows some of the fun of using ThePhilosopher's iReal Animated Clouds in a Cyberpunk City scene as city steam
Wow! Lower Decks has some Brilliant Actors in it! And, although short, comes with a bunch of little featurettes!
Strange New Worlds - Oh Yeah!!! I Loved the Pike/Spock parts of Discovery - which I think I was a bit harsh on. I'm going to give it another watch. But Strange New Worlds looks like it comes with some nice Special Features - one, "Exploring New Worlds" is even an hour long!
There's one that I found called "Building Star Trek: Season 1". I'm not sure if that's the documentary I saw or not. The description makes it sound like it's that 50th Anniversary thing. Not sure. They have the 50th Anniversary too though.
This one's pretty fun
Regarding Stonemason's Work
From the very beginning of my 3D animation experiences (which was quite some time ago) Stonemason = Amazing.
I've been buying and using Stonemason's products forever - but I'm still fairly new to Daz Studio, compared to my Carrara Pro journey, which was/is Incredible. The products in Carrara are absolutely amazing and render out really well.
Most of my time in Daz Studio has been working with my many versions of Rosie, trying to get that all worked out - and that endeavor is still growing.
Loading into Daz Studio any of Stonemason's products that are of the generation that they come Iray-Ready, it's absolutely Incredible how well they render right out of the box.
They're not just great looking, but if we check our lowly GPU, it's being used in the render as well! Why? Because Stonemason is an Absolute Professional when it comes to creating these artistic sets - they're highly efficient. In making my Massive Cyberpunk Sprawl, using Urban Sprawl 3, throughout the process I'd run Sceme Optimizer to keep things in check. In doing so, I have to click the selection box at the very top to deselect everything, then go through the biggest issues and optimize those. Stonemason's are already optimized fully and take up an impressively small footprint - even on a scene so massive.
Load in the Entire Urban Sprawl 3 on it's own, we can easily Instance entire blocks and spread those around to expand the already massive environment and still have a workable scene. In truth, a much better way to work is to create or use a city-surround backing image for the added depth, if needed. Each of those blocks ar massive in their own right, and we don't need to have true geometry for the depth perseption. A fun way to do this, using the Sprawl itself, is to create a massive city scene using all of the included city blocks and instance them around enough where all we see at any angle (from ground human height view) is city sprawl. Now remove the center block, place a spherical camera at around 6 feet or so high and render it at a 2 to 1 ratio, like 8000 x 4000, for example. Render that out at various times of day for correct lighting and you've just made environment domes. If we include the sky it'll have sky. If we don't render the dome and render to png with alpha, we have a surrong that we can map to a sphere and still use HDRI lighting and whatever we want for the sky - and it'll allow us to load Much Much less city blocks for animation rendering.
This one is using such a thing. It's the Alpha surround I just mentioned, mapped to a primitive sphere, and I'm using the map in the Emission Color channel - adjusted for the proper effect. I'm still working out ways to render Stonemason's Incredible street shader for my animations. I don't think I'm letting the renders bake long enough and need a few more tweaks to the settings. I prefer to Not use the post filtering in Daz Studio Iray, because I like the grainy look I'm getting, but it often adds glittery motions to the resulting animated renders. Add the post filtering and that disappears. So I might start using that for these renders. In fact, I'm going to rendering this one again using it.
All in all, however, my experience working with Stonemason's work in mine has been So Problem-Free that I am extremely grateful. You have one Overly Satisfied Customer here, my friend!
Rendering The Rift, Wow! Rendering the Urban Future kits... Amazing!
It's cool how even the legacy Stonemason Work is So Good!
Rock On Andrey Pestyakov!!!
Including all of the additional Light Presets for the Iray Sun/Sky dome is a really nice bonus.
In the end, they turn out to be very simple settings in the Sun/Sky pane - and that's part of what makes them So Good!!! Before I bought my first Pestryakov kit, I have never even used that feature. Didn't even know about it.
Temple Cave was that first Pestryakov I bought, and it is Stunning from all camera angles, yet Andrey includes many of them to help us get started. I couldn't believe my eyes! I also thought that, if I add a character to the scene that it would take forever to render... no. Andrey includes minimized render presets and options for improving or altering the render setting, like spectral and all that stuff. Bringing in and animating a charcter is a breeze!
Thank You Andrey Pestryakov I love evey kit I've bought so far - and will continue!
Walking in the Woods
This scene is So Amazing! Wooded shadows and leafy sunlight enamour this set with realism and beauty!
Not just Bark shader on trunk with green leaves, no. This place is brimming with life growth and that which has spent. Very natural. But you know what? It's also very easy to work with and use with our characters. I render my characters separately because they take up a lot of render space on their own. So I try to think like a filmmaker who is working with ILM or WETA - but in my case, I'm working with me - the VFX department.
This kit makes it easy to select various parts and hide them from render. Then I'll remove everything else (still there, just hidden) to film the foreground and other elements I need for the shot.
In basic form, this is the process:
Stones and Structures
I bought this and loaded one of the two full scenes and tried those wonderful preset options like the ones I loved about Temple Cave - yes! Fantastic!!! So I loaded the other scene and was eaqually impressed, amazed, and ultimately satisfied with my purchase.
Exploring the product more reveals an enormous weath of additional loading options for individual elements. This kit is Awesome!
I needed an animated render of this, so I bought ThePhilosopher's iReal Animated Ocean Water System to see... and, Yes! It works really really well! being that this is Not an ocean, I used the water shader that came with Andrey's Stones and Structures on the iReal water, and it worked like Magic!!!
check out the water movement in this scene
Really loving how nice the stones, rocks, water, and especially the plant life in various levels of Living or Spent, I went back to Andrey's Store looking for more.
This Kit Is Awesome too!!!
It's a real treat moving around in this environment with the camera. Going for a specific shot, I started noticing more and more ways I wanted to shoot this set... it's Incredible!
At the time I bought this, I had also got my hands on DeepSea's incredible Bald Eagle Bundle. So I put that majectic creature in one of the trees and applied his "Take Off From Branch" aniBlock and watched the magic happen. So Freaking Amazing!!!
Kits like this and the ones already mentioned and yet to come, inspired me to buy more and more of ThePhilosopher's iReal products - of which I now own most. A couple more and my collection will be complete. So... ThePhilosopher, buddy... I need you to make more, okay? :)
It's a bummer that I lost all those years of my work. Remembering some oof it, I had some great shots of Rosie 5 and 7 climbing these stairs as that eagle took off from the branch.
As for the Rosie 5 part, it led to the very beginning of this Rosie 7 short, where Rosie 5 is flying the eagle into another of my favorite Andrey Pestryakov kits
Wow! Just... Wow!!!
I mean... this kit is Enormous!!!
But that's not all that it is. It's light on its masive feet and renders really really well. But even more, as we explore this immense terrain and head toward the really cool medieval castle area, we start to see other points of interest along the way! Buildings and structures. Check the library and there's a plethora of otpions for having a more populated, higher-resolution environment with a lot more trees, or just keep it light. Additional castle structures, complete buildings to place in the places... and the other favorites that I haven't mentioned yet - the rock formation kits - work Beautifully as foreground elements or simply as changes to the terrain!
I Love This Kit!!!
Speaking of Massive - Awesome Kits!
Valley and Hills and Mountain Lakes and Forests can help us film all manner of fantastic outdoor shots that just tantilize the viewer with that bliss of nature!
Add to these ThePhilosopher's iReal Animated kits and we get it all with a very natural motion of real nature! Blows My Mind!!!
...and there's a Lot More to them! Check out their product pages!!!