Does Daz have a road map for animators?
davidedwards.me
Posts: 56
I really see the potential for Daz and want to get on board and create some great projects with it, but I do wonder where their focus is? is it purely aimed at the 2d drag, drop, pose, render, deviant art user?
Apologies if this question seems a little too open;
Does Daz have a road map for conforming its animation tools to what most animators would consider standard?
For example, the ability to delete a key frame, or even move a keyframe in the main timeline, i had a recent animation project that I had to scrap because I dropped the keys to the timeline and couldnt remove them later! Motion graphs? auto keyframing on and off? why does everything auto keyframe?! where is the possible logic in that?!
Is aniMate actively being developed?
I'm currently beta testing a tool for another very popular program. The tool allows you to look through a web camera, which then tracks your facial features and in real time translates these to a 3d character, eyes, lips, head rotating etc and is extremely accurate. This would be amazing for Daz! Kind of like an advance version of mimic i guess. Which brings me to another question; what every happened to Mimic? that was a great tool. Is there's anything like this today for Daz? I'm curious what Daz would recommend for creating lipsyncing etc
Thanks
David
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Comments
These are the three recommended animation "roadmaps". http://www.daz3d.com/3d/3d-animation/
If you want to do a complex or mult-scene animation and want to focus on big picture "movie production" rarther than posing and figure details, I do highly recommend the IClone. With Pipeline you get the advantage content at both marketplaces. Also you will find the keyframe and animation systems more satisfying. If you want to make high detail, hd movies I might recommend Carrara. If you want to do expansive, macro environments scenes I recommend E-On Vue. For short scenes with less than half dozen figures DS is good, I however I still prefer Posers timeline better. Customizing keyframes with Animate is cumbersome and less than intuitive and Graph is needed for decent acceleration curves. Vue, Poser and Carrara all have nice easy to handle keyframe timelines.
Thanks for the reply.
My question is less about pipeline and more a question of; Do Daz have a roadmap for improving and conforming their animation tools to industry standards. From reading various posts a feel a sense of; This is the way it is, deal with it. I feel Daz Studio has a lot of potential with the right animation tools, but it seems this isn't where Daz want to invest their efforts.
I don't so much want to make a movie; like most software, i just don't want to be limited :) And when I can't even move a keyframe in Daz Studio, i do wonder!
I've had many encounters with Vue over the years, and clashes with E-on over their lack of support! It's great for stills and base renders, however rendering for animation is brutal.
I wouldn't mind using Carrara, if it had a better render engine.
Thanks again! :)
David
Octane maybe
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=41902&p=200081#p200081
I myself love carrara's render engine, Daz studio not so much :lol:
Octane isn't really an effective engine for animation purposes. the day unbiased render engines become useful for animation, is the day we wont need render engines; because it will be at a point of rendering real time in the viewport :)
oh for that I use iClone
How do you get content from Daz into iclone?
3dxchange5 pro or pipeline
I see from your Blogspot you are a MAX user
why not just FBX export to MAX?
Max out of my budget but here are forum posts on it inc a cat-rig someone made for Genesis
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/4128/
In practice, taking Daz content into max via FBX and trying to animate with it is near impossible. If you just want to render through Max, then this is possible, but anything more than that just becomes extremely painful.
Earlier today I exported a character that had a run cycle animation, with various zbrushed morphs, exported as FBX into Max. It hanged Max during the import process, several times trying with different export settings.
ABC would be great, if it wasn't completely rendered useless by the lack of UV/map setup issues.
Iclone seems to have some interesting lip sync tools, but the question is; can you take content from Daz into iclone, apply the lip sync animation and then back to Daz? If I had an animated character inside Daz, with various custom morphs, could i take this into iclone, do lip syncing and take it back without any issues?
no I am afraid not
only bone animation via bvh
facial exports as Blendshapes, as an FBX not supported by Daz Studio it may however work in MAX
Ahh you are referring to a product life-cycle plan and development roadmap. DAZ tends to keep info like this close to the vest and user documentation in general is an afterthought. DS seems to evolve much faster than Carrara, as its awaited release v.9 is more than a year behind the previously announced ETA. Bryce has not evolved in half a decade.
To be fair DAZ is a 3d figure company first, brokerage second and its applications third. At least that's the innovation priorities I observed the past several years.
I also believe Daz has great potential for animation and I'm sort of surprised we haven't seen more animated projects. I'm tinkering with one as a hobby and suggest KEYMATE which is a plug in that will help with moving keyframes and seeing all keyframes in an expandable window. I have been rendering each shot in separate fore-mid-background layers and then finesse them in After Effects.
Can you elaborate on the reasons why Octane is not effective for animation?
Octane is a full bias render, which means it will perpetually render and improve quality by sample one frame (in theory to infinity) or when stopped by the user. While render can be stopped by a timer function, because animated scenes (perspective, light) change from frame to frame, determining time to render the exact quality level is the challenge with multi-frame rendering required by animation. The end result would be inconstantly rendered animation with obvious effect or take incredibly long and be extremely tedious to produce.
Octane is disadvantaged big time over traditional animation rendering systems because you can only scale to performance to the number of GPU''s your system will support and you must redefine all material selections and lighting within its own UI. For larger projects check Vue for the best quality, IClone for realtime-render speed. If you want particles and like toons and want need a versatile figure rigger - Messiah3d 6 is powerful and low cost. Also, while I have not animated in it Blender - I have seen superior results. Similar to max etc... http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/27-inspiring-blender-animations-that-will-make-your-jaw-drop/
Then there is Unity and Torque type game engines which also do great with interesting lighting effects.
Since I only do animations, I guess Octane is not for me. My heart has just sunk, but no to worry: I'll survive.:-S
Octane will do animation
the Poser demo I have has the option, you set how long to render each frame
I cannot test it in the demo unfortunately
great example using Daz studio plugin by Scifi Funk
Yes - I guess they did make a render que plugin for animation. Did you see the test results, exactly as I predicted. Each frame seems to pulse with a slightly different "focus" and the result is a nauseating wave like effect.
https://vimeo.com/78788452
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nHW-0y8YW4
even a simple rotation is less than impressive
https://vimeo.com/54720535
This thread explains what is needed to reduce the inconsistencies ..and the expense kills the benefit: http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/topic/75345-octane-render-for-animation/
I like to use poser pro over daz studio for rendering long multi-scene animation my self, Poser offers poser fusion plugin for max and Maya users which is a direct pipeline for importing characters into max or Maya, and over all the firefly render engine gets the job done pretty well. its not renderman render engine. but who has that kind of money. , With my experience using daz, studio rendering avi animation scenes just takes a long time and requires patients & with out real time render preview you can't see animation shadow issues & key-frame problems until the finished render .
Daz 3delight render engine does looks great for 1080 hd animations i have done a few of them ,2 or 3 minutes long. but the cost is resource intensive for your PC so i recommend having a high end 6 core or more system with lots of cooling.
I can't speak about carrara or iclone. because i have no experience with those programs , but from what i have seen on youtube. to me iclones finished animation renders look more like a blockey type game animation, which if your trying to create high end HD 3d story animations it won't give you the results you want.
As i said daz renders animation well at 1080 hd if you have the animation skills to use animate2 & patients to wait for the rendering to be done. keep in mind daz 4 pro has no physic engine or particle effects offered for the daz studio program which means fx needs to be done post work. which to me is a big draw back when you need behind the character FX.
Also Daz Studio animation needs to use raytrace lighting in the animation proccess to avoid getting pink or purple artifacts in your rendered scenes, if i do use daz for animation most times i will use HDR light sources and domes. they are long renders but with the best results.
As far as octane render i have tried it for both poser and daz with the same results , to get the best quality renders the times are very long and GPU intensive.
as sci-fi funk told me patients is a virtue. maybe someday Daz & renderman will have a plugin that can be used with daz studio like poser fusion does for poser and renderman, but at this time in my opinion Daz studio is best suited for still art and minor short animations under 300 keyframes. without FX's but that is just my opinion
The image quality of the first and last scene of this movie by SciFiFunk (street exteriors) is stupendous. I think maybe Octane is in my future after all.
Yes - I guess they did make a render que plugin for animation. Did you see the test results, exactly as I predicted. Each frame seems to pulse with a slightly different "focus" and the result is a nauseating wave like effect.
I've been using Octane for animation for months now - pretty much since the DS plugin became available, and I've found the results to be very impressive. I would have no reservations on recommending it to anyone who is interested in using Daz or Poser for animation - the render speedup over and above the base renderers in addition to the massive quality difference makes it more than viable for production work. Here's an example of stuff that I've done using mocap data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceN-jrPGiC4
Here's work that has been done by others:
Rendered in Octane for Daz Studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFBpgJhppLs
These were C4D, rendered in Octane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAgxI3CZoVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MeNO2vqx4
This one was done in Max, rendered via Octane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLyhma-kuAw
Blender+Octane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKkucQTWkLs
I've found Blender's Cycles GPU renderer to be almost as fast as Octane and I was able to replicate scenes between Daz-Octane and Blender Cycles that were very close together in appearance, quality, and render time. Right now, I'm looking at a workflow that combines Daz for character animation with Blender's Cycles for backgrounds and dynamics.
Just a quick follow-up:
Here's a video I rendered overnight with DAZ|Studio and Octane, just to show quickly what can be done. It took a little over 16 hours to render out fourteen seconds of animated footage, which is really good for a single machine at this level of quality. Octane is more than capable of doing production animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S_WfVH1uVI
Have a look and let me know what you think.
Very good. The guy seems a little nervous, maybe he was getting ready for this "mission" (start at ~19:15):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqDf8ztUDs
there's mcjTeleBlender a script for DS 1, 2, 3, 4 which lets you render animations by exporting each scene-frame as an .obj
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2877/P600
it's not a turn-key solution but it opens many possibilities
there's a version 3 coming soon
animations created in Daz Studio and renderd in Blender-Cycles GPU mode ( NVidia CUDA preferably )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTIIwjTV7s4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgccxFGrS8
if you work at it, all the LuxRender/Luxus/Reality Octane Blender-Cycles type of renderers can produce similar images
----
on the general topic of animation, there's a heap of animation related scripts for daz studio on my site
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4
@Steve K - Thanks! :)
@Casual - I can't wait for version 3 of the script. I have used the latest available version, and it works very well. Like you, I've also been impressed by Blender's cycles renderer. So much so that I have a project in the coming months that will be exclusively rendered in cycles.
well I went ahead and bought Octane for DAZ Studio today
big cash outlay hope it is worth it
liked what I saw in Poser demo so took plunge
hoping to render animations using the HD stuff, hence the reason
I think you'll be quite satisfied with it.
Thought there is a bit of a learning curve, there are also a lot of people on the DAZ forums using Octane who you can answer questions if needed. There's also the Daz-plugin-specific section of the OTOY forum for Octane.
well yet to find any instructions but it does work out the box!
I am rendering an animation right now
only one question, can you go less than 15secs a frame for quick preview renders or simple ones?
it does not seem to let me.
http://youtu.be/7UB_a4_Etjw first go out the box