Animation in DAZ, I think I wasted my money - help?

Mythmaker

Some quality conversation going here...

I've been chasing my single creator CGI dream for 4 years now since I first got excited by the possibilities shown by Cry and Unreal. So now here I am armed with multiple "incomplete" wares - Daz Studio4.7 Carrara8.5 Iclone5 all pro - plus Zbrush4.6...still hoping and wishing for The All in One 3D moviemaker suite in Jan 2015... Ah, at least am wise enough now to know multi-tasking is the only constant!

Iclone6 is looking good overall albeit still in bug-fix mode and weighed down by its stubborn refusal to have a basic mesh deform tool. If 3DXchange 6 is integrated properly at least as tightly as Indigo, one click to DS and Zbrush morph edit, Iclone6 will fly very high.

Daz Studio is gearing up too with IPR and AuxVP. If openGL shadow and reflections and Genesis collision and dynamic soft cloth are "fixed" to then there'll be lots of happy DS users.

Carrara is the most complete of them all but is looking old and obscure without IPR and custom UI. Nothing major to fix though, just introduce some relatively basic Daz Studio goodies like native IPR Viewport, 3D mouse, custom UI + custom script/icon, it will net all one-man cinematic creators looking for UE4 and Unity5 alternatives.

Poser...IMO occupies a strange position between all mentioned here...includes similar features AND flaws...

But if Zbrush 5.0 somehow magically become full-on real-time animation render suite... :)

Keep talking guys and gals!

FirstBastion

Rosa is still the best example of one man team delivering an award winning piece of animation with Daz products. Dedication, hard work, vision and talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHp90z9bq4

Interview with-jesus-orellana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHp90z9bq4

digitalcraft

I am also looking for that incredible Pipeline for Indies.

So far DAZ Characters and ICLONE Animation option looks good. I love DAZ Toon Shader, but I am hooked on to the ICLONE native quick realtime rendering. I am not impressed by ICLONE's new Indigo render.

After seeing some of Toon Shaded work in the game engines I started exploring Unity, Unreal and Cry Engine as integrated environment for my episodes.

Unreal looks good. Though Unity and Cry are as good. Infact I would love to have others' opinion.

a-sennov

I've chosen DAZ Studio as main tool because:

1. It is Qt-based and has free SDK, so if I need something I can relatively easily write a plugin for this functionality.
2. It also has scripting so I can easily automate some tasks when I'm too lazy to write plugins :)
3. It gives me production quality RenderMan compliant renderer for free (unlocked for any number of cores on single PC)
4. It has open text-based save format, so I can make adjustments or even generate my own .duf/.dsf files
5. The FBX support enables me of using MoBu when I need something really complex in animation (with a bit of extra work :) )
6. Best human models and very short rigging pipeline for them
7. Contrary to what most people are saying DS has solid animation base (if you spend a bit on plugins :) ), animate2 is one of the best NLA editors I've seen (SoftImage was better but now it's a dead meat)

Will use Carrara for some shots but that's mainly dictated by bugs in Octane plugin for DS. Also I'm currently exploring the ways of adding Houdini Indie into the picture for fluid and cloth simulation (again, it mostly depends on the state of Octane support in Studio)

For my modelling needs Hexagon and Wings are more than enough as most of content I use comes from DAZ (and sales are endless here :) ).

Paint.NET provides texture painting.

Audacity is adequate for soundtrack production, plus some plugins for DS from me for 3D sound.

Used AviSynth+VirtualDub for video editting but now I'm closely looking into Fusion+DaVinci and Natron.

Also did a very simple third person game in UE4 with my characters and animations as a test of THAT sort of pipeline. Maybe it will evolve into something in the future (plus Epic will fix some bugs I've found :) ) but now I have a schedule for at least 3 more shorts :)

skydat

Hi,

I'm a bit of a noob at 3D but not a noob to IT or software development. You state you only want 2004 source engine (Vavle Half Life 2 level). As a gamer I know what this looks like. Here's what it looks like, with no promotional "bullshots".

http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life-2/images/in-game25

Low Poly, Shadows baked in from one direction, almost no occlusion. low rez textures, probably no displacement or normal maps.

I own a AMD 280X, my Open GL Renders are *almost instant*. As a test, I've done a simple rotating Camera animation of Daz Studio's Catgirl. I think the cat model probably as more polygons and textures than the entire 2004 source scene. Each frame is rendered as a jpg image (png would have been better) in about 0.5 secs. The entire sequence took less than 120 secs. 240 frames total at 30 FPS. The resolutions I chose was 863 by 480 16:9 since most people tend to watch youtube videos at 16:9 480P.

Here is the clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_3Q8tD6nQ&feature=youtu.be

Note that the lighting works as it rotates around her, but the shadow resolution sucks. I've seen this issue before with AMD OGL games, maybe there is a way to fix it, or just turn shadows off; I've hardly scratched the surface with this since I prefer to render in 3Delight anyhow.

You state that it takes 18 seconds a frame to render 2004 Half Life graphics? There must be something wrong with your setup. Hope this helps, don't give up