New Daz Studio plus Iclone 5 Pro short basic animations

mjordy59

I've started to get more involved with the hard to do Daz studio 3D animations. We all know that Daz wasn't created for "off the box" fluid 3d animations,but with a few efforts Daz users can create decent basic animations.
I have been testing this particular pipeline: using Daz Studio for the base animation,and Iclone 4 and 5 Pro for the enhancement and refinement of the final rendering.

Here are a couple of Youtube uploaded 3d animations to share with all of you,not impressive,but basic with hope to improve in the future:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JeI6XypdMg

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1MUFsnXYsA

These two short animations were rendered first inside Daz Studio with the default 3D delight render engine. with a green bacground to
simulate greenscreen for chromakey inside Iclone 4 and 5 Pro,(the chroma keying done in Reallusion's Pop Video Converter 2) and the resulting pop video imported into Iclone 4 or 5 pro and combined with background virtual studio video loop.

WendyLuvsCatz

While there is nothing wrong with the animations themselves, the shadows in the compositing gives away the fact you used layered videos.

I have never used popvideo but an alternative for iclone is to render two avi files (or images series compiled in virtualdub, my prefered method) one a straight 3Dlight, iray whatever render, the other a black background with the figure and clothes all shaded white, this can be openGL no lights as just an opacity mask.
Then texture a plane in iClone the diffuse the first video, opacity the second.
Make sure it always faces the camera, try not to move the camera.
Popvideo should work the same way though.
You must on your iClone light always enable selfcast shadows if you have objects behind, add blur for low value shadow maps
the red wall not recieving shadow looked stuck in, it can just recieve not cast shadows likewise ground to save resources.
Use pixelshader only for render if you have a crappy video card, set it up in quickshader and render to image series.

mjordy59

Thanks Wendy for the advice and tips. I will certainly try and implement those methods on a future animation. And, my video card is an oldie.