Camera Magic (Commercial)

Xandyr78

Hi!

Would it be possible to create an add-on for this that remembered shaders/materials?  I have a set I built from a product available here, the Create-A-Room product sets.  I LOVE them, but they have a (pretty major) hiccup in that the wall material zone has two parts: top and bottom, but no "front" and "back," meaning I can't use a single wall prop and texture each side of it individually, for say a hallway adjacent to a room, and duplicating the prop/shifting it slightly creates much larger scenes than my system can manage.

I'd love to be able to position cameras in the hallway that would show one set of shaders/materials for walls that were part of connected rooms, then place cameras within the rooms that showed the inner shaders/materials correctly.

I'm not sure if I'm explainign this well, so if clarification is needed, let me know.

Zev0

Hi. There isn't enough demand for a materials\shader add-on unfortunately to warrant it's development time. If this situation changes we will re-review.

Xandyr78

Zev0 said:

Hi. There isn't enough demand for a materials\shader add-on unfortunately to warrant it's development time. If this situation changes we will re-review.

Understandable.  Disappointing, but understandable.  Thanks for taking the time to respond!

emerazea

My goal is to use Camera Magic + the Pose add-on to help me store lots of variations of character reactions + clothing in a single DAZ file so that I can generate sceneless reaction poses.

This *mostly* seems to be going well. I've got the following experimental set up of groups + cameras:

• Emotions (Adjust character poses)
  • Emotion - Zero
  • Emotion - Happy
• Clothing (Adjust visibility of wearables)
  • Clothing - Zero
  • Clothing - Casual
  • Clothing - Party

The behavior of the script seems to be that I can choose one Pose camera, then one Visibility camera, and end up with a combination of the two... which is *excellent*. It seems like I could theoretically use one of the render queue plugins to help automate my way through getting the poses I need in a *consistent* way. (And if I change a character's nose or something, I wouldn't have to *manually* redo 100s of files).

---

Issue 1: Heels

However, several outfits use different heels, and therefore need additional slight pose modifications (definitely to the feet, and also to the character's y coordinate).

I attempted to add a "Foot Pose - Party" camera to the list, and was hoping that in the "What would you like to save Pose data for?" dialog, I could choose "Selected Assets" while selecting the "Left Foot" and "Right Foot" bones. However, this saves the character's entire pose to my "Foot Pose - Party" camera.

I suppose "Selected Assets" means it's grabbing the entire figure? If so, would it be simple to add a "Selected Bones" option? Would that even get me where I need to be?

---

Issue 2: All visibility settings are saved in a visibility camera

The screen shots in the store are a bit misleading in that I misread the helpful red/green diagrams as being actual in-DAZ UI elements. I was imagining being able to selectively choose *which* visibilities to apply to a camera.

The current behavior leads to two small annoyances:

1. If I add new clothing items to the character (even if I toggle their visibility off by default), all of the cameras assume their visibility should be on by default. This... would mean updating every Visibility camera I have each time I add more clothing items. Not a dealbreaker.
2. I won't be able to add a camera that selectively turns lights on or off for the other cameras to use. This could have been cool to generate the same poses with nightclub vs daylight lighting. But... this... is where I'm pretty sure I'm trying to use this tool way out of its intended use-case. Hammer/nail.

---

Are there better ways to handle what I'm trying to do? This entire plugin feels like a bit of an imaginative way to circumvent some of DAZ's most glaring flaws, so I'm not really sure how much of what I'm trying to accomplish with it is *too* outside of the box versus being *exactly* the kind of trickery that could make DAZ-life easier.

Zev0

"I suppose "Selected Assets" means it's grabbing the entire figure? If so, would it be simple to add a "Selected Bones" option? Would that even get me where I need to be?"

Selective bones would seriously slow down the script between switching cameras.

1. Unfortunately this is how the script works in order to do what it does.

2. Not possible unfortunately.

"Are there better ways to handle what I'm trying to do?"

No Idea to be honest. Sounds like you have a handle on things.

 

Damsel

Thistle said:

Does anyone know if Camera Magic works with (is compatible with) ManFriday's Render Queue ? Render Queue | Daz 3D

I have been using that for my automatic render workflow and am very happy with it.

So Render Queue rendering all the different camera's of a file while Camera Magic orchestrates what is in the actual picture.

That would make these two products very strong companions !

How did you get it to install? When I tried to install it, my antivirus screamed in rage and shoved it into quarantine, swearing it was a virus. I tried several times, and it ate it every time.

 

Damsel

Anyway, I bought this today and noticed something weird. The zip says it's for Daz Studio Public Build. When I tried to install it with DIM, Dim doesn't seem to see it. :/

Elor

It's strange, because it (and its two addons) does appear in DIM when I'm typing Camera in the search bar:

It's already installed on the screenshot, but for contents bought on Daz Store, I'm only using DIM.