Can someone point me in the right direction for animation?
tring01
Posts: 305
I've been playing around with Daz for a couple months now and have finally figured out a workflow that produces consistently good renders. Really good. At least to my eye. It took a lot of trial and error and I invested many hours in dead ends.
I now want to get into creating animations with IRay. The stock Daz product does some animation, but it's pretty clear I need additional tools to make decent animations quickly. I've been looking around and there are many different routes I can try, some of them pretty costly.
Can anyone direct me to the best utilities and workflow to create IRay based animations?
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That is the crux of Daz Studio. The best way to animate is really outside of daz studio. So you would potentially use other tools and then have to bring the animations back to DS. Some people use iClone.
However there are some tools if you want to stay within DS.
Animate, Keymate and potentially Graphmate. I never use Graphmate myself, but Animate and Keymate get used a lot.
How do you intend to animate the figures? Hand animation? Custom motion capture or will you buy stock animations and manipulate those? Also what figures are you using? These bits of info will steer you on how to decide what will work best.
Thanks so much for the reply! Yes, I've been lookig at iClone and it looks like a good route. Not sure how it will work ithe iRay skins. Animate 2 is also interesting, but I don't have access to the kind of server farms it would take to render even a one minute animtion at 25 fps with IRay in Daz. That much I have figured out. My target animation length (for now) is 5 to 10 minutes.
I plan on using Gen 2 Male and Gen 3 Female. Perhaps a few creatures. My intention is to hand animate. Possibly buy stock animations and manipulte them - though I have no idea how that works at the moment. I might use aniblocks for simple things like walking or running. No custom motion capture. That's way beyond my level. Or is it? Custom motion capture would be ideal if it could be done in the price range of a hobbyist. All I've ever seen of motion capture involves hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Not where I'm at (LOL)!
(hobbyist) Motion capture is cheap these days. I have not tested myself but have seen people demonstrate Iclone and Microsoft Kinect motion capture solution with good results. Custom Motion capture will probably be worth review if you consider iClone.
This page just references that iclone 5 can use the microsoft Kinect http://www.reallusion.com/iclone5/iclone_mocap_device.aspx
I've done 3D animations on and off for nearly 15 years and I can say that hand animation is a very slow tedious process. For the length of animations you wish to do, Motion capture is going to be a much better path. Of course you still manipulate motion capture data afterward, but it gives you a much better start.
You could craft the figure in Daz, animate in iClone and send back the animation to daz so you can render with Iray. That is what the 3D exchange is for.
Thanks. That's exactly what I was asking for.
Out of cuiosity - does animating in iClone make the render process any less taxing, or does it still take as long to render as if I hand animated? Not that I won't take your advice on iClone. I will pick up a copy shortly. Was considering it already anyway and your input seals the deal for me.
How you animate won't change the render process really, rendering typically takes longer than it takes for the figures to transform into position. It may take a couple of seconds for everything to move into place, but minutes or more to render each frame.
Well, looking it over and watching a bunch of YouTubes, it appears it will cost between $400 and $600 to get the basic iClone applications I would need. Then the iClone add-ons and assets go from there. Wow. That's more than I'm willing to invest.
Animate2 is $60. I've had some success already with aniMate lite. I figure I will try the $60 solution as a learning experience. Maybe some day I will be ready to take it to the iClone level. That's not today.
Iclone + Kinect was really bad... so they dropped the development.
Then they announced to support Noitom Neuron Perception (about 1600$), but users were crying about dropped support of Kinect. So a few months ago they announced to support Kinect again. Final results for both solutions not yet available.
I noticed that reallusion is not in the store anymore? http://www.daz3d.com/software/animation/
Does that imply a relationship issue, or perhaps Daz is looking into expanding its own animation capabilities? The latter would be awesome!
EDIT: Whoops, just found it via google: http://www.daz3d.com/reallusionanimation
I was not aware of that. I do know there are other Kinect compatible motion capture solutions as well, but I haven't had the time or interest to try myself.
The biggest limitation with Animate is the relatively limited assortment of animations available. Most aniblocks are sold on this store, I have seen one or two other aniblock packages on competitor sites, but not many. So hopefully what you need is here.
You can turn your own keyframe animations into aniblocks and I find that useful. You could potentially find some BVH files that have what you need, and turn those into aniblocks.
I much prefer working with Aniblocks for longer animations than raw keyframes. For small sections I can work the keyframes, then save those as blocks. Then string blocks together.
Thanks for the tips. I'm working on learning all this stuff now.
I plan to start with just tiny snippets of maybe 5 seconds or so. Character looks at camera, says a line of dialogue and looks away. That kind of thing. One step at a time.
You are heading fast forward. And yes I also like to try out animations in DS some day.
I'm still in the state of creating character morphs / texures / clothes / props / environment for my still image scenes and transform old poser stuff to DS and genesis 1 / 2 figure compatible.
But I sneak peek some ways to turn my characters to life anyhow - yes finaly its alife - mhuuaaahahahah
I'm currently creating a screenplay / script as a concept by only posing some key-situations like a comic strip and maybe fill in the gaps with some animated scenes later if i find the time.
I allready collect some things and informations that may help with starting animations.
Take a look at this - may helpful - all free - daz studio compatible Carnegie-Mellon BVH Library ect.
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/search.php
http://www.cgspeed.com
https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture
http://www.sharecg.com/v/29174/browse/11/Poser/55F-Carnegie-Mellon-BVH-Library-for-Poser
http://www.sharecg.com/v/72544/related/21/DAZ-Studio/PACK-01-ANIBLOCKS-2500-motion-Carnegie-Mellon
http://www.sharecg.com/v/72545/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/PACK-02-ANIBLOCKS-2500-motion-Carnegie-Mellon
http://www.sharecg.com/v/72556/related/21/DAZ-Studio/PACK-03-ANIBLOCKS-2500-motion-Carnegie-Mellon
http://davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjvoodoodaz-for-ds1-2-3-4
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts2/kinect-mocap-basics
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50542/mcjkinectkit-script-and-exe-for-ds-3-4-pc-win-beta-version-is-online
I render animation with Daz Studio all the time, It is about all I use daz for now days.. I never have to animate outside of the daz program. but i do use a Adobe Premiere cs5 movie editor to put all my scenes together. when i am done rendering them, the first thing is to know the basic functions of daz studio and how it works , which sounds like you have figured out. Next is the 5 best tools for animation in Daz Studio is as follows
1) The Puppeteer tool which can be found under the <windows <tabs< puppeteer, for Hand keyframinig and making custom animations, this is properly the tool I use the most.
2) Aniblocks, are pre-made motion container or blocks you can add to your animate2 timeline which can be linked together or edited for your needs to make a seamless continious animation. you can find the default aniblocks in your content folder. and you can purchase & find free ones all over the internet
3) Animate2. is the best tool for your default timeline editor. I use the paid version for all the extra tools that don't come with the included free version you can find animate under in Windows< Tabs< Animate2
3) Keymate http://www.daz3d.com/keymate is a plugin found here at daz, this allows you to micro edit or customize your aniblocks . Just using this plugin really helps you nails down the little details of animation
4)graphic mate.http://www.daz3d.com/graphmate This allows you to make sure your animated figure is where it is suppose to be during the animation cycle it helps you edit the flaws in those cycles.
5) The next is "Common sense" , A lot of trial and error and patients. until you get the hang of it.
it may help you view some of my animation to give you ideas on movements. which I use daz studio to created at YouTube link: Ivy Summers Animation
I wish you good luck and i hope you post your film when you get it done so we can all see :)
Here is my first animation and render test.
I'm just trying to figure out what works and what doesn't here. Nothing fancy, but I thought you might like to see it.
The render looks pretty grainy on my screen, but on YouTube SD the graininess just goes away in the blur. I used the default settings for the IRay render except I limited the render time per frame to 300 Sec. I used a single mesh light and the scene is my test stage inside a 30m primitive cube.
I've got a second test baking now. The changes I made are:
Here's my second animation render test.
Conclusions?
Well, it looks like if I want to render decent quality in reasonable time I will have ot invest in significantly better hardware. One hour per second of final product is already at the upper limit of what I can tolerate.
That was not bad for a first time. Iray remndrring animation takes a wicked long time. , have you tried rendering it in 3dlight option to compare the results , this will help you render your animation scene a little faster and give you a chance to work up to a long running animtion you can do in Iray. , the 3dlight options renders animations pretty decently its just a good way to practice and see results quicker to build up to better quailty animationa
PS: i know what you mean about yputube killing the Video quailty of uyou upload. I have many HD films that when I uploaded them to youtube it was very grain when the orginal wasn't
Thanks Ivy;
I like your work. I started out with 3Delight and found I couldn't achieve any kind of consistent results with it, and even the best results didn't compare to IRay. I'm getting used to the time IRay takes. I plan on getting a much more powerful machine built as soon as I've got the money. Dual 980's should do the renders a lot better.
Uh oh. May have hit a deal breaker here. Does the lip synch feature in aniMate2 work with Gen 3. If not, I may be forced to buy iClone. Anyone know?
My third test here. I'm "searching for the bottom". Trying to find out just how low I can squeeze the render time and how high I can go in quality before the published product looks too bad to use. I boosted to full HD resolution and cut the rener time per frame back to 120 sec. My machine rendered a 5 sec video in 4 hours and 30 minutes. Here are the results:
Yes, I think we've found the bottom with my current hardware. The image is VERY grainy on my screen, and is just noticably degraded when uploaded to YouTube. Next test I will bump it up to 180 secs with full HD. I think that might work pretty well.
I totally understand, I was merely suggesting using the 3dlight as a learning curve for the animation and not used for your finished animation .
It maybe your system or your lighting technique why your getting poor image quality in your 3delight renders, 3delight was developed by the same people who are developing Renderman render engines & 3Dlight actually with the right lighting can give very good rendered animations. especially if your making toon style animation. Personally I like to save my animations to AVI which allows me faster film editing, than rendering a bunch of PNG graphics and having to put them together. but that just my perference . each person will find their own way of doing things that are best for them. I like using the Uber Evo2 light domes for 3dlight which give superiour renders , The render times are much faster with 3delight which give you a chance to play with the animation part of Daz Studio . Even though I have 2 titans 980 graphic cards they still do not render animation as fast as 3delight rendering does. which makes experimenting with animation in 3delight much easier than Iray . that is why I suggested it.
Hmmm....You make a good point. I originally moved to 3Delight from IRay to try to cut back on animation render times. I got some good results in 3Delight. I have a feeling it is much faster because it uses an older engine from the days when computers were much less powerful. I believe it uses a render algorythm that only renders the changes from frame to frame, whereas IRay renders each frame completely no matter how minor the changes. Since I plan on doing a fair amount of dialog where the only changes frame to frame are the character's facial expression, I might get dramatically faster results with 3Delight.
You make a good point. I will experiment with it.
By the way, have you tried to do a lip sync track in aniMate2 with a Gen 3 figure? I'm curious if it works.
No I'm sorry I have not tired g3f , it hold no intersst for me at this time, maybe because of the lack of conversion tools needed to make older generations content work with it.. though if the g3v figure came with the Dmc file needed for g3f to work with mimic or lip synic to work it shoudl work fine, just a reminder that Lipsync only works in 32 byte versions of daz studio , 64 byte does not have lip sync as a options. so it will not work
DAZ Studio might not be the best option to do animations, but it's nevertheless a less expensive one. Even the award winning short movie "ROSA" by Jesús Orellana was animated within DAZ Studio, and then exported to Blender to be rendered there for timesaving reasons.
For tring01:
Your question about lip synch I answered in your other thread. As Ivy said, youTube's conversion to the flv format is very a poor thing. You might take a look at f.e. vimeo instead, which supports the mp4 format. Even there the base account is for free. And once you're at a somewhat professional level with your animations, you can go Pro and publish your movies in a video on demand fashion.
The method I prefer for animations is to let Studio save them as "Image Series" (for the codecs Studio uses aren't that perfect, either) and then putting them together in an external Video Editing software. Even the free "Movie Editor" of Micro$ofts "Windows Essentials" can do that. Which also includes more proper codecs than Studio btw. That way, if Studio dares to crash for whatever reason, your effort isn't completely lost, just pick up again at the frame where Studio played it's little mutiny and let it render to completion.
About graininess: poor lighting in Iray can also be the reason; instead of lowering you might tray to raise it a bit. Including playing around with "Exposure Value", "Shutter Speed", "F/Stop" and "Film ISO" in the Tonemapping settings. Before rendering a whole animation, I'd also try a "Still Image" first, to check if the lighting and all is set properly.
In addition to Syrus's list I'd like to add Mixamo, which offer you to the basic 11 free motions you'll always get for just signing up an additional amount of 20 motions which you can freely pick from their whole catalogue. In the past they were priced somewhat between $10 and $30 USD, depending on the motion. The quality of them is IMO above that of GoFigure's classic stuff, and comparable to those made by ReallusionAnimation. Aaand they contain a lot less "dancing ones".
Thats why when I render to AVI I alsways save the PNG's in the temp render folder that has all the rendered png that are used to compile the AVI , this way you have promo pics and if in the event daz crashed or your scene did not come out right you could redue the scene and re rendr just the part you need to fix instead of the whole scene with the saved temp renderd pngs to replace the avi.. if the avi comes out good enought to use. then i delete the saves pngs i had retrived from the temp render folder as back up., AVI is just a much faster way of editing anaimation to me. even though the boys at Disney still put their films together one Bmp image at a time .I don't make those quaity films to bother with all that work.. BTW Youtubes format has changed from FLV to H. 65 HD, about 4 months ago. Buty if you try loading your animation Via Adobe premieire its still uploads them as FLV So I found it much better to save my film as H.65 1080 hd and upload it manually . Though I have started upload my adult animations to my own web site in HTML5 format. which has been pretty cool. that way no TOS to mess you.
Thanks, didn't notice that. It has been a while I uploaded something to youTube since I changed to vimeo. Yeah, I guess the methods rely on the workflow one is used to. I don't own Adobe Premiere (and doesn't plan to get it in the near or even far future) so I would have to stick with such software like VirtualDub if I would work with the AVI format. Since mp4 is a more and more common video format, and in most times of a smaller filesize than AVI, I like and am more used to work with that one. If I remember correctly, one drawback of a workflow similar to yours is that if you accidentally close Studio before saving the temp folder, it will clear it's content when closing down. That way I lost a short animation sequence which took almost ten hours to render.
When I redid that one I tried the "Image Series" instead and stayed at that method ever since.
Adult animations, huh? I wouldn't have thought you'd belong to that kind.
I dabble in a little of everything :)
what was it they say sex sells ..ha ha
VirtualDub is still awesome. I use it myself.
And yes, render to stills. Always! For the reasons Ivy stated.
3Delight is a great render engine. But like anything practice makes perfect. Many people like unbiased engines like Iray because initally they make nice results without much learning curve. However over time you will need to spend time with any engine to really learn it properly.
3Delight still renders a full frame, however there are tons of tricks with it to make it render very quickly without making the animation test look like crap. Like you can turn off raytracing and shadows to speed up test renders. When testing animations, you may want the renders done really quickly, so you can focus on the animation technique. Even though I use Octane Render myself, I do my test animations with the stock 3Delight render since it can be blazing fast.
The end product I'm trying to reach is someting like a series of video game cut scenes. The film will alternate between live motion sequences (combat for the most part), and dialogue scenes where the characthers move very little but lip synching and facial expressions are paramount. Since lip synch does not work in Daz3D 64 bit, and I don't want to step back into the 32 bit world, that kills Daz3D as my animation tool.
Arnold C.; you've got my head going in a whole different direction after I looked at Mixamo. What do you think of the possability of me creating a character and set in Daz3d and then exporting it to a gaming engine to do the lip synch and animations? I don't need amazing quality. Not going for a photoreal CGI movie here. Something that looks like the orginal Mass Effect or similar video games would be fine with me.
I have both versions of daz 32 & 64 byte loaded, that way I can changed between the 2 programs I use lip synce on the 32 byte. then save it after you made the animation ascne with the audio file & then load it in 64 byte it will load and work the lips will play with the wav file accept you won;t be able to edit the lip snyce part. thats the cheapest easiet way
The original Mass Effect is a high bar actually. But I find that Daz rigging in other applications isn't always so good, so you will have to experiment to know if it will work for you.
I was just wondering? Do you have any animations posted anywhere? I love animation. what types of animation s are you into producing? I love watching all types of animations, I know mine aren't very good, though i love to try to tell stories using daz for basic animations, there not Disney quailty for sure Ha Ha. Maybe this is why I love watching all tyoes of animations & what other people have done to create them, its can be really inspiering for people learning like me and others , and I never seen you post any links to your animations so that why I ask becaue i would love to watch some of your work :)