Dodgerrecord's render thread

dodgerrecords

Hey, figured I should start a render thread since I'm getting more active with daz after taking a break.

 

dodgerrecords

PS, all of these are my own poses unless stated otherwise, I'm really trying to focus on my posing skills.

dodgerrecords

just did this, pose completely by me, post processing in photoshop,

dodgerrecords

Just did this pic, lots of post processing in photoshop.

dodgerrecords

Come on I know someone has a comment or critique lol I need attention!!! :P

Novica

I like to see folks using their own poses, yours look nicely fluid and not stiff. Be sure and save them so you don't constantly reinvent the wheel. Have fun with your new thread and the Photoshop, of course!

dodgerrecords

Novica said:

I like to see folks using their own poses, yours look nicely fluid and not stiff. Be sure and save them so you don't constantly reinvent the wheel. Have fun with your new thread and the Photoshop, of course!

Thanks man! It took me a long time to get used to the posing tools, it used to be so frustrating but I learned some tricks like pinning limbs and things like that, using powerpose etc and its alot easier now. The next hurdle I want to overcome is creating my own animations I've tried to before but failed miserably.

 

daveleitz

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder (not to be confused with bear-holder or bee-holder!). 

Nevertheless, any image can be improved by learning the rules of lighting and composition.  Ask yourself, "What makes a particular work of art so appealing?"  Then you develop your style.  Of course, it does take time to learn the technical aspects of your medium, and digital artwork is deceptively difficult in that respect.  At first glance the tools at our disposal allow us to recreate the human form in any way we want, but there's more to it than that.  What brings life to our creations? 

If you're interested in animation, I'm not sure DAZ Studio is the best way to get started.  Even with the most professional of programs and character rigs, good animation takes a lot of time.  DAZ Studio is great for those of use who like to play with our digital dollhouses, but it can in no way compete with professional animation tools.

Animation in Maya:  https://youtu.be/3tyQpoZsAJ4

Animation in Blender:  https://youtu.be/XAY3JbI4jBs

Blender Open Movie project:  Cosmos Laundromat  https://youtu.be/Y-rmzh0PI3c

I write in the hope that this will not discourage your efforts.  I would say the same thing to anyone else in the forums, too, if they asked for constructive criticism.  Set your goals impossibly high, but make the journey one step at a time.  I myself am not an expert, only an enthusiastic student of art in all its forms.

dodgerrecords said:

Come on I know someone has a comment or critique lol I need attention!!! :P

Unfortunately, all your renders have bad lighting.  The action in Superkick doesn't "read" well, probably due to the chosen camera angle.  Ask yourself, would the silhouette of the characters in that particular pose tell your audience what is going on in that scene?  In Sidekick 2 the scene appears to be lit by a headlamp from the camera.  Post processing only muddies the final image without fixing the underlying problem.

Edit:  Just to give an idea of the complexity of a "simple" animation, ask yourself how you would go about animating the act of putting an audio cassette into a Walkman in DAZ Studio.  Then watch this:  https://youtu.be/bCap0ScvtLM

dodgerrecords

Hey I appreciate the honest critique, truthfully I didnt do any lighting on these images as my main focus was the poses, I've been working on my skills at posing my characters, trying to make them look as fluid as possible. But I agree with you the lighting isnt good, one of the reasons I chose not to do any lighting is because I just wanted to get the render done as quickly as possible to see what the poses would look like in a semi finished state and lighting seems to drag the rendering process out quite a bit. I really would like to buy a set of good video cards so I can speed up my renders but right now it's not in the budget.

The appeal to doing animation in daz for me is that the characters are right there, easy to set up, and already rigged. My modeling skills are okay, I can create a human character that looks decent but nowhere near as good as the daz characters look. My 3d suite of choice is 3ds max, so I may look into exporting the daz characters over to max, but I've always been concerned about having to rerig the characters as I dont know if the rig from daz will transfer over. I hate rigging but I guess I need to get used to it if I want to be a truly good animator. 

 

I'm not a total beginner to animation in daz, I've created very simple animations that turned out okay, I'm really interested in turning up the dial and creating complex action sequences like a kung fu fight.

 

Thanks for all the tips it's given me alot to mull over and definitely helped bring me back down to earth, sometimes my mind can become an echo chamber that tells me how awesome I am and its good to get some honest critique that helps keep me level headed. 

daveleitz

I wish I had the budget for a more powerful system too!  (I'd probably use a better video card to play Skyrim in all its glory, lol!)

I also completely agree with the fact that DAZ assets are excellent, and it did cross my mind to attempt rigging a Genesis mesh in Blender, since that's the program I'm most familiar with.  However, that's a lot of work!  I managed to figure out material setups for DAZ characters using Blender's Cycles renderer, but rigging and morphs are an even bigger undertaking.  I had to look at the practical aspects, you know, like whether there was any kind of return for the time I would have to invest.

Here's an example of the most complex animation I've made to date, but it was using a character based on the Cookie Flex rig, which is free for anyone to use.  Needless to say, it took a lot of time to get as far as I got, and it remains unfinished.

https://vimeo.com/73146343

You might find something similar for 3ds Max if you just want to practice posing and animation using professional programs.  Perhaps with the advent of Genesis 3 we'll be able to import our DAZ assets into our preferred programs with working rigs, but the nature of the rig in Genesis, G2F, & G2M makes that nearly impossible.