Question about Raccoon by AM
michaelxm_a1dddd836b
Posts: 123
I just purchased this model.. and was wondering how you make ihe tail look fuller like in the promo pic.. It looks really skinny in my render :/ Other than that..pretty cool :o)
Post edited by michaelxm_a1dddd836b on
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Are you rendering in 3Delight or Iray? And did you load the model with or without the LaMH fur? Remember that the hair in LaMH is a function of the 3Delight render engine, it won't work in Iray — if you have the full LaMH plugin you can export the LaMH stuff as fibermesh hair, if you only have the free plugin you'll have to export as an .obj object... and don't forget to change the hair materials to Iray.
Hi SpottedKitty..well my problem I guess is that I have an ATI Radeon card and even though its an HD / 2gb one, Iray snubs it. I loaded it as a lamh (I dont have a commercial version or even know where to find it) that is when I get the skinny tail. When I try 3Delight..there is nothing there :/
Iray is Nvidia's render engine so of course it won't work with ATI/AMD cards.
!!!??? Wow!
That must be something, to be sort of "locked out" of rendering the fur. I suppose you could pose the animal the way you want, save the pose to disk, and then ask someone you know who has the product to render it for you as a TIFF file, eg. on a transparent layer.
It's not exactly a lockout, but if your graphics card isn't an NVidia, or if the whole scene, geometry and textures, doesn't fit into the card's memory, then the render falls back to your computer's main processor and your system memory. So it's still possible to do an Iray render — that's how I have to do them, since my card's too old and low-spec — but it will be much slower. And as I said upthread, it's perfectly straightforward to convert a LaMH set into fibermesh hair and convert the materials to Iray. But it's fiddly, and you have to learn how to poke at the various parameters.
As an example, here's one I did about a year ago, when I was first learning my way around Iray materials. I don't remember now how long it took, and you can see I should have let it run a bit longer to get rid of the fireflies here and there. Looks good, though.
I wonder if the Poser version might work ok (The product comes with both DS and Poser folders) .. since Poser is not an ATI hater. I did a manual download since I was told the installer sometimes fails to put thing in the right place in Poser. Roman that would work about tiff I guess, But it would also be nice if the product image would just work regardless of the graphics card used, That is sort of like buying a new car and immediately taking it to the mechanic to repair it..lol, SpottedKitty.. when I do render with LaHM..I do have a quad cpu for what that is worth.. the fur shows up after a few passes..which is fine,,but the little guy looks silly with that skinny tail. I live in a small rural town..so raccoons are commn around here,,and I have never seen one with a scrawny tail like that.,, :o)
When you export the LAMH are you sure you are exporting all the pieces, sounds like the tail isnt getting transfered proberly
Yes, many of the LaMH sets for critters have two or more separate hair groups. Usually this is because the current LaMH doesn't allow for varying hair length, only hair density (although this might change in a later version). When I did that wolf setup, I think it had two or three hair groups, which I had to convert to fibermesh one at a time.
I haven't tried it in Poser yet..but I will then let you know how that went :o) I am trying not to rip it apart too much because I would like to make some simple animations..such as run and jump (2 things the little guys like to do). For the record I am not upset with the DS program (I never complain about free stuff) ,,it actually works pretty good.. even without an nvidia card it rendered and entire scene from scene builder in about 22 minutes, and I did notice iray..does use the card to a point at least, so I guess the ati card does have some things it can use. It is too bad Daz puts up a "Donald" wall between us and the vendors,,it would be nice for them to pop in and give us a hand with issues now and then.
A lot of vendors do and AM is one of those - he has a thread dedicated to LAMH.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14818/look-at-my-hair-lamh-official-thread-update-1-6-0-1-released#latest
Yeah contacting vendors is not a problem and Allesandro for one is right quick... good to know that michaelxm_a isn't completely locked out though. I only have one ATI video card here and it's not up and running at the moment... I do remember DS 4.x acting real crazy with it a couple of years ago though... lots and lots of on-screen corruption all over the place that I couldn't fathom - like a satellite dish in a snowstorm maybe.
It looks amazing!! Wow. You wouldn't have a version of that lying around as a transparent TIFF or PSD file, would you??? SLURP!!!
Sorry about that... here, have a tissue.
Yes I agree wth Roman..the render you did, SpottedKitty, it looks cool :o) I went over to that AM blog..but seems once someone asks a question..it just goes back to a session with other users.and no answers from the author :o( But no problem..I will figure this out eventually :o)
Hello, sorry if I saw this only now. Well the Raccoon for Poser is "naked", meaning that there is no fur on that. About the DAZ version, if you want to render Iray one thing to look out, if you have the full version, is to export FiberHair, which reduce sensibly the amount of geometry being created without losing too much quality. If the fur looks a bit "sparse", increase the hair quantity and perhaps also the hair root/tip width; that will help to create thicker strands and give more cover. Cheers.
Here is a quick Iray render (didn't touch any material), with the raccoon: I increased root/tip widths to 200/110. If the tail isn't fluffy enough, one could make hair longer or maybe do an additional LAMH shavegroup and grow more hair on the tail to increase the density.
Thank you AM for the input. However as I have mentioned I have an ATI graphics card. Is there some way to make it fluff up the tail? Oddly enough the card has a lot of the same features as the aka cuda, opengl, and it is 2gb ddr3. Other than his tail he looks excellent, and I like your render you did also :o) I am not certain what you mean by exporting FIberHair.. It's been awhile since I have used DS so I am learning it all over again,, more or less. I am still back in the morphing days.. I am going to have to watch a lot of tutorials...lol I will eventually get another Nvidia card.. I have that on my other pc..but its a lot slower renderwise than my new one which is a quad cpu
AM, could you possibly make a Poser Friendly raccoon with fur.. I would be more than happy to purchase it :o)
The main reason I want a Poser version is as I mentioned earlier so I can animate him.. Unless of course there is a way to do so in DS
Could you provide a bit more detail about your "animation" needs. I'm no expert but I had a quick look at the critter in DS 4.8 here at my end... unlike some of the DAZ animals, it seems he has limited movement in his mouth (unlike, say, the toothy little Silverkey bat) but I opened the "Animate2 Lite" pane and the AM raccoon definitely does move!
Not sure if you are a beginner-animator or an expert... I have done some animation with DS, but only simple loops like this spinning baseball. I'll wager most people should start with simple things, the availability of very good pre-calibrated, "canned" routines notwithstanding.
I don't have a lot of hardware and software but I found out recently that the copy of "Windows Live Movie Maker" in my copy of Windows 7 allows you to easily compile 24 or 33 frames per second for basic video, and more importantly it exports up to 1080 pixels high! At the moment I am testing these capabilities using an animated bouncing ball on a black field. My "ball" character is a transparent layer and I move him a couple of pixels, then restore full opacity and save the frame to disk. I'll repeat as often as necessary to get some speed tests and collisions (with resultant speed variations and sounds) under my belt.
On reflection it's ironic that the raccoon doesn't seem to talk because the real ones have quite a vocabulary! They are also very flexible. Of possible interest, a page of fairly recent research and commentary - http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/raccoon-nation1
Hi Roman, no expert here for sure, but I figured he could move. The reason I was wanting it in Poser form is because there is lots of bvh motion files out there and I figure with a little tweaking I could get him to move about some. DS is a good program, but I find Poser more friendly to bvh motion, or just simply because I am more use to using it. I was just hoping I could get a more ralistic look as in the promo image on the vendors page to put over there. AM did an excellent job of making the raccoon look realistic, but since I dont use nvidia graphics I am sort of stuck. That is probably the one thing I dont like about DS is it is so pro nvidia..and I think radeon makes an excellent card as well. Mine is a 2gb and it can render scenes in Poser in about 5 minutes intead of 20 minutes in DS..If you check with a site called carnegie-mellon you can find lots of bvh files there.. There are also some programs around (some free) to manipulate the rigging on characters too. I imagine there is a way to use them with DS.. but I have never discovered how. I am kist hoping to get the raccoon to do a few simple things like run and jump up, and I imagine if one moves his mouth around just a tad..it might work to get him to mimic speech a little bit :o)
Yes, I think I mentioned, I have rendered a bit with an ATI card and DS would really give strange results from time to time... at the time I couldn't put my finger on it though.
What is your final application that you have in mind... like are you making a looping animated sequence for use on a web page, or is it the title screen of a game (say) or a scene in a movie?
Hi Roman,, my plan is to put him in short films. I started this thing on my facebook page sometime back with these 2 raccoons sort of bantering one liner comedy back and forth, but it was just a still image with text. My friends there liked it though, so I wanted to take a step up and animate it, with audio too. Audacity is a good one to alter voice to make it a bit more "silly" lol There are actually 2 raccoon models here on Daz..but my friends all voted to use this one, as it is more realistic and not cartoonish. I actually do have another PC with a 1GB nvidia (Zotac GTX 650) card..but it is on dual processor and pretty slow overall. Suprisingly slower than the one I use now with the ATI card.but I guess the quad processor helps some too with this one. Unfortunately I cant put the Zotac card in this pc because its a small form one, and not enough space or power to run it
Update: Well I ordered a new nVidia (evga brand) card that should fit my small form pc.. it is 2GB, GT610 which I gather is not the top shelf,,but I guess it is a start plus it was only 35 bucks through walmart. Now to figure out if DS can animate the little fella, and hopefully learn how to do it. This of course is no fault of the vendor because I am sure they did not design it to do animation, but it still might work as long as it has bone rigging. I guess I am a person that finds Daz models just "posing" after awhile a tad boring, so I like to give them some life instead of just standing around. I mean you can make stuff in a paint program that just stands around :)
I wonder if it is possible to export just the bones to Poser and animate them as a bvh then import it back to DS due to the fur issue.. does anybody know it that might work?
I'll let others address the bone issue/idea, but I'm sure that in a pinch you could use two mostly STATIC raccoons, and even have a bit of static, fluffy TAIL visible coming up from the bottom of the frame. Spend your time animating the bat's mouth -- if I'm not mistaken it would be very similar to the raccoon's mouth, but (again if I'm not mistaken) it does vowels and consonants -- and build up a library of little mouth routines that could be composited or pasted into position on the head of the raccoon. Then it's just a case of working out the timing of the speech and having just the right pauses for gag delivery and so on. You might be able to get away with just having the raccoon "flap his gums" the way some politicians have been known to do!
Hi Roman,,precisely. I dont care about detailing..flapping would be adequate for want I want since it will primarily be comedy anyways. I remember seeing some program years back that could make a mouth on any image and let it talk..cant recall the program though. It looked a bit rough, but I think they did an example on the fly and didnt take time to tweak it. It's been quite some timw since I used DS and it seems the old morph magnet concept is not used much now. I would have thought that would be a good way to fluff his tail up a bit. It still boggles my brain why it is just the tail that is the problem child.
Like I said (I think) you can probably get someone to make you a fluffy tail with the position and lighting you want. Ahhh... now animating the fur, that would take a bit of combing and brushing, in LAMH!
Oh, and I forgot to mention: the program you would have wanted in the 1990's say was Kai's Goo but it was relatively low resolution. Nowadays a program that has a "puppeteer" or "puppet warp" will allow you to set up some specially modified, high-resolution frames of the raccoon's mouth, that you would scale down to size for your animation. Adobe Photoshop CS6 had the warp feature and current versions probably do as well. DS 4.8 has a puppeteer feature and I've downloaded the tutorial, but have yet to try it.
Here is a quick animation of the un-textured bat. It seems to me that you want very small movements ("25" in DAZ Studio, say) and the timing of these frames would be at most around 25/100th's of a second, or a bit less. I only moved his mouth a little bit but he can do a few vowels and consonants, and you can bob his head up and down and sideways etc.
(NB. I had originally "attached" this file a couple of minutes ago but the system didn't like the animation so I put it in my "Hexagon" section, on my dog's web page. Sorry.)
Hi Roman,, yes something like that. That would be the way I could do it for just their chatting..since they are not on the move while doing so
OK..so I now have an nVidia card installed.. and it uses that iRay render..but I still just end up with a scrawny raccoon.. I looked all around for that fur option with no luck.. just some lighting stuff. Can someone (AM) give me a step by step how this is done..please.. thanks
Can you tell me where this root/tip adjustment is located in DS?