Opinons please
Ivy
Posts: 7,159
Okay there is really no or right or wrong answer I'm just looking for opinions on if I should use a U2E light-sphere and ;or if it would be worth using for a new animation build of my film "Daryl the Red -Viking adventure". this film is 1080p HD
below are 3 test renders
the top render is using a custom u2e light sphere w/4 lights, one set to Ray-trace as the sun with partly cloudy conditions as the light bounce.. this takes 14 minutes 13 seconds per keyframe to render.
the second render is regular 5 distant light maps one set at ray-trace for the Sun settings to mimic partial cloudy conditions, it has no light sphere shadow bounce. this one takes 3.minutes and 21 seconds to render each key-frame.
the last test graphic is a control render with no light or animation to the scene. running at 39 % of my pc resources and taking 38 seconds to render
Now here where your opinions will help me get some ideas .
I have a story board ready to render for animation and for this project i am looking for the best possible results with the less pc resources and time consumption.
I am wondering if because of the render time of the u2e light sphere a 10 second/300 keyframe animation will take 13 hours and 40 minutes to render. per scene. using 79% of my pc resources keeping my pc core temps at about 125 -128 degrees.
the second one will take me 2 hours and 13 minutes to render, using 67% of my pc resources keeping my pc core temps at 118-121 degrees. for the same animation sequence.
Here are the added factors.
The water pane is dynamic & is animated (ripples & waves)as well as the clouds & Sails
There are 10 characters stroking the oars, @ one cycle every 90 keyframes parented to the Drakkar. There are 12 characters in all on the Drakkar
If you guys were doing this film ,which do you all think will looks best and or do you think it would really matter if i did not use u2e lighting shadow bounce.
I am hopimng that some of you have may have a better way to light this scene with less resources and time consumption,
the characters are mostly made up with g2m & genesis base models.
this is a long term project so I'll be bouncing these kind of questions off you until I get this done.
any help or input would be helpful as this is a huge project for me to do as a single person animated short and if the rendering become the problem i may not be able to do this project to it finish. Opinions welcomed!
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Comments
it all looks great Ivy as always but time is gonna be your biggest limitation.
I may not be pro at animation but I know how to do stuff very quickly!.
UberEnvironment is prob the slowest Daz studio lighting render option you can pick.
I myself avoid it even for still images, many like AoA lighting for this reason.
My personal choice is of course not to render in Daz studio at all but if you do compositing is probably your best friend too.
Many video editors support layers or use a program that does video textures and backgrounds,
the obvious one being Poser
as well as Carrara, iClone (my choices for animation AND render)
you can still render in Daz studio using sequenced png images with transparency or an additional opacity sequence and composite in one of those using planes as well as extra content.
I don't see enough difference to justify the big render time increase.
And BTW, I happen to be starting on a Medieval/Viking animation myself, so far just rounding up 3D elements. I am also reading the book "The Long Ships", historical fiction from the 1940's about "the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean." 4.5 stars (out of five) at Amazon with 200 reviews. And the hero is Red Orm.
thanks Wendy i respect your imput. on this greatly.. I know that big projects require more powerful programming. I just can't afford to learn anymore 3d programs. the learning curves gives me Brain cramps ya know..lol I don't have Carrara and Iclone looks to me as a cheap video game render animation where daz and poser have a little better quality to the finish renders anyway that just my opinion.
I am building all the scenes in PP2014 and then I can easily share it with Daz Studio for rendering because i think daz renders much faster than poser. I am using rhe viking village sky dome so having that as anaimted background was not a option.
Also Poser allows me to make the water pane & clouds dynamic where daz does not. i load the poser scene already animated into daz. and the animation will carry over into daz,
why that works that way I have no idea but it has been working so that is what I have been using.
I tried the 3 layers of animation in my adobe premiere, But its looks like it was a shadow box animation which I was not looking for especially when adding the fog layering. it also looks flat when panning the cam as the drakkar moves by. and the shadow did not watch well.
I did tried using the animated texture script i got from Dragonstorm for the water pane but the water pane look to flat and un-realistically when the Draker was moving through it. so Dynamic water pane was my best option. I do agree about the UE lighting thought being super slow , it just to me give the best results that's why i was hoping you all had better lighting solutions.
I don't see enough difference to justify the big render time increase.
And BTW, I happen to be starting on a Medieval/Viking animation myself, so far just rounding up 3D elements. I am also reading the book "The Long Ships", historical fiction from the 1940's about "the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean." 4.5 stars (out of five) at Amazon with 200 reviews. And the hero is Red Orm.
Thanks steve for the imput I look forward to seeing your film when you get it done .. R&D is how i got my storyline as well.
Ivy I'm a pure Ani Noob and still learning animation as I go. One reason not much has been seen from me. I keep learning better ways and going back to redo scenes, over and over. But I would use lighting 2 on my system. Render speed at quality is a hard thing to get right. That version two sounds much like what I would use and looks very good, I might go so far as too only render out a couple of hours of frames per time so my CPU can rest and cool down before I render the next batch of frames.
Just my two cents...
Thanks Jeff for your input.
I think I am going to use the setting in the second one as well plus I rewrote a old daz 3 script to mimic IDL which gives me a better shadow base .using a IDL script for GPU rendering instead of 3Dlight which seem to really sped up my render times by 11% and dropped my PC-CPU resources down by 18%. by using my graphic card to do the work load. it also gave me no bad artifacts so I think I'm going to go with that set up and after playing around with After effects last night I found I can add the fog an clouds effect back in into the scene with tracking with Aftereffects to cut down on product resources.
these were my results using a IDL script for GPU rendering
the bottom one is the final test render which took 1 minute 39 seconds so for a 6000 keyframes , 20 seconds scene it should be abouta little over 6 hours to render using GPU
Very acceptable quality at a great render speed. I agree with the Effects not being rendered in as well. It is one of the things I have learned but still not mastered. I need a better effect package for my editor or a better editor. Just have stock stuff from Roxio so far.
Thanks Jade,
well I am finished the animation part
the complete scene calculated at 1200 minutes to render, there is 19 seconds of animation I got the render times down to 1minute 28 seconds per key-frame. using 66 % of my OC resources it going to take about 20 hours to complete. so before i start the rendering I'm going to have my husband when he gets home from work put the window air conditioner in bed room in my office window. I don't really want to run my heat pump below 70 degree for 20 hours..lol but with the window AC I can crank it down to 60 degrees for a few day I want to get computer room as cool as i can for that amount of render time.
Today in Tennessee it was 95 and is suppose to be about 90's the rest of the week , so I'm going to move the window AC before i start this one rendering. the pre-renders look great so I am excited to see what this 19 second scene going to look like .
I had to stop this animation project I had a long written reason to as why but I retracted it because it was such a bad review that daz forum police would have pulled it anyway
I have kept very detail records and a journal of every step , the products i used and the issues i was having & steps i took to try to correct the issues and the with result i kept getting that lead me to halt this project with daz.
The end results Daz Studio can not be taken serious as a animation software and that it is to pc resources intensiveness and to many rendering issues with Artifacts and lost of animation integrity after saving animated scenes. i have been working with daz for a long time in animation, properly have as much experience as anyone in using Daz Studio software and why i started this thread. So when I say daz (add profanity here) as a animation software please don't take it lightly after all the testing postings and what I was getting for final renders and genesis character animation problems. I have decided to stop using daz Studio & Genesis & Genesis 2 characters for animation. even after making special trans-maps for the characters which worked well but did not solve the problems of the Genesis characters loosing their integrity during the animation cycle. this is very unsatisfactory and disappointing. i have the log files and bad rendered animation to prove my claims .
I am going to compile my notes and journal along with the log files and renders of the bad artifact issues and post to to my account on Photoshop.com if anyone is a member there then you can read my results there.
To the daz studio technical dept you guys really need too address Issues with 3dlight and the bad artifacts even with ray-trace light. I can not tell you guys how disappointed I am after all the effort i put in to finely have to give up because of issue after issue. Please stop advertizing Daz as a Animation software because I can assure you it is not a software that can be taken seriously for animation
Best regards
That's too bad, I thought I had read here a year or so back that DAZ was beefing up the animation features of DS.
Thanks for the comment Jade .
Maybe I should give you the run down . It was not just the pink & purple and sometimes blue artifacts I got when rendering with Ray-trace in the test renders on the ray-trace water maps. I could post work them out of the animation in the temp file before saving it as a avi. the main reason I stopped using daz for this project was the g2 figures I bought the viking outfit for failed me big time. & it made me very angry. this does not have anything to do with the poke through
The user Poser-mocap advised me to make black white trans maps to make the poke through issues invisible so after spending about 20 minutes to create the custom black and white trans maps needed in Photoshop to eliminate the poke through issues which worked great BTW, a new issue arises which really sent me off the edge and i have no idea why or what causes it so I'm blaming the g2 figure because i don't not have any of these issues with generation 4 characters.
I had spent hours hand key-framing the 8 g2 figures for the rowing sequence. I saved the scene as a complete ready render scene so I could start it the next day. When i reloaded the scene all the g2 figures either lost their integrity somehow loosing the timing with the oar stroke and 3 of them lost the complete animation sequence all together. I was like WTF?.. so thinking i may have done something wrong i re-did the hand key frame animation again taking hours to completing them. and then again I saved the scene and rebooted my pc for rendering, when i loaded the scene the g2 figures again lost their integrity and this time 6 of them lost the animation sequence all together and they were the only thing in the scene that lost the animation during the save, the water and bg map and even the two m4 characters i was using did not.
I don't have to tell you how blue i turned the air in my office. anyways not wanting to give up because this project is something i am making for my own web site I thought i would try making a ani-block out of the rowing sequence, then just use a ani -block for all the g2 figures using the center character as my model for the ani block. so after hand animating the row stroke for a third time and creating the ani block that did not work well at all because each seat arrangement and located of the oars were different and the ani block would not match up to the main rower sequence with the others..
After all this work and still getting no where i tried using " Send in the clones " for Daz 4.5 well at first it seem to worked. But about 250 key-frames into the animation all the g2 figures gravitated to the main character that I was using to start the clones. I was like WTF they all want to sit in the same seat.? so then I figure i would not animate then at all and make them just sit there with out the oars and started rendering, 17 minutes into rendering according to my log, my heat alarm went off on my PC, The core temp had reached its limits at 158 degree and I stopped render at that point .. my log files said that I was using 98% of my processing with 1 ray-trace light and 11.5 gigs out of 12 RAM . with just 12 characters in the scene and dynamic water it was over heating my system in a room air conditioned at 70 degrees that is when i gave up.
This morning i had moved the project back over to poser as that is where i started the build in the first place. the first scene just completed it took 7 hours and 8 minutes of rendering for 16 second scene or 480 key frames my core temp never got even close to the my limits staying around 124 degrees and 10.2 gigs of ram using firefly@ 67% of my processor & I have a perfect render with no artifacts including, dynamic water with ray-trace maps and all. I only used one g2 figure in poser replacing the other 7 with m4 as a test. In the finished scene you can clearly see the g2 figure is the only one that can not keep its animation integrity like the m4 characters motions have, the g2 figure i spent more time on as well. This has lead me to believe it s a flaw in the g2 character and is not worth a ( insert profanity here) for animation and I will not use them for animation any more,g2 are way to much work and they do not maintain their animation after hand key-framing them and saving them. . So at this point no matter what argument someone tries to feed me about g2 figures, until they have gone through the animation process of trying to use more than 4 or 5 g2 characters in a animated scene with bg and they have succeeded in using them , which to me does not seem all that complicated then and only then will i try using them after that person tells (shows or demonstrate) to me how they succeeded in using them for more that a 30 to 60 key frame animation because, until someone else has figured out a way to do it other than rendering one scene at a time which is not inductive for 3d animation and I will stand by my statement that G2 figures have a flaw and Daz studio can not be taken seriously for a animation software with the issues it has in animation process, it should not be that complicated. and 3delight needs to be fixed as well , it should not have been released if it was known issue with these artifacts in rendering multiple scenes at a time..
So I am sorry if no on likes my review, its the truth of what I had gone threw trying to get this software to work for me. and i will gladly share my journal and logs of my work along with the rendered test animation as a testament.
In the mean time I am ready to start scene 2 using poser with out g2 figures or the viking outfit I bought to use in it. which was a really great outfit. Maybe I should convert it over for M4 if i knew away to.
Anyway helluva way to spend my vacation having to try reworking g2 characters over and over.. no thanks. I'll stick what I know works. GRRRR it was too frustrating to say the least.
Ivy, I never said a word about Genesis or Genesis 2 Figures in DAZ Studio Animation. I just pointed out that DAZ 3D has no control over the Render Engine, 3Delight. I myself do not use anything but Generation 4 figures in DAZ Studio to animate with. And Have no plans to try any others at this time. I like Genesis and G2 for still rendering but I do not try to animate them. Unless I use paid for AniBlocks made for genesis and then I only use Genesis with those few AniBlocks. I have not seen any for the G2 figures and have never once tried them.
well your smarter than I am because i have been trying to work with them for a while I get one issue solved and another arises.
g2 bites putting it nicely for animation don,t waste you time.
I have to sympathesize with Ivy. Fighting with the animation software is no way to enjoy animating. I love animating with Carrara 8.1 Pro using DAZ Gen4 characters. Its about as user friendly as it gets. You can focus on the story and the characters without worrying about the program glitches (for the most part). Plus the sheer volume of Gen4 content (characters, scenes, props, etc.) is huge, including DAZ (admittedly nothing new for a long time in Gen4), Renderosity, Content Paradise, and many others. And you don't get the dreaded "Not Tested in DAZ Studio, and not supported in DAZ Studio".
P.S. Yes, I have Carrara Pro 8.5, just testing it. For my Gen4 work, I'm not so sure about it. Yet.
I myself use genesis and to a lesser extent genesis2 solely in iClone
Carrara if really pushed but prefer V4 and M4 there too any day.
and yes done a lot of stuff lately with genesis but has all pretty much been iClone rendered
well it does not matter any more, I am over being upset that I can't work with Daz with the rendering issues & G2 figures issues so I'm doing the project in Poser Pro and so far so good no problems.
this morning i converted the viking outfit to m4 for poser, I had to make each piece of the clothing into a .obj file .
Then I created a geometry folder in my runtime and after making it fitting to M4 saved it as a PP2 & PZ3 format for poser in my runtime. i was not sure at first which poser format would work best. but they both do .
I used MEC4D Eli m4 character as my base M4 model to fit the clothing to.
I used the Original "RD folder" Viking texture file as the texture base, and i can manually put Moyra Normen textures to the m4 clothing . so all is good and the viking outfit is now useable for M4 in Poser. Its to bad it was not created for m4 to begin with but never the less i got the Viking outfit working great with no trans maps needed , and no more poke through.
so on to rendering scene 4
below is what what the viking outfit looks like for m4
Test render for my next render
scene 4 is well on its way of rendering in Poser pro no issues to report thus far.
The viking outfit m4 conversion looks great on M4 in this scene. life is all good again :)
ironically I have been collecting vikings for a while now planning a movie too but rest assured it shall not resemble yours in any way except the viking village prop
the singing for a start will avoid any confusing of the two :lol:
I am sure it will be great , and if it keeps in line with the Wendy Vanity animation style it will be hilarious as well
I look forward to watching it :)
Your right he viking village is a great prop, but i don't know if I'll go beyond the boat part of this animation if i do i may use Merlins village instead only because its smaller and less pc resource intensive. I was originally creating this for a streaming video intro for my web site in flash catalyst cs5 & YouTube for Ivysdomain.com ,my sound track is just drums bg music that was created by my friend Kevin Mcloud , but it all depends if my knowledge is enough to complete the task. its a rather big project and I'm only in the beginning stages of it , it may end up being just a YouTube video and I'll have to come up with something else , if any more frustrations pop up ...lol I have very little patients :P
I look at it this way, we as users will always need to find things that work best for us. And sometimes that will even mean not using DS to do things. I see nothing wrong with that at all. I'm just not able to use some programs others do as I never bought them and I probably can not afford too still at this time. I do have a power program in my collection but it is a Steep learning curve and I'm not ready to take that leap yet.
And a correction, I was informed that Renderman does not own 3Delight, just that 3Delight is a renderman compliant render engine. But my statement that DAZ 3D does not own or code 3Delight is still correct, 3Delight is its on company.
Jade don't get me wrong I love using Daz studio for things other than animation. Daz 4.6 is just too buggy for my liking anymore. .
Generation 4 characters differently work better than Genesis or g2 figures I never had to make special trans-maps for gen 4 like i have to with genesis and g2 characters to work around the poke throughs , that is big draw back. & if they would like people to animate g2 they need to find out what is making it loose its saved animation sequences that would be another issue to address. plus the lack of animation tools is really disappointing.
The other thing is as you stated g2 is very new still and there is not many work around for problem we encounter, Heaven knows I have really tired to work with it.
I see things trying to use daz for animation that other user would not encounter in still graphic creation so Daz properly does not see a reason to address the animation issues as fast as they would for the still graphic user , I can understand that part of it ,
And even though daz does not own the 3dlight render engine it does not work very well for animation, Daz should develop their own or by now have the capability to be able to use other render engines . etc.such as poser does with poser-fusion.
Reality render engine plugin does not work very well for animation because the one at a time render times are horrible & and Octane render is even worst. as I said Daz has real potential to become a good animation software if they would put more R&D into the animation part.
The older versions of daz we had PC vender tools like particle effects FX and wave & rain tools etc. which are not compatible so much with the new versions of Daz , not to mention Genesis and g2 are just a lot of work to animate, compared to gen4 , it actually save me time just converting the g2 clothing to gen4. which is a shame.
Now the advice Daz gives out here of creating animation one png graphic at a time and putting them in a video editor is just silly as heck,& unless if your trying to create a serious animation. because you can not use aftereffect or other good video editing programing which require AVI or Mpeg video formats with out adding more creation time by doing this in this program to make it work with that programing is ridiculous .not to mention the incredible amount of time it would involve, still graphic animation is not animation, no matter how much you want to call it animation.
If Daz would put a little more focus for us animation creators it may have a better chance of becoming a good software.
as you mention about not using other software . far as poser goes there are pros & cons there too. Poser is harder to set up scenes in, and pose tool is not as good as animate 2 is in daz., But poser has physix and Subdivision animation tool
Then here is fire-fly render engine , which for still graphic don't look as good as 3dlight. but is a heck of a lot better for animation.
the only reason I have poser pro now is because I have been a long time poser user and I get the introductory offers of 75% off their new releases which i take advantage of, other words i would not have it either at $499 for the pro version. but for $89 for the upgrade its worth it to stay current.
I would be using Maya right now if i could afford the $6000 licensing required plus plus plus for everything else needed. ,But with my student version it has a very notable water mark on finished animation renders.and i have to show proof of licensing to YouTube every time i use it.
I'm like you jade i use what works best for the project i am working on. I would like to use daz all the time. but it seems lately I keep getting more and more issues in trying to use it for animation as I was taught to create animation using high end software.
maybe that is why i am frustrated so much with daz because i can see the potential but its seems like being ignored.
I just wish Daz would put a little more focus in it for us Animation creators and make so we can use other render engines. & it would be great if the characters were a little easier to work with ,like they use to be.
Okay Ivy, I'm all in and have not taken offense from any of your posts just so that you know that. I agree it has taken too long to get a final version of the DAZ Studio SDK, needed for plugin creators. I can hardly see why any of the default SDK code was changed in the first place when Add To's could have been done instead of new code that broke the older versions. But then the new speed of processors would not have been usable, I did some deep coding back in my day so can see that from both sides. At this point in time some Plugin creators may have just moved on, and I can understand that as well, as they are in need of income so could not wait on the SDK. They need to earn money now just like the rest of us, well I'm retired but you know what I meant.
As for the Genesis and Genesis 2 Figures I'm not seeing poke through when I use them for still renders, and If I do that is often just a setting for collision is not correct with the morphs I'm using on my figures, a easy fix really. I have seen poke through issues with them Animated I admit.
As for the Render to frames, that is my normal work flow. To use those in After Effects you do need to create a Full movie file from them in a editor and then use that clip for the addition of effects. Just one short step I never noticed as I was already doing that anyway. As a hobby level only user my time is not as important as yours and I understand that as well. Some day in the future I will install my Carrara 8.5 Pro and start from the ground up learning how to use it. I do agree a choice of render engines beyond what is now supported would help the usefulness of DS for animation. I almost went Octain until I really read deep into what was needed for high end renders. So glad now I saved that money.
Be Well Ivy, carry on and just create how you can with what works. I'll just keep watching your stuff just like I keep watching Wendy's stuff. Even if Wendy does poke lots of punny at my Jade character. It is all just fun to watch. And all work to do no matter what we do it in.
Thanks Jade I'm glad we can have these types of discussions :)
I want to share my work flow for this project with people who are new and have been thinking of using daz or poser for animation
I found having a good file system really helps when gather assets and when it comes time for rendering and movie editing.
to make it a little easier to understand i am using a capture of my file system to demonstrate
Capture one
in your documents folder or what ever folder you like to keep your daz and poser content. i like to make a folder called 3d project file
this will be my main work horse folder for all my animation files to go into.
Capture 2
Is showing inside my 3d project folder how i have started a file tree for each project i have going. this allows me to find my projects quickly and a place to save my assets when creating a project that requires lots of files to be saved .
I will use my current working project "1)Daryl The Red" for this demonstration.
Capture 3
This is how i set up my files to manage my animation project I am working on
I learned this trick from creating web site design & flash animation layouts and I applied it to creating Daz animation as well it keeps things very organized
The first folder you want is to have a place to save your scene or model assets into whether its daz ,poser or what ever program your using saving our scene assets in a folder of its own will save you a lot of time from having to go back and find everything again and a good place to save ready to render scenes as well.
for this demo i will use my "Model file" I have saved my Daz scene assets in which is shown in capture 4
Next Folder
the next folder you will want to have a place to store your asset graphic files which i have named Photoshop.
this is where you will want to save your custom textures , test renders , promos etc. and/or anything that maybe will be used in helping you create your animation.
you will want to do with with your sound files and movie editor files as well keeping them all in one place helps your work flow..
Capture 5
is showing inside my finished rendered movie folder where I keep my AVI and PNG sequence files that are to be placed in the movie editor this is important because this is the place you will put all your finished scenes you will need to edit later. and keep you from hunting them down.
I always name my avi files the scene name and how long it is in seconds because when it comes time to edit your file you will know first hand what your working with for a movie scene and keep you from mistakenly placing scene 1o for scene 5. in your movie editor
same for your sound files , a place to keep your sound effects and sound trax will be very helpful when it comes time to put your film together.
I now think you can see how this file set up will save you some time and eliminate some frustration when creating animation with Daz .. I hope it will help in creating your own project.
Back to my project :)