Digital Art Zone

For cwichura or anyone else familiar with the concept…

How do I change things other than poses during a DS4.5 animation? I know how to set key frames and change a figure’s pose, but I don’t know how to change things like the hair color, clothing, etc.

Most of the tutorials I have seen are out of date or don’t cover this. Any ideas?

Thanks.

Again, I’m not sure if it can be done—I’ve not personally tried.  Changing the clothing itself might not work.  But I believe you should be able to apply surface material changes and have that remembered per frame.  Or I could be wrong, and only pose information is tracked by the timeline.

In the old Poser/DS tutorials there was a tutorial for SnowCloning.  Unfortunately, I can’t locate it the new knowledge base.  If the tutorial doesn’t specifically mention DS (which it doesn’t because DS didn’t exist in those days), it doesn’t seem to show up.

You might want to PM SnowSultan here or if you have a Rendo account, site mail him there.  It’s been a long time since I’ve used the technique but it might same you some time.

IIRC, you set up your figure with hair, clothes, poses, ect.  You then hide the clothing (and even the hair if necessary) and render just the figure.  Save that render to png.  Hide the figure, make the clothing visible and render the clothing saving the render to the same format.  You can even to the same with the hair.

You then take the png’s into your image editor and assemble the layers.  Since this was done in the Poser 4 days, conforming clothing was the norm.  It’s been a while since I used this method and never with dynamic clothing but it should work the same as you are simply hiding elements of scene and rendering only what the camera sees.

I’m sure SnowSultan can give you more detail since it was his tutorial.

cwichura - 10 December 2012 08:57 PM

Again, I’m not sure if it can be done—I’ve not personally tried.  Changing the clothing itself might not work.  But I believe you should be able to apply surface material changes and have that remembered per frame.  Or I could be wrong, and only pose information is tracked by the timeline.

Gotcha, I understand. Thanks.

icprncss - 11 December 2012 06:16 AM

I’m sure SnowSultan can give you more detail since it was his tutorial.

Sounds like the same image layering techniques I’ve been working with. It seems like a good technique, but honestly doesn’t seem to be much of a time saver, sadly. My current method is super easy to do, it just requires tons of seperate renders, which is a pain to work with.

At this point I’m leaning towards cutting back on some options. I can always add some more options in at a later time.

Thanks for all the advice.

I wonder if the new keymate product that just came out today will be what you’re looking for. You can always pm the creator or ask in his commercial thread if it will do what you’re looking for.

Okay, here’s another idea based on what other people have said in this thread. It sounds like you can’t change clothes and hair color in the animation. But what about this. Send in the Clones 2 sounded like you might be able to change hair color,etc. with it. If that works, what about having each frame of the animation be a different clone with the desired changes? So you’d move one clone out of the picture and the second one in. Both in the same poses. That way it could render on its own. You’ll probably need to ask the Send in the Clones 2 maker if it will do what you want in regards to clothing and hair.

This would still work to a point without the Send in the Clones 2, depending on how powerful your computer is. Some computers can handle up to 10 figures before it starts slowing down the viewport. (In another thread we discovered the smoothing modifier has to be completely turned off on all clothes till it’s time to render for it to not slow the computer down as much.)

And in another thread, also in the new users forum, I found out that you can have 2 windows of DS 4.5 open. With some caveats that you have to be very careful with. So one could be rendering while you set the next animation up. But that’s very resource intensive, so if your computer is old, it probably won’t work.

MadisonXF - 10 December 2012 07:59 PM

For cwichura or anyone else familiar with the concept…

How do I change things other than poses during a DS4.5 animation? I know how to set key frames and change a figure’s pose, but I don’t know how to change things like the hair color, clothing, etc.

Most of the tutorials I have seen are out of date or don’t cover this. Any ideas?

Thanks.

I’m fairly certain you can make things visible or invisible in the animation timeline. So you can load up all the clothes and hairstyles onto the figure, then hide all but one for the first frame, go to the next frame and hide the first clothing/hair combo, show the next hair/clothing combo, etc. Using this method, you can also load the same hair twice and change the color on the second iteration.

Then render the timeline to separate images, and voila!

sikeus - 12 December 2012 03:32 PM

Okay, here’s another idea based on what other people have said in this thread. It sounds like you can’t change clothes and hair color in the animation. But what about this. Send in the Clones 2 sounded like you might be able to change hair color,etc. with it. If that works, what about having each frame of the animation be a different clone with the desired changes? So you’d move one clone out of the picture and the second one in. Both in the same poses. That way it could render on its own. You’ll probably need to ask the Send in the Clones 2 maker if it will do what you want in regards to clothing and hair.

This would still work to a point without the Send in the Clones 2, depending on how powerful your computer is. Some computers can handle up to 10 figures before it starts slowing down the viewport. (In another thread we discovered the smoothing modifier has to be completely turned off on all clothes till it’s time to render for it to not slow the computer down as much.)

And in another thread, also in the new users forum, I found out that you can have 2 windows of DS 4.5 open. With some caveats that you have to be very careful with. So one could be rendering while you set the next animation up. But that’s very resource intensive, so if your computer is old, it probably won’t work.

Sounds like an interesting possibility.

zigraphix - 14 December 2012 09:20 AM

MadisonXF - 10 December 2012 07:59 PM

For cwichura or anyone else familiar with the concept…

How do I change things other than poses during a DS4.5 animation? I know how to set key frames and change a figure’s pose, but I don’t know how to change things like the hair color, clothing, etc.

Most of the tutorials I have seen are out of date or don’t cover this. Any ideas?

Thanks.

I’m fairly certain you can make things visible or invisible in the animation timeline. So you can load up all the clothes and hairstyles onto the figure, then hide all but one for the first frame, go to the next frame and hide the first clothing/hair combo, show the next hair/clothing combo, etc. Using this method, you can also load the same hair twice and change the color on the second iteration.

Then render the timeline to separate images, and voila!

I’ve tried this and can’t get it to work. It renders whatever it set to visible at any given time in each frame. If you can get it to work, please teach me!