Future of Animation 2017
First, I'll start by saying I enjoy animation in Daz. The timeline is intuitive and easy to use. I purchased animate2/keymate/graphmate and would like to take the time to delve further. But like everyone, time is limited in life. So here are my questions (please don't take these as offensive, I'm just trying to get a general feel):
What is the best 3d animation tool with the brightest future? Yesterday, I read about Daz3d, Carrera, Blender, iClone (reallusion), Maya, and Houdini. Here are the opinions I found:
- DAZ - Rudimentary. Clunky tools. Difficult to master. However, some love it. In fact, some animations from pure Daz3d (with help of ZBrush) look absolutely amazing.
- Carrera - Easier to animate but doesn't support G3 content and future of product seems less certain.
- Blender - Inexpensive. Great for hobbiest. Tricky parts, but can be as good as the most expensive tools.
- iClone - Tied with blender. Perhaps iClone 7 will make put it ahead.
- Houdini - Most expensive of the bunch. PBR. Physics! Engines for simulating everything (water, clothing, fracturing stuff, etc.). The biggest learning curve too.
My skill level is newbie, a hobbiest who may decide to go further (perhaps professional) one day if it keeps my interest. Right now, I'm highly interested. But I want to learn animation with a product that has a semi-bright future.
Houdini looks amazing, but the pricing for the hardware and sofware necessary would be a downside. Plus I'm not sure how much canned content it has. Still, I LOVE the physics engines.
Still, I love DAZ3D. I'm afraid to dive deep because animate2/keymate/graphmate seem like 'older' tools and there really hasn't been much in the way of new aniblock products being sold in the store recently (other than a high heeled walk and a turn and a jog). I just want to start with simple aniblocks, like a character breathing for G3 but that doesn't exist that I can find. Then again, I'm not sure how easy it would be to find a pre-packaged 'breathing animation' with Houdini or any of the others. Prepackaged building blocks (though it can be costly if you buy alot) is awesome and saves tiem and lets you put together really realistic scenarios -- and Daz seems to be the king in this area for non-animation.
I think I'm going to bite the bullet and go with DAZ3D animation, just because I've seen some really cool stuff folks have done with it. The more I use timeline, the less clunky it became and now I understand it totally and it's not clunky at all. I assume the same will happen for animate2/keymate/graphmate. I suppose I'm just looking for some opinions on what others like and why.
Thanks!
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Comments
I applaud your efforts to move forward with the DS animation tools, and I wish you the best of luck! I, too, would like to do more with animation inside DS, and if I could only build that time machine and have several clones of myself, I'd be in business. :) (It's my goal to start adding animate blocks to my pose sets, but I'm still muddling my way through on making cooherent animations for this purpose.)
I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but I'd like to draw your attention to this: http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-particle-physics-the-complete-bundle . I just picked it up, but I've yet to find the time to play with it. It does particle animations inside DS, which might be what you're looking for. It looks pretty good to me (otherwise I would not have purchased it! Lol.)
Yes, I purchased simtenero partical physics, but I haven't tried it yet. Mostly because I haven't seen any realistic demos with it. The videos on the promo page show jelly-bean like objects falling and bouncing. I still am going to spend time learning it to see what more it can do (perhaps I can apply shaders), but a cool demo would excite me to investigate as a higher priority.
The main physics I'm interested in is rigid body [1] and cloth. DAZ talks to 3rd party tools like MD and VWD for cloth (and optitex of course), but I've never seen a third party tool for rigid bodies that cooperates with Daz Studio.
My hunch is it will be another few years before the average mainstream computer is able to render animations in reasonable periods of time. Teh time it takes to render a single still image today...eventually comptures will render a 10 second animation in that same period. Folks will want to do more animations and I just want to make sure improving animation tools are going to remain a part of Daz3d roadmap.
I think it will. Yeh, I think I just convinced myself to go with Daz/ZBrush/Photoshop for animations.
BTW I love your super hero poses and just bought your Taekwondo yesterday for my first superhero animation. It had exactly what I needed!
[1]
This pleases me! I'm glad I was able to make something useful. Oh, and I'm not saying anything, but at some point there may or may not be additional sets in the same vein (or not) as you've previously mentioned. If it were from my own catalog, I could be more specific.
I have MD and I can honestly say that it is somewhat limited on the rigid body stuff. You can create rigid objects like buttons and the like which will follow the drape of a fabric, but as for stand alone rigid body animations, I'm still unable to find something of the sort there.
I also have zBrush and Modo, both of which I need to explore more fully to see what they're capable of doing in this regard. I'll let you know if I discover anything. :)
You should consider Unity 3D for future animating. They have physics and cloth simulation too. You will need to buy products to assist you with creating animation (OK, more like editing existing animations most of the time). Unity will also be adding Octane Renderer this year.
So while Unity ain't up to Houdini par yet, in the future they are liable to match and exceed Houdini as they have been making a lot of progress on a lot of technology. They are primarily a game engine though.
So given the likihood you aren't rich, Unity or Blender seems the two choices that will be affordable and make the most technological advancements.
Does the genesis 3 skeleton work with unity animations? From what I read using premade animations who haven't been done for genesis 3 usually don't work well.
Cinema 4d + iClone7 must be the best choice for you.
Yes, you can retarget animations make for Unity mecanim avatars to Genesis 3. Unity for sure has they biggest amount of money coming in to improve Unity in the future, much more than other products. UE4 is comparible though.
I like the compatibility with G3. I'll have to check out this Unity creature.
Hopefully it'll also support the 2k+ free animations from Mixamo. If it does, I might be able to use those as a library for G3. That would be amazing.
I've been pushing Daz Studio hard on my project. What I like is the library of models. It takes modelling and rigging off my plate. I can get right to setting up shots. Ideally, the folks at Daz would come up with a Super Daz product that keeps many familiar elements but add features you find in higher in packages. I agree that Unity is a good program to look into.
Why don't I see more Daz Animation on Youtube. I haven't seen anything yet that goes far beyond the old pre-Iray look.
Well even with iRay many renders look pasted together, part iRay & part 3DL look. It is very difficult to get a scene textured 100% coherently and lit 100% coherently even if you spend much money in the DAZ Store. Also, most people don't want to have their computers rendering for weeks to produce a 5 minute iRay animation.
Something I figured out with iray: if you put things down on the low when it comes to maximum settings for iray renders it goes faster... and isn't as grainy as say if you wanted just a picture. I don't know why that is. I'll post a couple of my samples below.
I'm curious about this Unity3D. I was sold until I saw that you have to pay a subscription - a growing business practice of late I've come to hate. Nah, loathe. I want to own the program, not rent it with no hope of keeping it. If I wanted to live without any belongings of my own, I'd move to a monastery. ;-) So back I go to playing with mcasual's scripts and making my own dynamic hair. Siiiigh.
Daz animation seems daunting at first, but once you start getting used to the process it's actually quite easy.
Yeh, I like Daz animation. Even dynamic hair. Not too difficult with VWD (which, with the plugin, makes everything doable within Daz).
I like how you toon shaded those animations! That's what I'm trying to figure out now. I want to find a toon shader for Iray that's easy (if it converts my Iray shaders, I'm fine with that so long as it's simple to execute).