Mudd in Your I--a Star Trek Fan Film

jake_f

Wow, just came across this high quality video featuring Daz characters.   It's by forum member Auroratrek.  Pretty impressive!   Let's see if we can persuade Auroratrek to share some detail about how this video was produced.

 

wolf359

Hi Tim Vining,the creator of that film,
uses poser pro and Maxon Cinema4D with a special plugin called
 "Interposer pro" that supports All poser formats for direct usage in 
Maxon Cinema4D, from your poser runtime. 
 
The plugin is no longer in development and only supports Daz millenuim 4 or earlier.
No Genesis or Daz studio
He use an optical Human Mocap system for his base body motion and the 
older Daz mimic pro 3 for lipsinc.

The voice work was done by himself and family & friends.
In the wake of the more restrictive usage terms for Star trek fan films 
,imposed by Paramount inc,

He is currently working on a new production
Based in a  Tolken  styled world of Hobbits/fantasy etc IIRC

http://www.questofthekey.com/

kenshaw011267

Will restrain myself from expressing my opinion of CBS/Paramount since that will surely get the post deleted. 

Very impressed by the animation.

Leonides02

I loved Aurora. I hope his new production has as much spark!

wolf359

Leonides02 said:

I loved Aurora. I hope his new production has as much spark!

I am looking foward to his new film.
Tim is currently investigating his options for adding the genesis
models to his pipeline.

We recently had some very detailed discussions over at the
Reallusion forums about the various methods to get animated genesis figures into
C4D.
I am sure his new production will be a major step up in quality and figure diversity. 

jake_f

Wolf, thanks for the description of the technology involved, and for the introduction to Cinema4D.   Hey, they have a Mac version, but it costs a bit more than Daz.    I'm curious what one gets in $1000 animation software, not that I'm likely to understand the explanation. 

Ok, I thought I read he used Daz figures in this film, but I could easily be confused.  Perhaps I should be looking for animation portfolios that are pure Daz. 

Anyway, this film expanded my understanding of what is possible in 3D, thumbs up for that.

 

 

FSMCDesigns

jake_f said:

Wolf, thanks for the description of the technology involved, and for the introduction to Cinema4D.   Hey, they have a Mac version, but it costs a bit more than Daz.    I'm curious what one gets in $1000 animation software, not that I'm likely to understand the explanation. 

Ok, I thought I read he used Daz figures in this film, but I could easily be confused.  Perhaps I should be looking for animation portfolios that are pure Daz. 

Anyway, this film expanded my understanding of what is possible in 3D, thumbs up for that.

 

 

Dax Studio is entry level hobbyist software and from what I have read the animation tools are very lacking for serious quality production which is why serious animators use high end commercial apps like Maya, 3DSMax, C4D or game engines like Unity.

Those are DAZ figures in the video, only much older pre genesis ones. Of the videos with DAZ figures I have seen this is the best animation and lip sync I have seen and not the norm for sure.

jake_f

FSMCDesigns said:

Dax Studio is entry level hobbyist software and from what I have read the animation tools are very lacking for serious quality production which is why serious animators use high end commercial apps like Maya, 3DSMax, C4D or game engines like Unity.

Which perhaps takes us in to a discussion of how one might earn income with 3D tools.   For example it looks like Maya is $1500 per year.  Presumably such users are doing 3D for living.

FSMCDesigns said:

Those are DAZ figures in the video, only much older pre genesis ones. Of the videos with DAZ figures I have seen this is the best animation and lip sync I have seen and not the norm for sure.

Yes, it's impressive, even though the characters themselves do seem pretty dated. 

I'm thinking we need to start an animation portfolio thread that is limited to what one can do within Daz.

Auroratrek

Thanks, all! And thanks, Wolf, you saved me a lot of typing! ;-) To expand a little on the discussion, the figures are all Daz--mostly Millienials 4, but some 3 in the earlier half of the first movie, and even some earlier versions in the background characters.

The reason I compose my animations in Poser (imported mocap bvh, cleanup, adding expressions, blinks etc.) is because the animation tools in Daz stink, even with the Graph editor & Curve editor. I have tried several times to work with them over the years, each time trying to convince myself that maybe I'm just not used to them, but epic fail every time. If Daz would just make decent animation tools I'd jump over in a second. As Wolf notes, I am currently looking into iClone for mocap editing, and we'll see if that yeilds anything, since the advantage there is that it is compatible (hopefully) with Genesis figures. 

As for Cinema 4D, that is as much for the quality of lighting and the speed of rendering as anything else, tho I do customize a lot there, and the Interposer plugin allows my figures to interact more directly with C4D than using the Poser Plugin.

Anyway, going forward, I may be incorporating Daz a bit more if iClone pans out, but we'll see. My workflow has evolved over the years, but I have always been at the whim of the 3D gods!

cathan01_wwg1wga

I remember watching this and Star Trek Spectre and its sequels a few years ago. ST Spectre was a cg film series using much older poser figures, including Victoria 3, for its characters. Very cool. I miss the old days of ST fan films when a project could be longer than 15 minutes and you could make an entire series. Oh well...

wolf359

I'm curious what one gets in $1000 animation software, 
not that I'm likely to understand the explanation. 

Understand this,
Most users of Apps like Autodesk Maya,Maxon Cinema4D or Lightwave3D
only use apps like Daz studio or Iclone as a secondary resource now that the figures are actually of decent
quality and easily incorporated into our existing pipelines.

I have used Lightwave3D and Cinema4D for well over 15 years.
Apps Like Maya ,Lightwave and Maxon C4D are complete 3DCC suites with full modeling tools 
professional Animation Graph editors and dopesheets particle, systems advanced lighting
and compositing output options and the ability to add addtional render engines internal scripting languages
etc etc.

These programs provide  a superior final render environment for figures
animated and imported from apps like Iclone or Daz studio 

My current file project is being rendered in Maxon Cinema4D
on an Apple Macintosh computer
the first ten mintutes of my feature length film, was created with the exact same
process of Poser Pro & C4D Via the defunct Interposer plugin

I have long since dumped poser& the legacy millenuim, figures for an
Iclone pro ,Daz studio Genesis to C4D pipeline
via exported animated .obj files fromDaz studio aniMate2 

I have 63 minutes of completed footage

( 4 minute sample clip)

 

 

I'm thinking we need to start an animation portfolio
thread that is limited to what one can do within Daz.

Daz studio animator, Ivy Summers works exclusivley in Daz studio
Visit her youtube channel for Daz studio only animations.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoM6V2M-SWC8sIG8HnrKsSw