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@Fixme12 you have been carping about the same things for a number of years now. Daz Studio is not, and can never be the same as the likes of 3DSMax, Maya, Cinema 4D etc. those are all very expensive all -in-one applications.
if you want those capabilities, use those programs. Daz3D have been continously developing the flagship program ( Daz Studio ) adding tools, new render engines, new , useful plugins etc. They will continue on the same path, i am sure.
The vast majority of the userbase are happy with the way things are continually being developed. Yes, new, more powerful tools would be nice, but you need to realise that the Dev Team are relatively small, and can only do so much in any period of time. Also, with Daz Studio being given away to its users, you cannot expect the same capabilities as in programs that cost thousands of dollars( and have far larger developement teams)
BTW, even the studios do not use a 'single' program to produce the animations, FX etc. Most actually use a multi-app workflow, and many actually write any special effects software/plug-ins 'in house'
LoL Many would disagree with that assertion
Automated lipsinc:
Indeed it is nice to have money to hire an entire team Like the$$$ Frame store$$$ or $$$MPC$$ to work on your project.
But for the individual artist working alone, spending days to get a ten second key framed Character shot is
Bloody retarded when you also have to do:the scene assembly ,some modeling,environmental Lighting ,camera animation, the VFX ,compositing and Film &sound editing.Unless you want to spend 15 years making one short film.
Hmm..Curious considering Iclone leased its Human IK system from Autodesk back in 2011 ,You Clearly must have notproperly used the tools it provided for proper Foot& hand contact solving .
You are correct of course.
Anyone who comitts to a brute force /Arch vis pathtracer as Primary render engine, is clearly not looking to Have animated filmakers Use Daz studio itself as final scene assembly and rendering solution.
However ( unlike Reallusion)at least Daz does not charge a near punitve premuim to get their content out of daz studio into the Major industry standard formats.
From the description that lipsync is all mocapped, not generated by a mimic-like tool. Yes, in real time; it's impressive. But driven by a real person, not by a program mimicing sound.
I was a studio animator. And they payed me for animating. At first on handdrawn films like this:
And later as a junior Maya animator on European TV stuff like this (CGI character, some sort of Gollum rip-off on a budget in last third of the trailer. From the trailer, I did the blow pipe scene, the high five and the Nessie-shot. All of it key framed without any reference material.)
Didn't have to care about shaders, lights, rendering, that was done by others than me. I worked in studios with up to a hundred collegues. It was all a team effort.
Never cared about making my own films. I was content with acting with a pencil, and later Maya, on studio productions.That had the budgets to make it look good.
Did not play with it for a long time. Tried out some of the stock animations included with the program. They did not impress me. Neither do the feet during the guitar playing in this clip. The foot that should have been stuck to the floor supporting the weight is sliding too much. Making it all rather weightless. Funnily the foot that is not supporting the weight and could have moved more is more stable.
Like I said; I was into acting, not rendering. I was not a film maker but an animator. (and a director for a little while, for an European kiddiie show) When I animated with Maya, I was given a powerful PC to work on, a licenced version of Maya, professional rigs created especially for that production, and my scenes were rendered on a render farm. And it payed my rent, and a bit more. And when things went wrong we had IT and Pipeline wizards to solve it for us. It's all a long time ago now - never got beyond junior status in Maya and that was the end of it...
Machine/software Driven or human mocapped it is NOT hand keyframed.
Also I Have never seen a realistic hand key framed ragdoll physics simulation such as the ones Machine/software driven by the Golaem Crowd physics software
Not key framed:
You worked for a studio..lovely
Please understand that Not everyone will have the advantage of a team to give us the luxury being a single focus, keyframe purist.
Indeed Iclone did have a "weight problem"........ back in 2011
All easily avoided with its present day toolset.
Here is completely audio driven animation ("autolipsync"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJJzUMYwUg Its the software I'm using from SpeechGraphics. Its waaaayyy more practical for us independent filmmakers than hand keying. I couldn't imagine having to hand key my production. I would like to finish before I die. Mocap and hopefully deep learning AI is the way to go for sure. I'm hoping Nvidia releases their AI lipsync tech soon. I am blown away by what machine learning can do to replace tedious tasks like keyframing animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDzrfdpGqw4 Yay! for Pro tools.
I just took a look at their website. Pretty incredible. I assume you're using them after importing your DAZ characters to Maya?
I am (or was) a key frrame animator. From an era when computers still were mostly science fiction.
Meaning the main accent was on the acting performances.
What I love is creating motion by hand, acting, inventing body language. Creating emotions and communicating those to an audience using body language and timing. Mocap takes away the whole fun. I even vastly prefer (Disney style) cartoon over simulated realism. I've never seen the sense in hand drawn live ation either, like many of the Anime. I preferred seeing cartoony action. The sort real people cannot do. I never understood why films like Final Fantasy; Spirits Within , Beowulf or Polar Express were made. Also never was into computer games. never liked the look. I'd had rather anmated at, say, Pixar, as in Weta. All that automated stuff is taking away the fun for me. Key frame animation is not tedious, it is acting. The bunny and the fox from Zootopia? You'd never get a performance like that using Mocap. And it's for cartoony comedy acting like that why I ilke animation that much.
Mocap is just (partly) the death for us animators.
But mocapping is also not the same like using automated lipsync. At least it is still character driven. Not an algorhythm. It's a human driving the motion. And if that human is a good actor, you'll get a good performance. And if he's not, yes, oh well....
Like I said, I'm not an independend film maker. I'm an animator. My unsung heroes were Disney's Nine Old Men, like Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ward Kimball, Art Babbit, Or WB's Chuck Jones, MGM's Tex Avery, the old Tom & Jerry shorts, with animators like Ed Barge, Irven Spence, Kenneth Muse. Stop motion wizards like Ray Harryhausen. Phil Tippet doing the go motion for Dragon Slayer. Was lucky enough to work with a couple of ex-Disney guys. And got a Maya workshop by Kyle Balda, a former Pixar animator.
Crowd simultion. Yes. Great. Love it in action movies. Mostly consider it a special effect. It's not what I want to do. I alrerady considered it a cheat in the original Lion King.
Mocapped humans? Why, if you can have real actors....?
@ drzap. Yes, the mouth movements in your first example are spot on. Only the main accents are off, Eyebrow accents are off. Body sync is hardly there at all. It's bad acting without conveying real emotion. You can always tell. Mocap gets it right - with the right actor. This one here was moving around like crazy wihout more than superficial relation to the dialogue, missing all the important accents And what the hell is she staring at? Very uncanny valley. Mocap can be great, yes. If you have someone like Andy Serkis who is a good mocap actor. And then still tweaking it like crazy (friends of mine animated Ceasar in the first of the Planet of the Apes movie. Spend days even tweaking short scenes.) Keyframing gets it right, with a trained animator. and a lot of extra tweaking. (mostly with cartoon action, realistic humans are mostly too difficult for key framing, it's easy to get into the uncanny valley. Look at Tarkin or Leia in Rogue One. Truly horrible. Even with mocap. Despite a multi million budget.Much prefer the stylized Tarkin from Rebels.)
Look at the second clip, around 1:20. The human reference model. Alive with quirky little accents. The CGI; next to it; no quirky accents and dead as a doornail. Would need days of tweaking.
If I ever would get involved in MoCap, there''s only two things that would interest me. To direct the Mocap actors, or to be a mocap actor myself. (I did a realtime test during a mocap workshop by Craig Gaton-Largent (former Digital Domain), and was told I'd be a good mocap performer for facials) Tweaking it in a computer would not interest me at all.
@ Wolf 359; the iClone video. Yes, good toolset. A graph editor with bezier handles. The very thing DAZ Studio could use. And all keyframe, no mocap. The animator doing the demo is good, and knows his 12 principles....
But again; I'm not interested in realistic humans - apart from fantasy creatures, action scenes and stunt work too dangerous for actors I've always preferred live action above CGI pretending to be realistic humans, and hated films like Beowulf. I always considered myself an actor. Not a technician. Technics never interested me at all.
Yes, I know I'm a bit negative. I was an animation supervisor for a few years, and trained to spot things that did not work and have these corrected. But uncanny valley bugs me. And I have never been intested in mocap at all. Or in things like AnimBlocks.
And also in DAZ Studio, or Poser, I'm interested in key framing only. If Studio ever gets good enough, I'd pobably go for a cartoony 3DUniverse character to animate with. Unlike you guys I'm not into mocap or simulated live action at all. DAZ could release thousands of Mocap files for free and I couldn't care a bit. Please give me bezier handles instead.
But well, to each his own. And if you want to do multi-minute projects all by yourself, yes, mocap is probably the only way to go.
Well.. like and the internet and smart phones they are science fact now..Welcome to the future.
Computers and 3DCC software have taken the ART of Storytelling and visual communication OUT of the hands of a few elite Gatekeepers at Disney etc and "democratized" it for the rest of the creative population.
I am glad to have lived to partake in it.
Lovely... Many of us are and now have to freedom to do so thanks to technology.
The Families who made the Lion King the monumental success that it was, Did not Care about the technical means how that story was told only how well it was told..period
No trophies are awarded for using slow vestgial methods of the past when better options exist
Because real actors are limited in what they can portray on screen.
Hollywood is a business..Not a religion
and were in living in 2019 ..not 1949
Your beloved Disney is reaping massive rewards from the marvel comics based& Star wars movies and would not be doing so if "Thanos" or the "Hulk" were portayed by a live actor in a Goofy rubber suit.
Congratulations on Hilfe, Ich bin ein Fisch! I loved that movie but I thought it was made in Germany.
By the way, just because the old Gollum character, if not the old Jewish legends about Gollum, is now widely known because of Hollywood movies doesn't mean that people that use Gollum or similar characters are 'ripping off' anyone. The Gollum character and it's old legends have all long been public domain, sorry. Even in the 70s Marvel Comics had a Jewish superhero called Omega (I had issues 1 & 2 but Lil' Champs were not known to keep current comics in stock as I bought comics as old as 5 years old in their comic book turnstile racks, meaning I never saw another issue before it was canceled - try finding comics in a convenient store that old today, collectors/hoarders don't let it happen!
). Anyway, rambling on, Gollum was in the Omega comic book from Marvel.
If mocap will put animators out of business, it would already have done it. The technology is quite mature and I don't think it will ever replace a real human touch. Animation, the art form, will always need humans. And directors will always need animators like you who find the tedious stuff interesting. You just want to animate, thats all. You don't want to get involved with simulations or lighting or modeling.... just animating. People like you are very useful to people like me and I think it will always be so. Just like we need people who just want to run simulations or who just want to light and shade 3d models. I love the classic Disney work. Also love the stuff Sony is doing now with Spiderman into the Verse. They could not have been done without dedicated animators.
I haven't tried a Daz character yet (I'm just using Daz figures for background characters), but yeah, this is a Maya tool.
Hey; I animated in Maya. Even made it to the big screen. Can't say I prefer it over pencil and paper, but I got out of the stone age.
That said, who needs a Lion King remake? The acting sucks because the animals weren't rigged to have human expressions. Yay progression..... Never understood this obsession with photorealism. Goes for iRay as well....
A lot of genius Disney Animators were thrown on the street. As in: Thank you for the renaissance and the millions of profit but now you're obsolete. What did we get in return? Aladdin live action. Oh my...... But thank you for hating genius craftsmen. I can't do what they did. I doubt that you can. But hey, if you say they're worthless, they must be so.
I'm only saying what I would like to seen in DAZ3D. Or in animation. That's different from what you want.
Yeah, Disney is big business now chunking out horrible Star Wars sequels...
Disney used to be about art. Between 1940 and 1950, when masterpieces like Pinnocchio, Bambi and Fantasia were made, Disney did not make any profit at all. They were on the verge of bankruptcy. But they knew hand drawn animation was an ART FORM. Not just a bloody technique. And they were the better company for it. Now they mostly seem to care about being powerfull and making billions. And not taking artistic risks any more.
And even in the MCU, scenes are key animated. Worked at Trixter, next to people animating a GCI stand in for Samuel L Jackson for Winter Soldier. No mocap there, and neither in a lot of the Iron Man stuff. All keyframed. And many of the Trixter CGI crew still have pencil on paper anatomy sessions. In 2019.
Partly it was. The main studio was Danish A-Film. For budget and deadline reasons, it was done as an international co-production. In Ireland, there was Teraglyphe working at it, built from the ashes of the Don Bluth studios when he went back to the USA. And I worked on it at Munich Animation, in, yes, Germany. We had some ex-Amblimation people there, including our director. We worked from an English voice track. Did some of the scenes of the kids as fish. Worked on some other German features as well: Peterchens Mondfahrt, Fürchtlosen 4, Der Kleine Eisbär, Till Eulenspiegel, and directed one season of Hexe Lilli. After that, 2D mostly died. Or it's done on the cheap in countries like China. (As was Hexe Lilli.).
The character was a bit of a mix between LOTR Gollum and E.T. He was supposed to be Scottish; the keeper of the Loch Ness monster. Which was shot in Austria. Would have preferred it if it was a bit moire original. But the rig was fine for a mid budget TV show, and the deadlines were OK. Had fun working on it. (In Schleswig Holstein, near Süderbrarup, between Flensburg and Kiel.)
There's a lot of stuff going on in Germany,. Some of the Game of Thrones dragons were done at Pixomondo in Stuttgart, and Scanline does a lot of water FX for Hollywood. And Trixter and others are doing VFX for the MCU. Cartoony animation - that's another story, that mostly died...
100% with you on this. The most interesting animation, if not the most realistic is still done by hand. Even the Blade Runner Scene, highly regarded as the single most convincing performance by a CG character was entirely keyed by hand (speaking of the facial). While I think AI will eventually be able to reach that level of realism, strict realism isn't usually the most interesting. I will take hand keyed animation over mocap and AI any day. I just don't want to be the one doing it or paying for it. Human animators are not going away. Only the tools will change.
Thank you everyone, especially for valuable insights from personal experience of people who animate professionally.
One minor point related to context. Last century, the industry had Disney's cel animators, Harryhausen's wireframe stop motion, Rankin and Bass's claymation stop motion, and the Andersons' marionettes all being professional at the same time. There wasn't just one way that the industry animated, or just one style. This century, a variety of styles and techniques continue to coexist. I believe that there are potential audiences for stylized, cartoony, non-photorealistic animations, at least as indicated by rankings of top animated shows.
https://www.ranker.com/list/animated-tv-shows-new-episodes-2019/ranker-tv
It's more like CGI rules and the rest sort of struggle to survive right now. A lot of classical animators basically went out of business.
But I do hope all art forms survive. They all have their merits, strengths and weaknesses.
If by classical animators, you mean the old school pen and ink cell style animators, yes you are right, that tech is history. But if those animators are struggling to survive right now, its entirely on them. The march of innovation moves on and there is no reason to continue with an antiquated process of doing things when there are much faster ways of doing the same thing. It doesn't have to die as an art form, but as a commercial workflow, it has almost zero viability and the majority of those old style artists have retired or upgraded their skills to keep up with new technology. 2D cell style animation is doing just fine now, IMO, and just like any other profession, artists have to keep up with the times if they want to work.
I would certainly hope so. Photorealistic, 3D animation is extremely labor intensive, expensive and difficult to do right. Small independents often don't have the funding to produce it and the story doesn't always need it anyways. The bulk of animation will continue to be NPR, stylized cartoons as it has always been.
It's not tech. It's art. It is bringing flat drawings to life.
The piano has not become obsolete because someone invented a synthesizer either.
We now mostly have vector graphics in 2D. Sterile and most of it ugly like hell. It's not doing the same thing. It's approaching handdrawn 2D in a cheaper way. And in an inferior way. Last show I supervised was animated in flash. Motions limited to two dimensions. Simple slow headturns were next to impossible. Yay progress....
Handdrawn animation was not tech. It was draftmanship. We animated with our bellys. And if we were limited, than by our skills, not by the tech. 70 year old Bugs Bunnys or Tom & Jerrys still look vastly superior compared to most 2d stuff produced today.
CGI - that's tech yes. Mostly it's intellectual rather than intuitive. Most of the Disney and Pixar 3D animators still prepare their animation as thumbnail sketches. The more technical people rarely have a good instinct for acting. Way too much in love with the tech. Graph editors are highly unintuitive. I consiodered them the enemy more than my friend. I sort of managed to achieve junior animator status. Many classical animators were completely a-technical. Hated computers. And that was it.
Is it a fair trade? Is Frozen better than Fantasia? I don't think so. Is the new Lion King better than the old one? Dream on. It's more realistic. And all the magic's gone. Somebody lost track of the magic of moving drawings and decided that everything is better when it looks more photorealistic. Favreau should have stuck to the MCU.
Which is also one of my complaints right now. People seem to be in love with software and hardware more than with actually creating the art.
Not very clear what you meant. Are we going to have at last proper inverse kinematics without sliding feet and hip rotations? If so, that would really be an important step towards making Daz Studio a more professional animation tool with more friendly rigs.
ARRRGH!!...No Dissagreement here
I can not comment here,on the last two SW films, and stay within the Daz forum TOS!!
Chemical mixing at Eastman Kodak was once a master craft...
the digital Camera sundered that "Art form" extinct.
We all could give numerous, similar examples
Honestly I dont chagrin anyone being a Luddite.
Frankly Based on what I know about the way human eyesight actually functions,I beleive 4K is largely a marketing gimmick.
A redundant waste of bandwith & storage at this point in time ,to say nothing of 8K.
But it is here to stay.. so be it
However it seems to me that most Luddites are typically people who USED to have Status in some arena or another and are always railing against the inevitable progress or paradigm shift that removed that status making them less relevant as they stubbornly refused to adapt to the times.
Is it really rational or fair to expect Disney and its employees and their families to stay stuck in the past, teetering on the verge of financial ruin because of some silly ,romantic notion that noble suffering to maintain the purity of ones "Artform" is somehow more important than feeding your newborn baby or having health insurance ?.
For the record I am not a Mocap kitbasher who dismisses hand keying
as some vestigial relic of a by gone Era.
I hand key all of my secondary motion on top of my base layer body locomotion including my facial expressions on top of software generated lipsinc
My IMBD listing is for a film client that micro directed every second
of a Skateboarding videogame sequence I "simulated" with poser and
C4D All hand keyed "curb tricks" in poser 6
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4134490/
The films trailer here:
An outtake of my animation being used in the fake on screen video game
I love hand keying !!
however Hand keying everything is simply not a logical approach to achieving My creative objectives or meeting a paying clients deadline.
I don't remember The Frog Princess making a loss.
And i don't think you can compare 2D vs 3D with chemical photography vs Digital photography.
It's more like comparing photography wiht painting.
Has photography made painting redundant?
Hardly. Except for family portraits.
3D has a different feel and a different look, and there are still lots of people preferring 2D.
Mocap has a different feel and look as keyframing. Try to do cartoony stuff in mocap and you'll fail miserably.
I rather watch a Pixar or Disney 3D film than a mocapped Robert Zemeckis trainwreck like Beowulf, Polar Express, Monster House or Mars Needs Moms. All of which bombed at the box office. (But hey, he had a huge hit with hand animated Roger Rabbit) Pixar and Disney (and Dreamworks and Illumination and others) are making billions with key framing. Who on earth would think it's obsolete?
Key framing is not an obsolete technique.
It's superior for a lot of things.
Mocap? I think it's good for stuntman replacement, alien creatures, video games and some superhero action stuff. Other than that, I don't need it.
Because I want to. Both hang out here, and learn other software.
And, because by learning other software, it helps my skills in Studio.
I don't find anyone here making the argument that hand keyframe animation is obsolete. Most would probably agree with you. It just isn't practical for filmmakers you find on this site. We have to be a one-man studio and hand keying is a waste of our time. If I had the money to pay a band of animators, hand keying would be a serious consideration for me.
I have all the The Little Polar Bear cartoons too. They are good. You are right there have been lots of good animations in Europe that gets ignored because it is not Disney or Pixar or so-on.
Anyone remember those tiny paper flipbooks that would create an animation when flipped through that used to come as prizes in Crackerjack?
This seems to be picking up the tone of a political or religious debate - perhaps it is time to ease back on the heat.
I think one of the main points of difference is our use of DAZ Studio/Poser. I consider both to be hobbyist programs and that's how I use them. Given a proper graph editor I might want to do 11 Seconds Club entries with it (The 11 Seconds Club is a challenge for key framers to do a short scene using an 11 second voice fragment from an existing hollywood film) I would never use them professionally, or for creating entire shorts. When I was still a 2D only guy I used Poser to get a better understanding of CGI - rigs, keyframes, shaders, etc) to have a base foundation when I started practicing in the way more complicated Maya. Other than that I use DS and predominantly Poser only for creating stills. Have some vague notion maybe doing a graphic novel one day when I have everything I need in my runtime. What I mostly like about DS/Poser is that I don't have to model and rig my assets.The available content more than the actual software.
As the software is at its current state, I would never use it for commercial animation assignments. If I ever do make my animated short it will be classically handdrawn. Not becuase I'm a luddite, but becuase I still think it to be the best looking type of animation I know. The same reason why I prefer American Songbook music that was written well before I was born to the bland stuff in the hitparades today. And why Mozart is still better than the whole heap of them together. Because modern or high-tech does not define quality.
Other than that I always considered animation to be a group effort. A lot of the joy I got was interacting with the other artists. And learning from them. I'd rather not be a one man studio, except for some hobby stuff.
But again, that's just my angle, what I want to do with DS and why I would like a decent graph editor. Mostly just to play and fool around with a bit.
Some of the animators made the jump to America and joined the big studios. One of them, a very talented guy, became a co-director for the third Kung Fu Panda movie at Dreamworks. I didn't want to leave Europe (and wasn't that talented) . When I started to consider it I was too late for 2D and too much of a beginner in 3D. Many of the CGI people working at the studio during my last 2D gig moved to Vancouver.
But yeah, 1990s, first half of the 2000s were a fine time for classical animation here. Four big German studios (Hahn, Trickcompany, Cartoon Film and Munich Animation and some smaller ones like ASL and Trixter) chunking out feature films and TV series. Along with studios in other countries.
I was finding this interesting reading in spite of having the Original Poster on ignore
Sempie offers some real insight into professional animation and Wolf’s points are valid too, I didn’t think they were arguing just giving different perspectives and advantages of both methods.
I have no quarrel with anyone...
What a great thread, nice to read there are others that still would keying by hand above pre-made mocaps.
that daz never have maya render engine, we all know.
But a few beter tools to do it's character animate, who can't like that?
If an old stupped X-game'villa had a better motionsystem to make actors move in 2009, we could expect 10 years later good Ik system would be basic mainstream.