Daz 3D
Daz Productions, Inc
224 S 200 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Daz 3D is part of 
JOIN DAZ
Daz 3D
Daz Productions, Inc
224 S 200 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Daz 3D is part of
Daz 3D
Daz Productions, Inc
224 S 200 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Daz 3D is part of
JOIN DAZ
Daz 3D
Daz Productions, Inc
224 S 200 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Daz 3D is part of
Comments
Very nice. Thanks for sharing. I like your animation thus far.
I'm thinking the program would have an easier time reading the motion, if there was more contrast from the background. more light in general or lighter color fabric.
Put a bunch more work into this, and for now, this will have to be good enough. Found a way to fill in the background without exploding the render time, got an animated HDRI working, gave her hair, reframed it, probably some other stuff. Any attempt I've made to improve the quality of the render (let alone the size) would balloon the render times to around 30 minutes per frame, at least.
That water animation is really nice.
A short animation featuring the IronStar spaceship model. It is 1114 frames rendered over 5 days on my ancient I7 with a laughable video card. The frames were assembled and edited with Hitfilm Express. All of the models used are intended for 3Delight use, so I went back and applied emissives to any surface that would act as a light source like lights (obvious), display screens, stars, etc...
I've been experimenting with Cascadeur, which is a great free* tool for character animation that works well enough with Genesis 8 characters despite all their peculiarities. Considering I've barely attempted character animation before, I think it turned out pretty well, and I learned several important lessons in the process.
*it's free for now with a paid option, but it's still early in its development. Once they've released a full build, it might go paid only, and the free version does have some limitations that might make it unfeasible for some of the more seasoned animators.
Hoo boy. Still lots to do on this one, from small fixes to the animation to finishing his outfit to working out what happened to the fire in its first few frames to filling out the environment to learning how to effectively use DOF and motion blur in Cycles 4D to....
Maybe a weird question, but how do you actually import FBX animation into DS? I built my Cascadeur animations on G8 characters, and I have no problem using them in C4D or Houdini, but the only way I've found to get them into DS is to import the FBX, then Copy Figure and paste to a G8, but the results always look wonky, like I'm trying to use G3 animation on a G8 or something.
It has a very bad issue: subscriptions.
Subscriptions for softwares are the worst thing ever, I prefer to pay once for my copy and use it as much as I want.
But it's a great tool, anyway.
For the moment, it is still free for shorter sequences. OK for a <5 min. movie. I *think* the rentware thing is focused on exporting to games. Run run run, shoot shoot shoot.
So this is the Vanguard ship and I've lit all the panels and lights as iray emissives. I did the same with the station which is built out of parts of Solaris Station parts. Other than some odd flickering from the emissives, it works pretty well. Everything was imaged and animated with Daz Studio. Video editing was done with Hitfilm express.
looks good. Lot of work went into lighting the ship. Thanks for sharing.
A Iray render with some dForce and lip syncing.
Well, I'm pretty new to creating actual animations but Cascadeur is pretty cool and imports back into daz studio very well. I did have a problem not being able to export from cascadeur in the "free version" due to Genesis8 bone count (i think that's what the problem was) but I just found the solution was to, in daz studeo joint editor, delete all the bones that I wouldnt be using in Cascadeur (facial rig mostly) befor exporting the fbx to animate in Cascadeur.
So now that I know it works and I can get the animations back into daz studio I'm happy to try to learn how to make fancy animations lol ;-)
edit -ok maybe not "very well" ...but somewhat ok
How do you apply the animations to a figure in DS?
Export from Cascadeur as "fbx without meshes" then import the fbx into daz, lower to ground and save as animated pose preset
then apply pose preset to a loaded Genesis 8
ps it's not perfect or anything, still some foot slipage, not sure how to fix that
Still, very promising
OH! save as an aniblock seems to work much better for me
So create aniblock from studio keyframes (I used direct copy) save that and use on another genesis 8.
Enough testing for tonight hehe
I'm still not having any success with it. Could you play around with this and see if you can make it work?
Yeah, the aniblock thing didnt work on that one. Poor G8F was flung around the scene. And I can't replicate one I tried earlier that worked. Weirdness! Back to the drawing board -facepalm-
Here's your animation using the copy figure way.
on the fbx import - edit>copy figure
on Genesis 8 - edit>paste>Paste figure pose
Is this how it looks when you've tried it? Seems still some foot slippage. I cleared animation on the pectorals. The figure on the right, I tried moving the hip bone/points roughly into same position as normal genesis 8 on the fbx first. seemed to make a slight difference.
This is more or less how it turns out when I tried to do it, as well. For reference, this is the animation inside Cascadeur:
It's built on a G8F, and I definitely didn't do anything with the pectorals, so I don't know where that's come from. Like I said, I can get the animations I've made onto G8 figures in C4D and Houdini, but DS is thwarting all my efforts to import. Hopefully Cascadeur adds a BVH export option soon, because that's what I've had the best luck with when importing animations into DS.
Looks good. If only the import to daz worked better
I was all excited too. I think I'll learn to animate in Cascadeur anyway though and hope things improve. I noticed and "export to daz button" in cascadeur commands menu but it doesnt seem to work either at the moment.
I was starting to figure out how to make Cycles look good when it became unusable for me, so now I'm back to square one with Octane.
Like I said, the animation works just fine on a G8 in other programs, so I don't know why DS of all programs would have trouble with it. Both of the Avatar animations I've posted in this thread were built with Cascadeur and applied to G8.1s bridged into C4D.
Super, what did you use for lip sync? It looked good.
Here's what I've got to show for several months of work. The good news is that I've been putting in a lot of groundwork, so future shots will be much easier to execute.
edit: turns out I've only been working on this for about two months, so I guess I don't have to feel quite so bad about only having six seconds of footage to show for it.
Thanks! I used a free tool called Wav2Lip available on Github.