Animation vs Still Art?
nelsonsmith
Posts: 1,337
in The Commons
Just out of curiosityhow many of you who use Daz use it for animation , CG artwork, or both? The subject seems to come up quite often concerning Daz's functionality as a professional, or merely hobbyist software, and it just occurred to me that some people base their decision on the application people are using the software for.
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I use it for both.
Looking at the Store content I would say the majority of Daz user in this community use DAZ studio for rendering stills or single images
And Daz's Entire business model for this store is built ariound those who render stills.
I use Daz studio for both Animation & Illustrations . but my primary interest with daz studio is to use it for animation and when i shop for 3d content i mostly look to see how i can use it in animation. . I prefer 3dl over iray for animation But that can change in the future as I learn to get better render times using Iray. Some of my videos. Ivy's Animations
So far I am using it for stills but I have been thinking of some of those stills as storyboarding for later animations. However I don't know if that will be in DAZ Studio, Cararra, Blender, or even Unity yet although so I know how Unity works much better and easier than DAZ Studio animations and am not going for iRay style animation stills I will probably use Unity because the physics and all the animations tools are there and there are so many other tools to buy in their Asset Store to make even that easier.
I'd love to use Daz for animation, but I need to:
1). Either get a new graphics card or computer or have a little more patience in the set up that I've got
2). Get Animate2
I have done a short animation render of the basic G2F model with no skin tex, clothes or hair. But, when I try to render with skin tex, clothes and hair (hair being the worst), the render just slows completely or doesn't move past 2 or 3%.
So, for now, it's mostly still renders.
A little fairy told me DS animator vs still photographer ratio has gone from 1:9 to 2:8 within a year, thanks to
1. iRay implementation
2. Daz3D animation push on YouTube.
I use DS for animation 100%, stills 0%.
With just a bit more input from official and plugin creators DS could gain even more next gen users. IMO
I use DAZ 100% for iray animation.
ha
a thread to count the daz orphanes
me too
thread title should say
"where art thou pour daz animators ?
the vs is misleading
I use DAZ Studio for both Animation and Stills, however you kinda need a few plugins to make animation work a tad bit easier on yourself.
Mainly these two help a bunch:
- KeyMate
- GraphMate
The basic tools let you make an animation, but these two plugins simplify it a lot. Keymate makes it easier to work with your Keyframes, while Graphmate helps sort out motion and odd bugs that sometimes happen.
To be honest, I made Iray animations with a pretty old GPU that has around 384 CUDA cores (Yes, three hundred eighty four), so... yeah. Iray is not bad for animations, you just have to setup a limit for your image iterations so each frame renders rather quickly.*coughorhaveabetterrigcough*
Also - never used Animate2. But from my experience, it is not a must-have to animate - it just makes it easier to do certain things.
I will admit, when I first saw the iclone, dynamic cloth demo, I was impressed because even if you were using high end software, to achieve that fluidity of movement could take years to master. Who knows, maybe to achieve that level of animation quality with Daz/iclone might take months to master as well; I'm curious to find out. All software has a learning curve and all take some degree of dedication to master. For the people who seem to knock Daz as a serious animation tool, I wonder what level of mastery with the program they have managed to achieve, since consumer products in the hands of someone who knows what they're about can often produce professional results.
...guess I'm one of the rare few here who is only interested in stills. Used to paint and draw, until my arthritis got the best of me and made it difficult to hold a pencil or brush steady without downing Adivl like M&Ms. Found 3D CG to be a nice medium to get back into art and save my stomach.
Did a bit of flat and cel based animation in college, long before everything went digital and when I still had a steady hand. The school I went to had one of the few multi plane animation stands in the nation, and the instructor was a former Disney animator. Lots of work for a very short tme but very rewarding to see your drawings come to life.
Don't really have a system with the horsepower to support CG animation even if I wanted to try it (and don't have the budget to build one). Crikey, it barely can cope with rendering stills in Iray sometimes whereas with 3DL it works just fine.
Stills. I just never got into animation.
I tried Cararra 8.5.x for about 30 minutes today but it didn't take long for it to crash.
To be fair no level of "mastery" can overcome the limitaions
imposed by a softwares lack of fundamental tools for character animation creation.
For Example before the introduction of the third party GraphMate&keyMate plugins ,trying to edit an animated character's motion was essentially a pointless exercise
with the ridiculously primitive graph thingy that ships with Daz studio.
And even with the aniblock nonlinear motion clip system (another third party paid addon),
Daz studio has no proper IK solver to pin a figures feet to the floor during lowerbody hip movements..
I get it... the Daz business model is based on people who buy content ,load it and render still images mostly of the latest Daz female.
But the gaming industry's revenues now exceed that of Hollywood movies.
even if you Dont play video games you still know that Video game characters tend to move around alot.
So if Daz were really serious about entering that market
thery would offer better native animation tools that ship with Daz studio instead of just trying to sell lower resolution versions of the same old content content to the unity users as they are now doing at "Morph3D"
And for animation Genesis 3 is literally a step backwards despite the marketing Hype.
None of the above mentioned third party add ons work with the figure so to get her /him animated requires 3 times the labor ,even for us experienced animators, just to get a simple
walk cycle like this one we created yesterday
I couldn't agree more. BTW I'm proud of you wolf you did good with your g3 walk cycle. I dunno there is something unnatural about the way g3 bends during walk/run cycles i tried creating some 3 or 4 times with a lot worst result than what you got. so thumbs up to ya . Its not like I'm not trying to get g3 to work in my animation, its just dam hard to get g3 to cooperate for what i want it to do , some bends are weird ,& like you said the conversion tools I have tired leave me spending a ton of time reediting the converted motions files. its very discouraging considering how great the clothing and props look .
This is what gets me then. When Daz does their promo spots and the like what the hell are they using to animate with since their animations tend to be smooth as silk?
And don't get me wrong. I've never considered using Daz as an animation tool, not when you have dedicated software specifically for animation out there that is available to anyone who wants learn, but I have seen fantastic animation that was purported to have been done with Daz that was as good as stuff I've seen done with Hi-end software. So it's understandable how I can assume it's the users and not necessarily the tool itself that is a major factor in the end results. In filmwork I've discovered that necessity oft-times causes non-professionals to be more ingenious than people who have other options. It has nothing to do with how many work arounds or extra work you might have to do to get the same results, if it's all you've got then you do it; simple as that. I don't knock filmmakers who use DSLRs, or DSLRs because I've never "had" to use one; therefore I never had to get serious about learning the intricacies of DSLR filmmaking. Just saying if you're a Disney animator using Maya and Renderman, Daz is simply going to be a hobby for you, why would it ever occur to you to learn to use it the way a person would who can't afford Maya or the like?
I don't see much movement in that promo video. A lot of camera moving around and she turns her head a little but the character kind of stays in one place.
And I use Daz for stills but animation would be fun.
It has a brief walk cycle though. It's not necessary "smooth as silk", but I've seen worse done on dedicated CG software. Convincing walk cycles are damn hard, Many of the walk cycles I see in daz don't look the way they look because of the software, but they look like they do because of the same reason a lot of clothing for Daz female figures don't look like clothing any real woman would actually wear; it's simply overstylized in an attempt to be sexy.
Daz properly used the Genesis 3 Female(s) & Victoria 7 High Heel Walk aniBlock
which is great if the only thing you want its girls strutting around in High heels.
These walk cycles are better more cat like in movements ,Sexy Walk Cycle for Genesis 3 Female(s)
But then again not really useful if you want to use it for a kid or teen walking down the street.
But I will give a big thumbs up to Posermocap for Ambient Moves Volume 1. which is for both g2 nd g3 . Though I'll be honest i only tested them with g3 and have use them more for genesis 2 because that is what I have been working with mostly
Me too.
Myself , I like to tell stories using daz, and (still art) story boarding is okay. But animation is a challenge and pushes the limits of my imagination, so I look at making animation with daz as a puzzle. I take one step at a time to create the animation-puzzle-peice, and then add the pieces together in a film editor, and I get my animated story when finished. , It take a whole different set of skills creating animation. Mostly just because you have to combined your knowledge of creating still art with Daz and the the art of movie making, sound editing, Directing , and the creation of motion. then learn how to incorporate all that combined knowledge and skills into animated film.. which is not easy when using Daz as the software & the developers keeps moving the target on how to use it . it really makes animators like me looks for solutions where the files and mesh won't change or break compatibility with the companies own 3d content every time there is a software update. thats the most frustrating part using daz for animation. you don't see that issue with Vue, Autodesk, Blender, Poser, etc etc. which is really to bad because daz has some of the best content for detailed animation. Its = just the (err cough-people -cough) that develop the software keep breaking its compatibility with their own content they sell. that is what you hear us animators complain about the most too.
I have to disagree with this. I was doing animation before the Commodore Amiga was released (on mainframes). I had even written an animation/simulation package that helped several people complete their thesis projects using animation for making support videos, and these used simple text files to define the "action". It is perfectly possible to animate "frame-by-frame" without the use of a timeline or key editor or dope-sheet or even puppeteer type setups. One has to use the older tried-and-true storyboard to keyframe and then manual inbetweening. It is tedious, but it is done.
When it was first released as an OSS package, there were several decent animations done with POVray that involved humanoid motion. Obviously, the models are nowhere near today's standards but the animation is still very good.
Kendall
I think the root of the problem is that DAZ does mot have "native" animation capabilities, at least in the way I suspect you mean; it's all third party plugins. Let's not forget that it was initially designed as a means of continued business if the maker of Poser ever stopped updating it. Animate2 and the other tools ARE the closest you're going to get to native animation tools.
There are many factors to consider when making the distinction between "professional" and "hobbyist" software. If you consider any software that has been used to produce something in a professional project or work for hire, then DS is definitely a "professional" software, as many people use it to produce images and content (probably also animations) for sale or in a work for hire environment. But, if you consider what the vast majority of the user base are, I would guess that DS is definitely a "hobbyist" software.
There are a lot of people who use DS in a professional pipeline for the production af still images. It is an ideal tool for this type of work, especially for graphics with human figures. Does this make it a "professional" software? That really depends on how you want to define "professional".
However, the functions and features available in/for DS for animation simply pale in comparison to Maya, Blender, 3DS, etc. This is especially true when you consider the custom controls for efficient animation of custom made figures (or any figures), skin and "soft" surface animation (i.e. ripples in the skin/flesh of a large dinosaur as it walks), animation of water (streams and oceans/lakes), wind blowing through grass and trees, constrained dynamic cloth/hair. particle systems, etc. When considering these additional needs for something more than simple figure movement, then DS simply doesn't hold up to what typically is considered as professional 3D animation tool sets.
This doesn't mean that DS can't be used effectively for certain types of animation, and possibly even professional animation where some of the additional tools aren't needed (or where the user can afford to invest time in the required additional time/work to mitigate a needed deficiency). I've seen a few outstanding works that were very very "professional" where someone has used DS for the animation. I've also seen a lot of animation that fits the hobbyist category.
IMVHO, DS is not what I would consider professional level 3D software package. However, it does have several professional level features, and is definitely capable of producing professional quality results. I think one of my favorite sayings fits well here, "It's not the the size of the dog in the fight (or in this case the level of "professional" tools available), but the size of the fight in the dog (or in this case the skill level, desire, and creativity of the person using the software)".
To answer the original question, I primarily use DAZ products for still renders, but have done animations as well ("professional" animation with Carrara).
I think DS can fill a huge gap for creatives who want to animate, much like camcorders did for amateur filmmakers. I remember going to film school and learning to film with hand crank Bolex cameras, hand held light meters, I used to be able to tell you the f-stop and film speed needed just by instinct. That was so long ago. Physically cutting and splicing 16mm film. This was during the time of camcorders, but prior to Apple releasing Final Cut, and imovie, etc. prior to NLE being available to everyone. Then I wound up being a Production Assistant in NY and LA, wound up hating the whole industry, completely left it. Then got into IT field. Then within a couple years, film students were cutting together films and we had the Blair Witch era of filmmaking. Sure a lot of it was crap and still is, but there was also a new age of low cost entry into filmmaking and really great documentaries that would have never been made otherwise.
Now take DS, and yeah it might lack a lot of things, but I would never be able to make the short animations I've made so far, in just 6 months time, if I had to learn and master any of those more expensive "professional" animation suites. And I realize Blender is free, but it was always intimidating to me and I never got into it. Maybe its changed now, I don't know. But what I do know is that I'm currently 10 minutes into another short animation, I'm able to do about 2 minutes of animation a week. I think thats good for going it alone without a team of animators. And in a year I should be able to complete a 90 minute animation film by myself. I see people go to animation/art school for years, to end up 100K in debt, with a short reel of 2-3 minutes of animation, and with a job they they hate working for someone else, because they have to pay off that debt.
Or you can do it the cheap "non professional" way, but make animations that interest you in a very short time.
I think the key is just to work around the limitations. If the feet don't always touch the ground, don't frame the feet in the shot. Simple. How often do you actually see anything but the upper body and face in most films anyway? A lot of limitations can be covered with a guerilla filmmaker attitude, creative camera angles, editing, etc. I might change my tune in another 6 months. But right now I keep getting better, and so far my only limitations are my own. And like I said, the key I think is to creatively approach the problem and find work arounds for the limitations. At the end of the day, it comes down to your story telling ability, and your passion for making it happen.
Before getting into 3D/CG I worked for 20 years in the printing industry as Graphic Designer for 4 color offset press.
Sure I can recall the bygone days of "postscript" printing where it took 26 pages of postscript page description language to describe one printed 8.5x 11 page with the word "cat" in times new roman font.
Or the messy process of chemical film image setters to develop our four color process CMYK separations to be manually "stripped up" and cut out by hand to shoot light through them to make aluminum printing plates...Arrgh!!
But once Adobe gave us the highly portable PDF format and Printing presses evolved from brobdignagian,room sized monstrosities to sleek,Clean,quiet Digital composite printers,we gladly left all of those tedious labor& cost intensive tools in the past ........where they belong.
I am painfully aware that here near the end of 2016 that it is perfectly possible to animate "frame-by-frame"
But why should we ???and what about physics type simulations with ragdoll character interaction with rigid bodies such as this one we did over five years ago with C4D ,Vicky 4 and poser 6??
without the proper simulation tools built in to your program No amount of manual "mastery" will give you a result like this and certainly NOT in a Client directed ,deadline oriented service environment.
IIRC The walk cycle part of that "Eva 7" promo was made
by the vendor "Skamotion"
http://www.skamotion.com/animation.php
He has an optical human mocap system and I remember him posting in a thread how that animation took him "weeks" to develop due to the Strange rigging of genesis 3.
His stuff is accurate& realistic ,if you only need that kind of animation, and not a knock on "Skamotion" but
if the Gaming industry is the growth market it appears to be,
we are going to need alot more action and everyday character motions as I dont see many game titles based around endless sexy "booty shaking" runway struts.