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It's a Smaug "LOTR Dragon" thing.
...I received a comment on my railway station scene where the viewer said he thought it was a photograph until he saw the character closest to the camera. The scene was rendered in Iray, took all night to complete (as it went into swap mode) which had 8 figures (including the train driver) a wet fog volumetric effect, multiple emissive lights, and all the surfaces (including the brolly held by one character had a slight reflective sheen from the dampness. Since the one character closest to the camera (a Genesis 1 figure with the best skin I could find in my library) was not as enveloped in the mist, the skin quality (or slight lack thereof) tended to stand out more as a CG figure. It wouldbe interesting to take that character out and re-render the scene (thought about it), then post it to another gallery site to see what the reaction would be.
Before I added the characters I posted just the setting in the Iray Renders thread and one person (from the UK) said I captured what is known as a "grey day" so well he had to go get his sweater and put it on. Compared to my other Iray works, it is probably the closest I ever came to creating a photoreal image though at a huge time investment (much of which was rendering tests and the finished scene). The file itself is so "heavy" that it takes several minutes to load, a long time to move a prop or pose a character, and to calculate light and shadows before anything shows up in the render window. This is the scene that is 8.9 GB in size.
Got a link to the render ?
I used to be a professional character animator.
I was least limited by the cheapest tools: pencil, paper, eraser. The tools were almost invisible, an extension to my own limbs, and I could work in a very intuitive way, from the belly, without the need for thinking much and without getting distracted by a lot of technical stuff.
Then came 3D and I tried switching to Maya. Did do some professional keyframe animations with that, for the European TV and Movie market, but found the rigs quite rigid and limiting and the graph-editor very sterile and not intuitive at all. The simplest motion arcs meant hours of tweaking the curves in the graph editor, to get out all the jitters - because Maya sucks at automated tweening; you got to do all the fine tuning by hand It could be very frustrating; fixing an ellbow motion curve could cause a new jitter in the motion curve of the hand, etc.(I animated, in a sense, in the Studio/Poser way, as I got my characters pre-modelled, pre-rigged and pre-textured by other artists.) Never used mocap or automated lipsync; every pose and syllable was handcrafted, as the productions demanded, for maximum body language and facial expressions. A few seconds of animation every day, without the rendering, that's where the quality comes from, not the tool itself but from the talent, knowledge and time the artist invests.
As much as I dislike graph editors, you need one for decent keyframing and DAZ Studio and Poser are still sorely lacking in this department. The IK is so bad you can't even pin feet to the floor. I worked at a studio alongside people working on FX for Marvel superhero blockbusters and I've seen what the big packages can do that Studio and Poser cannot, even with the best artists around, because the tools are missing. I'm not saying you can't do decent pictures with them, but you do have a lot of restrictions because of a lack of tools. (On the plus-side, you don't need to do your own modeling, riging, texturing, etc, which you would in Maya in a non-studio environment.)
I like Poser/DAZ for creating still images rather fast with pre-made content, but that's where its limitations are. It's not really made for anything else than that.
Well, the upscale CGI is great if I want to go to HollyWood or be a pro in the industry. I keep a copy of Blender on my computer because I could see editing some special older peices made for V4 to have them work better in the future if I want to drag them out and continue to use them on future Genesis models. What I don't see is any more of a market for Advanced CGI art in the home or in people's lives in Mass Appeal. I see the Masses still like art to have a handmade feel to it before they choose to put it on their walls or pay for it. They want the feel of hand-drawn artwork. If it fools the eye, it might as well be a photo and would have to be a very special subject to interest them at all. My daughter is all into cartoons drawings and Anime style art and doing commissions for people as a buisness when she grows up. If I wanted to make Youtube animations and videos or my own animated cartoons I'd have a problem but I focus on still art. I can use Daz to make better characters, get a grip on how real lighting would affect a scene, I can use it to help me with proportions and scale. Its way better than the charcoal I was taught to use to lay out a painting. Combined with photoshop brushes and Krita and Elements, What kind of art can I make? I'd rather put the time into my 2D skills than getting better at all things 3D. 3D is great to me and I know it take time and work, however the public is enchanted with finding out how good your hands are. It was never impressing them that you fooled their eyes, it was about how great your hands and spacial abilities were. Could you sire a nuerosurgon if the babe went to medschool instead.....???? They want to know you put your hands all over that artwork even if they know this because it doesn't look like a photo or fool them in away except for the fact you scetched it out with Daz before you painted it and you don't have to tell them at all.
This!!! I use it for still art. If you want animate you need something else most of the time. But when asking myself what I should spend on a hobby, this was affordable. My money matters side clicks in all the time when people start talking about expensive software. My busy life doesn't leave me with lots of hours to play. I think Daz could really help me develope better 2d art skills and would be an amazing tool for that. I believe in adding value to the things. Painting over a Daz image would add value to the 2d work I could do. A good 2D image with a by-hand look would find its way into people's lives and onto their walls where as my orginal render would lack a certain personal touch and perhaps not be recognized as a form of art they liked. I can't change minds and hearts when it comes to what people expect when you say the word art. But nothing I have bought will really go to waste because I have a huge Daz library to draw upon and my content frees me to be quite creative and work on different styles. But I am sticking with still art because that's what I like. I may never sell my art, I am very selfish with my talents and usually lavish them freely on the people I love rather offer them to the public. But inside my head is a score card where I know how much hiring a maid for that, or eating out, or a necklace, or a print would go for if I had to put a price on it. Many people don't think homemakers are valuable and often I get taken for granted but I am keeping score thank you very much. At the end of the day I like to be worth a ton so I curb some spending and often do things that I can jack the value of up to ensure it is so. My husband is a buisnessman after all.....
I know that it exists, but even that is quite limited compared to Maya's graph editor - that one is bezier curve based with handles for easy manipulation. Also allows you to delete a lot of unnecessary keys along the way to make things smoother. We'd basically need a new GraphMate with added features.
Examples:
Basic graph editor functionality:
Animating using the graph editor:
...
https://kyotokid.deviantart.com/art/At-The-Station-570418704
Very nice!
...thanks.
Again that took all night, and lots of time even for rendering tests as well as just moving items around and posing. I actually preposed the characters individually but still had to make some minor adjustments afterwards (for placement I used a little trick I came up with for multiple character scenes where I put cube primitives at the location for each character and then use copy/paste to move them to where the cubes were after merging them in as it was much faster than transitioning from the zero point particularly as more characters were added).
Killer render n gallery :)
Daz/Iray has always been good with objects, it's the people that always give it away.
Anytime you go for a natural look.
And I do think 50% of the problem is not emulating a real photo or video media-.
...thank you.
...yeah shiny things like cars and sci-fi tech in particular look really great. Part of the matter with characters is not so much the skin surfaces (there's an entire thread devoted to just that topic which often times goes way over my head) but the figures themselves.
The best I've seen was a portrait of Teen Princess Leila that was featured on the site's main page a while ago however as I understand, it also involved a fair amount of postwork.
The version of Iray we have integrated in Daz also doesn't offer many of the features that the standalone version does. Same for 3DL though there are a few people here pushing the boundaries and opening up more of what it can do.
Well, we cross a weird line depending on the product or the method that the PA uses to create their skin. If it's a SAMPLE of skin (a texture SOURCED from an actual picture of a face) it sounds silly to say the skin doesn't look real. It's real skin. So that continues. If you sample textures and bits of actual images to make your 'surface' - you're doing something different than a digital/created/synthetic [from scratch using maths or shaders] approximation of a skinned surface.
And just like sampling in audio, the algorithm used to 'stretch' or 'blanket' or cover the wider areas with textures (or bits of the sampled sound) is where the details show.
Aside from the photo-accurate texture, it's now down to the physical modeling of contour, or bump maps, I believe they're called.
And I do further say, mileage varies - and (again just my opinion) that's why i believe people still say there are V4 figures that look better or more 'real' than Gen8 figures.
Usually the faces of those figures seem to be using the samples from a real profile picture for their skin texture(s).
---------------
Which is better, to model every pore and blemish and add moles and freckles or just grab the skin from a picture that has those details present?
Rhetorical question.
I will say one thing for those, there were PAs that actually hand-painted specular into the right areas. That seems extremely rare now.
The standard 3Delight shaders don't use some features, but as you know others have written shaders and scripts that do - so obviously DS does support (i.e. offer access to) those features.
The only Iray feature I am aware of that DS doesn't support (allowing for the stuff in the change log, as discussed by others in these threads) is motion blur.
...as I have seen there are displacement based grass shaders for Iray, being used in other programmes just not here. All we get is either the old "flattened under Plexiglas look" or have to use geometry which really bloats the polycount and slows rendering down even more
Meanwhile AoA released one for 3DL several years ago.
How long has it been since you last used Maya??
certainly it has Autoclamping by now ( cubic interpolation) to eliminate the "splinegraph overshoot" that you have just described.
Autoclamping is the default with the Graphmate addon fro DS
it does not exist in posers primitive, vestigial graph editor
even in the latest poser 11.
There is a free script for Daz studio called decimate that enables selective culling of keyframes for easier graph editing of imported mocap or Animate2 aniblocks baked to DS keyframes..
The main problem with both DS & Poser is a lack of a proper Foot
& hand Contact IK solver such as the on we have in Iclone Pro or the Autodesk products
I use Iclone pro 3Dxchange pipeline for most of my animation creation but I do fine tune it once the BVH is imported back to studio
where I add my lipsynch & facial animation.
The optional Add on tools for DS make this much easier than trying to edit imported mocap in poser.
A clip from one of my animated film project was recently promoted on the featured movies section of the Official Reallusion website.
Iclone Pro is a perfect example of how much tools matter when compared to Poser or the native DS tools for animation
The scorpion king is notorious for bad CGI .The fight sceen with Neo n 100's of Mr Smiths better but still.
Superman gets real close. Starwars Governor Wilhuff "Grand Moff" Tarkin ,No comment.
Kingdom of heaven nailed it best CGI dudes I've ever seen.
If Hollywood pro's with millions of dollars budget. Can't do realism ,Whats the odd's of are not millions budgets home grown armatures doing realism ?
...my feelings exactly.
I am incorrigible to take to a big action blockbuster at the cinema as I start picking out all the flaws I see. Often it is lighting mistakes (like the lighting on the model not blending in properly with the lighting in the live portion of the film), shiny surfaces not properly reflecting the actual surroundings, poor particle physics, and motion that just looks "forced" and too mechanical instead of fluid.
When the entire film is CG generated (like Pixar), it is easier to suspend disbelief as the world setting and characters have continuity and "mesh together" better with each other.
If they are MDL shaders they can be brought into DS by placing them in an MDL Shader directory and dragging them into Shader Mixer. I don't know how those shaders are working, or if they are in fact using Iray to generate the grass or if they are generating the mesh for it before passing the scene to Iray, but there are certainly options if the code is available.
" The simplest motion arcs meant hours of tweaking the curves in the graph editor, to get out all the jitters - because Maya sucks at automated tweening; you got to do all the fine tuning by hand It could be very frustrating; fixing an ellbow motion curve could cause a new jitter in the motion curve of the hand, etc."
Haven't animated in Maya since 2011. Last time I've had collegues next to me animating in Maya was 2014.
The curves that matter are the motion arcs that appear on the screen; everything should move on arcs, save for some mechanical stuff. The curves in the graph editor are just some tools that only the animator sees, and are meant to assist in creating the perfect on-screen arcs.
Say, I have keyframed a nice walkcycle with a fluent armswing. Now the director comes. He thinks, the hip schould be more bouncy, and the schoulder section could have a little more swing, and an offset of four frames. This changes everything in the animation chain, and now the arcs of the hands are off. I need to do counter-animation on the arms, etc, to fix it. And of course, the direcor liked the arm swing, so I cannot change that, I have to restore it. That's where the fun begins.
Problem is not the interpolation, the problem is the translation of movent of several attributes over three axes over joints. When you're talking flat projection (even stereoscopic movies are for all practical purposes still flat, just split in two slightly different flat images) even perfect curves on every attribute can still cause jitters. Legs often had problems like these; sometimes even extra handles were added on eg the knees for fixing stuff.
Without handles to change the tangents of the curves in the graph editor changing the spacing (ease in/ease out) is cumbersome. You need much more keys for that. iClone was always renowned for too even interpolation and very floaty, weightless movements. That's what you get from automated interpolation. Spacing (ease ins and ease outs with some nice rythm) can make or break our scene.
Only ever did keyframe animation. Either handdrawn or in 3D. Without even live action reference. No automated lipsync either, that destroys all acting. Got my characters in their T-Poses, got my instructions from the director, got a voice track, created my own poses, and worked from that. My job was mostly transferring my knowledge of acting, body language and the 12 basic principles of animation over to Maya, which was just a dumb tool, no miracle machine, that did almost everything wrong that it did automatically. I actually hate pose to pose animation ('blocking,' in Maya), whenever I could I would anymate from the belly, straight ahead, just going with the flow. The perfect way to make a mess of your graphs. So I would animate in my messy way until I had some base animation with a nice timing. I would then select a few key extremes, key all attributes for those frames, delete everything else inbetween, and do the finetuning with a more or less orderly graph editor. With the handles on the bezier splines as my best tool to finetune the spacing, all the ease ins and ease outs.
Maya's strength is in its ability to handle large numbers of characters
for Major crowd scenes such as the epic battles depicted in shows like HBOs' game of thrones.
None of that is hand keyed obviously as it would not be practical to have artists spending hours editing four frames in a deadline oriented environment.
Of course, most Maya Shops have TD's on hand to write MEL script on the fly to automate many tasks
Hand curated animation is the only way to learn the basic principles
and every animator needs to learn to hand key using both graph editor and edit large number of keys using a Dope sheet.
However when you are a single artist wanting to do scenes with multiple characters who talk, fight get knocked about
hand keying everything is simply not practical and I personally do not beleive in masochistic excercises in self flagellation for the sake of "purity"
and I have found that My clients only care if the finished product meets their requirements not wether an automated solution was deployed or not.
Quite the Pity about the subscription only feature of Autodesk products though...it certainly assures that I will never be customer.
It's only the acting stuff - preferably cartoony Disney/Pixar style - that I'm interested in. Disney and Pixar have their own software and don't use Maya; studios like Blue Sky (or Weta, for that matter) do use Maya. I'm not interested in crowd scenes or epic battles at all (But to each his own, of course). Got one or two in-house master classes by Kyle Balda, a former Pixar animator, where I learned some of the tricks, and way before that I attended Richard Williams' traditional animation master class, who covered the basics of motion quite thouroughly. For my character animation scenes, only about 12 seconds of character animations were required per animator, even less for juniors. We had to polish all our arcs.
Trixter, where I worked for a while, did shots for the Marvel MCU movies - mostly a mix of mocap and keyframe animation. With supervisors nitpicking over each and every motion arc. Yeah, we had MEL wizards there, as well.(I worked at a 2D project and was never involved in the Marvel stuff, but I had an interesting inside look at how that stuff is made.)
I know someone who worked at the first and second season GOT dragons, at Pixomondo - and two of Weta's Smaug animators - that's just old fashioned character animation; creature animators are still in demand and work the old fashioned way, key by key. Maya all the way.
Maya's not only in demand for its crowd simulation capabilities; for many of the CG character animateors I spoke with, it's their favorite animation program. And most of the cartoony 3D animation is still done without mocap, key by painstalking key.
...scripting or converting shaders in the Shader mixer is beyond my expertise.
I think it’s beyond my expertise, too – but I don’t let that stop me! lo
- Greg
...If it were Carrara, it would be different because I find that programme's Shader Tab to be more intuitive. The one donwside is I cannot use the most recent and refined versions of my characters as Carrara only supports up to G2.
MDL shaders ... can be brought into DS by placing them in an MDL Shader directory and dragging them into Shader Mixer is the conversion process. No scripting or coding required.