Q's ABOUT ANIMATING & SAVING CHARACTERS W/ BAKED TEXTURES?
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HELLO! I hope everyone is well. So I have a few questions. Firstly, I am in no way a pro. I have been dabbling in DAZ Studio for about 8 years now and have made some nice static renders for my skill level but far drom a master. I wan't to get into animating, so where my questions stem from. My pc is not really powerful. I have a mac mini with half of my drive running windows 7. So i do not hav a fancy graphics card just the bulit in hardware and 16 gigs of ram.
I am not trying to achieve photorealism just some basic animations. LONG STORY SHORT: Is there a way you can create yourt specific characters with all their clothing and hair and such and them save them as a complete character but have all of the textures BAKED in as to keep resources low when rendering the animation in DAZ Studio. I hope I have made some sorty of sense with what I am wanting. And fingers crossed it can and has been done and some of you will have the "know how" to guide me t hrough this. Thanks for you time and patience as I rambled on. As always THANK YOU!
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I know what you need to do, it's called compositing. I have tried to render an animation in DAZ Studio, with & without compositing, and it's no contest - you will want to composite until you have an array or 200+ CPU to render your animated scene.
1) Create your environment.
2) Create your character(s) that will be animated.
3) Animate your character(s). Often it won't be possible but try to design your scene so that no shadows are cast by the animate characters except on the ground. Try to animate the character(s) to were they don't cast shows on each other either, often not possible.
4) Hide your character(s) & render your enviroment. Save it.
5) Hide the environment, everything except the currecnt charact @ of # character(s) you have created animations for, & then render animated frames of character 1 of # character(s), save it, then character 2 of # character(s) & save it, and so on up to # character(s).
6) Composite those # character(s) on the environment render you created in 4.
7) DAZ Studio is really not good at compositing or sound editing or credits creation or special effects or .... Search on YouTube for Blender tutorials on how to composite rendered frames of an animation and add sound to them. You may want to consider doing the animation creation in Blender too by exporting your DAZ Studio scene to Blender using the diffeomorphic.se Blender DAZ Scene imported. Fair warning: you would then have to do a lot of editing of the materials surfaces and lighting in Blender to get them to be as reasonably pleasing as the iRay scene looks after render in DAZ Studio.
I'm on an IMac with 8Gb RAM. I'm using 3Delight for all my animations (and stills), and very rarely have any problems rendering my scenes even if they can be fairly complex, (2-4 characters, large environments). Compositing gets pretty complex as soon as you have camera movement, so that is not a solution for me. If I have a static camera, which is not that often, I usually render against a background using shadowcatchers, which is very effective and fast. Also for characters in the background I delete displacement- normal and possibly bumpmaps to save on resources. With a bit of fiddling I usually can keep rendertimes/frame under 90 sec. without having to simplify things too much. But there's the scene optimizer if you need to reduce textures, I think it's even more relevant if you plan to use IRay for rendering out your animations. IRay is a totally different ball game, though, when it comes to using memory. I've rendered scenes with over 30 fully dressed characters with hair and SubD +a large environment with 3DL without reducing or optimizing anything on those 8Gb of RAM, granted it took a couple of hours but it worked very well;)
I save all my characters as scenes or subsets. If I have modified some skins using the LIE I always use the LIE baker to save out as a materials preset. That will speed up loading times significantly, since DS won't have to create all those temp files everytime I open a scene.
Thanks guys for the responses. With mac mini, it tends to hear up rather quickly and even though the fan still runs well it's just a small space to contain alot of that heat. But anyway lol I digress. Yeah I have played around with animation a bit and understand most of the things you were explaining Sven. However I was just wondering if there was a way to bake all the textures in to make it a little more simplified so I could just add my character in to each scene and not have to go through the process of making sure every texture was tweaked just right for best best performance and quality. "QUALITY" besing subjective lol. I just don't want to have to go through atll that everytime my "movie" switches scenes. And Thank you as well Nonesuch. Yes I had thought of that as well but again either way you are still rendering out 2 seperate pieces of animation and in both instances waiting on all the texures to render. Like I said I am not going for photorealism so I don't really care if they are spot on. It can be cartoony I dont really care much about that as long as it still looks good and not like a muddled mess. So I figured if there was a way to back all the textured into one piece then it would be a bit more simpler and and render a bit more quickly. I dunno. Lol I don't know what I am trying to say.... Or I'm not finding the words to explain it correctly. Thanks again guys. As always have a good one!!! P.S. sorry for any typos
Hmm you could always remove everything but diffusemaps and opacitymaps, then save as a new materials preset. I don't know any other way except using the scene optimizer. Don't think you can "bake" all the information from all the different maps into only one channel? Reducing texture size will certainly work;)