Animating The Hulk?

marble

Ok, so I don't have an actual Hulk figure but I'll use Hulk to explain what I want to do. In a comic strip there may be three still frames in which Bruce Banner transforms into Hulk: (a) Banner gets angry, (b) Starts turning green and muscles expand and shirt rips and (c) Full green and huge in typical Hulk rage pose. Lets imagine I have three still scenes depicting those three stages but I want to make an animation using those three frames. So each of the stages would represent a keyframe on the timeline. Is this possible or would I have to re-create the poses and morphs in a single animated scene?

I have thought of saving stage each as a Character Preset or a Sub-Scene but I can't figure out how to comibine them in one timeline. The saved frames would need to contain pose, texture and morph information, obviously.

As I said, I'm just using the Hulk as an example because it illustrates pretty well what I'm looking to do.

wolf359

Hi if you are trying to have a figure merge between shapes over time then  doing it all in one scene is the best way forward.
You can simply start at frame one with the shape/pose dialed in and move further down the timeline in whatever increments you choose and change the shape/pose and DS will interpolate between the shapes.

I dont think DS can animate changes in skinmaps /textures over time
At least not the version I am using (DS4.8)

 

hphoenix

wolf359 said:

Hi if you are trying to have a figure merge between shapes over time then  doing it all in one scene is the best way forward.
You can simply start at frame one with the shape/pose dialed in and move further down the timeline in whatever increments you choose and change the shape/pose and DS will interpolate between the shapes.

I dont think DS can animate changes in skinmaps /textures over time
At least not the version I am using (DS4.8)

There are scripts that can animate textures, like mCasualJaques freebie MatAnim:  https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/matanim

There are also scripts/plugins to use animated images/image sequences/video as a texture....there's at least one in the DAZ store, and mCasual also has one:  https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/texanimfords3

 

 

marble

Thanks for the replies. My main focus was not really on the textures - as I said, Hulk was just an example. The question was whether it is possible to use saved poses and morphs along the timeline - textures would be a bonus but not essential for me. To put it another way, I'd like to have the Bruce Banner character (for example) at frame one, the half-morphed character at frame 20 and the Hulk character at frame 50, using the characters - morphed and posed -  from previously saved still scenes.

To use a more simple example: a transformation of a character from a flabby, unfit man to a muscular athlete over an animation timeline. I would need to do this several times in the course of a narrative (a kind of multi-media effort involving comic strip stills and short animations). So it would be handy to have the morphed and posed characters saved so that I could somehow bring them into the timeline at different stages.

The alternative is to morph and pose the character in the scene as I progress along the timeline but I could never be sure to repeat the same morphing state I had in another scene. Thinking about it, poses should be easy to save and re-apply because they can be applied to the character already in the scene but is there a way to save the morphed state of a character and apply that in the same way, or would I need to swap out the character for a morphed version? In that case I can't see the gradual progression being possible.

wolf359

 but is there a way to save the morphed state of a character and apply that in the same way, or would I need to swap out the character for a morphed version? In that case I can't see the gradual progression being possible.

Save the shapes/morphs from the other scenes as shaping presets  to be applied later.

marble

wolf359 said:

 but is there a way to save the morphed state of a character and apply that in the same way, or would I need to swap out the character for a morphed version? In that case I can't see the gradual progression being possible.

Save the shapes/morphs from the other scenes as shaping presets  to be applied later.

Ah - is that the one? All these years and I still don't use many of the features available - only when questions like this arise do I discover what they do. :) 

Thanks, I'll try that.

Ivy

I could have properly done this demo in 5 keyframes . But its so much more dramatic using 420 keyframes..lol 

Done using Genesis 1  , 1 transformation motion aniblock found in the gofigure  "Hero pack. " and dragonstorm animated texture script  , took about 20 minutes to put together using 3 texture mats for the animated texture script and about 2 hours to render the 420 keyframes

 Link https://vimeo.com/287352002

marble

Ivy said:

I could have properly done this demo in 5 keyframes . But its so much more dramatic using 420 keyframes..lol 

Done using Genesis 1  , 1 transformation motion aniblock found in the gofigure  "Hero pack. " and dragonstorm animated texture script  , took about 20 minutes to put together using 3 texture mats for the animated texture script and about 2 hours to render the 420 keyframes

 Link https://vimeo.com/287352002

Excellent. So did you morph the figure yourself, all withing the same scene or did you import a morphed character somewhere along the timeline? I'm guessng that you applied the morph to the figure at gradual percentage increments along the timeline?

Ivy

I used smays Mr Hyde character morphs https://www.daz3d.com/mr-hyde-for-genesis and pushed the morph dial to transform the character during animation on the timeline.  Starting with default genesis character first then, ending with smays Mr Hyde monster character morphs  I used 3 texture maps and applied them to 100 keyframes for each map color.  and rendered it as  the whole timeline cycle in 1 shot.    genesis1  is a great character asset for character transformations in animations because yuou can do the transformations using just one scene, instead of having to breaks it up into different scenes to compose the transformation. when using other genesis characters

marble

Ivy said:

I used smays Mr Hyde character morphs https://www.daz3d.com/mr-hyde-for-genesis and pushed the morph dial to transform the character during animation on the timeline.  Starting with default genesis character first then, ending with smays Mr Hyde monster character morphs  I used 3 texture maps and applied them to 100 keyframes for each map color.  and rendered the cycle  genesis1  is a great character asset for character transformations in animations because yuou can do the transformations using just one scene, instead of having to breaks it up into different scenes to compose the transformation. when using other genesis characters

I'm not sure I understand the last sentence there, Ivy. Are you saying that you can't transform a G3 base to a morphed character (e.g. Ivan) in the same scene?

By the way, colour me impressed that you can render 420 frames in 2 hours. I have a GTX 1070 and it takes half an hour to render 15 frames! Is that 3Delight or IRay? And my frames are bare minimum in terms of content, image size and lighting. I delete anything not in shot, remove walls so that I can light with HDRI if possible and use the new denoiser in the latest Beta version.

Ivy

Sorry for the confusion.  I'll put it this way.to me Genesis 1 transforms much better in animation. itt has cross figure compatibilities  last time i tried genesis 3 a few months back I could not transform genesis 3 male character into a beautiful  genesis 3 female for a drag queen show animation. all in one scene, unfortunately  i had to do it by film editing and splice 2 different scenes together to make the transformation seamless, where i if i would have used genesis1  in the first place instead I would have been able to do the whole boy to girl transformation seamlessly in one scene, I am guessing because genesis1 has better cross figure morphs capabilities in gensis1  or maybe i just have not bought enough crap err I mean stuff for genesis 3 to make it work the same way. But i prefer Genesis1 for transformations over all other characters daz has.    the next one I'll do is a werewolf later on when i have some down time. using rawarts wolfman 

marble

Yes, I get what you mean now. The bulk of my purchases for DAZ STudio have been first with V4 and then with G3. A few of both G1 and G2 but very little by way of G8. So G3 is still where I'm at. I don't use aniblocks either - or rather I rarely use aniblocks. But then my animations are very short and I use a lot of loops for repetetive actions. They are more like things you would see in animated gifs than in story animations.

Ivy

I do a lot of 15 to 60 keyframe animations I transpose into flash and html5 for paid ads used on google for people that want to pay me for them. some promo animations and some GIF's for websites. 

I love to create story animations. it just takes alot time to make them when doing them by yourself

Ivy

marble said:

By the way, colour me impressed that you can render 420 frames in 2 hours. I have a GTX 1070 and it takes half an hour to render 15 frames! Is that 3Delight or IRay? And my frames are bare minimum in terms of content, image size and lighting. I delete anything not in shot, remove walls so that I can light with HDRI if possible and use the new denoiser in the latest Beta version.

Sorry I meant to answer this questions last night.

I usually try to keep my render time around 25 to 30 seconds a keyframe using 3delight and around 40 - 90 seconds a keyframe using Iray, inspite having tons of props and characters in the scene. I use decimator & scene optimizer alot which helps tons.  I have a older but very powerful PC running windows server with a GPU Amplifier box attached using 2  evga 980ti's cards. nothing special but it gets the job done...    

I prefer to make animation with 3delight mostly because of the resource issues of running out of vram or GPU ram during rendering.  but also 3delight gives me so much better control of lights and colors, shadows control etc. which are really required if you want to make toon based animations. photorealistic animations with iray require a lot more render time to cook the iteration.  even though I have had done animation that have take as much as 17 minutes a keyframe,  those scene were very short just a few keyframes and were used mostly for fx in the scene. You definitely want to get those long running rendered scene right the first time.   Right now I kind of am still waiting for GPU rendering to improve with iray and properly  why prefer 3delight for rendering daz studio  animation, because of the ridiculous  render times I get with iray its just not worth it to me

Plus my primary interest animating with daz studio is for cute cartoon creation which daz fills that nitch great for me..  BTW I found cartoon animation is much more for giving in animating mistakes than photorealistic animations are . I guess people expect cartoons to be kind of weird and do goofy things  where a pretty hot girl in a photo real animation doing looking or doing goofy things may not be so desirable.   so cartoons are a great place to start when learning animation with daz IMO.