Ain't Misbehaving: learning animating through repetition (nonesuch00)
nonesuch00
Posts: 18,131
Well, I've made frequently interrupted half-hearted attempts to animate before but since we've been told that DAZ Studio will have seriously professional animation capabilities added to it starting with the DAZ Studio Public Beta 4.12+ I thought I'd give it a more serious attempt to learn how to make animations because that's always been the reason I dumped a pauper's fortune in the DAZ Store.
I am using the DAZ Studio YouTube Tutorial Playlist: Animations to learn. However, it needs updating to be valid for the enhancements added for DAZ Studio 4.12+ such as IK solving, contact solving, eg the feet with the floor, a hand with a frying pan, a frying pan with a stove top and similar labor and accuracy enhancing capabilities for us amateur hobby animators.
To kick it off I will post my 1st attempt to begin to animate in DAZ Studio 4.12+. It's just what results from doing the 1st tutorial above, nothing special but hopefully enough to illustrate has actually easy and good it can be animating in DAZ Studio if more serious effort is put into it. That I hope to show later after I finish doing the tutorials in that list and also figure out how to use the new animation features added to DS 4.12+ I will then make a real attempt at a 2 - 3 minute animation by seeing how similar I can get to the old 2D Bewitched animation but in 3D and syncing it to the soundtrack. I figure that is as good an introduction to creating animations as any and is simple enough for me to attempt it without feeling overwhelmed, although it does have surprisingly a lot of work to do already. In the meantime, you'll see me posting the results of me doing the DAZ 3D Animation tutorials playlist here.
I used virtualdub to collate the 91 frames of rendering into an animation movie as explained. It's mostly correct: the tutorial says that the virtualDub menu though only has Open File... and not Open Video File as is the only case in VirtualDub but ignore that you have only a series of images and use 'open video file' menu option in VirtualDub as it will still work as explained in the tutorial at this link. Also, you can only save as AVI format. Ultimately it would be nice if DAZ Studio improved it bad capabilities in this regards or you could learn to do it in Blender instead since assuredly Blender will be the only capable free SW that you'll be able to sync a soundtrack with your animation. I'll cross that bridge in this thread when I get there I guess.
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And another major reason for me to start this thread is I've figured out how to correctly post a youtube video to the DAZ forums and format it such that I Ilike the layout of the video in the post. I'd like though if we could post our videos to the DAZ Gallery instead.
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Comments
Looking forward to watching this thread; I love your toon work and all of the 60s characters you're created so far. Are you planning on doing the whole Bewtiched opening?
-- Walt Sterdan
Thanks. I haven't done much yet but it will be fun trying. I hope with these new animation capabilities in DAZ Studio 4.12+ we can pass tips back and forth to each other.
Well I just did the Power Pose and Puppeteer tutorials and they are good for creating very rough 1st drafts of animations via pose presets you've bought if you edit the results in the timeline. Also the intermediate results are often good for creating new poses.
They aren't good for editing animation though because you will never be able to move the mouse pointer in the puppeteer or vary that movement in the directions and speeds needed to be what you are intending. Even if you personally had that skill due to years of playing video games for example, the viewport lag is too great.
I knew those tutorials aren't going to have a lot of usefulness for the technical matter of actually using the new IK solving capabilities in DAZ Studio to do accurate animation how the animator intends to create the animations as they precede those features, but I thought they might give some helpful shortcuts to create rough draft animations that could then be refined using the IK solvers and they will in some cases if you plan carefully but not all cases. I will have to try to actually see if I have IK solvers chains on a character and apply poses which are using FK then is that 'FK' applied to the IK chains as the IK solver isn't really solving anything, is it? How to cause the pose presets and posing corrections to apply to an IK chain?
Or are you stuck either doing an animation 100% in FK or 100% in IK with no mixing?
Here you see, posted below, rendered at 640x360 (16:9) to only 100 iterations per frame, so a lot of artifacts & noise, sorry, because I have a 7 year old laptop with integrated GPU. about what you can expect do be able to do in puppeteer in animating as a rough draft with 2 characters and no editing of the animation timeline for those two characters afterwards. It's not easy, that's why most animations you see in DAZ land are dance or walk cycles made and imported from outside of DAZ Studio.
You can see 100 iterations of this type of scene is very noisy, even at only 640x360. Since a lot of reflection, refraction, and translucency is involved and the background doesn't change, I rendered the background once to 100 iterations also and then the 'Sailor Jack & Bingo' animation alone without the background.
If Sailor Jack & Bingo sound familiar to you that's because they are based on the Cracker Jack mascots that 1st appeared in 1916. The mascots started out as a toddler boy & what i think is a schnauzer dog in real life but the dog seems to have changed to be more like a generally shaggy small dog and the boy changed 1st to about an 10 year old and then to an adult man on the newest Cracker Jack. I changed the dog to a sea lion and the man to a realistic man as it seemed like a good fit for someone portrayed as a sailor after all to have a pet seal from the seas instead of a dog.
I think as I learn to animate I'll continue choose old advertising arcana as they are simpler for a beginner to learn and conducive to short animation clips.
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well oh well oh well...I couldn't figure out how to composite the background image I rendered easily onto all 170 animation frames I rendered as an image series in so I gave up for this animation since it was just a simple test of puppeteer's capabilities. It was easy enough though to collate the image sequence I rendered out of DAZ Studio into a avi movie animation in Blender 2.80 though it's just missing it's background.
Now that I have finished all of the available animating in DAZ Studio tutorials by DAZ 3D available; I will move on to trying to learn IK and how to use the DAZ Studio animation timeline in earnest. That will take a long time though to try and do a good job.
You have a good start . The more you learn about keyframing animation the better your stories will turn out. I look forward to see what you come up with ... :)
Thanks. I am setting up a new scene now. As I felt the DAZ 3D tutorials were very short on details and repetition I will do a walk cycle tutorial from a guy that made it called 'WP Guru' on youtube but it is pre-IK. It might be seen as a time waster being it's pre-IK, but that is to more thoroughly learn the basic features of the timeline. I think I will be then ready to use your written blue jay directions for the IK approach.
In using the DS timeline I am going to take a mixed approach of the old hand drawn cell animators combined with the modern mathematical interpolation of movement of models in DS and other programs, because, well those old animation houses had big teams of animators to draw all those cells for a single cartoon and we don't.
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Well as it turns out the WP Guru Walk Cycle Animation tutorial was just a aniBlock tutorial so I had to scrap that. No big deal, the truth is the way I have to learn to animate in DAZ Studio is to animate in DAZ Studio and use and learn the features of the timeline on an as-needed basis so I consider myself done with tutorials unless someone can point to an over-the-top good tutorial(s) that are relevant. Maybe that causes me to be inefficient at times learning and making animations but at least I'll be on my way to making animations I want to make.
The animation I'm using to do this FK animation in DAZ Studio is an old Warner Brothers cartoon, only a short clip I found on a youTube search but at 107 seconds with eight scene changes it is quite sufficient to get a good start at learning animation.
I've finished the 1st scene which was 2 seconds long but as luck would have it; it's the only scene that I couldn't render the environmental background only once separately from the characters so it's each frame requiring both the environment & the characters and it is taking 12 minutes per frame at 100 iterations per frame in iRay at 640x360 resolution for 61 frames at 30 frames per second.
So 12 hours to render 2 seconds of animation! Ugh! If I've calculated right the other 105 seconds will only take about 3 1/3 to 4 1/3 days to render, extra time for allowing for rendering the environment background for one frame for each of the 7 scenes and such bookkeeping matters, so much quicker to render than the initial 2 seconds.
How long it will take me in Blender to create an animation from those rendered stills and sync the audio track to it is unknown to me. Of course the audio track already exists and so I'm really syncing my animation to the audio track, not the audio track to my animation. So what I'll be doing actually isn't really being that creative at all; I'm just frame by frame advancing from an old video clip and FK posing the 3D characters to match those 2D characters to the characters in my 3D scene. Tedious and difficult, but not difficult in a 'bullet sweating' way but in a tedious way. You can guess why I and most people that aren't getting paid would avoid this type of work for a hobby but if you want the animation you have to do the work.
One thing that might be an issue as I teach myself how to do this is the original source material was a series of hand drawn animation cells that were photographed & collated to film. In that original form each cell was unique and complete in the series. That film in turn was digitized and compressed using video codecs where each new frame is just the old frame with the delta from the next frame calculated and superimposed over the original frame; so there almost certainly won't be a one to one correspondence between the frame numbers of the original film and the video codec encoded animation. The effect of that compression is that if you had 100 original frames in a film then each of the 100 frames was saved and stored complete in that film, no compression involved, but in conversion to a video codec that compresses the original source frames, only the original frame of the 100 frames is saved completely and the other 99 are only partial frame deltas (changes from the original frame) that are saved, so you're missing most of the original source frames really, but that's why the video is compressed to a smaller size. That is fine though, as there likely were many instances where the original hand drawn animation cell frames did not wind up matching the film frames; for example, inserting or deleting frames to sync the film with an audio sound track would be the most common change I think. If you think about it, the music sounds good the way it is written at the tempo it is played and often this music was public domain classics that really sound best the way they were originally written. I think it was much more common than admitted to animate and sync a cartoon planned around a piece of orchestral music than the other way around, write a piece of original music that is changed to sync with a completed original animation. I plan on employing the same approach to sync my attempt to FK animate with the video codec encoded video animation as well and also in the future when I attempt to make up completely original animations.
I've yet to find a tutorial in Blender 2.80 though that even tells how to composite the same background for all the frames of an series of stills that comprises an scene in an animation.
Hi my advice is to use the open GL render engine while learning to animate characters instead of waiting for hours
for a hardware, intensive brute force path tracer to find out where you made mistakes.
It is called "previsualization"
Also,if you are determined to keyframe everything from scratch and not use anibloks etc , you are wise to start with the 4.12 beta to get used to a proper IK /foot contact based workflow.
also ( assuming it still works with 4.12)
get the key frame culling script from Mcasual's site
to parse down the number of framesof any baked aniblocks or imported BVH to an editable state.
Thanks.
Everytime I have tried that basic openGL renderer in DAZ Studio to render, DAZ Studio has locked up or crashed or simply not rendered for me. I think I have to replace the iRay materials with 3DL materials to use the openGL renderer maybe? Was that my mistake? I couldn't find documentation on that.
OK, I changed all shaders to 3DL and found that openGL Intermediate locks up DAZ (or maybe it's much more intense than I though but a window never pops up with what is being rendered) so I changed to 'Basic OpenGL' and it's very fast, thanks. I can already see the animation I've done so far is too sudden and robotic but now I can using virtualDub & Basic OpenGL render series keep refining and repeating until I get a grip on how many blank frames I'll need between key frames to get better motion. Somethings like Daffy's expressions aren't going to be doable but I expected that.
Instead, I was planning on switching to a animation cel shader style that was derived by Crescent from the DAZ 3D pwToon product. i also have Visual Style shaders, a sort of toony-digital look and several others, all 3DL based and quite quite to render even on my computer. I have the pwToon shadow catcher, pwGhost and the whole pw Suite but I don't plan on making a complex rendering style in 3DL but a simple digital toon style that is flatter and clearer than say a Toy Story 1. I'll have to try those and see which I like. I will go for pwToon/Cresent Cel Animation Style to start though and maybe something more complex later.
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Anyway, my question for you is here is a short outline of my planned workflow for posing/animating:
1) I am currently FK animating in the DS 4.12+ timeline. I have not yet added any IK chains. I am frame by frame advancing the original source material and then matching posing as best as I can in DAZ Studio and then I 'create keyframe' when the pose changes in a frame (not all frames in the original animation video change either). Sometimes I embellish a little bit but not too much.
2) When that is completed I will collate into an AVI at 30 FPS and if i judge if it's as good as the original in movement I do nothing. If the foot contact with the floor and their hand handling of props fails that I will IK chain in entirety both characters, the props, and adjust the animations to make them look good.
My question for you is 2) possible after I do 1)? That is, can I do FK animation and then add the IK chains too it later to refine those FL animations? When I add the IK chains to the characters & props how do I transfer the FK animation(s) to the IK chain so that I can make those adjustments?
I'm think IK will greatly reduce the look of 'robot movement' that posing for FK is giving (even though in the original animation most of the time most of the body is unnaturally still too.
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Well while I'm only in 110 frames into about a 3100 frame animation I've making, I am going to backtrack and at the IK chains and do this the IK way. I hope at sometime in the future I'll learn if it's possible to transfer a FK animation to an IK control chain but it's not essential right away.
Well, I've been going back of forth with tech support about a Timeline bug so I did finally send the entire scene and a video to demonstrate a DS Timeline bug I can consistently reproduce. Until that bug is fixed and a couple of other bug fixes and improvements are made to the animation system in DAZ Studio it doesn't make sense to risk all those FK/IK frames I create to get lost by the bug.
So I will move over to Blender to learn animation for the next few months and try DAZ Studio with the Timeline & new animations are more complete and debugged. I'll still be bug testing in DAZ Studio when I hear whether the bugs have been fixed but not a lot more than bug testing.
Disappointing news about the bug. Glad you are continuing your development. Thanks for sharing thus far.
Thanks.
I'm sure DAZ 3D will get it fixed one they find it. I think it has something to do with initialization failing to traverse the depth of the trees when people make up their own groups & put their scene assets in those different groups they've made up.