Workflow

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

Currently when I am working with a scene, if I alter the pose/position of the characters at all, I save that new position as a second scene. Basically whenever I get everything to the point where I want to render it, I save it as a scene, then move things around to the point I want another render, and save that as another scene. Is there a better way of doing this? It seems clunky.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

So the best workaround for this I've figured out is saving poses instead of entire scenes, as this is a lot faster, however it gets bothersome quickly if there are changes to multiple figures. Is there a way to save multiple characters as a pose preset and apply it to the whole group? Or is there some better way of doing this?

Petercat

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2 said:

So the best workaround for this I've figured out is saving poses instead of entire scenes, as this is a lot faster, however it gets bothersome quickly if there are changes to multiple figures. Is there a way to save multiple characters as a pose preset and apply it to the whole group? Or is there some better way of doing this?

If you're only going to be using those poses with that group of characters, you could save them all together as a set. They'll keep their X,Y, and Z positions and orientations.

Reusing a scene with different poses can be pretty clunky in Studio, I'm afraid.
I guess not enough users do this for DAZ to make the workflow smoother.

JonnyRay

You could treat it like an animation, even though you're only going to render a single image. Use the timeline to store different locations and poses for the people and then just render the keyframe you're interested in without doing the full animation sequence.

For frequently used characters, keep in mind the "Save As -> Support Asset -> Scene Asset". This has a value over saving a scene or scene subset in that updates to the components of the scene are reflected in scenes that use them. To put it more clearly, if you have a charcter you use often that is setup using Aiko 8 with OOT's Linda Ponytail hair. You get her basic setup and save her as a Scene Asset (let's call her Aikolinda). Then you load Aikolinda into one (or more) scenes you're going to render. Then you decide you don't like her as a blonde and want her to be a redhead. If you go back and update Aikolinda with the new hair color, that change will automatically be reflected in every scene you loaded her into. If you had saved her as a Scene or Scene Subset, you'd have to apply the hair color change manually to every scene you used her in.

As for my overall workflow, I tend to bulid scenes using this process.

1. Scene Blocking
   1. First I'll figure out the setting (environment) and rough camera angle I want to use. I make sure to use an actual camera and not just the perspective view or so I don't lose the blocking of the image.
   2. I may also rough in the lighting at this time like adding HDRI skies and other lights I think I'll need.
   3. I save this as a scene, and start a new one.
2. Character Setup
   1. I load one of the gray background HDRI presets from Colm Jackson's PRO-Studio HDR Lighting package. I like the even, low-contrast lighting for character setup.
   2. I load my first character I'm going to use, tweak skin, eyes, add hair and clothes. I will do several test renders to make sure things look okay rendered.
   3. If the character is going to pose by themselves in the scene, I may choose a pose for them at this stage. If they will be part of a "couples" pose, then I leave them in default.
   4. I save this as a "Scene Subset" rather than a "Scene" because the Subset won't include the HDRI I loaded for the setup or any cameras I created for test renders. (Also, refer back to the note above about Scene Assets if you'll reuse this character over and over again)
   5. I repeat the above for each character in the scene.
3. Optional - Couples Posing
   1. If the characters are going to be posed using a couples pose, I'll create a new "character setup" scene with my HDRI
   2. Then I import the Scene Subsets for each character and apply the couples pose to them.
   3. I will adjust the poses if necessary, doing some quick renders to make sure that the intersection of characters, clothing, etc. looks correct
   4. Then I create a group with the two characters and save this as a new Scene Subset
4. Character Placement
   1. Now I'll reload the original scene and merge the character and/or couple scene subsets into the main scene and move the characters into their positions in the scene
   2. This is where the couples group comes in handy because I can move them together without having to adjust each one individually
   3. Now I'm tweaking poses, adding or removing other props, etc. to get the final look for the image I want.
   4. During this time, I use the Aux viewport set to my main camera view while I'm using the Perspective View to move pieces, adjust poses, etc. That way I can see how the changes look from the main view.
   5. I also swap from Perspective to Main Camera on my full viewport to make sure I'm getting the results that I'm trying to and that I'm not spending too much time on something that won't even show in the final render. I can't tell you how much time I wasted trying to get a hand to be in the correct place only to realize it was blocked from the camera anyway and nobody would notice all the time I spent getting the fingers to just lightly touch the other character's waist.
5. Lighting
   1. Once everyone is in place, I start tweaking my final lighting, doing test renders and adding Ghost Lights, etc. to get it looking correct
   2. With some renders, this is the longest part of my process as I feel the lighting has the greatest impact on the overall quality of my images
6. Final Render
   1. I always do my final renders using Iray canvases, even if I only intend to use the Beauty pass. Canvases contain richer information about the image and so are a better basis for any post processing I want to do.
   2. For higher quality images, I'll also create canvases for each light source so that I can adjust their strength in the postwork
   3. I also always render about 20-50% larger than I want the final image to be. That allows me to downsample the image post-render which can help reduce any remaining "noise" in the image.
   4. If my goal is the highest quality I can produce, I'll disable Iray Tone Mapping and set the render quailty settings to 100% convergence, Quality factor of 8, and both max samples and max time constraints to max values to allow the render to go as long as necessary.
7. Postwork
   1. I use GIMP to import the EXR files from the Iray canvases and perform exposure adjustments, layering the light layers, etc. I save this as a GIMP file so I can come back to it if necessary.
   2. I will export the image as a PNG in it's full size, then open the exported file and resize it. This way I don't mess up the post process file I saved in the previous step.
   3. Even though I calibrate my monitors regularly, I've found that mobile devices display them much differently; so I'll open the final file on my mobile phone and use Adobe Lightroom to perform final tweaks to the exposure and color balance settings before I post it anywhere.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

What do you mean save them as a set?

I thought the animation timeline was a great idea but it turns out it doesn't work. What happens is when I make changes down the line, say in key frame 3, when I go back to keyframe 1, everything is all screwed up because the changes I made in frame 3 are backwards applied to frame 1. : (

Is this really such an odd way to work? I would have thought storytelling was a pretty common usage, and clearly that is going to entail settinga scene and then making pose/position adjustments and then rendering again from different camera angles, etc.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

It's just really annoying that you can't just go 'back' without completely reloading, not to mention having to decide whether or not you want to save new adjustments as an entire new scene or not. Even if there simply was a way to remove the limit on 'undo' that would be better.

Richard Haseltine

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2 said:

What do you mean save them as a set?

I thought the animation timeline was a great idea but it turns out it doesn't work. What happens is when I make changes down the line, say in key frame 3, when I go back to keyframe 1, everything is all screwed up because the changes I made in frame 3 are backwards applied to frame 1. : (

Is this really such an odd way to work? I would have thought storytelling was a pretty common usage, and clearly that is going to entail settinga scene and then making pose/position adjustments and then rendering again from different camera angles, etc.

Had you set a key in frame 0 initially? If not then the key you set in frame 3 is the starting state for the property. If you did set a key in frame 0 then to cntrol what happens between frames 0 and 3 is the job of the interpolation type and the graph editor.

rrward

JonnyRay said:

For frequently used characters, keep in mind the "Save As -> Support Asset -> Scene Asset". This has a value over saving a scene or scene subset in that updates to the components of the scene are reflected in scenes that use them. To put it more clearly, if you have a charcter you use often that is setup using Aiko 8 with OOT's Linda Ponytail hair. You get her basic setup and save her as a Scene Asset (let's call her Aikolinda). Then you load Aikolinda into one (or more) scenes you're going to render. Then you decide you don't like her as a blonde and want her to be a redhead. If you go back and update Aikolinda with the new hair color, that change will automatically be reflected in every scene you loaded her into. If you had saved her as a Scene or Scene Subset, you'd have to apply the hair color change manually to every scene you used her in.

That's very nice to know. Thank you.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

Ok I think I can describe what I want to do much more simply and hopefully that helps. Right now, the 'undo' feature only goes so far, it has a limit which is not very high. I like to mess around making lots of different adjustments, but often all I want at the end is to go back to the 'starting' point and try a different path. Right now, the only way I know to do that is to save the whole scene, start fiddling around and then if I don't like the outcome, I have to completely reload the whole scene again. Very clunky.

It _seems_ like the timeline should be able to function this way but I can't figure any way to do so. It does all kinds of bizarre things, moves items around that I didn't move, changes the positions/poses of characters in the beginning of the timeline even though I'm working at a later point, etc.