Create a "flyout sign" in an animation?

office_264e2f23

I'm the nerd for a dance school, and we're looking at Daz to see if it is viable for creating technique videos.  I'm starting with "ballet position 1," which is where the dancer is in a pose most people wouldn't consider attempting.  I've figured out how to pose the Genesis 8 character, and how to animate the video so that the camera is zooming and spinning around the model properly with appropriate timing.

What I'm wondering is if there is a fairly easy way to create "floating flyouts," which display text on the animation and an arrow to point to the precise area of the model, to give specific technique pointers.  I'm assuming that I can create an OBJ that is large enough to be a "billboard" with a changing texture (maybe) which includes the text, and add on some sort of "rod" which extends between the model and the billboard.  I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who has wanted to do this, although I'm sure I'm in very small company wanting to do this specific to dance.

I have 30 years in mechanical 3D design, and organic 3D design is so different that I'm having a hard time finding the right words for my searches.  And with 500 pages in this board alone, my searches turn up a lot of topics which have nothing to do with what I am seeking.

Richard Haseltine

You can create primitives, including planes which would work as your label, inside DS - Create>New Primitive. However, animating their materials is trickier, especially if you want to change maps. You don't have to render the sequence as a whole, it's generally best to render a sequence of images instead, so if you didn't mind a fairly abrupt switch you could just swap the map on the plane out instead of animating it (if you wanted a simple transition you could overlap the sequences, so for a few frames you had a version with aption one and a version with caption 2, and blend them together in the software you use to stictcch together the final animation).

For a pointer you could use a cylinder primitive, ong and narrow, and perhaps a cone parented to its end - position one end on the caption, or near according to taste, then create a Null (Create>New Null) and in the Parameters pane set the cylinder to point at it - then you can move the null around, or parent it to a bone you want to point to, and the arrow will track it.

Sevrin

It would be much easier to add text or a 2D graphic of a speech bubble in a video editing program.  You could create text effects much more easily like that.  There are lots of cheap/free video editors out there that have this capability.

Or, for a really quick and dirty 3D solution you could make a plane, and use a transparency map to create your shape and put your text in the diffuse channel.  You could parent the panel to your camera so that it would appear to remain static as you move around your subject.

There are also some speech bubble models at CGTrader, etc.

office_264e2f23

I'll try the primitives.  The thought of creating external objects and then trying to manage them was more than I really wanted to do.  If we use this type of video, it is the model and her positioning that really matters.  We're even looking at sticking to OpenGL renders so we can focus on the technique rather than the "can't tell that's not real" render quality - a dozen solid videos are better than one Hollywood-quality render for our purposes.  We'd be quite satisfied if we had simple Arial text in a color that stands out from the background. Since the camera will be spinning to different viewpoints, it's easy to zoom to one perspective and show a flyout long enough for the viewer to read, then hide the flyout before the camera moves to a different vantage point, then show the next flyout (rinse, repeat)...  I considered changing maps only because I haven't seen any other approach - I had no idea if that is possible or nightmarish.

I've done animations of very complex mechanical designs in Fusion 360 and Pro-Engineer, and it's always been easy to create flyouts that can give information on specific sections of the overall mechanism during the animation.

I have considered rendering the frames to images, repeating one frame with the text and pointer enough times for it to be read, and stitching the image sequence into a video.  If there was an easy way to build the flyout into the animation sequence, I'd prefer it, since jumping between multiple programs (usually) adds more points of failure.

Richard Haseltine

Some of the issues with rendering direct to an aniamtion are about points of failure - if the render crashes, or proves to have errors, then the whole thing has to be redone while an image sequence can be restarted part-way trhough or even just have a few frames in the middle re-rendered.

Catherine3678ab

The store does have a few alphabet sets. These are objects which can be animated. Could be parented to a D/S created plane if background for the text was desired.

Some eg.:

https://www.daz3d.com/alphabet-and-number-props-with-lights-for-iray

https://www.daz3d.com/rw-letters-and-more

https://www.daz3d.com/multi-letter-system

 

Sevrin

office_264e2f23 said:

I'll try the primitives.  The thought of creating external objects and then trying to manage them was more than I really wanted to do.  If we use this type of video, it is the model and her positioning that really matters.  We're even looking at sticking to OpenGL renders so we can focus on the technique rather than the "can't tell that's not real" render quality - a dozen solid videos are better than one Hollywood-quality render for our purposes.  We'd be quite satisfied if we had simple Arial text in a color that stands out from the background. Since the camera will be spinning to different viewpoints, it's easy to zoom to one perspective and show a flyout long enough for the viewer to read, then hide the flyout before the camera moves to a different vantage point, then show the next flyout (rinse, repeat)...  I considered changing maps only because I haven't seen any other approach - I had no idea if that is possible or nightmarish.

I've done animations of very complex mechanical designs in Fusion 360 and Pro-Engineer, and it's always been easy to create flyouts that can give information on specific sections of the overall mechanism during the animation.

I have considered rendering the frames to images, repeating one frame with the text and pointer enough times for it to be read, and stitching the image sequence into a video.  If there was an easy way to build the flyout into the animation sequence, I'd prefer it, since jumping between multiple programs (usually) adds more points of failure.

For your purposes, adding text in your video editor definitely sounds like the way to go.  It's far simpler and more flexible.

office_264e2f23

Maybe I'll revisit this in the future.  Adding text to specific frames is certainly easy enough, and I already do lots of video stitching with live action shots.  I just thought something a little more dramatic would make the videos pop more.

I'm having a real "fun" time just getting the camera to work as expected.  It seems that my current animation pursuit isn't too common, by leaving the model static and just panning/zooming the camera, but the only way I can characterize my results is that it looks like the camera operator is fighting off a dog that is attacking and tugging on his leg while the video is being shot.  The pans start out right and then all of the sudden, the camera twists, the zoom shifts dramatically and the model goes in and out of the field of view. 

The "figured out the camera" statement from my first post was way too premature - I got a couple of great pan and zoom or spin and pan shots and thought I understood how the camera worked...turns out, not so much!

I created another discussion to see if there is any help out there - Decent camera tutorial for animation - Daz 3D Forums