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My goodness, @wolf359 - I have been playing around with DAZ Studio and similar for years and you've just opened my eyes to the fact that there's a whole industry that I had not been aware of. Never heard of Source Filmaker, for example. Even using Google I can't find much on how to use it to make videos but there are hundreds of pages selling videos made using SFM.
My first question would be, can they use DAZ assets or is it strictly allied to a certain gaming platform? I've spotted that they seem to use assets from Team Fortress 2 but I will try to find out more.
I've looked at other options for animation previously - such as Unreal and Unity - but I always come away with the impression that these are designed for gamers so they have actions similar to aniblocks giving you walk/jump/crouch/run actions and also lipsych but that's not really what I want (although I don't really know what I want to do with animation yet).
The Source engine is made by Valve Software. They literally invented Source Filmmaker just to make animated videos advertising Team Fortress 2 using in-game assets. It uses the Source engine's proprietary model format, though there's Blender plugins if you want to convert Daz models over. It's pretty technical though.
Yeah, I managed to find a couple of videos explaining the process. Not for me, I think.
Ah well, back to hoping that DAZ improve the animation tools with DS5.
In some way. That is, what's imported is the dforce "structure", so pinned parts will be pinned and flowing parts will be flowing. Then the blender presets are used instead of the dforce parameters, because it is not possible to convert among them, they use a different way to "define" clothing. What this means is that while a dforce clothing will "behave" in blender as in daz studio for its purpose, it will now "flow" in the same exact way as dforce. Then you can always change the blender preset to "silk" or "cotton" or whatever to get the type of clothing you like most for a particular garment.
Same boat here, girl!
I wonder why everyone is trying to convince everyone else that DAZ Studio is bad.
Even showing them what you can do with DAZ Studio, they doesn't change their mind.
I was just answering the original poster's questions.
I agree you can and have done awesome videos just in DAZ but is it the easiest way, does it have all the extras like physics, paths, easy mocap import, no.
Can I afford Motionbuilder and an Xsens suit, no.
I know I love posing a character's hand touching their body or something in the environment, then tediously nudging bones to adjust the pose without the IK pins coming undone and slamming the undo hotkey when it inevitably happens every five seconds because Daz doesn't have Blender's "Press Shift to move in smaller increments" hotkey.
There is no need to switch to the SFM eco system
Unless you really wish to do so.
If you are going to learn a pro animation system anyway
Diffeo with Blender has everything a person might need
for animating "interacting" genesis 8 Figures with full suuport
of your Daz figures & content including environments.
You could theoreticly harvest premade motion data
from the SFM community/markets if , any are available in Standard FBX format ,as I demonstrated in Rokkoko/Mixamo/Daz genesis tutorial I posted earlier in the thread.
@Imago .it is not a matter changing peoples minds or
feeling that Daz studio is"bad"
It is the objective reality regarding character animation software features.
your sample is hand keyed in Daz studio..lovely that is fine
for your purposes.
But IMHO the OP was clearly asking for objective /technical
reasons to use Daz studio for character animation, presumably
as opposed to something else.
Now as wendy stated, all factors have to be considered
from costs, to time required to get the results you posted.
And objectively quantifiable measures such as solid
foot planting and a sense of weight,
as shown here in this Blender/EEVEE render that was created in another program.
That old mantra, "it is not the tools,its the artist" was only true back when there was little functional differences between the various chisels & hammers available to every aspiring sculptor.
Anyone living in todays reality understands why certain software tools
are chosen for certain tasks and why others are not the best choice.
@Ivy You are my new hero! I loved your animations and am tickled you've taken the plunge into adult animation. I would love to learn more about your animation process with in Daz and how you come about making a completed adult animation. It's something I've been interested in for some time but never was sure where to begin lol.
I hear you Wolf. I also hear @Ivy. I get that Blender has the better tools but for my purposes - at the moment - quick videos for my own fun are the aim. That said and as I mentioned earlier - I'm tempted to get more adventurous which will most likely mean at least giving Diffeo another shot and trying out the Blender timeline. Rendering more than a few seconds of animation in IRay is just not going to work for me so Eevee would be the way forward. I'm just at the (old) age when leaving the comfort zone is getting more and more difficult.
Out of interest I checked out some of those Source Film animations and, even for two characters interacting with colliding physics (bet you never heard sex described that way), they are quite convincing. I wonder how much of that is hand-keyed, how much is IK assisted and how much is motion capture.
Thanks. I know a little about IK and I know what keyframed means so I'll look up cyclical filters. Maybe easy when you have been through the Blender learning curve to get to the point of knowing how to animate but I still have to start that journey yet.
If I remember right, Valve pretty much invented IK for games to get around the Quake engine's janky vertex-based animation.
Pierre Picault has an animation course on Gumroad. It's pricy ($80 US) but well worth it, as long as you can get over his very thick accent. He goes over cyclical modifiers and pretty much everything else, in a beginner friendly way.
@Ivy This is somewhat off topic so I'll keep it short and to the point. If you make adult content, do pay attention to the contract you get with the publisher. Especially if you're asked for "extreme" material. You should be absolutely certain that the publisher is taking full responsibility for publishing your "art".
You may find the link below interesting.
http://cbldf.org/
My take on animation is that you get the non-physical pose creation of Daz and make lots of frames using the poor posing. Just getting your character to put their feet on the ground without looking like they are going to fall over is a huge problem when the physics is all wrong (center of gravity over feet). It's more like posing a helium baloon. First you float above the ground, then you drift down until something touches, then you guess what has to touch first, then you bend that up a little and float back down to the ground. Now do this for 180 frames. Then, flip back and forth, trying to keep the bouncing motion lines correct. About then, you realize, you're on a Mac, and they haven't fixed the movie file output bug anyway, so it's File-> New time!
There was a Carnegie Mellon database for character digitized motion points to help this, but it appears to be DOA. Oh well.
Agreed, it is well worth it. It's called "Alive". I have pretty much stopped all my activities until I finish it. Pierrick is a very, very good teacher and unlike his "The Art of Rigging", Alive is subtitled :) It's far and away the best animation course I've ever done. After learning Blender, I think the best favor one can do for oneself is to buy this course.
Edit - name spelling
Thanks for the advice.
I changed this comment from the origianl I had posted to make the thread have some sense. the mods had removed some of my comments breaking the conversation so no use posting to your reply now.
have a nice day
But thanks for the heads up I appreciate it
Thanks for the suggestion. I had a little trouble finding the course (his name is Pierrick Picaut) but eventually found this intro video. A little more than I need (or can afford) at the moment but I'm sure that others will be keen.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Thanks for the Heads Up ... I did buy it. Now to take a deep breath and dive in.
Rock 23, I was right where you are about a year ago. You can do decent animation in Daz--this is an animation using imported BVH that I edited & enhanced in Daz and exported as Alembic to Cinema 4D for rendering:
I had worked out a whole new workflow from a Poser-centric one to a Daz one that seemed very promising, not least because Daz had recently fixed the timeline & curve editing capabilities. It was great, but for one thing: lip sync. I do character animation with dialog, and Daz simply has no real lip sync capability. I had been exploring iClone only for mocap processing, and it worked great for sending bvh files to Daz, but the more I struggled to find a lip sync solution for Daz, the more I kept getting drawn toward iClone against my will. What finally broke me was when iClone came out with their Acculips lip sync system, which is really fantastic. I still use a fair amount of Daz assets, but I animate in iClone, and get results I'm really happy with, especially the lip sync, and iClone has a number of other features that make animating easier, tho I had to unlearn a lot of old habits and had to learn to trust the software. As I said it to my wife "I keep trying to do things the hard way, and it won't let me." This is a sequence I did with iClone using "translated" Daz characters as well as iClone characters:
I have to say, tho, that if Daz came out with decent lip sync, I'd be tempted to come back to animate there. Daz has great-looking characters and a ton of great content, but without lip sync, it's just not an option.
@Auroratrek That's very good for a home made short. I did enjoy the "cuteness" into storytelling. Bravo.
If I may, intended as constructive advice. The camera/cutting is a little static. And you do notice the absolute lack of secondary animation, that's common when you only use mocaps. Also there's noticeable bad deformations, I guess it's due to figure conversion limits. The lightning and shaders are too much "opengl" and non realistic, even for a real-time engine. Especially the "plastic" look of the figures is very noticeable.
Hi Tim,
Actually Daz studio has a decent third party facial mocap option called "Face MOJO" ,but alas it requires ownership of at least an Iphone 10 for the Depth cam capture.
NOT an option for me at this point
As you know, I migrated to the RL product line years ago, however as Blender is now my primary rendering software, I have been seriously considering at least a partial migration back to native G8 figres imported and converted to rigify via the diffeo plugin.
The big caveat being lipsynch,
I actually have Anilip 2 and sorry but it did not meet my personal requirements
(being very charitable here)
I have the pose recorder app that uses regular video to record facial mocap
and it is hit or miss with alot of misses
installed copy of the 32 bit version of DS for the basic lipsynch function.
still requires manual keyframing of facial performance.
So as it stands now for production
I still rely on the RL to Blender solution as we now have an officially supported
Blender addon for import of animated character with full material conversion.
@Padone The native Iclone render engine cannot even do screen space
reflections nor does it have motion blur.
That is why I only use iclone for motionbuilding and retargeting
before export to Blender for rendering.
With all of the affordable advances in rendering options from unreal engine to the new uber fast Cycles X (coming on Blender 3.0),
I see ZERO reason to settle for slow brute force path tracers like Iray
or limited quality engines Like iclone native.
This is a major factor one needs to consider when deciding where you are going to animate.
So from a $$cost$$/benefit perspective, anyone heavily invested in the Daz content eco system is best served using Diffeo/Blender.
or if you are already invested in the Reallusion software you have either UE4 or Blender both of which are well supported by Reallusion.
Thanks for the input, Padone and Wolf! I'm actually rendering in Cinema 4D, which can do very realistic shaders and lighting--not to mention that iClone can create very realistic characters--but I'm really trying to do neither. My intention is to make this look slightly stylized, so none of it should look strictly realistic. I remember years ago there was a CG movie called "Monster House" where the characters were very stylized, but the environments, textures and lighting were much more realistic, and it just looked weird, so I'm trying to keep the characters, lighting and shaders in a similar level of realism. In fact, one of the problems I'm having with both the current Daz and iClone is that the characters look too realistic, so that's one reason why you might recognize that the main character here is based off of Daz's V4, with a bit of Aiko thrown in. I also built my own eye textures to be less realistic and more like doll's eyes. For the rest of the characters I adjust their proportions and their faces to look less real. Overall, I want this to look more like a fantasy illustration than the real world, not least because audiences really don't want realistic CG characters in their animations. There are some bad deformations, particularly in the elbows, but that's really something that people like us notice more than the general audience--I've been dealing with these kinds of deformations since my first Aurora episode over a decade ago and nobody has ever mentioned it. If I were doing stills, I'd probably fix it in post, but not so easy (or necessary) in animation. I'm not sure I understand what is meant about the lack of secondary motion, can you point to an example? Wolf, I did look into Blender, and even Unreal, but I guess I'm not ready to make the leap. Maybe I need to do more reasearch, and/or get much faster GPUs!
Actually, I thought the camerawork and editing were very impressive, nice and fluid. And your lighting has always been rock solid, dating back to the original Aurora Trek. My God, has it really been ten years?
Indeed you do need a big GPU for UE4/5
But for Blender ?..not so much.
My average render time per frame for this animation was about 16 seconds per.
System: Dell Inspiron core 17
16 GB system ram
intel UHD graphics
NO separate GPU!
Iclone is great for character animation but as sci fi genre guy,
the lack of motion blur and screen space reflections
and true volumetrics makes it not viable
as final render environment for my particular needs.
Secondary motion is mostly "physics" added to figures and scenes. For example the sword on the back of your main character should bounce or move a little when she moves around. While it is rock solid mounted on her back with no weight at all. Also some hair movement is usually expected, for example for hair bangs.
As for stylized vs realistic, I do hear you. But today the common direction is to use realistic shaders and lighting even for stylized figures. See any movie around. This way the figures look as "toys" moving in a real world. Your rendering style is somewhat in the 90's and the audience may perceive it as "strange" for a movie and more fit to a retro game. For example in your short what I noticed most and first was painted reflections on the hair. You will not find them anywhere nowadays, not even in games. Reflections do change when the figure moves. But I do understand your choice.
p.s. As for painted reflections they're unfortunately common in daz transmapped hair, so I guess they come from there. Truth is transmapped hair is no more used in movies from a while now and daz is some sort of "dinosaur" in this matter. But you don't notice painted reflections much in a single picture, where the figure doesn't move, so I guess this is fine for anyone not doing animations.
Thanks, Zombie! Yes, the first installment of Aurora was over 10 years ago, tho completed 9 years ago, if that makes you feel better. ;-) When I started it, I estimated it would take about a year and a half to complete, but was more like six!
Wolf: those sequences look great, and 16 seconds/frame? Nice! I've been adding motion blur in After Effects, which isn't perfect, but gets the job done.
Padone, what you're saying may be technically correct in some respects if I were Pixar, but if I were Pixar, I wouldn't be on this forum or using Daz at all, I'd have 500 animators and modelers and coders writing custom software. Technically speaking, my first Aurora movie was a "dinosaur" even 10 years ago--much of the animation is stiff, the lighting, textures and effects pretty minimal, the characters--V3 and M3--were primitive compared to Hollywood standards even at the time, but that hasn't stopped 700k people checking it out, or give it 5000+ "likes", or continue to comment on how much they liked it even now. The other day a viewer commented "A charming and well told tale worthy of the Star Trek Universe." I don't say that to toot my own horn (and not that 700k is that impressive compared to many wacky cat videos), just to say that having "substandard" aspects to an animation doesn't negate the ability for an average viewer to enjoy it--I don't get comments or emails complaining about the animation, just that they liked the story, which is the point. And since this is a forum where we're sharing advice, my advice would be to listen to the old adage about "perfect is the enemy of good." When I set out working on my first Aurora project, my goal wasn't 15 seconds of perfect animation, it was 55 minutes of finished animation to tell a complete story. From the very start I was aware the animation could be better if I put in a lot more time on it, but--as noted above--even with compromises it still took 6 years. If I fretted over every pixel, I'd still be working on it today. My consideration at the time was whether the animation was good enough to not interfere with the story, and judging by the response I've gotten where the vast majority of the audience talks about the story and almost nobody even mentions the animation except to occasionally praise it, I think it worked. Of course, this is all in context of a free animation uploaded to Youtube, not a feature released in theatres. Again, if that was my goal--or that of anyone on this forum--we wouldn't be using Daz. None of this is to say that you shouldn't bother trying to do a good job, but you have to make choices in order to get things done within the limitations of the software and abilities, and especially time. I am perfectly capable of creating hair textures without painted reflections or making sure the character's hair bounces and the scabbard hangs correctly, but those things take time that could I be using to get the next shot done.
Very nice breakdown, thanks. This is very similar to how I"m approaching this. My goal is simple cartoon animation. I'm not shooting for Pixar-quality (not by a couple of light-years). It's funny that if I chose to do it in 2D using Cartoon Animator, most people would focus on how realistic the character movement is and absolutely no one would be focused on how accurate the reflections in the eyes would be. Do it in 3D, and suddenly it's going to be screencapped to see how photorealistically accurate everything is, even if stylized.
I'll be absolutely thrilled if I can get 5 minutes of even lower than dinosaur-quality animation done in a month especially approaching it with almost zero animation experience.
Thanks to everyone so far for their contributions to this thread; like the original poster, I’m looking at taking a run at some character animation in the future as I near retirement; I (theoretically) have the first two weeks of November off (after months of 9-12 hour work days) to try my hand at doing a real animation for the first time, but due to lack of time for testing and the need to take advantage of this downtime while I have it (it may not last the whole two weeks) I am sticking with DAZ Studio for now as it has everything I need for now. The last thing I have time to do in this window is install and test two more software packages.
I’ve been looking at different long-term systems for the future, though, and Maya and Blender were the only other 3D systems I’ve been considering. I was disappointed that Maya LT didn’t have a way to easily get DAZ character imported into it, but Maya Indie is a reasonable price. I like their library system, similar enough to D|S’s that I’d feel at home. My main concern with it, though, is whether they’ll maintain an Indie license going forward; the last thing I’d want is to invest a couple of years in moving things over and modifying everything in Maya only to find out that down the road they’ll either drop the Indie license or scale up the price to my “out of reach” range after I’ve retired.
Blender looks pretty decent as well, and while their library system doesn’t appear to be as robust (from the one or two videos I’ve watched) the fact that they’ll have Cycles running under Metal in the very near feature is a big draw especially after Apple’s latest MacBook Pros just released.
For my animation, for now, rendering engines don’t matter; I’m going to be using either OpenGL or Filament for the time being, as they both work very well for the style of non-realistic cartoon I’m aiming for. I may inject a little 3Delight if needed, but iRay for me is a nonstarter; I don’t mind the long render times, but just don’t need nor want photorealistic renders.
The animation samples shown by Auroratrek and Ivy are inspiring, and are far better than I’m initially aiming at. I’m just shooting for a proof-of-concept at this point.
I especially appreciate Wolf359’s videos insights that really show very well what’s involved with the bridges and such.
A few questions regarding Maya and Blender:
I’ve taken note of comments about how Maya and Blender make animating much easier, but I do wonder if the time saved using either offsets the time taken to move everything from DAZ Studio and set up to work well (rigging and/or texturing/shading?), especially when you have a DAZ library with hundreds of characters and thousands of morphs and poses at your fingertips and ready to go almost instantly.
As mentioned I have some time in the first two weeks of November where I want to see how far I can get. To this end, I’m using an Intel-based MacBook Air; not very powerful, but it allows me to have three versions of DAZ Studio running simultaneously, the latest 64- and 32-bit Mac versions for DAZ’s lip sync and general set up and animation, and 64-bit Windows 10 version for if I decide to render in Filament.
The other reason for going with a laptop is that after a year-and-a-half of a long days sitting at my home workstation, I want to sit somewhere else while on holidays but still want to work on a computer.
Any extra information or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
— Walt Sterdan